Durban is not Johannesburg. This is obvious geographically — one is a coastal city on the Indian Ocean, the other a high-altitude inland metropolis. But the difference runs deeper than elevation and climate. It is a difference of orientation, of the direction in which each city faces. Johannesburg looks inward, toward the mines, the capital, the continental interior. Durban looks outward, across the water, toward Mozambique, Madagascar, India, Southeast Asia, and the Arabian Peninsula. This oceanic orientation has produced a fundamentally different kind of city — and a fundamentally different kind of identity.
Understanding Durban requires understanding the Indian Ocean not as a barrier but as a highway. For centuries before European colonisation, the east coast of Africa was connected to a vast maritime trading network that linked communities across thousands of kilometres of open water. The evidence is not speculative: archaeological research, including analysis published in PNAS (2025), has documented glass beads from the 8th and 9th centuries at sites along the southern African coast, material evidence of trade networks connecting this region to the Middle East and South Asia over a thousand years ago.
Layers of Arrival
Durban’s cultural complexity is the product of successive waves of arrival, each leaving sedimentary layers in the city’s identity. The Zulu kingdom shaped the region’s political and cultural landscape long before European settlement. British colonialism imposed its own structures of power and extraction. And then, beginning on 16 November 1860, a new chapter began: the arrival of the first ship carrying indentured labourers from India to work in Natal’s sugar cane fields.
Over the following decades, 152,184 Indian indentured labourers arrived on 384 ships. They came from different regions of India, spoke different languages, practised different religions, and carried different cultural traditions. They were brought to serve an exploitative colonial economy, yet they built communities, temples, mosques, schools, and cultural institutions that transformed the city permanently. Today, Durban is home to the largest Indian diaspora population in Africa — a community that has been present for over 160 years and whose contributions to the city’s food, language, architecture, and cultural life are inseparable from what Durban is.
“A port city does not have a single identity. It has currents — cultural forces that flow through it, mix, separate, and recombine in ways that no one planned and no one controls.”
Displacement and Destruction: Cato Manor
But Durban’s story is not only one of convergence and cultural mixing. It is also a story of violent displacement. The forced removals of Cato Manor — known in isiZulu as Umkhumbane — represent one of the most devastating acts of apartheid-era urban destruction. Between 1958 and 1964, approximately 150,000 people were evicted from Cato Manor, a dense, multiracial neighbourhood where African, Indian, and Coloured communities had built lives in close proximity.
Cato Manor was demolished not because it was dysfunctional but because it was functional in ways that apartheid ideology could not tolerate. Its multiracial character, its informal economies, its dense social networks — these were precisely the features that the apartheid state was designed to destroy. The removals scattered communities into racially segregated townships, breaking social bonds that had taken decades to form. The trauma of that dispersal continues to shape Durban’s social geography today.
Coastal Identity Versus Inland Identity
Mbembe and Nuttall’s Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (2008) offers a powerful account of how Johannesburg’s identity is shaped by its relationship to mining, migration, and the interior. But the framework does not transfer easily to Durban, because the forces that shape coastal identity are different in kind, not just in degree.
Port cities are shaped by exchange rather than extraction. Their economies are oriented toward trade, movement, and connection. Their populations are shaped by arrival and departure, by the constant circulation of people, goods, and ideas across water. This produces a different relationship to difference: in a port city, the stranger is not an anomaly but a structural feature. Diversity is not a policy aspiration but an unavoidable condition of geography.
This does not mean that port cities are inherently tolerant or progressive. Durban has experienced horrific racial violence, from the 1949 anti-Indian riots to the xenophobic attacks of 2008 and 2015. But it does mean that the texture of identity in a coastal city is different from an inland one. Identity in Durban is layered, oceanic, shaped by currents that come from many directions simultaneously. It resists the neat categorisations that both apartheid and post-apartheid governance have attempted to impose.
What the Ocean Teaches
The Indian Ocean is not a metaphor. It is a material force that has shaped the lives, economies, and cultural practices of everyone who lives along its shores. To understand Durban — its food, its music, its languages, its conflicts, its creative energy — you must understand it as an ocean city: a place where identity is formed not through rootedness alone but through movement, exchange, and the constant negotiation of difference.
For AnthroWorks, this means that research conducted in and about Durban must account for the oceanic dimension of identity. It means moving beyond the inland-centric frameworks that dominate South African cultural studies and developing methodologies that can capture the fluid, layered, and perpetually unfinished nature of coastal belonging. The ocean does not offer a single story. It offers currents — and the researcher’s task is to learn to read them.
References
Desai, A. and Vahed, G. (2010) Inside Indian Indenture: A South African Story, 1860–1914. Cape Town: HSRC Press.
Mbembe, A. and Nuttall, S. (eds.) (2008) Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis. Durham: Duke University Press.
Maylam, P. and Edwards, I. (eds.) (1996) The People’s City: African Life in Twentieth-Century Durban. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press.
Wood, M., Panagiotakopulu, E. and Robertshaw, P. (2025) ‘Indian Ocean Trade and Southern African Coastal Communities: Evidence from Glass Bead Assemblages, 8th–9th Century CE’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(4), pp. 1–11.