Internal Frontiers. Jon Soske
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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,