The Duzi Canoe Marathon
13 Jan 2010

The gruelling Duzi Canoe Marathon, held annually in late January on the Msunduze and Mngeni Rivers, starts in Pietermaritzburg's Alexandra Park, and has become canoeing's answer to the Comrades Marathon. Completing the 'Duzi' has become synonymous with fitness, stamina and skill. It is South Africa's biggest and best known canoe race, and attracts the country's top paddlers. The first recorded trip down the Msunduze and Mngeni Rivers was attempted in January 1893 by two Pietermaritzburg adventurers, William Foley and Paul Marianny, whose seven-day journey featured prominently in the Natal Witness. They used 16-foot canoes weighing 36 pounds each. Their pioneering effort is commemorated by the Marianny-Foley bridge over the Mngeni. In 1910 two other Pietermaritzburg men, 'Timber' Wood and Sonny Mitchell, also completed the journey, using a steel canoe with watertight compartments fore and aft.

Since the days of Foley and Marianny, the river itself has been altered considerably, and this in turn has influenced the character of the Duzi Marathon. The Msunduze has only one dam, Henley Dam, situated in the Edendale valley above the City. City paddlers train on this dam which is closer than Midmar and more sheltered. Water is usually released to boost the water level for the start if the river is low. Sprint events are at present held at Henley. From Edendale to the low-level bridge near the SPCA, canalization has considerably altered the meandering 'Duzi', especially above the West Street bridge and below the Commercial Road weir. Photographs of Victorian boating parties suggest that the river, in Alexandra Park and below, was deeper than it is today. During the 1950s, canoe races were held between Mason's Mill and the low-level bridge. This stretch of river is seldom fully navigable today. Shale has been dumped in the river in places (for example, on the bend at the O'Brien footbridge), and elsewhere the river is only knee-deep due to silting.

Left: Danny Biggs, the fastest runner with a canoe.

The release of industrial effluent has been minimized, but pollution and dirty-brown water have become a characteristic of the Duzi. In Victorian times swimming was popular in the Alexandra Park section of the river, but today even canoeists avoid falling into the murky water, which harbours bilharzia. Water-sports were banned on one occasion due to the cholera threat. Litter is a problem, and canoeists have to contend with broken bottles and other hidden hazards.

A few kilometres from the start, and just below the Dorpspruit confluence, Duzi paddlers encounter their first major obstacle, Musson's Weir. Intended to provide water for irrigation and depth for boating, the weir was demolished in 1967, but jagged rocks remain to trap unwary or daring canoeists. A pool below the weir was known by early paddlers as Barbel Pool. The long Bishopstowe portage, starting at the low-level bridge and ending beyond the City boundaries, at Campbell's Farm, was unknown to early Duzi paddlers, who had to negotiate a maze of entangled logs amid the stench of the sewage farm. The present portage skirts Sobantu Village.

In 1986 the City Council decided to complete the Camps Drift canalization scheme above Alexandra Park and this has considerably altered the start. The Ernie Pearce weir - 2 metres high - has been constructed at the West Street bridge. The 2 000 metre-long canal is intended to provide the City with a watersports facility of international standard and the race with a spectacular and spacious new start near Dalry Park. This replaces the cramped starts opposite the Old Grey's Hospital, and Kershaw Park. However, despite a second weir at the upper end of the canal to minimize silting, the tons of debris left by the devastating floods of September 1987 have so far prevented the satisfactory completion of the project. Apart from the start, the river itself is barely recognizable, with many features familiar to 40 years of Duzi paddlers swept away completely. The new Inanda Dam has also contributed to the changed face of the river.

Many Duzi pioneers were Pietermaritzburg personalities, with Ian Player, Ernie Pearce, Bob Templeton and Fred Schmidt founding and dominating the race during the 1950s. During the 1970s and 1980s local canoe-builder Graeme Pope-Ellis has reigned supreme. Up to and including the 1988 event, he has won the race 11 times in a doubles canoe and three times in a single. His impressive story has been told by Clive Lawrance in Graeme Pope-Ellis: The Duzi King (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter & Shooter, 1987). His doubles partners have been Richard Hackland, Ernie Clarke, Peter Peacock, and Tim Cornish, a former British international. Pope-Ellis's most recent singles triumph was his narrow 1987 win over local student, John Edmonds, who won in a single canoe in 1985. Other Pietermaritzburg paddlers to feature prominently include Comrades' gold medallist Danny Biggs, Springbok Rory Pennefather, Mike Tocknell, and Mark Jamieson. Biggs won the race in 1982 with his brother Tim, and the Biggs-Pope-Ellis duels were exciting contests. Pennefather won the singles title in 1978.

Above: Yeka JamandJa agangayo! (Goodness! what a waste of strength!)

Dr Ian Player, presently head of the Wilderness Leadership School, was the pioneer of the modern Duzi Marathon. The river flowed past his workplace in Pietermaritzburg. 'Every day I crossed the river on my way to work and wondered about its course through the gorges and ravines until it joined the Mngeni.' Player's enthusiasm survived an exciting and traumatic trip from the Bulwer Street Boating Club to the sewerage farm, in December 1950.

Despite enthusiastic support from the Press, the idea of a race was greeted with ridicule. 'No one in his right senses would think of people chasing one another down two boulder-strewn rivers.' On 23 December 1950, Player launched his fragile wood and canvas canoe, Umthakathi, into the muddy Msunduze. Packed into watertight containers were the supplies for what was to prove a devastating week-long ordeal. Included was a pistol that was to come in handy to dispatch a snake. ‘Representatives from all three of Natal's newspapers were there to see me off. Photographers took pictures, reporters shouted good luck and pulled my leg about getting washed over a waterfall, thus making a really good story’.

Player remarked on the tranquil stretches above Musson's Weir and the careful task of nursing the fragile craft down the rapids.

On 22 December 1951, eight paddlers set off on the inaugural race, under the aegis of the newly-established Natal Canoe Club. Player described the start: ‘Some three hundred people were gathered on the banks of the Mzunduze in Alexandra Park. Although there were only eight of us we made quite a colourful scene: bright shirts and shorts and multi-coloured canoes. All contestants wore the leopard-skin hatband, the insignia of the Natal Canoe Club . . . The Mayor inspected us, made a short speech prophesying that the race would become as popular as the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race , whereupon there were howls of derision from the crowd’.

The Mayor, Mr Warmback, wrote messages of greeting for the canoeists to pass on to his Durban counterpart. Rules were harsh: no assistance was allowed, and all provisions were packed into the canoes at the start. The craft weighed up to 70 pounds laden. There were no overnight stops and single canoes had to travel in pairs (until 1969). Canoeists seldom trained seriously for early races and often underestimated the ordeal. One competitor bought tickets for the cinema in Durban that same afternoon, but scarcely made it out of Pietermaritzburg. (On other occasions carrier pigeons were brought along, and a steel-framed canoe proved a disaster.) Player was the only finisher of the first race, in six exhausting days.

The Duzi has become part of two Pietermaritzburg associated competitions. The first, the Gary Player trophy for the best combined Comrades and Duzi performances, introduced in 1962, has often been won by local athletes such as Danny and Tim Biggs, Graeme Pope-Ellis, Piet Vorster, and Tim Cornish. Danny Biggs holds the record for this competition which he won in 1981, 1982, 1984 and 1985. The second competition, for the Iron Man award, comprises the Comrades, the Duzi, and the Midmar Mile swim.

Above: Graeme Pope-Ellis, 'The Duzi King', and John Edmonds, 'The Duzi Prince', at the end of their titanic duel in 1987.

Optimistic predictions for the future of the Duzi have been vindicated. Fields have grown steadily, and the race itself has undergone many changes, especially in the increasingly sophisticated equipment used. Pietermaritzburg has shared in the growing popularity of the race and of canoeing in general.

Above: Ian Player, the founder of the Duzi Marathon.

SOURCE: Pietermaritzburg 1838–1988: a new portrait of an African city, edited by John Laband and Robert Haswell (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press and Shuter & Shooter, 1988), pp. 254–6.