Address
Cato Manor (Mkhumbane), Durban, eThekwini Municipality, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Approximately five kilometres west of Durban's central business district, accessed principally via Bellair Road and Booth Road.
Timezone
Africa/Johannesburg — South Africa (SAST)
Find Your Footing
Mkhumbane is not a place you pass through. It is a place you arrive at deliberately, with some prior knowledge of what it carries, and move through slowly enough to let that knowledge meet what is visible on the ground. The road patterns are the first thing to notice; they follow the logic of the original settlement rather than any subsequent planning intervention, which means they record, in their curves and their gradients and their refusal of the grid, the movement of a community that organised itself according to the terrain and its own social geography rather than a municipal surveyor's preference. You are walking, in some sections, on paths that the removed community made and that no demolition order addressed because paths are harder to destroy than buildings.
The view from the upper hillside is the second thing to attend to, not for its scenic qualities, which are considerable, but for what it makes visible about the relationship between Mkhumbane and the city below it. Durban spreads out to the east, with the bay beyond it, and the central business district, which houses the municipal authority that ordered the removals, sits within plain sight of the hillside it cleared. That proximity is not incidental. It is the spatial record of what apartheid urban planning required the removal of Black urban communities to distances far enough to be invisible from the centres of white civic life, except that Mkhumbane was never quite far enough, which may be one reason its removal was pursued with such persistence.
Seek out the Cato Manor Development Association and the community memory projects that have documented the original settlement. The oral histories they hold are more precise and more necessary than any architectural survey.
About
There are two names for this place, and both must be used, because neither is complete without the other. Cato Manor is what the colonial administration called the hillside that rises west of Durban’s central business district, named for the city’s first mayor, as if naming a landscape after its occupier were the same as creating it. Mkhumbane is what the community that built its life here called it, a Zulu name rooted in the topography and the memory of the people who lived within it, who were removed from it by force, and who have been returning to it, incrementally and imperfectly, for three decades since the legal architecture of their removal was dismantled.
Both names are necessary. Cato Manor tells you what was done to this place. Mkhumbane tells you what survived.
The hillside today holds both histories simultaneously and without resolution. From its upper reaches, looking down over the bay and the city that destroyed this community and is now encircled by its return, it is possible to stand on ground that has been cleared and reclaimed and cleared again and built upon again and that is still, in the most literal sense, being negotiated between the memory of what was here and the reality of what is being constructed in its place, between the community that was and the community that is assembling itself on the same terrain with different materials and without the continuity that the removals severed. The negotiation is not complete. It may never be complete. The piece that tells you otherwise is not a piece about Mkhumbane. It is a piece about the story that Mkhumbane’s complexity makes uncomfortable, softened into something that can be concluded.
This piece does not conclude. It witnesses.