This is especially evident this week as right on North Beach, where I am staying, is a major international surf competition. So unlike in most places where guys wander around with surfboards and wetsuits, the poseur ratio is remarkably low this week in Durban. Go out at dusk and you can see surfers practicing, showing off, and getting one last good wave before going on to dominate the logical offspring of the beach, which is beachside nightlife.
I spent most of the day yesterday just wandering the seaside, enjoying the sights, partaking of the food stalls, looking at the various options on the main walkway, which resembles nothing more than it does a carnival midway, albeit one on the ocean and without the carnies (and their carnie code). Here a mielies stand, there borewors on a grill, somewhere else soosaties. If you want tacky tee shirts, garish handbags, knockoff purfume, or are interested in finally getting that mobile phone, the beachfront is your place. The surfer boys wander around shirtless and careless, except inasmuch as they sometimes are working hard to look quite so careless. There are two kinds of beach people here, as evidenced by the tanlines -- the bronzed are regulars, if not of Durban, then of somewhere else. Then there are the pasty and the burned (count me in the former, would be in the latter if I shed my shirt), the vacationers, those getting a weekend or a week away from the hustle and bustle in Joburg or Pretoria or Vereeneging. Just as the surfers and their hangers on own the beach, so too do the tanned lord over the pasty. It's a hierarchy that is actually remarkably fluid, though insider status is hard earned. This is not a South Africa thing, it is a beach thing. A similar ethos will dominate just about anywhere that waves lap sand and pretty young people appropriate superiority over the rest of us. And unlike academia, this is an arena in which young means YOUNG. Thirty-somethings need not apply.
The periphery of the beach -- the few blocks between the beach and the CBD, from which I am writing this post -- is where a really gritty urbanism is squeezed. Not operating within, but reliant upon, both the beach and the CBD, one gets the impression that this is where the roadside traders, the rickshaw drivers, the shady operators, and of course masses of locals just making it by live their lives. This little ring is so tantalizingly close to the world that brings in the tourists and the money, and yet that very proximity must surely exacerbate just how far removed the average South African still is from that world. Not a lot of folks walking past the doors of this electronics store are much concerned with the Pic & Pay Pro Surf Championships happening not four blocks away.
I am just en route through this area to another place that draws, well, guys like me, I suppose. Several blocks west of here is supposed to be Durban's best and oldest bookstore, a couple of craft and art markets, information kiosks and the like. The bibliophile in me is looking forward to the bookstore. The collector of Africana and gift-giver is hoping to polish off his shopping before heading to England this weekend. The Africanist knows that this area, squeezed amidst the glitzy beach and the glimmering towers, is where everyday life is lived, even if no one takes out their cameras to capture it forever. Real lived life tends to draw far less attention than the life imagined. This is part of why I am stopping in here for a breather: To remind myself that Zulu masks, beadwork necklaces, and statuettes of the big five are African, but perhaps in a normative sense. "Crazy Bargains," the shop promising "Always Quality at the Best Prices," and "Kwa Dokotela Surgery," both directly across the street from the open, exhaust-choked door of this little cell phone and electronics repair shop (whose tatty old bank of computers are available for use for 6 rands an hour) have little need for Zulu masks and bead work.
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