The Rainbow Kingdom

Jambo! That’s how they greet you in East Africa.

The Swahili salutation is accompanied by a big smile and a genuine embrace. Back home, it is at the heart of our challenge in KwaZulu-Natal. We are ramping up tourism and it needs to be accompanied by a mindset change for a new culture to take root. We must welcome planeloads of tourists with warm hearts like we are inviting them into our homes. There is a varied offering in this edition of KZN INVEST, but most stories are dedicated to tourism to celebrate the British Airways London to Durban direct flights. This offers huge opportunities.

A host of good people have been working feverishly to make KZN spick and span for our visitors, but they can’t work alone. Everyone must chip in. The easiest way to do this is for locals to become the region’s best tourists. If we all get out and about, enjoying our splendid province we’ll become our own best advocates and our own harshest critics. My colleagues and I went wandering for this edition and it was largely a rewarding experience.

But then there was Big Sean. The juxtaposition couldn’t have been more severe. Big Sean’s bile rap belched out from the shack on a hot spring morning and spread through the shantytown surrounding Mahatma Gandhi’s Phoenix Settlement. The settlement is 18km north of Durban, and is an island of tranquility in a sea of poverty.