Progress After Apartheid —Retracing the Steps of Nelson Mandela in Durban, South Africa

Zulu dancers welcome me to the Inanda Valley. (Photo: Lisa Bonner)

Selma, the critically acclaimed and award-winning film by director Ava DuVernay, focuses on the struggle for African Americans’ right to vote and the philosophy of nonviolent confrontation that helped win passage of the U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965. Historical marches led by Martin Luther King Jr. were inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s use of nonviolence and civil disobedience to peacefully oppose the South African government’s disenfranchisement of its own citizens’ civil rights.

Gandhi started the nonviolence movement in the little-known city (at least to American travelers) of Durban, South Africa. He came to Durban as a young lawyer to represent a client in a commercial dispute but was thrown off a train for sitting in a “whites only” section. What was meant as a quick work trip turned into a 21-year residency during which he fought segregation and discrimination against Indians by the South African government through peaceful resistance.

Gandhi’s adopted hometown is what I call “The Other South Africa,” that awesome vacation spot on the Indian Ocean that many people don’t know about. Most travelers flock to Cape Town and its sophisticated environs, but each time I left there, I felt a void … like I hadn’t seen the “real” South Africa. I wanted to see the South Africa where blacks were once regal and ruled the land, the South Africa that later reduced these rulers to numbers in a passbook, the South Africa that, despite years of segregation and 20 years since apartheid ended, has come back swinging and thriving. I found that, plus incredible beaches and a #$& good time in Durban!

Related: Road Trip: The Nelson Mandela Tour of South Africa

The adorable welcome wagon. (Photo: Lisa Bonner)

My first stop on my cultural quest was the Inanda Heritage Route, 15 miles outside of Durban. As the bus pulled up, I was greeted by a handful of smiling kids from this township and Zulu dancers welcoming me to the Inanda Valley, the birthplace of the nonviolence movement and home to many South African activists and freedom riders. Here in this valley my spirit was awakened. In the Phoenix Settlement is Gandhi’s home, situated on a 100-acre site of beautiful hillside land. His former home has been dedicated as a museum, which takes the visitor on a powerful tour of his humble beginnings and his fight for justice against the South African government. The struggle is palpable as you stroll past inscriptions, photos, and newspaper clippings documenting his campaign for a more just South Africa.

Ohlange Institute (Photo: Lisa Bonner)

On a hill just above the Phoenix Settlement stands the Ohlange Institute, built on the grounds of the home (and now burial site) of the first African National Congress (ANC) president, John Dube. An educator, activist, and minister, Dube opened Ohlange Institute in 1901 as a school to educate African boys after he returned from the U.S., studying with Booker T. Washington, the African American educator and presidential adviser. Dube’s “self-reliance” curriculum at Ohlange is largely based on Washington’s teachings at Tuskegee Institute. I instantly thought about my ancestors’ struggles in the U.S. as I envisioned my grandfather walking through the halls at Tuskegee, his alma mater. He lived by example and often preached to us that same “self-reliance” philosophy instilled in him there.

Related: Traveling While Black: What You Need to Know

After apartheid ended and Nelson Mandela was released after a 27-year imprisonment, Mandela symbolically cast his first vote, in the 1994 elections, at Ohlange Institute. After casting his vote at Dube’s school, Mandela said, “Mr. President, I have come to report to you that South Africa is free today.” This is the same election in which the former inmate would be elected president of South Africa.

Before his imprisonment, as then-president of the ANC, Mandela had spent much of his life as freedom fighter around Durban’s ANC headquarters. On his way from one meeting, Mandela was arrested just outside Durban on a nondescript road. To mark the 50th anniversary of Mandela’s capture, the South African government dedicated this hallowed ground as the Mandela Capture Site and erected a massive must-see 50-column steel sculpture that forms a 31-foot-high profile portrait of Mandela.

The sculpture of Nelson Mandela’s profile was erected to honor the great leader. (Photo: Lisa Bonner)

There’s also a small but moving Apartheid Museum on the site that highlights Mandela’s “Long Walk to Freedom.” When I visited that museum, I vividly remembered “Boycott Shell Oil” (one of several companies that refused to divest from South Africa during the apartheid era) flashing across the TV screen during a news report when I was in grammar school. This was about the same time I wrote a school paper on my father entitled “Second Class Citizen,” documenting his struggle as a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force who fought in the Vietnam War but couldn’t get a room at a motel in the South, even in uniform, when he returned to the U.S. on leave. I kept thinking about the parallels of our struggles, albeit an ocean away, but Mama Africa awakened a sense of pride. We all may have been down but we were never out. I ran back outside and documented just how victorious I felt, right in front of Nelson Mandela’s portrait.

Related: Nelson Mandela’s Former Prison Warden Will Read Your Palm

An example of the passbook black South Africans had to carry around before apartheid ended. (Photo: Lisa Bonner)

The Kwa Muhle Museum in Durban tells the story of Indian, Colored (mixed-race) and black South Africans’ daily lives during apartheid, often by using statues, sculptures, and other 3D images. Standing next to a life-size recreation of a white police officer demanding a black African’s passbook, which allowed him to be in a certain area for a certain time, I had a sense of “Oh no, they didn’t!” But sadly, they did. And this depiction made it all too real.

What struck me most about Durban, though, was looking at it from this perspective. I was standing in a jazz club — The Chairman, one of the coolest lounges I’ve been to in a long time — and marveled at how far South Africans have come in 20 years. The lounge is owned by a black Durban architect who designed uShaka Marine World, the largest aquarium in the Southern Hemisphere, which houses a Sea World and Wet & Wild water park. I marveled at how Durban’s Zulu pride and culture, despite all, still shines through in arts and entertainment.

Ceramics on display at the Durban African Arts Centre. (Photo: Lisa Bonner)

That culture and pride is also on display at Durban’s African Arts Centre, which sells artworks, baskets, and ceramics crafted by local artisans. The proceeds from the consignment sales go back to support these artists and the community. I saw our parallel cultures as I wandered through the Ekhaya Multi Arts Centre, home to ballets and plays on African art and culture as well as the Durban International Film Fest, which featured “Free Angela and All Political Prisoners” in its 2013 lineup.

But it also saddened me, because, as a brown girl from St. Louis, on the heels of the Michael Brown case and other racially charged cases in the U.S., I realized how far, 50 years after the Voting Rights Act, we as Americans, black and white, have yet to go.

Lisa Bonner is a New York based travel and Op-Ed journalist and legal correspondent who daylights as an Entertainment Lawyer. She has written for Essence, TheGrio and Ebony.

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