fold into a broader South African identity. Because African nationalism was already a pluralistic identity, incorporating multiple groups in the pursuit of a greater ideal, it could open itself to others without endangering its essential unity. In isiZulu, Luthuli expressed this idea in terms of a nation composed of many nations: “kulelizwe siyizizwe eziningi.” At several points, he stated that it represented Africa’s most significant contribution to human culture. Luthuli’s ideas, and his promotion of symbolism as an instrument of articulating unity in heterogeneity, had a significant impact on the ANC’s broader political culture, especially through the celebration of 26 June (“Freedom Day”) and the campaign for the 1955 Congress of the People. By the mid-1950s, however, Luthuli found himself defending his philosophy on two fronts. On the one hand, he led a factional battle against proposals, embodied in the so-called Tambo constitution, to centralize the ANC and to adopt the Freedom Charter as the basis for cooperation with other groups. On the other hand, he conducted a public fight against Ngubane over the role of the Communist Party within the ANC. In both cases, the debate over the African political subject—and its relationship to the also-colonized other—became entangled with the global imaginary of the Cold War.
Internal Frontiers concludes with an epilogue that considers the long-term influence of Luthuli’s ideas within the ANC. Despite its popularization through Luthuli’s presidency, the Natal synthesis was only one of several competing formulations of African nationalism. At the same time, Luthuli either introduced or reworked ideas that would become more widely influential: the centrality of ideals to nation building, the importance of symbolic politics and popular participation in rituals of nation, and (most importantly) the constructive role of African nationalism in creating a broader South African identity. Although they rejected many of his philosophical assumptions, both the Pan-Africanism of Sobukwe and the Communist Party’s concept of the “national democratic revolution” incorporated elements of the Natal synthesis, especially the production of a common identity through the African liberation struggle. The ANC’s launch of sabotage in 1961, and the Communist Party’s growing influence within the ANC in exile, resulted in the eclipse of the Natal synthesis by a more traditional, majoritarian conception of nationalism. Despite this fact, the ANC incorporated Luthuli into a narrative of its history organized around major figures (especially presidents) and “stages” of struggle. Even if represented as surpassed, earlier leaders functioned as symbols of tactics and values that remained part of a living Congress tradition. At key moments during the Mass Democratic Movement of the 1980s and early 1990s transition, ANC leaders drew on the political aesthetic of the Congress Alliance and revivified elements of the Natal synthesis.
. . .
In his memoir, the antiapartheid activist Ismail Meer recalls a day he spent with Lembede shortly before the philosopher unexpectedly died at the age of thirty-three. After walking through Johannesburg, Meer took Lembede to see the library at Wits University. Lembede, who had earned two advanced degrees by correspondence, physically trembled at the site of the books. “This is what the bastards have kept from me,” he exhaled.93 The two young men proceeded to Orient House, where they shared a lunch of curry cooked by the charming Amina Pahad, whose imprisonment in the 1946 Passive Resistance Campaign helped shatter Mandela’s belief that Indians were incapable of struggle.94 Lembede later wrote a letter thanking Meer: “The day was full of wonders, but what moved me most was to see all of you eating with your fingers.” He then claimed this experience as his own: “Unless we respect our own culture we will never be able to respect ourselves and we will never be free.”95
The individuals discussed in this book are often described as elite. In some respects, they merit this designation. Their education, literacy, facility with Western languages, urban status, and social position differentiated them from most other black South Africans. The main figures of this book also enjoyed the privileges of masculinity in a decidedly patriarchal world. But an adequate treatment of their careers must also capture the insecurity, poverty, family worries, confrontations with subtle and brute racism, and genuine vulnerability to violence that permeated each day of their lives. Despite many advantages, they lived in black working-class and rural communities, participated in their struggles, and suffered their strangulation by the apartheid regime. They saw their most important work as the distillation of these experiences into a new philosophy of nation. Ultimately, it is the dialectic between a group of extraordinary, if flawed, thinkers and the lives of their complex, multiracial, and deeply divided communities that this book strives to recover.
PART ONE
1
The Racial Crucible
Economy, Stereotype, and Urban Space in Durban
In Durban itself Indian women are distinctive in vivid saris; mosques and temples break the line of colonial architecture with minarets and domes adorned with statues of the Hindu pantheon; shops are stocked with silk, brassware and spices; in the ‘Indian markets’, which are among Durban’s main tourist attractions, stalls are crammed with oriental jewelry and trinketry, with a variety of lentils, rice, beans and oils, with betel leaf and areca nut, lime, camphor, incense sticks, with currie powders, masala, all kinds of fruits and herbs, as well as with more familiar goods which themselves become unfamiliar in the excited atmosphere of oriental bargaining.1
—Hilda Kuper
Now Indians, as you are aware, were the shop keepers of the time, they provided transport, they provided land so Africans were literally helpless. Now this brought about a situation that when an African wrongly boarded a bus and wanted to jump off, invariably he was assaulted and murdered and the Africans couldn’t do anything about it: the shops belonged to the Indians, the very land on which they lived belonged to the Indians.2
—C. C. Majola
IN THE years following the First World War, the rapid and large-scale urbanization of Africans and Indians permanently transformed the social landscape of Durban and other cities in Natal. The expansion of secondary industry created new prospects for employment, especially for former indentured laborers who left the countryside in ever-growing numbers. The same period witnessed a protracted crisis in the “Native Reserves”—the desultory fragments of the Zulu kingdom maintained by the colonial state as labor reservoirs. Land shortages, population growth, overstocking of cattle, intermittent years of severe drought, and taxes imposed by the colonial state encouraged an exodus of Africans. These were (mostly) young men who lived in the backyards of white and Indian households or government-controlled hostels, or found rooms in the shack lands that began to surround Durban and other cities. The social and political consequences of the “African industrial revolution” dominated the first half of the twentieth century: the rise of Indian and African labor unions, the emergence and radicalization of mass-based nationalist organizations, and the new system of racial governance implemented by the Afrikaner Nationalist regime under the slogan “apartheid.” Yet historians have generally analyzed the urbanization of Indians and Africans in parallel—as largely distinct stories of racial groups, occasionally intersecting in the form of political cooperation or social conflict.3 These two processes were interwoven in the details and patterns of urban life, conditioning and transforming the other on multiple levels. To paraphrase E. P. Thompson’s famous discussion of class, relationships precede identities.4 In order to understand Natal’s racial politics, we must analyze the concrete social conditions that integrated Zulu-speaking migrants and Indians of differing class, linguistic, and religious backgrounds into a common urban landscape.
The image of the apartheid city continues to exercise considerable power over the imagination of South Africa’s historians. Since most of the writing on urban history concerns the origins of racial segregation and institutionalized white supremacy, historians have often neglected those aspects of the pre-1948 city (or,
