whites over “Indian penetration” into European areas during the early 1940s. Nevertheless, the refusal to provide basic amenities reinforced the perception among African tenants that the Indian profited from their hardships.
In parallel to this system, a set of more complex relationships also emerged. Barred from owning property in most urban areas, some Africans utilized the space created by Indian landownership to establish themselves as landlords. Since many landowners provided vacant lots, Africans would construct multiroom dwellings and sublet these accommodations. By the late 1940s, rack renting by both Indians and Africans had developed in Cato Manor on a vast scale.81 In the Grey Street area, central Johannesburg, and other city centers, African businessmen, trade unionists, and professionals rented office space in Indian-owned buildings.82 In his autobiography, Mandela recalls: “‘Mandela and Tambo’ read the brass plate on our office door in Chancellor House, a small building just across the street from the marble statues of Justice standing in front of the Magistrate’s court in central Johannesburg. Our building, owned by Indians, was one of the few places where Africans could rent offices in the city.”83 Champion, who occupied premises in a Grey Street building owned by Dawood Jeeva, praised the role of Indian landlords: “The Indian Landlord acted as a Saviour when he gave them a piece of ground to live. While other Indian Landlords are bad we have a number of Indian gentlemen whose good memories will remain honourable in our minds!”84 By the early 1950s, Ilanga’s rhetorical posture in describing Durban’s housing crisis had shifted, perhaps in response to the emergence of a new layer of African landlords after the 1949 Durban Riots.85 Now the newspaper overwhelmingly blamed official neglect for the emergence of Durban’s slums. The editor wrote: “The African and Indian landlords who now are being blamed for creating a slum area and exploiting poor workers were in fact meeting a great social need and doing work that should have been done by the authorities.”86 As later chapters will discuss, this argument echoed the defense of the merchant by Indian newspapers in 1949. From the perspective of landlords and shopkeepers, their actions provided for the poor by stepping into a breach created by the indifference of the state.
SITES MOVING THROUGH SPACE: BUSES
By linking African residential areas to the Grey Street complex, buses helped to integrate a largely haphazard urban landscape into a system characterized by the subordination of “African” to “Indian.” Although a small number of African operators maintained routes between Durban and outlying districts like Port Shepstone and Inanda, Africans only owned four buses in Durban during the late 1940s.87 In the years immediately preceding the 1949 Riots, there was an increase in applications for motor carrier certificates by African operators. These efforts became an important focus of local politics (the Lamontville Native Advisory Board attempted to ban Indian buses in 1939) and the Zulu royal house took an active part in supporting African petitions for licenses. A memorandum to the Riots Commission describes the scene at one motor certificates hearing: “In the Port Shepstone Court House the decision of the Board to award the above Certificates was received with mighty shouts of “BAYETE” from the chiefs and their Indunas—this was the Royal Salute presented to the Government as represented by the Board. There were seven Chiefs present including members of the Zulu Royal Family.”88
However, such efforts were actively resisted by the Bus Owners Association, a body established in 1930 by Indian drivers. In many districts, Indian-owned buses provided the only transport and when Indians applied for new or extended routes, these petitions sometimes found support among Africans desperate for improved service. Initially, most of these vehicles were wide-bed trucks converted to resemble city buses. Although some companies began to expand and hire full-time drivers by the late 1940s, most of these ventures were shoestring affairs, owned and operated by individuals who parked their vehicle outside the family home at night.89 These drivers charged roughly a third of the fare of the municipal buses that operated on some of the same routes. Nevertheless, many Africans still could not afford to travel on them every day.90 A substantial number of people walked or took pushbikes from African locations to the city center.
As with Indian-owned stores, a stock set of complaints cohered around the space of the bus, which then solidified into a racialized script through multiple reiterations. This narrative began with waiting for the bus itself. Drivers frequently ran behind their schedules and made impromptu stops to grab passengers walking from African areas into the cities. As riders fretted about the consequences of arriving late to work, the indifference of drivers seemed calculated. Complaints over service might lead to ejection. Z. A. Ngcobo remembers: “You would be anxiously looking at your watch, realizing that now you would be really late for work. . . . They were only too ready to take your fare, and if you opened your mouth in protest at the delay they would say to you ‘If you are in a hurry why don’t you walk?’”91 In the center of Durban, the situation was even worse. A report by the Durban Transport Commission captures the daily gauntlet of the Victoria Street taxi rank:
All the Non-European bus services in Durban have one starting point—the Victoria Street Extension Bus Rank—from where 116 operators are expected to operate 177 certificated vehicles to various termini. This bus rank is an uneven patch of ground without any facilities for passengers or buses. There are, in fact, periods during the day when there is nothing like sufficient standing room for either buses or passengers, and the crowds of waiting passengers are forced to surge into adjacent streets, where buses also have to stand owing to lack of room or order.
There are no loading platforms where buses could be ranged along-side according to their various routes. There is no shelter whatsoever provided for the passengers. . . . These passengers often, during the rainy season, have to stand in pouring rain for 30 minutes and more. There are no public conveniences and the lighting is extremely poor.92
After riders endured this ordeal, the driver would generally board Indian passengers first. “Ladies first” meant Indian women—conductors would push Africans of both genders back.93 Then a new stage of this ritual would commence: passengers and driver would debate over fares. Adding insult to this injury, conductors regularly gave passengers incorrect change. Some drivers ripped off poorer Indians as well.94 If passengers pressed the issue, they were cursed, struck, and sometimes tossed out. Ilanga describes “the prevalence of the assaults on Africans in some buses by some conductors and the insolent language used whenever Africans complain to some of these drivers: ‘This is not your father’s bus.’”95 This exchange occurred so frequently, and impressed itself so profoundly in popular memory, that housekeeper Josephine Hadebe repeated virtually the same words thirty years later in an isiZulu interview: “the Indians (amakula) were insolent, and on the buses they used to say, ‘No, this is my father’s bus, not yours,’ and push a black man so that he would be injured for the sake of a ticket.”96 Notably these anecdotes drew together a set of classic themes associated with migration and the city: the anonymity of the crowd, the negation of individual dignity, and new forms of right conferred through the ownership of private property. The repeated accusations of abusive behavior were not only an indictment of the Indian. They also served as a commentary on the African’s situation within the city as a social form. In effect, they protested a loss of social status so great that it could not be protested: the denial of any position from which to speak. This is not your father’s bus, the statement suggested, so you have no standing. This experience of voicelessness would later connect anti-Indian sentiment to broader opposition against foreign domination, especially colonialism’s denial of African capacity for self-representation.
AFFECT, CLASS, AND SPACE
The hierarchy that developed in shops, neighborhoods, and buses was both haphazard and brittle. As Ashwin Desai observes, “Middlemen minorities are visible, vulnerable, and accessible.”97 This combination of racialized inequality with relative legal and economic parity would produce significant consequences. For most Africans, the authority exercised by traders, landlords, and drivers lacked any justification beyond the simple fact of the hierarchy itself. In his
