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.