Durban - A broken sculpture of an elephant on a Durban pavement has much in common with manholes and kerbs on many of the city’s sidewalks.
They’re broken and in a mess.
One such ellie beside the freeway leading down to Warwick Triangle looks decapitated and detrunked, scrap metal having apparently been what attracted its attackers. Not ivory.
eThekwini – not only its municipality but also its airport – attracts statues. Sometimes expensive ones. So, while the elephant and its companions may have been mired in controversy for more than a decade, they need not feel lonely.
Not far away, in the midst of concrete jungle at the City Hall, former president Nelson Mandela and former ANC president Oliver Tambo are on their way to being immortalised in bronze for a handsome, already paid-up, sum.
“Both statues cost roughly R22m,” municipal spokesman Msawakhe Maiyisela told sister paper The Mercury.
“This was the cheapest figure as compared to others who wanted about the same price for only one statue.”
Opposition parties warned that if the ANC continued in this vein, it ran the risk of seeing the statues being removed if it lost control of the city.
DA councillor Yogis Govender said the ANC needed to go back to basics with service delivery and cut all the frills and nice-to-have items from the budget.
She said basic human rights were being infringed upon daily and the City had the capacity to reprioritise the budget for critical infrastructure and preventative maintenance.
IFP councillor Mdu Nkosi said a lot could have been done with the R22m.
“What benefit are these statues to the people of eThekwini? Nothing. There are many service-delivery matters that could have been attended to with that money.”
The elephant statues attracted controversy when local sculptor Andries Botha ended up fighting a court battle to continue with his commission to produce them after the then-leader of the ANC in the province, John Mchunu, decided elephants were too representative of the IFP.
Other legal action ended up in the Durban High Court which ruled that they should be protected but they have been vulnerable to vandalism.
Further out of town, at King Shaka International Airport, the monarch stands 12m high but wrapped in sheeting. The original “herdboy-looking” statue, also Botha’s work, was seen as an insult and has been relegated to storage, apparently in a warehouse.
The Zulu Royal House complained it did not make Shaka look like the warrior king he had been.
However, his cattle remain part of the scenery that the jet set pass between the terminal building and the parkade.
It’s up to the Zulu Royal House to decide when the big, new statue will be unveiled but spokesman Prince Thulani Zulu was not forthcoming with comment.
This, after The Independent on Saturday had been referred there by the provincial Department of Arts and Culture to which it had been referred by the Airports Company of SA.
Yesterday, the municipality said it required a 24-hour turnaround time for responses, so no comment would be forthcoming on whether there had been an update on the City Hall statues, nor the elephants.
There was talk of them being moved from the site where the last elephant was shot in the city, to the area around Moses Mabhida Stadium and the beachfront but that great wildlife migration in artistic form seems yet to take place.
Word has not come out on how much the yet-to-be unveiled statue at the airport has cost, nor who the sculptor was, as it welcomes people to the city impacted by floods, looting, corruption, poor maintenance, hunger, poverty, load shedding, apartheid town planning and other legacies of that era, beaches that frequently close due to sewage pollution… and pockets of wealth.
The Independent on Saturday