Video Journey: From Apartheid to White Slum

In the span of one lifetime, there can be change, for better and worse.

This is a video journey through South Africa’s history, from the establishment of the Apartheid Republic to whites living in a slum.

I’m the generation that watched South Africa turn from upside-down to a different kind of upside-down. It’s possible that dystopia simply changed its advertising campaign. Blue pills are always for sale.

SIXTIES

We begin in the Sixties, in coastal Durban.

10 years later, on the same beachfront in the video, I was born in Addington Hospital. My earliest memory was as a toddler trying to escape it, and consequently having my hands and feet tied. I had run in the wrong direction, towards the light coming through the sealed windows. I was too short to realise that my heart, at least, was running in the correct direction, towards the sea.

My gran lived in the last building, a view of the waves and harbour mouth. She shared jam and Marmite on Provita biscuits with me on the sand after swimming.

As a young adult in the ‘Rainbow Nation’, I was an accidental DJ who would sometimes piss from a club window into the high-tide sea. Later, customers would jump from those high windows during a destructive intimidation raid by the local drug mafia (which included the police). Everything was up for grabs in the new South Africa.

The building that housed the club and radio station was destroyed. Unfortunately, the dolphinarium never met the same fate, and was relocated nearer the harbour where it runs at massive loss to taxpayers. The hospital, though terribly dysfunctional, still stands. The nurses who kindly slept with me have likely emigrated. My first love did.

The 10km promenade is, by far, the best Durban has to offer, and infinitely better than tourism dressing e.g., liberated black people dancing in the animal skins of their Zulu ancestors. In the early 2000s, a friend’s Taiwanese wife refused to walk with us after the 600km ride from Johannesburg airport. She said it looked like California, and she’d already been there. Someone obviously agreed with her, because a decade later, a restaurant was opened in front of the southern most pier - it’s called California Dreaming (assumedly after The Mamas and Papas song).

Of course, there are more important issues in these videos than my anecdotes. The 80s segment is especially powerful, worth you logging into restricted YouTube for.

SEVENTIES

EIGHTIES

NINETIES

2000s

NOW

You can also view Johannesburg in the 40s, South Africa in the 50s, and 46 years of apartheid in 90 seconds.