Durban’s Casbah – a city within a city of no more than four square kilometres. On the one side, whites maintained a stranglehold on the seven or eight arrow-straight streets that edged onto the esplanade. The Greyville Racecourse and Botanical Gardens blocked any movement towards the steep flanks of Durban’s Ridge.
First Avenue, Florida, Mitchell and Cowey roads created some openings for the Casbah, but this was closed off, zoned exclusively for “Europeans”. Through the fifties and sixties, the Casbah’s borders were drawn ever tighter as the Railway and Magazine barracks were raided and their Indian inhabitants summarily put on the move.
Greyville and Stamford Hill were gobbled up, and the outer edges of the Warwick Avenue area nibbled at. All through this, the Casbah gathered its threads, spinning
