Durban’s beachfront, or ‘the golden mile’ as it is popularly known, was the setting for much of Lewis Nkosi’s novel Mating Birds.
from Mating Birds (1986)
I can see it all quite clearly: the beach, the children’s playgrounds, the seafront hotels, and the sweating, pinkfaced tourists from upcountry; the best time of all is that silent, torpid hour of noon when the beach suddenly becomes deserted and, driven back to the seafront restaurants and the temporary shelter of their hotel rooms, crowds of sea bathers suddenly vanish, leaving behind them not only the half-demolished cheese and tomato sandwiches but sometimes an occasional wristwatch, an expensive ring, or a finely embroidered handkerchief still smudged with lipstick from a pair of anonymous lips. Not infrequently, the tourists leave behind them an even worthier trophy – a young body lying spent and motionless on the warm white sands to be gazed at by us, the silent forbidden crowds of non-white boys in a black, mutinous rage.
That, after all, is how I first saw the English girl one afternoon, lying on an empty stretch of Durban beach as though washed up by the tide after an all-night storm: she was a golden statue, lovely and broken among the ruins of an ancient city, and yet for all that, she was shockingly alive, dripping suntan oil and glowing with the sun that beat upon her elongated body. Her flesh was surrendered, as it were, to the hungry gaze of African youths who combed the beach every day for lost or discarded articles.
