Internal Frontiers. Jon Soske
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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.
2
Beyond the “Native Question”
Xuma, Lembede, and the Event of Indian Independence
And then—UN! The whole of South Africa has been shaken by the decisions of that Assembly. The decisions have had international repercussions. The main source of the upheaval which is revolutionizing race relations in this country is—Durban! The centre of the Indian problem is Durban. And but for Durban there would have been no reverse for this country at the UN. . . . In Durban, the Indians (like the uprooted, war torn new European settlers) are experiencing rebirth. What of the African? May not Durban be the spring—or at least a chief actor in the story—of African Regeneration?1
—X. [H. I. E. Dhlomo]
THE MID-1940S