in the late nineteenth century, a significant Indian presence developed in Natal’s cities and the surrounding peri-urban areas.27 After their contracts had expired, most indentured workers sought to stay in Natal and some managed to lease and acquire land. On the outskirts of the official Durban borough limits, Indian households could participate in the growing economy of the city (through market gardening, fishing, hawking, and various crafts), while remaining largely beyond the reaches of the government. Forty percent of South Africa’s Indian population eventually settled in the Durban region and smaller communities grew along the “main line” towns connected by the Durban-Rand railway and near the northern Natal coalfields.28 As a market developed among indentured and former-indentured workers, a second migration of “passenger” Indians, largely composed of Gujarati merchants and their poorer kin, began to arrive in Natal and the Transvaal in the mid-1870s. Goolam Vahed explains: “The special circumstances of merchants enabled them to keep their social distance from other Indians and identify with India as their home country. The main distinction in Natal was between Gujarati speaking Muslim and higher caste Hindu traders from northern India and Telugu and Tamil speaking indentured Indians from south India.”29 By the 1880s, sections of the Gujarati community had become an outsized power in Indian business and, especially, politics.30 This layer accumulated a considerable amount of wealth. In Durban and Pietermaritzburg, Indians collectively held property valued at £40,000, including sixty retail shops in Durban and two Indian-owned shipping lines.31
The increasing visibility of an urban Indian population coincided with a series of racist campaigns by white South Africans and the implementation of laws directed at controlling Indian movement and economic activity. In 1885 the Transvaal introduced formal segregation for Indian residential areas and the Orange Free State prohibited Indians from owning and occupying land in 1891. At the end of the decade, the mayors of Durban, Pietermaritzburg, and Newcastle petitioned the colonial secretary for a ban on the purchase of land by Indians—although the secretary refused to comply with their request.32 As Maynard Swanson and others have argued, the Natal ruling class’s reaction to the perceived economic, cultural, and demographic threat posed by the Indian resulted in some of the first attempts to segregate urban space. By the late nineteenth century, a combination of legislation (particularly the regulation of trading licenses) and informal coercion had produced “bipolar, spatially juxtaposed European and Indian business districts” in Durban and the creation of Indian residential enclaves throughout Natal.33 These enclaves, in turn, were often internally organized around close-knit networks of Indian families or linguistic communities.34
This early stage of Indian urbanization contrasted with the migration of Africans in two important respects. First, a significant number of Indians managed to purchase land.35 Along with the growth of Indian business and residential districts, this fact encouraged Indian elites to finance the creation of local community institutions, many of which were organized along linguistic or religious lines: temples, mosques, schools, and social centers.36 In contrast, the social lives of African migrants centered on municipal beer halls, hostels, dancehalls, and illegal shebeens. Second, Indian areas developed around networks of intimately connected family homes.37 As Hilda Kuper observes: “A house in an Indian area is never an isolated dwelling; it is integrated into the street, neighborhood, and community. Kinsmen often live near each other, affairs of the neighborhood arouse the gossip that controls the moral standards of the whole area.”38 Although a small number of African women established themselves in Durban as sex workers, brewers, and “shebeen queens,” the overwhelming majority of migrants were single men, many of whom maintained close ties with rural society and frequently returned to homesteads in the countryside. Zulu working-class culture developed largely through associations comprised of male migrants. For example, domestic servants organized amalaita gangs around stick fighting, crime, defending territories, and distinctive modes of dress. An adaptation of rural youth organizations, these gangs drew on both rural solidarities and an urban criminal subculture.39 Other important groups included Zionist religious movements and African “buying clubs” and cooperatives.
In Durban and other Natal cities, the division between European and non-European areas developed on the basis of a pattern established by early Indian enclaves.40 Critically, the legislation that existed before the Group Areas Act (1950) prevented Africans from residing within European residential areas, but generally overlooked the residential penetration of other groups. As the urbanization of both Africans and Indians accelerated, the provisions made by the local government for housing proved inadequate and shack settlements began to encircle the city. The scale and pace of this influx was extraordinary. By 1951, two thirds of Natal’s Indian population had either moved to the cities or been born in urban areas.41 During the same period, the percentage of Africans present in Durban increased threefold.42 The population of Cato Manor—the famous concentration of shack settlements two miles from the center of Durban—expanded from about 2,500 Africans in 1936 to an estimated 50,000 at the end of 1950.43 Although census figures from 1951 show that Indians still constituted the largest population in Durban, Africans appeared as a very close second.44
Poverty often threw those newly arriving from the countryside together. Africans, Indians, Coloureds, and even some whites lived “cheek-by-jowl”—an ubiquitous term in accounts of this period.45 Letters to African newspapers occasionally celebrated the fact that urbanization was erasing racial distinctions. In certain areas, there was some truth to this claim. According to a 1952 housing survey by the University of Durban, African residences were relatively evenly distributed throughout Durban (reflecting employment in European households) with the highest concentration in Cato Manor.46 Although the maps of residential distribution published with the survey show areas of predominantly African habitation (the Chesterville and Lamontville locations), heavy interpenetration of the two groups occurred in several neighborhoods: Cato Manor, Sydenham, Central Durban (the Grey Street area), the South Coast Junction, and to a lesser extent Clairwood. Durban’s small Coloured population mostly lived interspersed with Indian families, although a significant number lived in Cato Manor as well.47 Describing similar conditions faced by Afrikaners in the townships surrounding Ladysmith, Ngubane recalls:
They [Afrikaners] did not have the money with which to pay for expensive accommodation. As a result they often settled in the cheaper parts of Ladysmith where their neighbours were often either the Africans or the Coloureds or the Indians. . . . The poor Whites discovered that only the poor Blacks were their real allies; they could borrow salt or sugar or food or money from them in the hour of need and did not laugh at them when they saw them sew pieces of hessian inside white calico flour bags to make blankets. The poor Africans, Coloureds and Indians did these things too.48
The character of social relations differed between city center and outlying shack settlements, from urban location to urban location, and sometimes from street to street. Each area possessed its own mood and racial texture. The Johannesburg location of Vrederdorp (“Fietas”), although predominantly Indian, included a significant number of Malay, Chinese, and African families, all of whom lived together in rows of tiny houses stretched along narrow lanes. Perceived as an Indian area by most outsiders, the social distinctions between Tamils, poorer Gujaratis, and the Gujarati middle class insured that these groups maintained separate identities within Fietas, undercutting an internal sense of domination by a single race. In this context, individual streets developed the solidarities of an extended family: households shared toilets, women spent their days talking as they worked on adjacent porches, and children grew up together under the neighborhood’s watchful eyes. The main social division was between the poor of all races and the largely Gujarati landlords and storeowners of nearby 14th Street, although families ties, shared religious affiliations, sports teams, and patronage bound these two worlds together.49 Neighborhoods like Cape Town’s District Six, Johannesburg’s Sophiatown, and (to a lesser extent) the Macabise district of Edendale contained a significant degree of residential integration. The presence of property owners and petit-bourgeois professionals from different groups promoted class tensions within as well as solidarity across
