the ANC’s relationship with the Indian Congress—and the ANC’s position on the status of Indians in South Africa—into a matter of national and international political significance. The election of the Nationalist Party in 1948, which slandered Indians as “alien” and considered their expulsion, further underscored the urgency of a common front.
This series of rapid developments intersected a parallel set of discussions. In the early 1940s, the founding of the Cape Town–based Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) forced a debate over the relationship between the existing African, Indian, and Coloured political organizations. In response to the NEUM’s proposals for “unity,” Xuma (who was supported by the Communist Party) advocated a more limited conception of cooperation between racially defined parties. In turn, ANC Youth League intellectuals, particularly Lembede, rejected all but the most limited collaboration with Indians, arguing that “they” were “foreign exploiters” who sought to manipulate Africans for their own ends. Acutely sensitive to popular resentments, the Natal ANC leadership echoed Lembede’s position and argued that the strained relationship between the two groups rendered an alliance impracticable. The ensuing controversy raised fundamental questions about the nature of the struggle. Did the separate political parties imply that non-European groups were distinct nations and therefore possessed unique claims to group representation within a democratic state? What was the relationship between party structure and the political subject of the liberation struggle? Did national boundaries correspond with the “common sense” racial categories of South African society, or were the ideas of race and nation irreconcilable in principle? After 1948, the significance of these questions was underscored by the fact that the apartheid regime legitimated its segregationist ambitions on the basis of an ethno-nationalist appeal to white self-determination. The Afrikaner Nationalist rhetoric of “separation” saturated the discursive space of politics and provoked competing (and sometimes conflicting) rejoinders of South African unity. In this context, the Indian became the focal point for a reconsideration of the idea of nation. Were Indians foreigners, immigrants, or South Africans—and, if they were South African, what was the basis for their inclusion within this entity? In translating diaspora into the categories of the nation-state, these responses invoked different criteria of nationhood (racial, cultural, political, and legal-juridical) and generated competing visions of political community.
The second section focuses on two events that interrupted these debates and challenged the majoritarian basis of anticolonial nationalism: the Partition of India and Pakistan and the 1949 Durban Riots. Partition severely damaged the credibility of the Indian National Congress, especially Nehru, and prompted some African intellectuals to begin reflecting on the dangers of the claim to popular sovereignty based on majority rule. Situated across the newsprint page from the postwar refugee crisis in Europe, the creation of Israel, and the victory of the National Party, Partition was as much a global moment as a singular event: it revealed the dangers inherent to the demand for national self-determination within multiracial or multinational territories. Less than a year after Gandhi’s murder in the midst of ongoing communal violence, Partition was followed by another rupture: the 1949 Durban Riots. Prompted by a clash between a shopkeeper and boy in Durban’s Grey Street area, a melee among Indian and African men escalated into two days of attacks directed against Indians and their property. Chapter 3 explores the ways that this violence polarized African public opinion and generated an unprecedented crisis in the ANC, leading to the downfalls of both Xuma and Natal president A. W. G. Champion. In the Riots’ aftermath, a diverse group of intellectuals within the ANC—including Luthuli, Ngubane, and Youth League leader A. P. Mda—experienced a genuine crisis of conscience and began to rethink the relationship between African nationalism and a broader South African identity. Although they differed considerably in outlook, these thinkers rejected a racial definition of national community (Mda denounced what he called African “fascism”) and created a space for the conceptualization of the national subject as simultaneously singular and multiple. In the following decade, these arguments would inform a larger set of discussions about the constitutional structure of a postapartheid government, the character of a future national culture, and the relationship between the Union of South Africa and the African continent.
Chapter 4 uses the Riots to explore the role of gender and interracial sex in structuring Natal’s African-Indian dynamics. As Philip Bonner observes, the dominant culture within the ANC understood the national as a masculine domain and located women within the terrain of local politics.90 This national public was also constructed around the use of English, while provincial political life largely transpired in vernacular languages. (This fact allowed Indians and whites, who rarely spoke vernacular languages, to participate in national African politics without necessarily transforming their relationship to African cultural and social life.) As a result, gender, the vernacular, and the “local”—which sometimes occupied the same physical space as the “national”—each became associated with the disruptive effects of African-Indian racial dynamics on the ANC’s construction of the nation. A frequent complaint raised by African men in Durban during this period (particularly in the isiZulu-language pages of black newspapers) was the “Indian peril”: purported sexual predation against African women. This allegation underscored the gendered character of urban space and the perceived absence of social reciprocity. According to this discourse, Indian men mixed freely with Africans in buses, movie theaters, and jazz concerts—where they “seduced” African women, often urbanized professionals—while Indian women remained isolated within the temple, mosque, or home. Simultaneously, the Indian woman became the central icon of a cultural discourse that circulated between colonial sources, diasporic versions of Indian nationalism, liberal social science, and African stereotypes. These “citings/sitings” (to use Burton’s evocative coinage) of gender and race both underwrote and troubled the ideas of nation that are the focus of this book.91
The third section explores the transformation of the ANC following the 1949 Riots. Chapter 5 focuses on a pivotal event: the 1952 Defiance Campaign, the first mass mobilization of Indians and Africans together. Near the end of the campaign, ANC leaders called for the creation of a white organization (the Congress of Democrats) to work with the other two groups, generalizing the form of its partnership with the Indian Congress and laying the foundations for a new political formation, the Congress Alliance. Drawing on the earlier symbols, slogans, and iconography of the ANC, the Defiance Campaign generated—to invoke the philosopher Jacques Rancière—an aesthetic of struggle: a “redistribution of the sensible” that made visible new political possibilities and therefore facilitated the emergence of unanticipated identifications.92 The Congress Alliance provided the image of a single, united South Africa in which each “section” (alliance leaders generally avoided the terms “majority” and “minority”) possessed a claim to belonging. In other words, the principles of national unity and racial multiplicity were reconciled at the level of political symbolism. While this imagery developed organically, ANC leaders, especially Luthuli, soon began to reflect on this process and strategize the aesthetic dimensions of the antiapartheid struggle. On the basis of these experiences, Luthuli (now the president of the ANC) formulated a philosophy of African nationalism that rejected a materialist foundation of politics, especially the liberal claim that democracy presupposed social homogeneity based in a common civil society. Reworking earlier contributions by Lembede, Ngubane, and H. I. E. Dhlomo, Luthuli’s ideas developed in active collaboration with a group within the Natal ANC (including Ngubane and Dhlomo) and represented a distinct Natal synthesis of African nationalist thought.
Chapter 6 reconstructs the Natal synthesis and Luthuli’s struggles to defend it against other currents within the ANC, namely an insurrectionist African nationalism associated with the Transvaal-based leadership and the Cold War anticommunism of Luthuli’s erstwhile friend and collaborator, Ngubane. The Natal synthesis envisioned nation as a plural political subject that would emerge through the struggle for universal values. The result was a layered conception of nationalism. African nation building, embodied in the
