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The Racial Crucible

Economy, Stereotype, and Urban Space in Durban

In Durban itself Indian women are distinctive in vivid saris; mosques and temples break the line of colonial architecture with minarets and domes adorned with statues of the Hindu pantheon; shops are stocked with silk, brassware and spices; in the ‘Indian markets’, which are among Durban’s main tourist attractions, stalls are crammed with oriental jewelry and trinketry, with a variety of lentils, rice, beans and oils, with betel leaf and areca nut, lime, camphor, incense sticks, with currie powders, masala, all kinds of fruits and herbs, as well as with more familiar goods which themselves become unfamiliar in the excited atmosphere of oriental bargaining.¹

—Hilda Kuper

Now Indians, as you are aware, were the shop keepers of the time, they provided transport, they provided land so Africans were literally helpless. Now this brought about a situation that when an African wrongly boarded a bus and wanted to jump off, invariably he was assaulted and murdered and the Africans couldn’t do anything about it: the shops belonged to the Indians, the very land on which they lived belonged to the Indians.²

—C. C. Majola

IN THE years following the First World War, the rapid and large-scale urbanization of Africans and Indians permanently transformed the social landscape of Durban and other cities in Natal. The expansion of secondary industry created new prospects for employment, especially for former indentured laborers who left the countryside in ever-growing numbers. The same period witnessed a protracted crisis in the “Native Reserves”—the desultory fragments of the Zulu kingdom maintained by the colonial state as labor reservoirs. Land shortages, population growth, overstocking of cattle, intermittent years of severe drought, and taxes imposed by the colonial state encouraged an exodus of Africans. These were (mostly) young men who lived in the backyards of white and Indian households or government-controlled hostels, or found rooms in the shack lands that began to surround Durban and other cities. The social and political consequences of the “African industrial revolution” dominated the first half of the twentieth century: the rise of Indian and African labor unions, the emergence and radicalization of mass-based nationalist organizations, and the new system of racial governance implemented by the Afrikaner Nationalist regime under the slogan “apartheid.” Yet historians have generally analyzed the urbanization of Indians and Africans in parallel—as largely distinct stories of racial groups, occasionally intersecting in the form of political cooperation or social conflict.³ These two processes were interwoven in the details and patterns of urban life, conditioning and transforming the other on multiple levels. To paraphrase E. P. Thompson’s famous discussion of class, relationships precede identities.⁴ In order to understand Natal’s racial politics, we must analyze the concrete social conditions that integrated Zulu-speaking migrants and Indians of differing class, linguistic, and religious backgrounds into a common urban landscape.

The image of the apartheid city continues to exercise considerable power over the imagination of South Africa’s historians. Since most of the writing on urban history concerns the origins of racial segregation and institutionalized white supremacy, historians have often neglected those aspects of the pre-1948 city (or, more accurately, the city before the forced removals of the late 1950s and early 1960s) that succumbed to later developments.⁵ At its height, the apartheid city boasted large-scale, systematically planned, and clearly demarcated residential segregation between white, African, Indian, and Coloured areas. Although significant regional variations existed, the apartheid regime succeeded in enforcing a strong correlation between race and class, particularly in the larger cities. Most of the industrial working class was African; Indians made up a “middle group” of businessmen, professionals, and skilled workers situated between white and black. The apartheid regime sought to secure the correspondence of race and space (in terms of both social and geographical segregation), although the economy’s dependence on African labor ultimately made this goal unrealizable.⁶

Little of this picture held true for Durban before the forced removals of late 1950s. Although a clear pattern of segregation had emerged between white and Indian areas by the close of the nineteenth century, the growth of African and Indian neighborhoods in later decades followed a different logic. The city of Durban established municipal housing for workers at locations like Lamontville and Magazine Barracks, but these provisions were inadequate for the scale of urban migration. By the 1930s, the Durban Commission reported the growth of a “black belt” around the city: a network of racially mixed shack settlements and sprawling, working-class neighborhoods.⁷ In areas largely outside of municipal control, the poor of all races (including a small number of whites) utilized buses, stores, and housing in large part established or owned by Indians.⁸ When Africans complained bitterly about the “color bar” in these areas, they were referring to their treatment in local stores and exclusion from Indian community institutions. Indians and Africans of all classes lived among and adjacent to one another, shopped at the same stores, and rode on the same buses. To the extent that segregation existed in the black belt, it was imposed and policed through institutions erected by the inhabitants themselves.

This chapter has two principle goals. First, it provides the background necessary to understand how Durban’s racial dynamics came to play a decisive role in the reorientation of African politics during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Indeed, the city itself functioned as a central protagonist in the larger story of African nationalism during this period. Other South African cities, including Johannesburg and Cape Town, possessed economically and politically significant Indian communities. Durban was distinctive, however, in both the size of its Indian population—people of South Asian descent were still the single largest group in 1951—and the nature of the spatial regime that developed during the interwar years. As new African migrants rapidly outstripped the housing and other amenities provided by the municipal government, they turned to the informal sector, especially stores, transport, and land owned and operated by Indian families. This ersatz infrastructure not only supported most of the new population, it integrated the two groups into a hierarchical relationship of “Indian” over “African” that transcended neighborhood dynamics and operated on the scale of the city. Symbolized by the picturesque and centrally located Grey Street complex, this hierarchy provided the basis for a powerful discourse of “Indian domination” that connected the antagonisms of multiple, and sometimes very different, sites around the image of the merchant. If stereotypes regarding Indians were common across southern and eastern Africa, they usually represented one element of a complex and motile urban reality whose predominant feature was white domination. In Durban, things worked differently. By the mid-1940s, the polarization between the two colonized and disenfranchised populations was a defining, if not the definitive, fact of social life.

Second, this chapter suggests a way of analyzing Durban’s racial polarization that resists, however paradoxical it might seem at first, endowing the categories of “Indian” and “African” with political or sociological coherence. Whatever its basis in a specific urban geography, the antagonism between Indian and African became generalized through the work of discourse. Outside of structures of representation, racial groups do not exist as collective agents: individuals and factions claim to embody racial or national totalities as a strategy for mobilizing sections of populations. Consequently, racial conflict can coexist—indeed, it always coexists—with social formations and relationships organized according to other categories and logics. If an Indian-owned infrastructure instantiated the hierarchy of “brown over black,” this hierarchy was haphazard and rested on local foundations whose dynamics varied considerably.⁹ Alongside depersonalized (and depersonalizing) interactions in buses and shops, more familiar and sometimes intimate relationships developed: between doctors and patients, landlords and tenants, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and lovers. When younger activists from the ANC and Indian Congress began to grapple with the question of African-Indian political cooperation in the mid-1940s, they confronted a polarized terrain of distinct organizations and identities, which they knew from their own lives did not express the complexity of race in Natal. As later chapters will show, this dilemma would lead them to rethink the relationship between race, political organization, and African nationalism—but only after considerable suffering and loss.

STEREOTYPES, DISCOURSES, AND DESCRIPTIONS

In sources relating to the question of African-Indian social dynamics (newspapers, memoirs, interviews, and government reports), three distinct forms of racial language appear: stereotypes, generalizing discourses, and specific descriptions. All three of these modes are grounded in a racial consciousness that, however much it might incorporate an individual or group’s lived experiences, translates social relations into idealized images and, in turn, shapes the field of personal interactions in racial terms. Because these types of language presuppose the existence of coherent groups (“the Indian” and “the African”), they should not be used as direct evidence of an underlying reality: racial language organizes and shapes social life in ways that require historical analysis and explanation. As Sander Gilman argues, stereotypes operate at the level of fantasy.¹⁰ They are images that have broken free from their original context through assimilation into collective identities.¹¹ Because they are a means of self-definition in terms of an “outsider,” they can function in contexts where there is no empirical correspondence between the stereotype and its putative object. A stereotype generally takes the form of a core association—for example, “white South Africans are racist”—accompanied by a cluster of related attributes that are invoked selectively and shift overtime. In most cases, multiple stereotypes exist regarding the same group, allowing racial fantasies to shift between differing, and often contradictory, characterizations without any underlying logic. For a historian, stereotypes serve largely as evidence of the imaginations, desires, and resentments of the individual or group deploying the image, rather than the actual content of racialized interactions.¹²

In contrast, racial discourses are the product of specific socioeconomic contexts. They incorporate stereotypes into narratives that correspond, in however partial and distorted a fashion, with existing social realities. Racial discourses are common stories told about the relationship between groups, although one protagonist (usually the group of the narrator) can remain implicit and therefore invisible in the account. Such stories often relate to specific kinds of spaces—the everyday theaters where the drama of interaction unfolds—or geographic areas. They provide relatively fixed scripts that influence the expectations and behavior of individuals within these sites while molding broader perceptions through their circulation as rumors, jokes, and urban legends.¹³ Since racial discourses are organized around the existence of an imagined binary, their basic structure assumes one of two forms: cooperation or conflict, friendship or war. In a very real sense, they form part of the material infrastructure that reproduces social interactions in a racialized form. In turn, the authors of specific descriptions seek to confirm or contest an established racial discourse. These sources recount events (an unusual or exemplary encounter, for instance) in the concrete language of personal experience. Descriptions often contain elements or details that subvert the generalizing terms of racial discourse while employing the same stereotypes. In such cases, specific descriptions do not necessarily provide evidence of a competing discourse. Nor should they serve as the basis for alternative sociological generalization regarding “race relations.” They relate events, relationships, or interactions that confirm or disrupt a standard script even as the author continues to perceive the participants and overall context in racial terms.

The most striking aspect of stereotypes regarding Indians was their uniformity. The same basic image appears across much of southern and eastern Africa, despite the varying character of the colonial policies and racial dynamics of different states, regions, and cities. Moreover, the core attributes of this image remained generally stable even as concrete social relationships and their underlying political economies transformed significantly. The “Indian” was synonymous with the “merchant.” The principle traits of this figure expressed popular resentments over the reputed practices of shop owners: “dishonest,” “crafty,” and “exploitative” were common epithets. Correspondingly, this language presupposed an undifferentiated victim of the Indian’s machinations, the African, who assumed the opposite characteristics. These were the common, even universal, terms of struggle between moral economies based on different forms of wealth: the honor-based ethos of an agrarian society and a mercantile diaspora’s profit-driven reckoning of value.¹⁴ The Indian was not just ethnically foreign, but embodied the increasing power of an alien mode of calculating and distributing wealth.¹⁵ One informant told Leo Kuper in the 1950s: “We cannot compete with Indians in business. Far from it. I don’t think we’ll ever pitch up to their understanding. Where merchants work it out for us, it’s alright.”¹⁶ As a figure, the merchant gave phenomenological immediacy to market forces that were capricious and otherwise invisible.

Whatever its origins, once this association was fixed as a stereotype, an enormous range of human behavior—from the thrift of working-class housewives to the international diplomacy of Krishna Menon and Nehru—became legible in terms of a common racial essence. The resulting image lent itself to paranoid and conspiratorial readings of social relationships. If Indians pursued their economic interests through duplicitous means, then acts of friendship, altruism, or solidarity (the distinction scarcely registered) masked their true intentions and therefore, paradoxically, were the most “Indian” forms of deception. Later, the same logic would transform the Indian into a highly visible embodiment of postcolonial (and postapartheid) corruption.¹⁷ By projecting threatening qualities onto the other, the merchant stereotype neutralized the internal conflicts and heterogeneities of urbanizing African society, and therefore provided an alibi for the divisions that troubled political, religious, or cultural nationalist claims to represent a coherent moral community. If we somehow resemble the corruption of the outsider, according to this argument, it is due to the outsider’s corrupting influence among us. Even proximity (spatial as well as social) could be recast as a form of infiltration, and therefore served as a confirmation of the Indian’s devious nature. This reiteration of distance reflected the most important attribute of the merchant stereotype. No matter how long his or her family had lived in South Africa, the Indian would always remain a foreigner. In popular culture, this image often appeared alongside signifiers of cultural difference: the smell of curry, the sari of the woman shopkeeper, and the intonations of South African Indian English. Several observers of mid-century Durban noted that these associations echoed core tropes of anti-Semitism. The Indian was, according to a common saying, the Jew of Africa.¹⁸

Because of its near ubiquitous presence in interviews and sources written by Africans, the merchant stereotype produces something of a false surface. Circulating between editorials and racist jokes, between political speeches and township gossip, this image encouraged many contemporaries (and some later accounts) to postulate a general hostility to Indians and a bifurcated social landscape.¹⁹ Underneath this surface, the reality was considerably more complex. It is important to remember that racial language is, after all, a form of language: a contextually specific act of speech or writing directed toward an audience. The same words could mask opposed attitudes and intentions. In the years following the Durban Riots, H. I. E. Dhlomo and Ngubane wrote a series of articles analyzing the complexity of African-Indian relations and urging closer political cooperation. Nevertheless, these same articles generalized about the Indian in ways that reflected the power of the trader stereotype.²⁰ In different contexts, this image could express an almost bewildering range of emotions: resentment, fear, jealousy, anger, and humiliation as well as admiration, gratitude, and—of course—desire. The very ambiguity of the stereotype facilitated inversion. Stigmatized characteristics could double as valued traits. Cunning, for example, sometimes transmuted into resourcefulness. Moreover, stereotypes are always inadequate to the complexities of social interactions. Individuals frequently upheld the validity of anti-Indian generalizations while making exceptions in practice.²¹ The abstract idea of “amaKula” (the isiZulu calque of “coolie”) was not necessarily the same thing as one’s neighbor, friend, or coworker. Many Africans employed a Manichean language of enmity. At the same time, they lived in a world composed of complex relationships and subtle negotiations involving multiple groups—racial and otherwise. In some cases, these relationships elude the historian precisely because they were considered unremarkable: they do not appear in sources because they were not translated into the idealized languages of conflict or racial friendship.

More than anything else, the merchant stereotype was a transplant. This language may have originated in the confrontation between the farmer and shopkeeper, but only a minority of Durban Indians were traders of any sort. The majority were former indentured workers who migrated to the areas surrounding the city in the late nineteenth century or early twentieth century. Most were desperately poor and lived near or below substance level.²² The single largest occupation among Indians was semi-skilled and unskilled industrial labor.²³ Even in later decades, visitors were struck by the size and poverty of the Indian working class. In his memoir Coolie Location, Jay Naidoo recalls his first trip to Durban: “I also saw something I had never seen in Pretoria: Indian petrol attendants, Indian refuse collectors, Indian street sweepers—Indians, in sum, doing all the menial tasks which in Pretoria were reserved for Africans.”²⁴ In both popular discussions and the African press, however, the significant class divisions among Indians were generally invisible. On the rare occasions when Ilanga and Inkundla mentioned poorer Indians, these references served to buttress the overall case against the merchant.²⁵

To a considerable degree, this absence reflected the consolidation of a new racial discourse beginning in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Despite ongoing attempts to clearly demarcate white and Indian areas, the Natal state lacked an overall legal or political framework for incorporating the different groups—however they might be defined—into a larger, segregationist order. Settler power and white supremacy were, of course, the bedrocks of social and economic life. However, urban racial hierarchies, especially among non-European populations, developed on a local basis and possessed a makeshift and informal character. The large-scale movement of Africans to Natal’s cities began to alter this situation. Crucially, a new racial structure emerged not through the direct actions of the state, but in areas outside of government control created in large part by the decision to relax pass law enforcement during the war. As African migrants arrived in the city, they largely relied on Indian-owned stores, buses, and land to meet basic needs, especially during times of rationing and food shortages. At the same time, the majority of Africans found themselves either excluded from community institutions coded as Indian (like tea rooms, social centers, and most cinemas) or incorporated into common spaces in subordinated roles, for example as domestic workers in Indian households.

In this context, a powerful discourse emerged that stressed the control of the Indian over virtually every aspect of the African’s existence. “Now Indians, as you are aware,” recalled Kwa-Mashu resident C. C. Majola in 1979, “were the shop keepers of the time, they provided transport, they provided land so Africans were literally helpless.”²⁶ This language fused two scales of phenomena: resentments grounded in the micropolitics of multiple urban sites and a broader image of Indian domination symbolized by Grey Street, the iconic shopping district located at the heart of Durban. As a result, the Indian came to exemplify the dependent position of the African within a series of spaces that governed core aspects of daily life: habitation, transport, work, and consumption. The fact that this discourse integrated experiences that traversed the city’s geography resulted in the generalization of local conflicts and facilitated the development of a widespread anti-Indian populism that assumed directly political forms.

PATTERNS OF URBANIZATION

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, a significant Indian presence developed in Natal’s cities and the surrounding peri-urban areas.²⁷ After their contracts had expired, most indentured workers sought to stay in Natal and some managed to lease and acquire land. On the outskirts of the official Durban borough limits, Indian households could participate in the growing economy of the city (through market gardening, fishing, hawking, and various crafts), while remaining largely beyond the reaches of the government. Forty percent of South Africa’s Indian population eventually settled in the Durban region and smaller communities grew along the “main line” towns connected by the Durban-Rand railway and near the northern Natal coalfields.²⁸ As a market developed among indentured and former-indentured workers, a second migration of “passenger” Indians, largely composed of Gujarati merchants and their poorer kin, began to arrive in Natal and the Transvaal in the mid-1870s. Goolam Vahed explains: “The special circumstances of merchants enabled them to keep their social distance from other Indians and identify with India as their home country. The main distinction in Natal was between Gujarati speaking Muslim and higher caste Hindu traders from northern India and Telugu and Tamil speaking indentured Indians from south India.”²⁹ By the 1880s, sections of the Gujarati community had become an outsized power in Indian business and, especially, politics.³⁰ This layer accumulated a considerable amount of wealth. In Durban and Pietermaritzburg, Indians collectively held property valued at £40,000, including sixty retail shops in Durban and two Indian-owned shipping lines.³¹

The increasing visibility of an urban Indian population coincided with a series of racist campaigns by white South Africans and the implementation of laws directed at controlling Indian movement and economic activity. In 1885 the Transvaal introduced formal segregation for Indian residential areas and the Orange Free State prohibited Indians from owning and occupying land in 1891. At the end of the decade, the mayors of Durban, Pietermaritzburg, and Newcastle petitioned the colonial secretary for a ban on the purchase of land by Indians—although the secretary refused to comply with their request.³² As Maynard Swanson and others have argued, the Natal ruling class’s reaction to the perceived economic, cultural, and demographic threat posed by the Indian resulted in some of the first attempts to segregate urban space. By the late nineteenth century, a combination of legislation (particularly the regulation of trading licenses) and informal coercion had produced “bipolar, spatially juxtaposed European and Indian business districts” in Durban and the creation of Indian residential enclaves throughout Natal.³³ These enclaves, in turn, were often internally organized around close-knit networks of Indian families or linguistic communities.³⁴

This early stage of Indian urbanization contrasted with the migration of Africans in two important respects. First, a significant number of Indians managed to purchase land.³⁵ Along with the growth of Indian business and residential districts, this fact encouraged Indian elites to finance the creation of local community institutions, many of which were organized along linguistic or religious lines: temples, mosques, schools, and social centers.³⁶ In contrast, the social lives of African migrants centered on municipal beer halls, hostels, dancehalls, and illegal shebeens. Second, Indian areas developed around networks of intimately connected family homes.³⁷ As Hilda Kuper observes: “A house in an Indian area is never an isolated dwelling; it is integrated into the street, neighborhood, and community. Kinsmen often live near each other, affairs of the neighborhood arouse the gossip that controls the moral standards of the whole area.”³⁸ Although a small number of African women established themselves in Durban as sex workers, brewers, and “shebeen queens,” the overwhelming majority of migrants were single men, many of whom maintained close ties with rural society and frequently returned to homesteads in the countryside. Zulu working-class culture developed largely through associations comprised of male migrants. For example, domestic servants organized amalaita gangs around stick fighting, crime, defending territories, and distinctive modes of dress. An adaptation of rural youth organizations, these gangs drew on both rural solidarities and an urban criminal subculture.³⁹ Other important groups included Zionist religious movements and African “buying clubs” and cooperatives.

In Durban and other Natal cities, the division between European and non-European areas developed on the basis of a pattern established by early Indian enclaves.⁴⁰ Critically, the legislation that existed before the Group Areas Act (1950) prevented Africans from residing within European residential areas, but generally overlooked the residential penetration of other groups. As the urbanization of both Africans and Indians accelerated, the provisions made by the local government for housing proved inadequate and shack settlements began to encircle the city. The scale and pace of this influx was extraordinary. By 1951, two thirds of Natal’s Indian population had either moved to the cities or been born in urban areas.⁴¹ During the same period, the percentage of Africans present in Durban increased threefold.⁴² The population of Cato Manor—the famous concentration of shack settlements two miles from the center of Durban—expanded from about 2,500 Africans in 1936 to an estimated 50,000 at the end of 1950.⁴³ Although census figures from 1951 show that Indians still constituted the largest population in Durban, Africans appeared as a very close second.⁴⁴

Poverty often threw those newly arriving from the countryside together. Africans, Indians, Coloureds, and even some whites lived “cheek-by-jowl”—an ubiquitous term in accounts of this period.⁴⁵ Letters to African newspapers occasionally celebrated the fact that urbanization was erasing racial distinctions. In certain areas, there was some truth to this claim. According to a 1952 housing survey by the University of Durban, African residences were relatively evenly distributed throughout Durban (reflecting employment in European households) with the highest concentration in Cato Manor.⁴⁶ Although the maps of residential distribution published with the survey show areas of predominantly African habitation (the Chesterville and Lamontville locations), heavy interpenetration of the two groups occurred in several neighborhoods: Cato Manor, Sydenham, Central Durban (the Grey Street area), the South Coast Junction, and to a lesser extent Clairwood. Durban’s small Coloured population mostly lived interspersed with Indian families, although a significant number lived in Cato Manor as well.⁴⁷ Describing similar conditions faced by Afrikaners in the townships surrounding Ladysmith, Ngubane recalls:

They [Afrikaners] did not have the money with which to pay for expensive accommodation. As a result they often settled in the cheaper parts of Ladysmith where their neighbours were often either the Africans or the Coloureds or the Indians. . . . The poor Whites discovered that only the poor Blacks were their real allies; they could borrow salt or sugar or food or money from them in the hour of need and did not laugh at them when they saw them sew pieces of hessian inside white calico flour bags to make blankets. The poor Africans, Coloureds and Indians did these things too.⁴⁸

The character of social relations differed between city center and outlying shack settlements, from urban location to urban location, and sometimes from street to street. Each area possessed its own mood and racial texture. The Johannesburg location of Vrederdorp (“Fietas”), although predominantly Indian, included a significant number of Malay, Chinese, and African families, all of whom lived together in rows of tiny houses stretched along narrow lanes. Perceived as an Indian area by most outsiders, the social distinctions between Tamils, poorer Gujaratis, and the Gujarati middle class insured that these groups maintained separate identities within Fietas, undercutting an internal sense of domination by a single race. In this context, individual streets developed the solidarities of an extended family: households shared toilets, women spent their days talking as they worked on adjacent porches, and children grew up together under the neighborhood’s watchful eyes. The main social division was between the poor of all races and the largely Gujarati landlords and storeowners of nearby 14th Street, although families ties, shared religious affiliations, sports teams, and patronage bound these two worlds together.⁴⁹ Neighborhoods like Cape Town’s District Six, Johannesburg’s Sophiatown, and (to a lesser extent) the Macabise district of Edendale contained a significant degree of residential integration. The presence of property owners and petit-bourgeois professionals from different groups promoted class tensions within as well as solidarity across racial lines. Beginning in the 1950s, African newspapers and magazines, most notably Drum, would develop a popular image of South African cosmopolitanism by celebrating these communities. Idealized by musicians, artists, and writers, spaces such as Sophiatown would provide the imagery and language for a discourse that playfully subverted racial binaries by celebrating a shared style of living within the modern city.⁵⁰

Several Durban neighborhoods, including sections of the Grey Street complex, developed along similar lines. However, Durban differed from other South African cities not only in the size of its Indian population, but in the overall structure of its urban geography. In important respects, the massive shack lands of Cato Manor helped set the overall tone of the city’s racial politics. According to one former resident, “Cato Manor was a lifestyle.”⁵¹ On the weekends, Africans traveled from across Durban to visit its shebeens, dance, buy dagga, trade in stolen goods, and hire prostitutes. By the 1940s, Cato Manor had developed predominantly African and Indian neighborhoods, with substantial sections of mixed residency interspersed with the more homogenous sections. Largely peopled by migrants and others living illegally in the city, the African section possessed a powerful sense of collective identity articulated, to a considerable degree, against absentee Indian landlords and local traders. In a fashion similar to the Johannesburg township of Alexandra, a bitter rivalry developed between established Indian storeowners and aspirant African merchants, a rivalry intensified by the sentiment among Africans that Mkhumbane (the isiZulu name for Cato Manor) was theirs by right.⁵² When journalists or racial populists sought to illustrate a narrative of antagonism between Africans and Indians, they invoked the social conflicts in these or similar areas. (Bantu World, for example, published articles on the rivalry between Indian and African traders in Alexandra during the early 1950s as part of its campaign against cooperation with the Indian Congress.) In the Transvaal, such rivalries sometimes simmered for years, occasionally erupting in violence and the looting of stores, but they nevertheless remained confined to specific neighborhoods.⁵³ Durban, however, was a smaller and more centralized city. If Cato Manor’s size, location, and cultural importance insured its broader influence on Durban African politics, the Grey Street complex provided a unifying center that connected—both symbolically and physically—local dynamics that may have otherwise remained discrete.

GREY STREET AND THE INDIAN MERCHANT

The Grey Street complex was located at Durban’s center, adjoining the white-owned commercial district and the City Market. Similar, if less spectacular, areas existed in other Natal and Transvaal cities. Visitors to this area were struck by the minarets and colonnades of the buildings, the art deco facades sprinkled with Eastern motifs, the reverberating tones of Indian languages, the saris of women working in shops, and the smells of curries and spices. The area around Grey Street included factories, apartment blocks, and hotels—many owned by Indians. A liberal anthropologist like Hilda Kuper could wax romantic about the excited atmosphere of “oriental” bargaining and the timeless seductions of the marketplace. However, as Omar Badsha underlines, Grey Street was never a purely Indian district.⁵⁴ The neighborhood also included the Native Meat Market, the city council–run African “Macheni” beer hall and small stalls, the Native Women’s Hostel, several African churches, the Bantu Social Centre (a major site of political and trade union activity), and numerous small eating rooms catering to either (or sometimes both) groups. Because the city’s major transport hub was located on Victoria Street next to four major markets, thousands of Africans and Indians passed through the area each day to catch connecting buses. Additionally, many Indian-owned stores employed African men to work as “boys”; that is, as menial laborers. In some descriptions of Grey Street, the sensory mélange of the market place and the blunt give-and-take of urban bustle embodied the spirit of the city.⁵⁵ But Grey Street’s “Indian” character produced enormous bitterness. For many Africans, its mosques, colonnades, and colorful storefronts became symbols of a foreign people settling in their land and achieving a prosperity denied to them. During the 1949 Riots, for example, a rumor circulated that the severed head of an African boy hung from the dome of the Juma Masjid, the most visible building in the neighborhood.⁵⁶

In fact, Grey Street did serve as a central space where sections of Durban’s Indian population monumentalized and celebrated their presence in the city. Religious communities constructed impressive places of worship (the Juma Masjid was the largest mosque in the southern hemisphere), businessmen sponsored community centers and language schools that advertised the importance of their groups (Parsis, a tiny section of the Indian population, owed much of their considerable visibility to building projects such as the Gandhi Memorial Library), and a wide range of cultural and religious associations used its streets for processions. Alongside these performances, Grey Street also provided a venue for conspicuous consumption and highly visible modes of leisure. A self-styled, urbane middle class made Saturday night appearances at legendary jazz clubs such as the Goodwill Lounge, sat ringside at widely hyped boxing matches, or took their “Coloured girlfriends" to exclusive clubs (public displays of romance, especially when combined with “race mixing,” were signs of modernity).⁵⁷

The district was also the epicenter of one of Durban’s most popular and accessible forms of entertainment: the cinema. Major cultural landmarks that sometimes doubled as meeting halls, Grey Street’s six theaters were venues within which a range of people—including Indian women and African youth—nurtured class aspirations and new forms of international awareness. These “bioscopes” were seen as distinctly Indian spaces.⁵⁸ The Grey Street complex arose out of efforts to build institutions that manifested the claims of particular groups—religious and linguistic, “traditional” and “modern”—to form part of a larger Indian community. The success of this strategy generated an ironic result: the popular association of the Indian with the wealth of Grey Street and the deliberately cultivated image of an elite.

This image obfuscated enormous disparities of wealth, security, and prestige. After a new generation of Indian activists emerged in the 1940s, several of whom were members of the Communist Party, the term “merchant class” came into increasingly widespread use to describe the most economically successful layer. By clearly demarcating the trader from the proletarian, the concept suggested that political conservatism, racial prejudices, and exploitative practices were the attributes of a small minority, which possessed little in common with the overwhelming majority of Indians. The idea of the “merchant class” functioned as a moral category: it reproduced the content of the trader stereotype while circumscribing its applicability to a small group, characterized in sociological rather than racial terms, and located outside the authentic (that is, working-class) Indian community.

In reality, only a few hundred Indian professionals and businessmen had obtained levels of wealth comparable to their white counterparts by the beginning of the 1960s. C. A. Woods warns: “To the casual onlooker the obvious wealth of some Indian traders with well-established premises and first class fittings and stock is apt to give the wrong idea. The other side of the picture, however, shows many small back street traders whose turnover is probably very low.”⁵⁹ Most Indian shops in Durban, which were often little more than stalls, operated with rudimentary stock and survived by mobilizing unpaid family labor, especially that of women and children.⁶⁰ Although some Africans may have frequented higher-end establishments, the majority interacted with a far poorer, more dependent, and insecure layer of retailers. In the Grey Street area, the stores that specialized in “African goods” (that is, daily provisions for the working class) were concentrated on Queen Street. Many of these traders cultivated good relationships with their African customers, offering them credit and selling special meals at an affordable price.⁶¹ In outlying areas, the Indian-owned shop sometimes functioned as a meeting point where groups of men exchanged stories, read newspapers aloud, and ate meals together.

Beginning in the mid- to late 1930s, the influx of African migrants began to transform Durban’s demographics. Shortly afterward, wartime shortages gave birth to rationing and a black market developed for many items. Hoarding became common and shop owners, white and Indian, often refused to sell to Africans or charged inflated prices.⁶² These crosshatching trends would have enormous repercussions for the city’s racial politics. Even as migrants negotiated an urban landscape in many respects defined by Indian institutions, their steadily increasing numbers altered the composition of existing communities and expanded areas of predominantly African settlement. In most cases, these migrants lacked the ties to Indian storeowners, co-workers, and neighbors that sometimes developed in Durban’s older, more mixed areas. At the same time, most of these new arrivals depended on Indian-owned shops for their survival, including within the more homogenous enclaves that some perceived as refuges from “Indian domination.” Already a deeply ambiguous figure in the urban imagination, the merchant now became the focal point of widespread frustration and anger. In letters to Ilanga and other papers, African customers complained bitterly about dishonest business practices, contemptuous treatment by storeowners (which they often compared to segregation and the “colour bar”), and their own powerlessness in the face of abuse.⁶³

The persistence of these conditions after the war, especially black marketing, reinforced the popular association between the shopkeeper’s dishonesty and racial arrogance. “In almost all of their dealings with Africans they show marked colour bar segregation,” wrote G. R. Moya in 1947. “In some of their shops they single out Africans for contemptuous treatment. ‘No bread’, ‘no tea’, ‘no sugar’ applies only to Africans.”⁶⁴ A repertoire of stock complaints became standardized through multiple retellings and generalized to Indian shops and then Indians as a whole. Store owners tried to segregate Africans from other customers.⁶⁵ They insulted Africans by calling them “boy.” They spoke to them in “Kitchen Kaffir” (Fanagalo) rather than English or isiZulu. They overcharged Africans and manipulated the weight of bulk goods. They gave incorrect change and threatened to call the police if the customer protested.⁶⁶ As Tunya Dlamini later recalled, many Africans attributed the origins of the 1949 Riots to the actions of Indian store owners: “One [reason] was that the Indians were ripping them off, the other was they put glass in their sugar.”⁶⁷ Ilanga called these traders “sharks” and published the addresses of stores fined for overcharging Africans.⁶⁸ Most Africans, however, stressed their helplessness: “We can’t quarrel with our shop; it is the only place where our people can buy food.”⁶⁹ On some occasions, individuals petitioned white employers to intercede on their behalf.

Even in these circumstances, some depictions of the merchant expressed envy, ironic appreciation of their cunning, and—more rarely—gratitude.⁷⁰ This ambivalence was particularly marked in writings and statements by members of the African middle class. Almost every aspect of their economic and social lives interpenetrated in some fashion with the world of the Indian petite bourgeoisie. Individuals like Luthuli, Champion, Ngubane, Yengwa, and the Dhlomo brothers negotiated with Indian creditors, established (sometimes clandestine) businesses with Indian partners, used the services of Indian printers, consulted Indian medical specialists and lawyers, held events at Indian-owned theaters and conference halls, paid rent to the Indian landlords willing to provide them with office space, and developed close relationships with Indian social peers through liberal organizations like the International Club and the Joint Council Movement. Unsurprisingly, their statements regarding the Indian often reflected a complicated—and frequently convoluted—synthesis of respect, their own class aspirations, and tempered mordancy.

In a 1946 column, “Rolling Stone” (Ilanga editor R. R. R. Dhlomo) lauded the proliferation of Indian-owned stores and taxis boasting isiZulu names throughout Durban. After celebrating the acumen of Indian entrepreneurs, Dhlomo suggested reversing this gimmick—a thought experiment designed to indict the double standard of the Indian merchant. “We think that is business enterprise and there is nothing wrong with it,” Rolling Stone pontificated, “although we still have to meet an enterprising Zulu store owner who would dare to name his shop or tea-room ‘KwaMaharaj’ or ‘Isitolo sakwaNaidoo’ and expect the people from the East to flock to it.”⁷¹ If an Indian-owned store could sell medicinal herbs to Africans, perhaps Africans could utilize these same marketing practices? Dhlomo exclaimed: “Why, he might live to see that rarest of occurrences. Indian customers in an African store!” Begrudging admiration bled together with jealousy. Both sentiments coexisted with frustration toward Africans drawn to such ploys. At the end of the day, Dhlomo’s irony in this article only worked because some Africans embraced devices like the patronizing signs outside Indian tearooms. Nor would this marketing have been effective unless the storeowners in question knew enough about the local market—including Zulu medicinal practices—to satisfy African customers.⁷² Ultimately, Dhlomo implied, Africans participated in their own humiliation by flocking to these places. Perhaps, he intimated, the Zulu should strive to be a bit more like the Indian.

LANDLORDS AND HOUSING

The rapid, and largely unregulated, growth of Durban’s African population resulted in an acute housing shortage. In previous decades, the majority of migrant workers found accommodation in the backyards of European and Indian households.⁷³ Their options, however, were restricted by the 1923 Native (Urban Areas) Act, which prohibited Africans from living in white-designated areas unless housed in hostels, government locations, or servant quarters.⁷⁴ As a result, Africans began to lease shacks from Indian landowners or build their own informal housing on Indian-owned land in areas like Cato Manor, Happy Valley (the location of the Wentworth oil refinery), and north of the Umgeni River in the Newlands area. Given the relatively high rents charged by landlords, several individuals typically crowded into a single room. In 1952, the Natal University Department of Economics estimated that half of Durban’s African population of 132,000 lived in illegal slums.⁷⁵ According to one estimate, Indians owned 80 percent of the land rented by African shack dwellers.⁷⁶

As in the case of the “Indian merchant class,” the category of landlord must be disaggregated. Some notorious slumlords like Omar Sayed owned blocks of flats and vast tracks of land in Cato Manor, which they exploited by allowing Africans, Coloureds, and poor Indian families to erect dwellings.⁷⁷ Indian business men also let flats to Indian and Coloured families, charging exhorbitant sums of “goodwill” for security.⁷⁸ But Africans also lived on land provided by Tamil- and Telugu-speaking market gardeners, who had purchased plots on what was once the urban periphery and later abandoned farming in favor of subletting their land. During the 1940s, Ilanga alleged that Indian landlords charged immorally high rents—“sheer extortion”—based simply on the reality that Africans had no alternative.⁷⁹ These landlords, however, were not necessarily elite.

As with the complaints regarding traders, a mood of powerlessness, even futility, pervaded statements about landlords. In addition to the economic insecurity of the war years, many African renters were in the city without authorization, living illegally on Indian-owned land. Not only did few other housing options exist, tenants had no legal recourse to challenge the dictates of landlords since their own presence broke the law. This intersection of illegality and precariousness generated a specific zone of social interaction: economic relationships that were outside of state regulation and characterized by asymmetrical vulnerability. (African domestic workers in Indian households occupied a similar position.) At the same time, this zone opened the space for an independent African urban existence, and sometimes small-scale capital accumulation, beyond the reach of segregationist institutions and state control. The hierarchies that solidified in this context were frequently personalized (many tenants knew their landlords), proximate (the material advantages of many landlords were small), and unstable (the situation possessed no direct legal sanction). The fact that some landlords faced similar forms of insecurity only intensified bitterness: different layers of the poor struggled against each other for increasingly scarce resources.

During the 1940s, the city council directed owners of over 1,800 shacks to provide basic services like water and sanitation to their tenants. In the majority of cases, the landlords refused to comply, petitioned for the authority to evict the squatters on their premises, and eventually paid fines rather than improve their sites. Only two of more than seven hundred landowners made any modifications.⁸⁰ Such resistance did not necessarily reflect callousness or profiteering. Given the insecurity of their property rights, owners—even when they had the resources to improve lots—often refrained from investing in the land on which they themselves lived. The threat to their titles had been further underscored by the hysteria among whites over “Indian penetration” into European areas during the early 1940s. Nevertheless, the refusal to provide basic amenities reinforced the perception among African tenants that the Indian profited from their hardships.

In parallel to this system, a set of more complex relationships also emerged. Barred from owning property in most urban areas, some Africans utilized the space created by Indian landownership to establish themselves as landlords. Since many landowners provided vacant lots, Africans would construct multiroom dwellings and sublet these accommodations. By the late 1940s, rack renting by both Indians and Africans had developed in Cato Manor on a vast scale.⁸¹ In the Grey Street area, central Johannesburg, and other city centers, African businessmen, trade unionists, and professionals rented office space in Indian-owned buildings.⁸² In his autobiography, Mandela recalls: “‘Mandela and Tambo’ read the brass plate on our office door in Chancellor House, a small building just across the street from the marble statues of Justice standing in front of the Magistrate’s court in central Johannesburg. Our building, owned by Indians, was one of the few places where Africans could rent offices in the city.”⁸³ Champion, who occupied premises in a Grey Street building owned by Dawood Jeeva, praised the role of Indian landlords: “The Indian Landlord acted as a Saviour when he gave them a piece of ground to live. While other Indian Landlords are bad we have a number of Indian gentlemen whose good memories will remain honourable in our minds!”⁸⁴ By the early 1950s, Ilanga’s rhetorical posture in describing Durban’s housing crisis had shifted, perhaps in response to the emergence of a new layer of African landlords after the 1949 Durban Riots.⁸⁵ Now the newspaper overwhelmingly blamed official neglect for the emergence of Durban’s slums. The editor wrote: “The African and Indian landlords who now are being blamed for creating a slum area and exploiting poor workers were in fact meeting a great social need and doing work that should have been done by the authorities.”⁸⁶ As later chapters will discuss, this argument echoed the defense of the merchant by Indian newspapers in 1949. From the perspective of landlords and shopkeepers, their actions provided for the poor by stepping into a breach created by the indifference of the state.

SITES MOVING THROUGH SPACE: BUSES

By linking African residential areas to the Grey Street complex, buses helped to integrate a largely haphazard urban landscape into a system characterized by the subordination of “African” to “Indian.” Although a small number of African operators maintained routes between Durban and outlying districts like Port Shepstone and Inanda, Africans only owned four buses in Durban during the late 1940s.⁸⁷ In the years immediately preceding the 1949 Riots, there was an increase in applications for motor carrier certificates by African operators. These efforts became an important focus of local politics (the Lamontville Native Advisory Board attempted to ban Indian buses in 1939) and the Zulu royal house took an active part in supporting African petitions for licenses. A memorandum to the Riots Commission describes the scene at one motor certificates hearing: “In the Port Shepstone Court House the decision of the Board to award the above Certificates was received with mighty shouts of “BAYETE” from the chiefs and their Indunas—this was the Royal Salute presented to the Government as represented by the Board. There were seven Chiefs present including members of the Zulu Royal Family.”⁸⁸

However, such efforts were actively resisted by the Bus Owners Association, a body established in 1930 by Indian drivers. In many districts, Indian-owned buses provided the only transport and when Indians applied for new or extended routes, these petitions sometimes found support among Africans desperate for improved service. Initially, most of these vehicles were wide-bed trucks converted to resemble city buses. Although some companies began to expand and hire full-time drivers by the late 1940s, most of these ventures were shoestring affairs, owned and operated by individuals who parked their vehicle outside the family home at night.⁸⁹ These drivers charged roughly a third of the fare of the municipal buses that operated on some of the same routes. Nevertheless, many Africans still could not afford to travel on them every day.⁹⁰ A substantial number of people walked or took pushbikes from African locations to the city center.

As with Indian-owned stores, a stock set of complaints cohered around the space of the bus, which then solidified into a racialized script through multiple reiterations. This narrative began with waiting for the bus itself. Drivers frequently ran behind their schedules and made impromptu stops to grab passengers walking from African areas into the cities. As riders fretted about the consequences of arriving late to work, the indifference of drivers seemed calculated. Complaints over service might lead to ejection. Z. A. Ngcobo remembers: “You would be anxiously looking at your watch, realizing that now you would be really late for work. . . . They were only too ready to take your fare, and if you opened your mouth in protest at the delay they would say to you ‘If you are in a hurry why don’t you walk?’”⁹¹ In the center of Durban, the situation was even worse. A report by the Durban Transport Commission captures the daily gauntlet of the Victoria Street taxi rank:

All the Non-European bus services in Durban have one starting point—the Victoria Street Extension Bus Rank—from where 116 operators are expected to operate 177 certificated vehicles to various termini. This bus rank is an uneven patch of ground without any facilities for passengers or buses. There are, in fact, periods during the day when there is nothing like sufficient standing room for either buses or passengers, and the crowds of waiting passengers are forced to surge into adjacent streets, where buses also have to stand owing to lack of room or order.

There are no loading platforms where buses could be ranged along-side according to their various routes. There is no shelter whatsoever provided for the passengers. . . . These passengers often, during the rainy season, have to stand in pouring rain for 30 minutes and more. There are no public conveniences and the lighting is extremely poor.⁹²

After riders endured this ordeal, the driver would generally board Indian passengers first. “Ladies first” meant Indian women—conductors would push Africans of both genders back.⁹³ Then a new stage of this ritual would commence: passengers and driver would debate over fares. Adding insult to this injury, conductors regularly gave passengers incorrect change. Some drivers ripped off poorer Indians as well.⁹⁴ If passengers pressed the issue, they were cursed, struck, and sometimes tossed out. Ilanga describes “the prevalence of the assaults on Africans in some buses by some conductors and the insolent language used whenever Africans complain to some of these drivers: ‘This is not your father’s bus.’”⁹⁵ This exchange occurred so frequently, and impressed itself so profoundly in popular memory, that housekeeper Josephine Hadebe repeated virtually the same words thirty years later in an isiZulu interview: “the Indians (amakula) were insolent, and on the buses they used to say, ‘No, this is my father’s bus, not yours,’ and push a black man so that he would be injured for the sake of a ticket.”⁹⁶ Notably these anecdotes drew together a set of classic themes associated with migration and the city: the anonymity of the crowd, the negation of individual dignity, and new forms of right conferred through the ownership of private property. The repeated accusations of abusive behavior were not only an indictment of the Indian. They also served as a commentary on the African’s situation within the city as a social form. In effect, they protested a loss of social status so great that it could not be protested: the denial of any position from which to speak. This is not your father’s bus, the statement suggested, so you have no standing. This experience of voicelessness would later connect anti-Indian sentiment to broader opposition against foreign domination, especially colonialism’s denial of African capacity for self-representation.

AFFECT, CLASS, AND SPACE

The hierarchy that developed in shops, neighborhoods, and buses was both haphazard and brittle. As Ashwin Desai observes, “Middlemen minorities are visible, vulnerable, and accessible.”⁹⁷ This combination of racialized inequality with relative legal and economic parity would produce significant consequences. For most Africans, the authority exercised by traders, landlords, and drivers lacked any justification beyond the simple fact of the hierarchy itself. In his editorial on the 1949 Riots, H. I. E. Dhlomo summarizes this sentiment: “Africans would be less than human not to feel humiliated, frustrated and outraged to find what to some of them are ‘foreigners’ and ‘people who did not conquer us and who came here as slaves,’ lording it over them in the land of their birth.”⁹⁸ Witnesses before the Riots Commission voiced these same views: “The Indian was introduced into this country as a labourer. Now we find we have to serve two masters. Our ancestors fought the Europeans and lost. We accepted the European as our master—we will not tolerate this other black master.”⁹⁹ Not only did Indians and Africans live (in many cases) side-by-side, but Indians had suffered the indignities of conquest, plantation labor, and poverty. They lacked the de facto legitimacy of a conqueror. Africans frequently articulated this resentment through a discourse of affect: two of the most common words used to describe Indians were “insolent” and “arrogant.” A common term in racialized discourses, “arrogance” generally designates the refusal of individuals or groups to abide by the terms of a dominant script: the arrogance of the subaltern, for example, is frequently invoked as a justification for violence designed to enforce the terms of an established racial order.¹⁰⁰ In mid-century Durban, the term functioned somewhat differently. The idea of Indian arrogance reflected the assumption of authority in the absence of shared social norms; that is, illegitimate (or, more precisely, unlegitimated) forms of privilege and agency. In this context, when Africans complained about “the arrogant Indian,” they were describing the unjustified refusal of individual respect, fair treatment, and reciprocity. These are the core entailments of social recognition based on a shared sense of community.¹⁰¹

Particularly in the writings of younger, educated African men, this thwarted recognition was simultaneously desired and feared, particularly when associated with “modern” spaces like dance halls, clubs, and cinemas. At one level, acceptance would provide entry into a cosmopolitan world of equality, urban sophistication, and middle-class pleasures. At the same time, the presence of a small minority of Africans within these spaces, especially political leaders, raised the specter of their material and moral corruption. In psychoanalytical terms, the Indian was an ambivalent figure par excellence. Letters in Ilanga and other papers claimed that African politicians “sell the African people to foreign nations” (udayisa ezizweni)—the language always invoked the subversive role of money—to win acceptance and the financial privileges gained from socializing with the Indian.¹⁰² This accusation combined popular anxieties about the relationship between class and political leadership with an acute sense of economic vulnerability. Under the sway of Indian wealth, it claimed, African leaders were “losing touch” with the desperate situation of their followers, who faced exploitation and abuse by the Indian at every turn. The fear of abandonment and political powerlessness was assonant with the general precarity of urban life. Letters and newspaper articles also linked these anxieties with the question of language. Since only a minority of Africans spoke English, the lingua franca in middle-class Indian spaces, many Africans felt that the “white language” excluded them from significant aspects of modern social life and, increasingly, the national arena of African politics. During the 1950s, the frequency with which ANC leaders delivered important speeches in English and published in Indian-owned newspapers elicited similar concerns.¹⁰³

Because of their popularity and public visibility, movie theaters were an important focus for middle-class aspirations and resentments. In Durban, six cinemas operated in the Grey Street area (including the Raj, the Royal, the Shah Jehan, the Albert, and the Avalon), one in Mansfield Road, one in Bellair Road, and three or four in the Jacobs area.¹⁰⁴ Theaters were centers of social life for the black middle classes: going to a movie publicly exhibited a set of values associated with leisure and modern life. Younger Africans voiced frustration over their exclusion from Indian-owned theaters and, more subtly, used these complaints to mark their distance from the uneducated of both races.¹⁰⁵ A letter to Ilanga complains: “Indians look upon us Africans as inferiors. There are some places where—no matter how decent you are they won’t allow you in; such places as restaurants and cinemas with the exception of the Avalon.”¹⁰⁶ The writer asserts that Indian owners made exceptions for prominent Africans and thereby purchased their complacency. “We non-leaders and small fry,” he continues, “will always be on the ‘Not yet fit’ for such privileges list.” His choice of English underscores the substance of his allegation: the Indian continued to sneer at the African even when they had obtained the accouterments of modernity and Western civilization. Rolling Stone expresses identical sentiments: “There are many, many places here in Durban where yours truly Rolling Stone cannot dare put his foot with all his qualifications and Degrees and Civilizations because he is an African, but in which he has seen Indians not worth his salt allowed because they are Indians.”¹⁰⁷ Those theaters that admitted Africans generally enforced a policy of segregated seating. Writing for Drum magazine, the novelist Peter Abrahams relates a story about a manager’s refusal to seat a young African intellectual next to his Coloured girlfriend.¹⁰⁸ Here again, ideas of civilization, interracial sex, and modernity were closely adjoined. By refusing to recognize these markers of achievement, the Indian cinema owner evinced the same hypocrisy as the apartheid government. In his eyes, no African would ever be civilized enough.

While the dominant discourse related to the intersection between the circulation of consumer goods and services and the racialization of space, there were also important instances of class antagonism between African labor and Indian employers. Africans frequently asserted that they would rather work for Europeans than Indians. A common stereotype was “the Indian exploiter who treats his employee poorly, overworks and underfeeds him.”¹⁰⁹ An African who worked for a Grey Street shop owner during the 1940s recalls waiting two weeks for wages already past due, waking at three a.m. to start work at four, laboring throughout the day with only a cup of tea and piece of bread, and never receiving overtime. The mindlessness of the work inspired bitterness: “You would do the work without knowing much about its purpose or implications.”¹¹⁰ Some members of the Indian elite expressed horror at the treatment of African workers. In a Drum exposé on working conditions in the sugar industry, A. P. Naidoo (a leading merchant from Stanger) publicly denounced the practices of many plantation owners: “I honestly feel that in many instances Indian farmers treat their labour worse than do many whites.”¹¹¹ The harshness of Indian employers had an economic impetus. Possessing substantially less capital then their white counterparts, and often forced to work in their own business or fields, many Indian employers doubtless struggled to cover baseline expenses. But economic pressures also intermixed with chauvinism. Indian market gardeners generally paid African labor half the amount that an Indian would receive.¹¹² Wage discrimination occurred against workers from the Tamil community as well. Mr. Drum (the pen name of investigative journalist Henry Nxumalo) describes a Hindi speaking plantation owner who paid laborers from his own linguistic group more than Tamils.¹¹³

Yet even in these circumstances, relationships developed that were more complicated and sometimes mutually benificial. Market gardeners demanded that Africans perform strenuous labor from dawn to noon for substantially less pay than the Indian standing across the same field, but they also allowed some of their African employees to cultivate their plots. If many Africans strongly resented the failure of Indian firms to hire qualified Africans for skilled positions, they also greatly respected those individuals and businesses that defied the norm.¹¹⁴ The Daughters of Africa, an uplift organization active in Durban and Pinetown, petitioned Indian store owners to employ Africans in order to ameliorate tensions.¹¹⁵ Africans also used these relationships to pursue their own ends. In some cases, Africans served an informal “apprenticeship” with Indian craftsmen so as to accumulate the experience necessary to set off on their own. ANC Women’s League leader Bertha Mkhize and her brother, for example, worked for a tailor on Field Street during the late 1940s before leaving and setting up a successful business at the Native Market.¹¹⁶

CONCLUSION

By the early 1940s, Durban had become a fractured and bitterly divided city, although the severity of these developments—despite repeated warnings in Ilanga and Inkundla—would only become apparent to most observers later. Unlike the qualitative social and economic differentiation later engineered by apartheid, however, this hierarchy of Indian over African was local, unstable, and relatively fragile. The centrality and visibility of the Grey Street area ensured that the mosques, stores, and movie theaters of central Durban would come to symbolize Indian power and privilege. But on an everyday basis, the drama of race transpired between Africans and a poorer layer of former indentured laborers who drove buses, worked in small stores, and lived in tightly knit communities among and adjacent to African areas. The powerful discourse of “Indian domination”—an all-encompassing narrative that linked together different sites, social dynamics, and resentments—reflected the centrality of Indian-owned spaces and infrastructure to the lives of most Africans. It could not have been further from the lived realities of working-class Indians.

The prose of everyday life—the complicated, protean, and often-incoherent realm that Ranajit Guha has called historicality—was far more diverse and varied than the polarization of racial discourse suggests.¹¹⁷ Africans and Indians were friends, drinking partners, criminal coconspirators, comrades, and lovers. Individuals shopped at the same stores, rode buses together, worked in the same factories, and played football together at lunch. They joined Christian communities such as the church of the Zulu prophet Isaiah Shembe.¹¹⁸ A privileged lawyer attended the same university classes, negotiated the same professional and political milieus, and visited each other on social occasions.¹¹⁹ Interviews mention a street named after an Indian who lived in a community of iqenge and isikhesana—“husbands” and “wives” who built a vibrant subculture around rituals of dating and marriage between men.¹²⁰ Photographs show African participants joining in the celebration of the annual Muharram festival as it wound through the Grey Street area.¹²¹ Yet in representations of Durban from the 1940s and ’50s, these relationships mostly appear in the form of anecdotes, marginal details of the city’s social fabric, or individual exceptions.¹²² They are found in descriptions of remarkable events or unexpected interactions. It is not simply that an African nurse dating an Indian doctor, or a close bond of affection between a worker and the family of a market gardener, were uncommon. As individual relationships, they managed to navigate—or, briefly and on a personal terrain, overcome—barriers of community structure, language, legal status, and social prejudice. In their motivations, affections, and social circumstance, they were often singular, contingent, accidental. They took place in the interstices of the city.

Beginning in early 1940s, a new generation of activists and intellectuals—both African and Indian—began to debate the relationship between the two groups. Propelled by the Indian anticolonial struggle and new arguments for non-European unity developed in the Western Cape, this discussion initially focused on the question of nationalist formations: what was the proper relationship between the historic organizations that claimed to represent the different groups? Everywhere, this question was divisive. It demanded a general reconsideration of the nature of black politics. Would an alliance between African, Indian, and Coloured organizations imperil each party’s capacity to represent the distinctive interests of its own constituency? Given the relative privilege enjoyed by Coloureds and Indians, were their interests ultimately reconcilable with those of the African majority? What would be the political and philosophical basis for an alliance? Liberal, Marxist, or nationalist? And if nationalist, what kind of nationalism could encompass peoples of different historical origins, cultures, and identities? In Durban, such questions of principle and ideology, important as they were, came face-to-face with the growing anger of isiZulu-speaking migrants, the prejudices and fears of many Indians, and the enormous complexities of race as it was lived. The Indian question was not, as it was for African intellectuals outside of the province, one issue of many. With Indian independence on the horizon, and South Africa’s future increasingly in question, it would come to dominate both popular politics and the calculations of the African leadership.