Red soil

Poet Julia Campbell-Gillies on trying to grow in Durban

The view from Julia’s garden; archaeological evidence suggests that the Durban area was inhabited by communities of hunter-gatherers since the Old Stone Age

On a map, Cato road runs perfectly straight. In Durban, it rolls over two steep hills in quick succession, so you have to accelerate on the first downhill to make the second incline. As a child it felt like free-fall, a rollercoaster taking us home.

Not infrequently, people haven’t even heard of Durban. It’s something of a test of mine: ‘pleased to meet you. Have you heard of Durban?’

Weather like India. Food like India. Art deco buildings in ice cream colours, like Miami in the nineteen-eighties. Sprawling, golden beaches, Indian Ocean water like a bath full of sharks.

Durban is beautiful. The sky bears down on you hot and pale blue every day, pink in the evening, swarming with birds. It’s terrifying. It’s almost lawless. Crime draws lines around life that are solemnly navigated with a wry kind of resignation, that loosely binds together an otherwise disparate population. Living in Durban is resolutely finding something tragic to laugh about with the person behind you in the supermarket queue.

I grew up in the central suburb of Glenwood, near the regional university of Kwa-Zulu Natal. Historically middle class, old family homes with gardens line wide boulevards curving round ancient trees, facing the natural harbour. “Discovered” on Christmas Day by Vasco de Gama in 1497, it was colonially named Port Natal, along with the surrounding region- the Zulu Kingdom.

Glenwood used to be considered well-connected, and attracted affluent young professionals like my parents. But more recently, its proximity to the city centre and the main freeway out of town have given it a dangerous reputation, with most wealthier locals leaving the city suburbs and choosing the confines of a gated-estate community further North of Durban. The remaining stalwart residents rally around arts and academic institutions, optimistic for community. Nothing a twelve-foot fence and near-mafia style private security can’t solve.

Private security companies fill a police-shaped void and operate ubiquitously, on any level from electric fencing installation and maintenance, to armed guard response- lest a beam of your property’s alarm system is tripped in the night. The most popular service in Glenwood now, is a “community watch” guardian. Each household on the street contributes to a subscription that employs a guard to sit in a wooden Wendy house at the end of the road, twenty-four hours a day.

Growing up, I was awoken most nights by the blaring siren of the alarm being set off. There was an elaborate web of beams all around the house. I remember trying to stay calm, always hoping it was just a genet (a type of small, wild spotted cat.) Soft ‘g’ but a hard ‘t’ – like ‘Janet’ rather than like that French writer.

Everyone in Durban has a horror story to hand. Home invasions of wide-ranging coordination, from opportunistic theft (the copper tap in the garden had to be frequently replaced), to gang-orchestrated murder. Everyone advocates for different solutions and tactics around each dinner party table, one father would insist on carrying a gun, another would attest to cooperating with intruders. The advertised guard response time was sufficient to render all of these possibilities clearly in my half-sleeping mind. I would sit and wait by my bedroom window, watching for the eerie figure with a flashlight, slicing the dark, tentatively scouring the garden for danger. Beyond him, the ships in the harbour like a bowl full of stars.

For years now and every time I go home, I have tried to plant flowers in my parents’ seething jungle garden, replete with troops of monkeys, swaying palm trees and the kind of plants you kill in your flat in London. Heat you can only dream of in England in March, and inescapably humid. But the red soil is devoid of nourishment and full of termites, eating everything- including the house.

Still, I’m convinced something will survive on the anthill under my childhood home. Something beautiful, tough, endemic will take. Terminal hope, like only Durban can give you.

Julia Campbell-Gillies is a London-based poet, model, and florist. Her second anthology, Tempus Tenera, was published earlier this year