human not to feel humiliated, frustrated and outraged to find what to some of them are ‘foreigners’ and ‘people who did not conquer us and who came here as slaves,’ lording it over them in the land of their birth.”98 Witnesses before the Riots Commission voiced these same views: “The Indian was introduced into this country as a labourer. Now we find we have to serve two masters. Our ancestors fought the Europeans and lost. We accepted the European as our master—we will not tolerate this other black master.”99 Not only did Indians and Africans live (in many cases) side-by-side, but Indians had suffered the indignities of conquest, plantation labor, and poverty. They lacked the de facto legitimacy of a conqueror. Africans frequently articulated this resentment through a discourse of affect: two of the most common words used to describe Indians were “insolent” and “arrogant.” A common term in racialized discourses, “arrogance” generally designates the refusal of individuals or groups to abide by the terms of a dominant script: the arrogance of the subaltern, for example, is frequently invoked as a justification for violence designed to enforce the terms of an established racial order.100 In mid-century Durban, the term functioned somewhat differently. The idea of Indian arrogance reflected the assumption of authority in the absence of shared social norms; that is, illegitimate (or, more precisely, unlegitimated) forms of privilege and agency. In this context, when Africans complained about “the arrogant Indian,” they were describing the unjustified refusal of individual respect, fair treatment, and reciprocity. These are the core entailments of social recognition based on a shared sense of community.101
Particularly in the writings of younger, educated African men, this thwarted recognition was simultaneously desired and feared, particularly when associated with “modern” spaces like dance halls, clubs, and cinemas. At one level, acceptance would provide entry into a cosmopolitan world of equality, urban sophistication, and middle-class pleasures. At the same time, the presence of a small minority of Africans within these spaces, especially political leaders, raised the specter of their material and moral corruption. In psychoanalytical terms, the Indian was an ambivalent figure par excellence. Letters in Ilanga and other papers claimed that African politicians “sell the African people to foreign nations” (udayisa ezizweni)—the language always invoked the subversive role of money—to win acceptance and the financial privileges gained from socializing with the Indian.102 This accusation combined popular anxieties about the relationship between class and political leadership with an acute sense of economic vulnerability. Under the sway of Indian wealth, it claimed, African leaders were “losing touch” with the desperate situation of their followers, who faced exploitation and abuse by the Indian at every turn. The fear of abandonment and political powerlessness was assonant with the general precarity of urban life. Letters and newspaper articles also linked these anxieties with the question of language. Since only a minority of Africans spoke English, the lingua franca in middle-class Indian spaces, many Africans felt that the “white language” excluded them from significant aspects of modern social life and, increasingly, the national arena of African politics. During the 1950s, the frequency with which ANC leaders delivered important speeches in English and published in Indian-owned newspapers elicited similar concerns.103
Because of their popularity and public visibility, movie theaters were an important focus for middle-class aspirations and resentments. In Durban, six cinemas operated in the Grey Street area (including the Raj, the Royal, the Shah Jehan, the Albert, and the Avalon), one in Mansfield Road, one in Bellair Road, and three or four in the Jacobs area.104 Theaters were centers of social life for the black middle classes: going to a movie publicly exhibited a set of values associated with leisure and modern life. Younger Africans voiced frustration over their exclusion from Indian-owned theaters and, more subtly, used these complaints to mark their distance from the uneducated of both races.105 A letter to Ilanga complains: “Indians look upon us Africans as inferiors. There are some places where—no matter how decent you are they won’t allow you in; such places as restaurants and cinemas with the exception of the Avalon.”106 The writer asserts that Indian owners made exceptions for prominent Africans and thereby purchased their complacency. “We non-leaders and small fry,” he continues, “will always be on the ‘Not yet fit’ for such privileges list.” His choice of English underscores the substance of his allegation: the Indian continued to sneer at the African even when they had obtained the accouterments of modernity and Western civilization. Rolling Stone expresses identical sentiments: “There are many, many places here in Durban where yours truly Rolling Stone cannot dare put his foot with all his qualifications and Degrees and Civilizations because he is an African, but in which he has seen Indians not worth his salt allowed because they are Indians.”107 Those theaters that admitted Africans generally enforced a policy of segregated seating. Writing for Drum magazine, the novelist Peter Abrahams relates a story about a manager’s refusal to seat a young African intellectual next to his Coloured girlfriend.108 Here again, ideas of civilization, interracial sex, and modernity were closely adjoined. By refusing to recognize these markers of achievement, the Indian cinema owner evinced the same hypocrisy as the apartheid government. In his eyes, no African would ever be civilized enough.
While the dominant discourse related to the intersection between the circulation of consumer goods and services and the racialization of space, there were also important instances of class antagonism between African labor and Indian employers. Africans frequently asserted that they would rather work for Europeans than Indians. A common stereotype was “the Indian exploiter who treats his employee poorly, overworks and underfeeds him.”109 An African who worked for a Grey Street shop owner during the 1940s recalls waiting two weeks for wages already past due, waking at three a.m. to start work at four, laboring throughout the day with only a cup of tea and piece of bread, and never receiving overtime. The mindlessness of the work inspired bitterness: “You would do the work without knowing much about its purpose or implications.”110 Some members of the Indian elite expressed horror at the treatment of African workers. In a Drum exposé on working conditions in the sugar industry, A. P. Naidoo (a leading merchant from Stanger) publicly denounced the practices of many plantation owners: “I honestly feel that in many instances Indian farmers treat their labour worse than do many whites.”111 The harshness of Indian employers had an economic impetus. Possessing substantially less capital then their white counterparts, and often forced to work in their own business or fields, many Indian employers doubtless struggled to cover baseline expenses. But economic pressures also intermixed with chauvinism. Indian market gardeners generally paid African labor half the amount that an Indian would receive.112 Wage discrimination occurred against workers from the Tamil community as well. Mr. Drum (the pen name of investigative journalist Henry Nxumalo) describes a Hindi speaking plantation owner who paid laborers from his own linguistic group more than Tamils.113
Yet even in these circumstances, relationships developed that were more complicated and sometimes mutually benificial. Market gardeners demanded that Africans perform strenuous labor from dawn to noon for substantially less pay than the Indian standing across the same field, but they also allowed some of their African employees to cultivate their plots. If many Africans strongly resented the failure of Indian firms to hire qualified Africans for skilled positions, they also greatly respected those individuals and businesses that defied the norm.114 The Daughters of Africa, an uplift organization active in Durban and Pinetown, petitioned Indian store owners to employ Africans in order to ameliorate tensions.115 Africans also used these relationships to pursue their own ends. In some cases, Africans served an informal “apprenticeship” with Indian craftsmen so as to accumulate the experience necessary to set off on their own. ANC Women’s League leader Bertha Mkhize and her brother, for example, worked for a tailor on Field Street during the late 1940s before leaving and setting up a successful business at the Native Market.116
CONCLUSION
By the early 1940s, Durban had become a fractured and bitterly divided city, although the severity of these developments—despite repeated warnings in Ilanga and Inkundla—would only become apparent to most observers later. Unlike the qualitative social and economic differentiation later
