Shannon Kenny | For Durban

Durban Aire – For Durban / eThekwini, KwaZulu-Natal

You are neither The City of Angels
Nor the fruit of Amsterdam and York
But the tri-continental offspring
Of a land battle-weary and worn

Such a motley, dysfunctional family
Divided against its own
And while you’re no city of angels
They hover all over this town

Your eyes are the streetlights and sunshine
Betimes filled with lightning-rain tears
Like drums and the waves is your heartbeat
While your lips proffer welcome and fear

There is much that is bollocks about you
And some have even named you as such
Still, I’m no doubt indebted somehow to you
And indelibly marked by your touch

Now wide is your distant horizon
And countless the sands on your shore
While the Hope and the Hunger inside you
Still vie for first place in your soul

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The port city of Durban is situated on South Africa’s sub-tropical east coast. A dynamic metropolis of contrasts: brimming with potential, replete with wealth and abject poverty; natural beauty and urban decay; hospitality and violence, generosity and greed. At once a place of rest and upheaval, Durban’s major historical and present-day influences are African, Indian/South Asian and British/European. The meaning of the name eThekwini (given to the greater metropolitan area which includes Durban), is contested. For some it is a reference to the “bull’s testicle” shape of Durban’s bay, or the “locative of itheku” – itheku is isiZulu for bay or lagoon.

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Remembering 2014: “This doesn’t happen in the developed world, my darling”

I read the news while nursing you,
my Little One just six months old, not yet on first solids
but having spoken your first words.
I’ll never know if the taste of my milk changed, if it curdled, Little One,
as my stomach churned, chest burned and bile rose,
for there you were unlatched, head tilted back, satisfied,
blissfully
fast asleep.

My strong will and oesophageal muscles held back the dry-heaves
backed up in my gut and my throat – but could not halt the tears –
while my surprisingly steady arms lay you down.

Then followed the rush to the bathroom,
the simultaneous irony, disgust and relief
at spewing lurid yellow-green onto shiny white porcelain connected
to a network of piped water and underground channels
that flushed away
our excreta.

And more tears.

That’s the best I could do at the news a five-year-old boy, in a faraway corner of our country, had drowned in a pit latrine.

Drowning in shit was only ever a figure of speech until then.

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In 2014 a little boy called Michael Komape drowned in a pit latrine at his school in Seshego village, Limpopo Province, South Africa. Almost six years later in December 2019, the Supreme Court of Appeal awarded the family monetary compensation (R1.4 million) for emotional shock and grief caused by the loss of their son and brother. Previously, in 2018 the Limpopo High Court had dismissed the family’s claim for damages from the government for grief caused by Michael’s death.

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Poetry (c) Shannon Kenny

Image: ChatGPT