1960s) that succumbed to later developments.5 At its height, the apartheid city boasted large-scale, systematically planned, and clearly demarcated residential segregation between white, African, Indian, and Coloured areas. Although significant regional variations existed, the apartheid regime succeeded in enforcing a strong correlation between race and class, particularly in the larger cities. Most of the industrial working class was African; Indians made up a “middle group” of businessmen, professionals, and skilled workers situated between white and black. The apartheid regime sought to secure the correspondence of race and space (in terms of both social and geographical segregation), although the economy’s dependence on African labor ultimately made this goal unrealizable.6
Little of this picture held true for Durban before the forced removals of late 1950s. Although a clear pattern of segregation had emerged between white and Indian areas by the close of the nineteenth century, the growth of African and Indian neighborhoods in later decades followed a different logic. The city of Durban established municipal housing for workers at locations like Lamontville and Magazine Barracks, but these provisions were inadequate for the scale of urban migration. By the 1930s, the Durban Commission reported the growth of a “black belt” around the city: a network of racially mixed shack settlements and sprawling, working-class neighborhoods.7 In areas largely outside of municipal control, the poor of all races (including a small number of whites) utilized buses, stores, and housing in large part established or owned by Indians.8 When Africans complained bitterly about the “color bar” in these areas, they were referring to their treatment in local stores and exclusion from Indian community institutions. Indians and Africans of all classes lived among and adjacent to one another, shopped at the same stores, and rode on the same buses. To the extent that segregation existed in the black belt, it was imposed and policed through institutions erected by the inhabitants themselves.
This chapter has two principle goals. First, it provides the background necessary to understand how Durban’s racial dynamics came to play a decisive role in the reorientation of African politics during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Indeed, the city itself functioned as a central protagonist in the larger story of African nationalism during this period. Other South African cities, including Johannesburg and Cape Town, possessed economically and politically significant Indian communities. Durban was distinctive, however, in both the size of its Indian population—people of South Asian descent were still the single largest group in 1951—and the nature of the spatial regime that developed during the interwar years. As new African migrants rapidly outstripped the housing and other amenities provided by the municipal government, they turned to the informal sector, especially stores, transport, and land owned and operated by Indian families. This ersatz infrastructure not only supported most of the new population, it integrated the two groups into a hierarchical relationship of “Indian” over “African” that transcended neighborhood dynamics and operated on the scale of the city. Symbolized by the picturesque and centrally located Grey Street complex, this hierarchy provided the basis for a powerful discourse of “Indian domination” that connected the antagonisms of multiple, and sometimes very different, sites around the image of the merchant. If stereotypes regarding Indians were common across southern and eastern Africa, they usually represented one element of a complex and motile urban reality whose predominant feature was white domination. In Durban, things worked differently. By the mid-1940s, the polarization between the two colonized and disenfranchised populations was a defining, if not the definitive, fact of social life.
Second, this chapter suggests a way of analyzing Durban’s racial polarization that resists, however paradoxical it might seem at first, endowing the categories of “Indian” and “African” with political or sociological coherence. Whatever its basis in a specific urban geography, the antagonism between Indian and African became generalized through the work of discourse. Outside of structures of representation, racial groups do not exist as collective agents: individuals and factions claim to embody racial or national totalities as a strategy for mobilizing sections of populations. Consequently, racial conflict can coexist—indeed, it always coexists—with social formations and relationships organized according to other categories and logics. If an Indian-owned infrastructure instantiated the hierarchy of “brown over black,” this hierarchy was haphazard and rested on local foundations whose dynamics varied considerably.9 Alongside depersonalized (and depersonalizing) interactions in buses and shops, more familiar and sometimes intimate relationships developed: between doctors and patients, landlords and tenants, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and lovers. When younger activists from the ANC and Indian Congress began to grapple with the question of African-Indian political cooperation in the mid-1940s, they confronted a polarized terrain of distinct organizations and identities, which they knew from their own lives did not express the complexity of race in Natal. As later chapters will show, this dilemma would lead them to rethink the relationship between race, political organization, and African nationalism—but only after considerable suffering and loss.
STEREOTYPES, DISCOURSES, AND DESCRIPTIONS
In sources relating to the question of African-Indian social dynamics (newspapers, memoirs, interviews, and government reports), three distinct forms of racial language appear: stereotypes, generalizing discourses, and specific descriptions. All three of these modes are grounded in a racial consciousness that, however much it might incorporate an individual or group’s lived experiences, translates social relations into idealized images and, in turn, shapes the field of personal interactions in racial terms. Because these types of language presuppose the existence of coherent groups (“the Indian” and “the African”), they should not be used as direct evidence of an underlying reality: racial language organizes and shapes social life in ways that require historical analysis and explanation. As Sander Gilman argues, stereotypes operate at the level of fantasy.10 They are images that have broken free from their original context through assimilation into collective identities.11 Because they are a means of self-definition in terms of an “outsider,” they can function in contexts where there is no empirical correspondence between the stereotype and its putative object. A stereotype generally takes the form of a core association—for example, “white South Africans are racist”—accompanied by a cluster of related attributes that are invoked selectively and shift overtime. In most cases, multiple stereotypes exist regarding the same group, allowing racial fantasies to shift between differing, and often contradictory, characterizations without any underlying logic. For a historian, stereotypes serve largely as evidence of the imaginations, desires, and resentments of the individual or group deploying the image, rather than the actual content of racialized interactions.12
In contrast, racial discourses are the product of specific socioeconomic contexts. They incorporate stereotypes into narratives that correspond, in however partial and distorted a fashion, with existing social realities. Racial discourses are common stories told about the relationship between groups, although one protagonist (usually the group of the narrator) can remain implicit and therefore invisible in the account. Such stories often relate to specific kinds of spaces—the everyday theaters where the drama of interaction unfolds—or geographic areas. They provide relatively fixed scripts that influence the expectations and behavior of individuals within these sites while molding broader perceptions through their circulation as rumors, jokes, and urban legends.13 Since racial discourses are organized around the existence of an imagined binary, their basic structure assumes one of two forms: cooperation or conflict, friendship or war. In a very real sense, they form part of the material infrastructure that reproduces social interactions in a racialized form. In turn, the authors of specific descriptions seek to confirm or contest an established racial discourse. These sources recount events (an unusual or exemplary encounter, for instance) in the concrete language of personal experience. Descriptions often contain elements or details that subvert the generalizing terms of racial discourse while employing the same stereotypes. In such cases, specific descriptions do not necessarily provide evidence of a competing discourse. Nor should they serve as the basis for alternative sociological generalization regarding “race relations.” They relate events, relationships, or interactions that confirm or disrupt a standard script even as the author continues to perceive the participants and overall context in racial terms.
