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,