The Port of Durban, usually called Durban Harbour, is the largest and busiest port in sub-Saharan Africa, built around Natal Bay on South Africa’s Indian Ocean coast in KwaZulu-Natal. It handles up to about 31 million tonnes of cargo a year across 58 berths run by more than 20 terminal operators, receives over 4,500 commercial vessels annually, and in 2021 carried about 60% of South Africa’s container traffic, according to its operator Transnet. It began as the trading post of Port Natal in 1824 and was renamed after Sir Benjamin D’Urban in 1835. It matters because it is a key sea link for Gauteng, which the N3 freeway connects to the harbour, and for much of southern Africa, and because its current expansion aims to raise container capacity from about 2.9 million TEU to more than 11 million TEU by 2031.
Two centuries separate a sandbar-guarded lagoon from a port of 302 km of rail track. The phases below follow that story in order, from the first European sighting to the private partnership at the container terminal’s Pier 2 that took effect in January 2026.
1497–1824: From Vasco da Gama’s Natal to Farewell’s Trading Post
The Zulu name for the city, eThekwini, comes from a word meaning bay or lagoon, and the bay was the reason anyone stopped here. The first written record is Portuguese. Vasco da Gama sailed along this coast at Christmas 1497 on his way to India and named it Natal, the Portuguese word for Christmas. Nearly two centuries later, in 1686, the Dutch East India Company ship Stavenisse was wrecked on the coast; survivors reached the Bay of Natal and lived among the Abambo people. In 1689 the galiot Noord came from Table Bay to collect them, and the Dutch Cape Colony signed a contract with the Abambo chief to buy the bay for £1,650, with the Stavenisse survivors acting as translators.
The port proper begins with a storm. In 1823 James Saunders King, captain of the British ship Salisbury, and Lieutenant Francis George Farewell, both former Royal Navy officers trading between the Cape and Delagoa Bay, risked crossing the sandbar at the bay mouth to shelter. The crossing worked, and King mapped the bay, naming Salisbury and Farewell islands; Salisbury Island still carries the name of his ship. In 1824 Farewell, together with the trading company J. R. Thompson & Co., returned to open trade with the Zulu king Shaka. Henry Francis Fynn sailed ahead on the brig Julia and Farewell followed six weeks later on the Antelope. By a document dated 7 August 1824, Shaka granted “F. G. Farewell & Company” the harbour of Natal and a large tract around it, after Fynn had helped him recover from a stab wound. Only six of the original 18 settlers stayed, joined in 1825 by King and Nathaniel Isaacs.
1835–1860: D’Urban, Congella and the Truro
On 23 June 1835, 35 European residents meeting in Fynn’s territory decided to lay out a town and name it D’Urban after Sir Benjamin D’Urban, governor of the Cape Colony. Control of the bay was soon contested. Voortrekkers founded the Natalia Republic in 1839 with its capital at Pietermaritzburg, and Governor George Napier, fearing the loss of Port Natal, sent troops under Captain Thomas Charlton Smith, who arrived on 4 May 1842 and built the camp later called the Old Fort. On the night of 23 May they attacked the Voortrekker camp at Congella, were beaten back and found themselves besieged in their own camp.
The siege was broken by a ride. The trader Dick King and his servant Ndongeni slipped out and rode to Grahamstown in 14 days; reinforcements reached Durban 20 days later and the Voortrekkers withdrew. Britain annexed Natal in May 1843. Because Port Natal was one of the few natural harbours between Port Elizabeth and Maputo, and lay off a coast known for violent seas, it became a busy port of call for ship repairs from the 1840s.
Durban became a borough in 1854, and the harbour quickly got its first land link. The Natal Railway Company, formed in January 1858, built a line of about 3 km from Market Square to a new Point station at the harbour, the first railway to operate in South Africa. It was later extended to the Umgeni River, from where quarried stone was carried to the harbour works. Then, on 16 November 1860, the ship Truro arrived from Madras carrying 342 indentured Indian labourers recruited for Natal’s sugar plantations, followed by the Belvedere from Calcutta. About 200,000 indentured Indians arrived over five decades, until India ended the export of indentured labour to Natal in 1911, and their descendants, together with later passenger migrants from India, gave Durban the large Indian community that still shapes its food, culture and religion.
1860s–1945: The Bar, a Whaling Station and a Wartime Causeway
For most of the 19th century the harbour’s challenge was its entrance. Ships had to cross the Bar, the same sandbar King and Farewell risked in 1823, while the Bluff, a ridge of coastal dunes formed two to five million years ago, made the southern shore that shielded the bay from the Indian Ocean. As Durban’s most prominent natural landmark, the Bluff probably also served as a visual reference for ships approaching the harbour. An 1891 drawing by C. W. Methven shows a long pier running out along the entrance channel, with sailing ships and steamers inside and beyond it.
In 1910 Natal joined the Union of South Africa, and its railways and harbours were merged into the state-owned South African Railways and Harbours. The exposed south-east side of the Bluff housed a whaling station from 1907 until 1975. Durban received city status in 1935. The Second World War then reshaped the inner harbour. Fearing Japanese attacks on shipping off East Africa, the Royal Navy built Naval Base Durban on Salisbury Island, a mangrove-covered sandbank, and joined it to the mainland with a causeway, turning the island into a peninsula.
1957–2002: Navy, a College for Indian Students and the Car Terminal
After the war the base passed to the South African Naval Service. Under the Simonstown Agreement of 1957 the Royal Navy handed control of South Africa’s navy to the country in exchange for use of Simon’s Town, and Salisbury Island became the main base of the new South African Navy. Apartheid left a different mark on the island: from 1961 to 1971 it housed the University College for Indians, the first full tertiary institution for Indian South Africans, whose students commuted by ferry or lived in hostels on the island. Its alumni include the later finance minister Pravin Gordhan.
From the mid-1970s to the early 1990s the island was home to the Minister-class strike-craft flotilla. When those ships retired, the navy concentrated its combat fleet at Simon’s Town and Durban was reduced to a naval station in 2002, before being redesignated a naval base in December 2015 as home of the offshore patrol flotilla. Commercial changes came at the same time. The Durban Car Terminal opened in 1998 with capacity for 60,000 vehicles a year, and a R100 million expansion in 2004 raised it to 6,500 bays, with a 380-metre bridge to the quayside. In 2000 the state port company Portnet was split into a landlord, the National Ports Authority, and an operator, Transnet Port Terminals, the structure that still runs Durban.
2021–2022: Cyberattack, Floods and a World Bank Verdict
Recent years exposed how much of southern Africa depends on this one harbour. On 22 July 2021 Transnet suffered a cyberattack that forced it to declare force majeure at its Durban, Ngqura, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town container terminals; most systems were restored by 26 July. In April 2022 floods killed at least 435 people in KwaZulu-Natal. Transnet suspended port operations on the evening of 11 April, roads into the port and the N3 highway to Johannesburg were damaged, damaged containers were looted, and lorries queued for 10 km on the N3 unable to reach the harbour.
The World Bank’s Container Port Performance Index ranked Durban 341st of 348 ports in 2022, 399th of 405 in 2023 and last, 403rd of 403, in 2024. The 2025 index noted better vessel turnaround times, but still placed it 398th of 400.
2025–2031: ICTSI at Pier 2 and the Road to 11 Million TEU
The response is a rebuilding programme measured in billions of dollars. In April 2021 officials unveiled a US$7 billion modernisation plan to lift capacity from 2.9 million TEU to more than 11 million TEU by 2031. In December 2023, as part of a R154 billion KwaZulu-Natal Ports Master Plan, Transnet National Ports Authority sought bids to rebuild Berths 203, 204 and 205 on the North Quay of Durban Container Terminal Pier 2, deepening them and the approach channel from 12.8 to 16.5 metres and extending the berth line from 914 to 1,210 metres so that three Super Post-Panamax ships can berth at once. In March 2025 Transnet announced a R3.4 billion programme of new straddle carriers and rubber-tyred gantry cranes. The harbour entrance has already been widened to a navigable width of 220 metres, with 19 metres of water in the approach channel.
The biggest change is in ownership. In December 2025 Transnet and the Philippine operator International Container Terminal Services (ICTSI) signed a 25-year partnership for Pier 2, South Africa’s first port privatisation deal, after the KwaZulu-Natal High Court dismissed a challenge by Maersk’s APM Terminals in October 2025. Transnet Port Terminals holds 51% and ICTSI 49%, and the deal, which took effect on 1 January 2026, calls for about US$650 million of investment to raise Pier 2 from 2 million to 2.8 million TEU and crane productivity from 18 to 28 moves an hour. Labour unions have criticised the private-sector role, warning of job losses. Cruise facilities are growing too: MSC Cruises holds 70% of the company building the R215 million Durban Cruise Terminal, and MSC Opera began its Durban season on 28 November 2025.
Durban’s place in the national economy is set out in our guide to the economy of South Africa, and the forced removals and segregated campuses of the apartheid years are mapped in apartheid South Africa’s geography. For East Africa’s equivalent gateway, compare Durban with the Port of Mombasa.