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PHOENIX township, marking its 50th anniversary, is a paradox etched into Durban’s landscape – scarred by apartheid’s cruelty, yet radiant with resilience. Born of forced removals under the Group Areas Act, Phoenix was the municipality’s cold...
EVERY WEEK (for 52 weeks) TO CHANGE A LIFE. Enquire in-store on how to enter.
FIFTY years ago, Phoenix township was not born of choice, but of compulsion. It rose from the cold calculations of apartheid’s Group Areas Act, a law that uprooted settled Indian families from Durban’s inner suburbs, and cast them into state...
"WHEN I knock on the door of Sarvodaya in the morning, I hear their voices," whispers Bongani Mthembu, the curator of the Gandhi's Phoenix Settlement in Bhambayi, adding: "I then greet 'Namaste Kasturba'." Mthembu is a spiritual man of...
The period between the 1950s and the 1970s in South Africa witnessed the emergence of a central state housing policy in delineated group areas. The genesis of Phoenix from the late 1950s through to the mid-1970s occurred within the council's...
FIFTY years ago, a dusty patch of cane fields and gritty dirt was given a name borrowed from a mythical bird. Today, that bird is very much on the move. By the time I get to Phoenix, she’ll be rising. Those words, borrowed from Glen Campbell’s...
“THEY gave us numbered units on sugar cane fields and called it a future. We turned it into a home, a community, a history – and from that home we sent our children out to change the world. That is the story of Phoenix. It deserves to be told whole.”
