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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,