would develop a popular image of South African cosmopolitanism by celebrating these communities. Idealized by musicians, artists, and writers, spaces such as Sophiatown would provide the imagery and language for a discourse that playfully subverted racial binaries by celebrating a shared style of living within the modern city.50
Several Durban neighborhoods, including sections of the Grey Street complex, developed along similar lines. However, Durban differed from other South African cities not only in the size of its Indian population, but in the overall structure of its urban geography. In important respects, the massive shack lands of Cato Manor helped set the overall tone of the city’s racial politics. According to one former resident, “Cato Manor was a lifestyle.”51 On the weekends, Africans traveled from across Durban to visit its shebeens, dance, buy dagga, trade in stolen goods, and hire prostitutes. By the 1940s, Cato Manor had developed predominantly African and Indian neighborhoods, with substantial sections of mixed residency interspersed with the more homogenous sections. Largely peopled by migrants and others living illegally in the city, the African section possessed a powerful sense of collective identity articulated, to a considerable degree, against absentee Indian landlords and local traders. In a fashion similar to the Johannesburg township of Alexandra, a bitter rivalry developed between established Indian storeowners and aspirant African merchants, a rivalry intensified by the sentiment among Africans that Mkhumbane (the isiZulu name for Cato Manor) was theirs by right.52 When journalists or racial populists sought to illustrate a narrative of antagonism between Africans and Indians, they invoked the social conflicts in these or similar areas. (Bantu World, for example, published articles on the rivalry between Indian and African traders in Alexandra during the early 1950s as part of its campaign against cooperation with the Indian Congress.) In the Transvaal, such rivalries sometimes simmered for years, occasionally erupting in violence and the looting of stores, but they nevertheless remained confined to specific neighborhoods.53 Durban, however, was a smaller and more centralized city. If Cato Manor’s size, location, and cultural importance insured its broader influence on Durban African politics, the Grey Street complex provided a unifying center that connected—both symbolically and physically—local dynamics that may have otherwise remained discrete.
GREY STREET AND THE INDIAN MERCHANT
The Grey Street complex was located at Durban’s center, adjoining the white-owned commercial district and the City Market. Similar, if less spectacular, areas existed in other Natal and Transvaal cities. Visitors to this area were struck by the minarets and colonnades of the buildings, the art deco facades sprinkled with Eastern motifs, the reverberating tones of Indian languages, the saris of women working in shops, and the smells of curries and spices. The area around Grey Street included factories, apartment blocks, and hotels—many owned by Indians. A liberal anthropologist like Hilda Kuper could wax romantic about the excited atmosphere of “oriental” bargaining and the timeless seductions of the marketplace. However, as Omar Badsha underlines, Grey Street was never a purely Indian district.54 The neighborhood also included the Native Meat Market, the city council–run African “Macheni” beer hall and small stalls, the Native Women’s Hostel, several African churches, the Bantu Social Centre (a major site of political and trade union activity), and numerous small eating rooms catering to either (or sometimes both) groups. Because the city’s major transport hub was located on Victoria Street next to four major markets, thousands of Africans and Indians passed through the area each day to catch connecting buses. Additionally, many Indian-owned stores employed African men to work as “boys”; that is, as menial laborers. In some descriptions of Grey Street, the sensory mélange of the market place and the blunt give-and-take of urban bustle embodied the spirit of the city.55 But Grey Street’s “Indian” character produced enormous bitterness. For many Africans, its mosques, colonnades, and colorful storefronts became symbols of a foreign people settling in their land and achieving a prosperity denied to them. During the 1949 Riots, for example, a rumor circulated that the severed head of an African boy hung from the dome of the Juma Masjid, the most visible building in the neighborhood.56
In fact, Grey Street did serve as a central space where sections of Durban’s Indian population monumentalized and celebrated their presence in the city. Religious communities constructed impressive places of worship (the Juma Masjid was the largest mosque in the southern hemisphere), businessmen sponsored community centers and language schools that advertised the importance of their groups (Parsis, a tiny section of the Indian population, owed much of their considerable visibility to building projects such as the Gandhi Memorial Library), and a wide range of cultural and religious associations used its streets for processions. Alongside these performances, Grey Street also provided a venue for conspicuous consumption and highly visible modes of leisure. A self-styled, urbane middle class made Saturday night appearances at legendary jazz clubs such as the Goodwill Lounge, sat ringside at widely hyped boxing matches, or took their “Coloured girlfriends" to exclusive clubs (public displays of romance, especially when combined with “race mixing,” were signs of modernity).57
The district was also the epicenter of one of Durban’s most popular and accessible forms of entertainment: the cinema. Major cultural landmarks that sometimes doubled as meeting halls, Grey Street’s six theaters were venues within which a range of people—including Indian women and African youth—nurtured class aspirations and new forms of international awareness. These “bioscopes” were seen as distinctly Indian spaces.58 The Grey Street complex arose out of efforts to build institutions that manifested the claims of particular groups—religious and linguistic, “traditional” and “modern”—to form part of a larger Indian community. The success of this strategy generated an ironic result: the popular association of the Indian with the wealth of Grey Street and the deliberately cultivated image of an elite.
This image obfuscated enormous disparities of wealth, security, and prestige. After a new generation of Indian activists emerged in the 1940s, several of whom were members of the Communist Party, the term “merchant class” came into increasingly widespread use to describe the most economically successful layer. By clearly demarcating the trader from the proletarian, the concept suggested that political conservatism, racial prejudices, and exploitative practices were the attributes of a small minority, which possessed little in common with the overwhelming majority of Indians. The idea of the “merchant class” functioned as a moral category: it reproduced the content of the trader stereotype while circumscribing its applicability to a small group, characterized in sociological rather than racial terms, and located outside the authentic (that is, working-class) Indian community.
In reality, only a few hundred Indian professionals and businessmen had obtained levels of wealth comparable to their white counterparts by the beginning of the 1960s. C. A. Woods warns: “To the casual onlooker the obvious wealth of some Indian traders with well-established premises and first class fittings and stock is apt to give the wrong idea. The other side of the picture, however, shows many small back street traders whose turnover is probably very low.”59 Most Indian shops in Durban, which were often little more than stalls, operated with rudimentary stock and survived by mobilizing unpaid family labor, especially that of women and children.60 Although some Africans may have frequented higher-end establishments, the majority interacted with a far poorer, more dependent, and insecure layer of retailers. In the Grey Street area, the stores that specialized in “African goods” (that is, daily provisions for the working class) were concentrated on Queen Street. Many of these traders cultivated good relationships with their African customers, offering them credit and selling special meals at an affordable price.61 In outlying areas, the Indian-owned shop sometimes functioned as a meeting point where groups of men exchanged stories, read newspapers aloud, and ate meals together.
Beginning in the mid- to late 1930s, the influx of African migrants began to transform Durban’s demographics. Shortly afterward, wartime shortages gave birth to rationing and a black market developed for many items. Hoarding became common and shop owners, white and Indian, often refused to sell to Africans or charged inflated prices.62 These crosshatching trends would have enormous repercussions for the city’s racial politics.
