aspect of stereotypes regarding Indians was their uniformity. The same basic image appears across much of southern and eastern Africa, despite the varying character of the colonial policies and racial dynamics of different states, regions, and cities. Moreover, the core attributes of this image remained generally stable even as concrete social relationships and their underlying political economies transformed significantly. The “Indian” was synonymous with the “merchant.” The principle traits of this figure expressed popular resentments over the reputed practices of shop owners: “dishonest,” “crafty,” and “exploitative” were common epithets. Correspondingly, this language presupposed an undifferentiated victim of the Indian’s machinations, the African, who assumed the opposite characteristics. These were the common, even universal, terms of struggle between moral economies based on different forms of wealth: the honor-based ethos of an agrarian society and a mercantile diaspora’s profit-driven reckoning of value.14 The Indian was not just ethnically foreign, but embodied the increasing power of an alien mode of calculating and distributing wealth.15 One informant told Leo Kuper in the 1950s: “We cannot compete with Indians in business. Far from it. I don’t think we’ll ever pitch up to their understanding. Where merchants work it out for us, it’s alright.”16 As a figure, the merchant gave phenomenological immediacy to market forces that were capricious and otherwise invisible.
Whatever its origins, once this association was fixed as a stereotype, an enormous range of human behavior—from the thrift of working-class housewives to the international diplomacy of Krishna Menon and Nehru—became legible in terms of a common racial essence. The resulting image lent itself to paranoid and conspiratorial readings of social relationships. If Indians pursued their economic interests through duplicitous means, then acts of friendship, altruism, or solidarity (the distinction scarcely registered) masked their true intentions and therefore, paradoxically, were the most “Indian” forms of deception. Later, the same logic would transform the Indian into a highly visible embodiment of postcolonial (and postapartheid) corruption.17 By projecting threatening qualities onto the other, the merchant stereotype neutralized the internal conflicts and heterogeneities of urbanizing African society, and therefore provided an alibi for the divisions that troubled political, religious, or cultural nationalist claims to represent a coherent moral community. If we somehow resemble the corruption of the outsider, according to this argument, it is due to the outsider’s corrupting influence among us. Even proximity (spatial as well as social) could be recast as a form of infiltration, and therefore served as a confirmation of the Indian’s devious nature. This reiteration of distance reflected the most important attribute of the merchant stereotype. No matter how long his or her family had lived in South Africa, the Indian would always remain a foreigner. In popular culture, this image often appeared alongside signifiers of cultural difference: the smell of curry, the sari of the woman shopkeeper, and the intonations of South African Indian English. Several observers of mid-century Durban noted that these associations echoed core tropes of anti-Semitism. The Indian was, according to a common saying, the Jew of Africa.18
Because of its near ubiquitous presence in interviews and sources written by Africans, the merchant stereotype produces something of a false surface. Circulating between editorials and racist jokes, between political speeches and township gossip, this image encouraged many contemporaries (and some later accounts) to postulate a general hostility to Indians and a bifurcated social landscape.19 Underneath this surface, the reality was considerably more complex. It is important to remember that racial language is, after all, a form of language: a contextually specific act of speech or writing directed toward an audience. The same words could mask opposed attitudes and intentions. In the years following the Durban Riots, H. I. E. Dhlomo and Ngubane wrote a series of articles analyzing the complexity of African-Indian relations and urging closer political cooperation. Nevertheless, these same articles generalized about the Indian in ways that reflected the power of the trader stereotype.20 In different contexts, this image could express an almost bewildering range of emotions: resentment, fear, jealousy, anger, and humiliation as well as admiration, gratitude, and—of course—desire. The very ambiguity of the stereotype facilitated inversion. Stigmatized characteristics could double as valued traits. Cunning, for example, sometimes transmuted into resourcefulness. Moreover, stereotypes are always inadequate to the complexities of social interactions. Individuals frequently upheld the validity of anti-Indian generalizations while making exceptions in practice.21 The abstract idea of “amaKula” (the isiZulu calque of “coolie”) was not necessarily the same thing as one’s neighbor, friend, or coworker. Many Africans employed a Manichean language of enmity. At the same time, they lived in a world composed of complex relationships and subtle negotiations involving multiple groups—racial and otherwise. In some cases, these relationships elude the historian precisely because they were considered unremarkable: they do not appear in sources because they were not translated into the idealized languages of conflict or racial friendship.
More than anything else, the merchant stereotype was a transplant. This language may have originated in the confrontation between the farmer and shopkeeper, but only a minority of Durban Indians were traders of any sort. The majority were former indentured workers who migrated to the areas surrounding the city in the late nineteenth century or early twentieth century. Most were desperately poor and lived near or below substance level.22 The single largest occupation among Indians was semi-skilled and unskilled industrial labor.23 Even in later decades, visitors were struck by the size and poverty of the Indian working class. In his memoir Coolie Location, Jay Naidoo recalls his first trip to Durban: “I also saw something I had never seen in Pretoria: Indian petrol attendants, Indian refuse collectors, Indian street sweepers—Indians, in sum, doing all the menial tasks which in Pretoria were reserved for Africans.”24 In both popular discussions and the African press, however, the significant class divisions among Indians were generally invisible. On the rare occasions when Ilanga and Inkundla mentioned poorer Indians, these references served to buttress the overall case against the merchant.25
To a considerable degree, this absence reflected the consolidation of a new racial discourse beginning in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Despite ongoing attempts to clearly demarcate white and Indian areas, the Natal state lacked an overall legal or political framework for incorporating the different groups—however they might be defined—into a larger, segregationist order. Settler power and white supremacy were, of course, the bedrocks of social and economic life. However, urban racial hierarchies, especially among non-European populations, developed on a local basis and possessed a makeshift and informal character. The large-scale movement of Africans to Natal’s cities began to alter this situation. Crucially, a new racial structure emerged not through the direct actions of the state, but in areas outside of government control created in large part by the decision to relax pass law enforcement during the war. As African migrants arrived in the city, they largely relied on Indian-owned stores, buses, and land to meet basic needs, especially during times of rationing and food shortages. At the same time, the majority of Africans found themselves either excluded from community institutions coded as Indian (like tea rooms, social centers, and most cinemas) or incorporated into common spaces in subordinated roles, for example as domestic workers in Indian households.
In this context, a powerful discourse emerged that stressed the control of the Indian over virtually every aspect of the African’s existence. “Now Indians, as you are aware,” recalled Kwa-Mashu resident C. C. Majola in 1979, “were the shop keepers of the time, they provided transport, they provided land so Africans were literally helpless.”26 This language fused two scales of phenomena: resentments grounded in the micropolitics of multiple urban sites and a broader image of Indian domination symbolized by Grey Street, the iconic shopping district located at the heart of Durban. As a result, the Indian came to exemplify the dependent position of the African within a series of spaces that governed core aspects of daily life: habitation, transport, work, and consumption. The fact that this discourse integrated experiences that traversed the city’s geography resulted in the generalization of local conflicts and facilitated the development of a widespread anti-Indian populism that assumed directly political forms.
PATTERNS
