When Michael Jackson reached Durban: the pop star who crossed apartheid’s colour line

ON April 24, the biopic Michael, directed by Antoine Fuqua, and starring Jaafar Jackson, arrives in cinemas, reviving a global debate about genius, spectacle, and the price of fame. For Durban, it also offers something quieter: a doorway back into the humid, cassette-filled, television-lit 1980s, when Indian South African teenagers learnt that a song could travel further than a law, and a dance step could feel like the beginning of dignity. 

The moonwalk comes to Durban

Durban in the 1980s carried its own atmosphere of memory. Salt air drifting in from the bay, the faint sweetness of sugar on the wind from the North Coast, and a hard coastal light that made even ordinary streets seem to glow. Within that landscape lived a generation of Indian South African children who inherited two histories at once: the long echo of indenture and the daily pressures of apartheid’s classifications.

Over time, Durban had become home to the largest Indian community in South Africa, shaped across generations by labour, settlement and endurance. Apartheid expressed itself through space as much as through law. In Durban, that space took form in places like Chatsworth, created through Group Areas planning, where families were gathered into a landscape marked by relocation and quiet loss.

In the city centre, the Grey Street precinct remained a cultural and commercial anchor, carrying the energy of a community that persisted even as its boundaries tightened. But culture has always found a way to move through confined spaces. Before television settled into living rooms, cinemas in Grey Street offered a shared rhythm of gathering, where stories, music and community met under one roof. By the 1980s, that world began to shift, as home viewing and cassette culture slowly replaced the public screen.

Television, introduced nationally in 1976, soon became part of everyday life, even as the state attempted to shape what could be seen and heard. Radio remained equally intimate. In 1983, Radio Lotus began broadcasting to Indian South Africans, largely in English, reflecting a deeper linguistic shift already under way. Many children now spoke, thought and dreamed in English, while older languages lingered in fragments of prayer, memory and conversation. That shift quietly altered how the wider world entered Durban.

When a child lives in English, global music arrives with a certain immediacy. American pop no longer feels distant or translated. It settles easily into the imagination, alongside temple rhythms, wedding songs, and the lingering romance of Bombay cinema. In that convergence, something subtle takes place. The child begins to feel part of a world larger than the one mapped out around him.

Michael Jackson arrived through that opening. He entered the decade at full blaze of international power, and by late 1982, his album Thriller began its climb into world-defining status, accelerating the growth of music video culture, and dominating youth attention across countries, including South Africa. For Durban teenagers, this global force did not arrive as an abstract chart statistic, but as the sound leaking from radios in taxis and buses. It arrived as a cassette passed hand to hand, played until the tape thinned. It arrived as a grainy television image that still carried enough electricity to make a living room feel like a stage.

A Durban Indian schoolboy in the mid-1980s could live in a township shaped by apartheid planning, travel into “Town” through routes that revealed the city’s racial scaffolding, and still feel the world expand in the space of one song. When Jackson’s Billie Jean infiltrated the atmosphere, it carried something the apartheid imagination rarely allowed: glamour that felt universal, elegance that felt earned, and a kind of danger that belonged to performance rather than to politics.

Then came the moment that turned movement into mythology. In 1983, during the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever television special, Jackson debuted the moonwalk, and the step quickly became part of global youth choreography, copied in bedrooms, school halls, and community stages across continents. Durban learnt it too, the way Durban learns many things: through repetition, improvisation, and the stubborn joy of trying again.

The move spread through school concerts, talent shows, and family gatherings where children pushed furniture back and turned domestic space into performance space. Some children wanted white socks and a white glove. Others made substitutes, because scarcity has always been one of South Africa’s hidden teachers. In a city where Indian identity had long been pulled between belonging and exclusion, the appeal ran deeper than fashion.

Jackson’s work offered a rare kind of permission. It told a brown child in Durban that modern excellence had room for him. It suggested that the world’s bright centre could include somebody whose grandparents had once arrived as labour, and whose parents still lived with the daily mathematics of racial control. That does not read like politics, but it changes a young person's emotional posture and alters what he expects of himself. Durban’s Indian youth also learnt another lesson from the Jackson-era: shared culture can form a bridge even when society promotes separation.

You could hear Jackson in a minibus taxi passing through the city. You could catch him through an open window near a neighbour’s television. You could sense, in the way teenagers spoke about that video, that the same aesthetic shock had landed across multiple communities at once. A society engineered to keep people apart still produced moments of simultaneous wonder. This bridge functioned partly because the music arrived wrapped in the language of entertainment, even while the broadcasting system remained tightly managed.

Research and archival work on apartheid-era music control shows the broadcaster operating as a powerful gatekeeper through structures such as acceptance committees, deciding what reached the airwaves, and using practical methods to enforce silence, including “avoid” markings and physically-tampered records. Regardless, Billie Jean, Beat It, and the Michael Jackson catalogue travelled widely, carried by the everyday ingenuity of listeners, and by the simple fact that rhythm can behave like water, finding its cracks.

Viewed from Durban, Jackson’s influence during apartheid transcends nostalgia and serves as evidence that cultural power can exceed political design. It becomes a case study in how identity develops in conditions of constraint. Many Indian South Africans in the 1980s were learning English as their main language, absorbing Western popular culture, and still carrying older inheritances of faith, cuisine and memory.

Jackson entered that mix as a global symbol of discipline and spectacle. For a child shaped by Durban’s Indian history, he also functioned as a mirror that reflected possibility rather than limitation.

This month, as Durban readers prepare for the release of Michael, it may help to remember what the 1980s actually felt like here. It felt like a city where families could gather in Grey Street cinemas as a cultural ritual, and then slowly relocate their attention toward taped recordings and home screens as technology shifted the centre of entertainment. It felt like the arrival of a dedicated Indian radio service in 1983, in English, with the community’s languages carried alongside, reflecting a real linguistic transition already under way. It felt like television gaining cultural power through the decade, even as the state attempted to hold the narrative line.

Above all, it felt like a Durban boy learning to glide backwards while imagining his life moving forward. That is the gift these memories can still offer South Africans who grew up later and inherited democracy rather than fought their way toward it. The past can teach that a bridge sometimes begins as a song, and that dignity sometimes begins as a young person deciding that his body deserves grace. When the cinema lights dim for Michael on April 24, Durban can bring its own story into the theatre: the story of a community shaped by indenture, reorganised by Group Areas, and still able to claim a share of the world through rhythm.

Dr Ashok Damarupurshad is a South African writer and researcher whose work explores culture, memory, and the ways technology and media shape identity in everyday life.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media. 

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