DELORIS KOAN | The fiery hell of ‘development’

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Look, we have to point out the fibs but my early morning tour of the beachfront bellowed them.

This is the era of propaganda where the public are called to wield a magical sharp-pointed wand to cut through the lies, the imaginary, as SA environmentalist and filmmaker Janet Solomon called it on the weekend when she showed her mesmerising new work on Shell and the Wild Coast, Blue Burning. 

Of course, life is all about balance, and often the correcting force can become tyrannical in its own right, so let’s set sail this fine Tuesday morning.

The tour starts with tough love. The swim matriarchs who have me under their spell tell me we are swimming to Wimpy today. That’s 600m off the beach and out into a Humpty Bumpty but pleasantly dark silver-green ocean.

At one point we hit a brown jetsam. Probably from that property developer in Quigney who is just chucking piles of building rubble and diggings on the pavement which flood down the storm drains into the sea, along with all the rest of the suburb’s slough.

But it’s all good. I try not to look around, just follow Barbara’s yellow buoy until we land again on Orient Beach 1,7km later.

Now I am pumped. Endorphins dance through the ageing system — you are never too old or young to get out of bed and ride the best vehicle ever made in your lifetime, your bod.

Earlier in the week, in that Solomon movie, I had watched petrostate addict Gwede Mantashe, also our mineral and energy resources minister, punt oil and gas for the Wild Coast as “development”.

So I decided to ride the Esplanade and look at “development”.

Here, dear diehard reader, is Orient Beach, an enclave nestling in the corner of the harbour with a three-story lifeguard tower, the best floor now taken over by Buffalo City Metro officials for a meeting room and, despite signs of BCM private “oord” behaviour, workers seem to get the job done to make it clean and lovely for children.

Now I ride to Eastern Beach. Sorry, where is the beach? There isn’t one. Sea surges and climate change have swept the sand away and, at one point, it is only a pile of rocks which prevents the surf from washing away the road.

The beach that remains is a hazard, polluted by the Blind River which flows over it and, phfoof! that poor little stream stinks all the way from the NEX a few kilometres up.

Every East London surfer knows that Eastern Beach is a rocky, channel-goughed, gnarly open ocean wave, especially at the so-called bathing beach.

The left-handers roll into a dark, deep underwater canal. It is scary and exposed. Now put some inexperienced ocean newcomer onto those sands where the shorebreak is so powerful it is surfed as a break in its own right.

It is pure madness to have this as a free-to-use beach for the holidaying masses, while just along the Esplanade is the perfect, safe Orient Beach for the children.

It somehow hurts that this Eastern Beach, once the only place for black people under apartheid to swim, is still promoted as a swimming beach for the majority.

In my dreams, the people, the poor, hard-working people, seeking the solace and joy of the ocean, get through the Orient pay gate and have a heavenly, safe, fun experience.

Or the city does the right “development” thing and removes their elitist, self-serving, undemocratic gates which lock the people out.

It has always amazed me how public pools and beaches are targeted for corruption, but that is a truth the propaganda of “we have to run government as a business” punted by Politicians Inc.

The other day, I decided to treat my daughter to her favourite chow, a braai from those awesome braai women of Ebuhlanti. They are chefs deserving of SA’s highest culinary awards.

My year of vegetarianism was sorely tested and since we can be flexitarian now, when I plonked that wrapped, spiced, hot meal with its little toothpick and napkins on her desk, she platzed with appreciation.

You know they dust it with spices, turn it, roll it on a perfect low-but-steady thornwood heat. You watch as it turns from abattoir pink to a marbled, marmalade-cherry red. It’s unbelievable skill before your eyes and I can just stand there and stare, tongue hanging.

Now to see what they can do with my vegan sossies and a fungal forest of shrooms. I will also bring an alternative wrapping to the plastic film stuff.

And where are these 60 women, so beloved of us lazy braai lovers who arrive with orders and just plonk it down while we go off to have fun? They have been forced to move, stuffed into a tiny corner on the banks of the Blind River, ousted from Ebuhlanti.

I roll over there, get off the bike and snap a few pics of the most desolate wasteland, workus interuptus — a common sight in our construction-mafia ruled nation.

There is a wet, sad-looking sign saying the project is now subject to an environmental impact assessment — the construction company was allowed in without it.

But anyone who knows this area, whether you rode the whites-only Smarty train of Marina Glen or made your way through it as a black person to the only blacks-only beach, you will marvel at the coastal glory of the bush and huge trees.

But this is how “development” goes for the masses now. Just one more failed, stalled, stale project and, of course, the question of the money. Who was paid, how much and what did we get for it?

A bakkie pulls up loudly advertising a fishing lodge in Zambia and a guy wearing a jacket with the construction company’s logo comes up to me and wants to know why I am taking photographs. The security guard, possibly the only living person on the site, has called me in.

You must just know how this grates. We journos, the public’s eyes and ears I still like to believe, are somehow the bad ones, the prying ones with evil intent.

This is how propaganda and gaslighting works — you commit a moral, social offence and then blame the victim of your abuse.

I listen to the guy who can’t stop himself from letting some of the story out, something along the lines of shame, the company was busy doing something great for the people and that silly environmental law was brought down on them like a cosh, and that’s why there probably won’t be an Ebuhlanti for the people this festive season.

I pat (clap) him on the shoulder, mutter something about well that’s the &*&^%$ law, and get on my bike and ride off, leaving him smothered in my bike emissions — you see, the truth, always not what you think…

Earlier I stopped at The Stoep, officially known as the Leighandre “Baby Lee” Jegels recreational park. I gaze upon acres and acres of nothingness, glorious space, all cement and brick, in layers with the ocean panorama before us.

Yes, they “paved paradise, put up a parking lot, with a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin’ hotspot. Don’t it always seem to go. That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it'’ gone” — lyrics from Joni Mitchell’s famous song Yellow Taxi. Penned 54 years ago.

But this R89m — minimum — vanity project is here with us, named as a memorial after a most terrible tragedy and crime, a victim, not survivor, of this horrible era of theft and lies; but this “development” is here to stay (though I see it could have built 350 RDP houses).

I find it spectacular and grotesque. There is no-one here, but for four or five workers in blue overalls huddled against one of those weird little shelters, tonking on a few quarts at 8.45am on a Tuesday. Some kind of early start to the festivities.

I drift down the cascading stairs to the life-size sculpture of a southern right whale head and tail sticking out of paved cement and it is impressive, yet utterly devoid of people, like a buffer zone of the old frontier wars of colonial conquest, except now we live under the new conquest of “development”.

I feel it so tangibly standing here, with the mess and chaos of Ebuhlanti and overcrowded, crushed Little Mauritius/Ciskei/Transkei to my left, and the glorious, naked ugly truth of government policy and action to my right at Orient.

On the left, Little Ciskei, I saw the primary schoolchildren from across the Kei tumble from taxis on their big first-time visit to the sea amble over to two of the six portable loos on this horrid site, and promptly do their business on the ground — ain’t nobody going to use those cesspits!

To my right, scores of kids from an East London school are on Orient Beach, just playing in the sand, their bags neatly lined up on the pavilion-type stairs. It is fantastic, it is right, it is logical.

But overall, this is not development, it is social madness and cruel indifference. 

Why don’t I just bring my braai right here to The Stoep, with all this space, and get those shrooms zinging?

Any drippings will be happily scoured away by the excoriating Beastly Easterly, now with us to stay this summer as meteorological predictions shift from El Niño (Little Boy) to La Niña (Little Girl) which means relentless north-easterlies.

Then again, when forecasters are being open and honest, they just say that our polluted, enraged climate is utterly unpredictable.

I can just see BCM law enforcement coming to tell me to buzz off, and if they don’t, who will come next? Will my braai fire power be any match for the firepower of Marikana state — a moment when all pretence of a Mandela-inspired democracy and freedom was shot down.

But wait there is more to come. The Christmas lights, a festive decoration exercise to make us feel good. At R5.1m, they will be up soon and it will be great for the kids.

But for us adults who know what is going on, they will feel like the brightness that sucks us all in, making sure we don’t look out at the abyss, and definitely don’t do the drive I did, traversing the gloriously flawed and corrupted policy of development.

Enjoy the vacated offices of the Buffalo City Development Agency, who are so emptied out they have given up their beachfront offices and are stuffed in prefab in the EL IDZ. Please don’t let them go! OK, maybe they can be moved again to the wasteland of Water World to admire the result of their R125m abomination.

For all you good people, that is you, reader, a time of rest approaches and I encourage people to use these fabulous places of ours safely and with less dop. Maybe even separate your good self from the jive and jol and take a long stroll on the shoreline.

Imagine an era when the creatures of the age of democracy roamed free and wild. I will be doing it soon with my cosmic other.