Photo Essay: Durban's decay and neglect

I live in this Dirtbin, a compele shithole, one actually feels embarrassed to admit you live here, compared to bragging loudly about the awesome city before 1994.....

I am sure that if a few more street names were changed things would be much better.

A while ago, my family and I took a wrong turn in Durban and ended up in the area near where the N3 terminates. We all agreed then, that Durban must be the filthiest and most decrepit city in SA. It is utterly filthy and neglected! We then remembered back in about 1988 at how proud the city was when they opened The Wheel shopping centre with its 'market" feel. It pains us all to watch Durban, PE, JHB etc, etc... fall into squalor!

Food vendors everywhere - a veritable Cafeteria!

OK but the huts are clean.

As someone who grew up in Durban, this is heartbreaking. The city managers who took over cared more about renaming streets than doing anything good for the city. The few friends I know who haven’t left the city yet speak of how corruption rules the day now. So sad to see this.

I have all the pictures I need in my memory of living in Durban between 1958 and 1990 and the nostalgia of Stuttafords clock meeting point, Payne Bros, ABC Shoes, University of Natal Latin lectures in City Buildings, surfing the beaches, night window shopping and all of the rest. Then I went to work in Transkei in 1990, living in Umtata for 3.5yrs, where the future South Africa was written on the wall. What I see in this photographic essay is what I saw every day in Umtata. I chose a future elsewhere.

Once again so many of the comments here reflect the ignorance of racists shouting from their ivory towers. While the Durban CBD is definitely a mess compared to pre 1994 that was clearly an era so many of them wished they could still be living in. Oh and many of those pictures are of areas that looked virtually the same in 1993 but that none of these commentators would have ever dared leave their plush suburbs to visit.

Now that we've seen the devastating pictures of the current situation, and have possibly spotted the problem, so, now, what is the solution? Is there a way out of this? Can we rebuild from what is left and make our cities great again? Because we cannot always solely blame the government and politicians, we are also part of the problem. The problem is that we see problems but we don't bother come up with solutions. This problem of dilapidated and vandalized buildings, and of littering is not only on the CBD. They are all over the place. I've seen even privately owned dilapidated buildings in Morningside, Glenwood, Overport, etc. Do we blame government on them too? The time for blame-game is over. We, people, should come up with solutions, and do away with the mentality of entitlement. It is the mentality of entitlement that make us not to act and give solutions. We are entitled that the government must do it, not us.

It’s reminiscent of the decay of Johannesburg CBD around 25 years ago. It’s quite sad to see. That old saying is true: “Things fall apart gradually and then suddenly.”