All the Non-European bus services in Durban have one starting point—the Victoria Street Extension Bus Rank—from where 116 operators are expected to operate 177 certificated vehicles to various termini. This bus rank is an uneven patch of ground without any facilities for passengers or buses. There are, in fact, periods during the day when there is nothing like sufficient standing room for either buses or passengers, and the crowds of waiting passengers are forced to surge into adjacent streets, where buses also have to stand owing to lack of room or order.
There are no loading platforms where buses could be ranged along-side according to their various routes. There is no shelter whatsoever provided for the passengers. . . . These passengers often, during the rainy season, have to stand in pouring rain for 30 minutes and more. There are no public conveniences and the lighting is extremely poor.92
After riders endured this ordeal, the driver would generally board Indian passengers first. “Ladies first” meant Indian women—conductors would push Africans of both genders back.93 Then a new stage of this ritual would commence: passengers and driver would debate over fares. Adding insult to this injury, conductors regularly gave passengers incorrect change. Some drivers ripped off poorer Indians as well.94 If passengers pressed the issue, they were cursed, struck, and sometimes tossed out. Ilanga describes “the prevalence of the assaults on Africans in some buses by some conductors and the insolent language used whenever Africans complain to some of these drivers: ‘This is not your father’s bus.’”95 This exchange occurred so frequently, and impressed itself so profoundly in popular memory, that housekeeper Josephine Hadebe repeated virtually the same words thirty years later in an isiZulu interview: “the Indians (amakula) were insolent, and on the buses they used to say, ‘No, this is my father’s bus, not yours,’ and push a black man so that he would be injured for the sake of a ticket.”96 Notably these anecdotes drew together a set of classic themes associated with migration and the city: the anonymity of the crowd, the negation of individual dignity, and new forms of right conferred through the ownership of private property. The repeated accusations of abusive behavior were not only an indictment of the Indian. They also served as a commentary on the African’s situation within the city as a social form. In effect, they protested a loss of social status so great that it could not be protested: the denial of any position from which to speak. This is not your father’s bus, the statement suggested, so you have no standing. This experience of voicelessness would later connect anti-Indian sentiment to broader opposition against foreign domination, especially colonialism’s denial of African capacity for self-representation.
AFFECT, CLASS, AND SPACE
The hierarchy that developed in shops, neighborhoods, and buses was both haphazard and brittle. As Ashwin Desai observes, “Middlemen minorities are visible, vulnerable, and accessible.”97 This combination of racialized inequality with relative legal and economic parity would produce significant consequences. For most Africans, the authority exercised by traders, landlords, and drivers lacked any justification beyond the simple fact of the hierarchy itself. In his editorial on the 1949 Riots, H. I. E. Dhlomo summarizes this sentiment: “Africans would be less than human not to feel humiliated, frustrated and outraged to find what to some of them are ‘foreigners’ and ‘people who did not conquer us and who came here as slaves,’ lording it over them in the land of their birth.”98 Witnesses before the Riots Commission voiced these same views: “The Indian was introduced into this country as a labourer. Now we find we have to serve two masters. Our ancestors fought the Europeans and lost. We accepted the European as our master—we will not tolerate this other black master.”99 Not only did Indians and Africans live (in many cases) side-by-side, but Indians had suffered the indignities of conquest, plantation labor, and poverty. They lacked the de facto legitimacy of a conqueror. Africans frequently articulated this resentment through a discourse of affect: two of the most common words used to describe Indians were “insolent” and “arrogant.” A common term in racialized discourses, “arrogance” generally designates the refusal of individuals or groups to abide by the terms of a dominant script: the arrogance of the subaltern, for example, is frequently invoked as a justification for violence designed to enforce the terms of an established racial order.100 In mid-century Durban, the term functioned somewhat differently. The idea of Indian arrogance reflected the assumption of authority in the absence of shared social norms; that is, illegitimate (or, more precisely, unlegitimated) forms of privilege and agency. In this context, when Africans complained about “the arrogant Indian,” they were describing the unjustified refusal of individual respect, fair treatment, and reciprocity. These are the core entailments of social recognition based on a shared sense of community.101
Particularly in the writings of younger, educated African men, this thwarted recognition was simultaneously desired and feared, particularly when associated with “modern” spaces like dance halls, clubs, and cinemas. At one level, acceptance would provide entry into a cosmopolitan world of equality, urban sophistication, and middle-class pleasures. At the same time, the presence of a small minority of Africans within these spaces, especially political leaders, raised the specter of their material and moral corruption. In psychoanalytical terms, the Indian was an ambivalent figure par excellence. Letters in Ilanga and other papers claimed that African politicians “sell the African people to foreign nations” (udayisa ezizweni)—the language always invoked the subversive role of money—to win acceptance and the financial privileges gained from socializing with the Indian.102 This accusation combined popular anxieties about the relationship between class and political leadership with an acute sense of economic vulnerability. Under the sway of Indian wealth, it claimed, African leaders were “losing touch” with the desperate situation of their followers, who faced exploitation and abuse by the Indian at every turn. The fear of abandonment and political powerlessness was assonant with the general precarity of urban life. Letters and newspaper articles also linked these anxieties with the question of language. Since only a minority of Africans spoke English, the lingua franca in middle-class Indian spaces, many Africans felt that the “white language” excluded them from significant aspects of modern social life and, increasingly, the national arena of African politics. During the 1950s, the frequency with which ANC leaders delivered important speeches in English and published in Indian-owned newspapers elicited similar concerns.103
Because of their popularity and public visibility, movie theaters were an important focus for middle-class aspirations and resentments. In Durban, six cinemas operated in the Grey Street area (including the Raj, the Royal, the Shah Jehan, the Albert, and the Avalon), one in Mansfield Road, one in Bellair Road, and three or four in the Jacobs area.104 Theaters were centers of social life for the black middle classes: going to a movie publicly exhibited a set of values associated with leisure and modern life. Younger Africans voiced frustration over their exclusion from Indian-owned theaters and, more subtly, used these complaints to mark their distance from the uneducated of both races.105 A letter to Ilanga complains: “Indians look upon us Africans as inferiors. There are some places where—no matter how decent you are they won’t allow you in; such places as restaurants and cinemas with the exception of the Avalon.”106 The writer asserts that Indian owners made exceptions for prominent Africans and thereby purchased their complacency. “We non-leaders and small fry,” he continues, “will always be on the ‘Not yet fit’ for such privileges list.” His choice of English underscores the substance of his allegation: the Indian continued to sneer at the African even when they had obtained the accouterments of modernity and Western civilization. Rolling Stone expresses identical sentiments: “There are many, many places here in Durban where yours truly Rolling Stone cannot dare put his foot with all his qualifications