For a couple of years while working in the offices of Earth-Touch, one of Flow’s clients, I made a daily commute along the N2 (which links the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal with the north coast), and over time the notion of a parallel universe kept coming to mind.
I had two alternate routes to choose from every day: the faster, more direct, traffic-laden N2, or the slower, stop-start M4 via the robot-infested Durban city centre.
Due to the heavier traffic volumes on the N2, any hiccup, however slight, would result in a tailback, the worse of which delayed me for nearly three hours on the way home one night. At the first hint of a potential snarl up, I would therefore opt for the more laborious M4 route, the logic being that it would be better to move slowly in the direction of home, as opposed to sitting in a stationary vehicle breathing in gently chilled exhaust fumes.
So why the parallel universe? I must generalise here, but these observations were made over a period of two years. Let’s call the N2 route universe A. The road has many lanes, hardly a scrap of litter (thanks to regular clean ups), few minibus taxis and is frequented mainly by recent model upmarket vehicles and 4x4s driven by white-collar workers of all races. In the main these vehicles were making their way to Durban’s newly evolved CBD in the Umhlanga, La Lucia Ridge, Mount Edgecombe node.
Universe B would be the M4 route. Here I would see a plethora of jam-packed minibus taxis and middle-income vehicles squeezing past one another on one to two narrow lanes, pedestrians walking or hitch-hiking along the hard shoulder of the freeway, litter of every description along the route (but far worse the closer I got to the CBD), and very few of the aforementioned luxury vehicles.
The more I pondered over the dichotomy of this situation, the more I came to realise that this simple, everyday scenario portrayed a microcosm of greater South Africa. The privileged world of the “haves” versus the difficult world of the “have-nots”. How, I wondered, are we to bridge the gap between these two apparently autonomous universes? If we are to be truly South African, united as a single Rainbow Nation, where do we start finding common ground?
My other thought was how convenient the N2 will prove as a showcase conduit to ferry thousands of international tourists and soccer fans from the brand-new King Shaka Airport to the Moses Mabhida Stadium during the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Let’s not show our tender underbelly, heaven forbid the tourists see squatter camps (all of which have been quietly dismantled from alongside the N2), or the street children and mothers with babies begging at the city’s intersections, or the gutters overflowing with litter, or the many pavement traders whose homes are the cardboard kiosks that become their “shops” by day. No, these will be hidden from sight. They don’t exist. They belong to a parallel universe.