Internal Frontiers. Jon Soske

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was local, unstable, and relatively fragile. The centrality and visibility of the Grey Street area ensured that the mosques, stores, and movie theaters of central Durban would come to symbolize Indian power and privilege. But on an everyday basis, the drama of race transpired between Africans and a poorer layer of former indentured laborers who drove buses, worked in small stores, and lived in tightly knit communities among and adjacent to African areas. The powerful discourse of “Indian domination”—an all-encompassing narrative that linked together different sites, social dynamics, and resentments—reflected the centrality of Indian-owned spaces and infrastructure to the lives of most Africans. It could not have been further from the lived realities of working-class Indians.

      The prose of everyday life—the complicated, protean, and often-incoherent realm that Ranajit Guha has called historicality—was far more diverse and varied than the polarization of racial discourse suggests.117 Africans and Indians were friends, drinking partners, criminal coconspirators, comrades, and lovers. Individuals shopped at the same stores, rode buses together, worked in the same factories, and played football together at lunch. They joined Christian communities such as the church of the Zulu prophet Isaiah Shembe.118 A privileged lawyer attended the same university classes, negotiated the same professional and political milieus, and visited each other on social occasions.119 Interviews mention a street named after an Indian who lived in a community of iqenge and isikhesana—“husbands” and “wives” who built a vibrant subculture around rituals of dating and marriage between men.120 Photographs show African participants joining in the celebration of the annual Muharram festival as it wound through the Grey Street area.121 Yet in representations of Durban from the 1940s and ’50s, these relationships mostly appear in the form of anecdotes, marginal details of the city’s social fabric, or individual exceptions.122 They are found in descriptions of remarkable events or unexpected interactions. It is not simply that an African nurse dating an Indian doctor, or a close bond of affection between a worker and the family of a market gardener, were uncommon. As individual relationships, they managed to navigate—or, briefly and on a personal terrain, overcome—barriers of community structure, language, legal status, and social prejudice. In their motivations, affections, and social circumstance, they were often singular, contingent, accidental. They took place in the interstices of the city.

      Beginning in early 1940s, a new generation of activists and intellectuals—both African and Indian—began to debate the relationship between the two groups. Propelled by the Indian anticolonial struggle and new arguments for non-European unity developed in the Western Cape, this discussion initially focused on the question of nationalist formations: what was the proper relationship between the historic organizations that claimed to represent the different groups? Everywhere, this question was divisive. It demanded a general reconsideration of the nature of black politics. Would an alliance between African, Indian, and Coloured organizations imperil each party’s capacity to represent the distinctive interests of its own constituency? Given the relative privilege enjoyed by Coloureds and Indians, were their interests ultimately reconcilable with those of the African majority? What would be the political and philosophical basis for an alliance? Liberal, Marxist, or nationalist? And if nationalist, what kind of nationalism could encompass peoples of different historical origins, cultures, and identities? In Durban, such questions of principle and ideology, important as they were, came face-to-face with the growing anger of isiZulu-speaking migrants, the prejudices and fears of many Indians, and the enormous complexities of race as it was lived. The Indian question was not, as it was for African intellectuals outside of the province, one issue of many. With Indian independence on the horizon, and South Africa’s future increasingly in question, it would come to dominate both popular politics and the calculations of the African leadership.

      2

      Beyond the “Native Question”

       Xuma, Lembede, and the Event of Indian Independence

      And then—UN! The whole of South Africa has been shaken by the decisions of that Assembly. The decisions have had international repercussions. The main source of the upheaval which is revolutionizing race relations in this country is—Durban! The centre of the Indian problem is Durban. And but for Durban there would have been no reverse for this country at the UN. . . . In Durban, the Indians (like the uprooted, war torn new European settlers) are experiencing rebirth. What of the African? May not Durban be the spring—or at least a chief actor in the story—of African Regeneration?1

      —X. [H. I. E. Dhlomo]

      THE MID-1940S witnessed a series of watershed moments: the revitalization of the Indian Congress under a younger, more dynamic leadership, their launch of a campaign of passive resistance against the Asiatic Land Tenure Act in 1946, and the first censure of South Africa’s treatment of Indians by the UN later the same year. Occurring in break-neck succession, these events had an enormous influence on the thinking of African intellectuals, especially a new generation of activists associated with the ANC Youth League. At the same time, the ANC was divided over the proper response. The emergence of a new left-wing party based in the Cape, the Non-European Unity Movement, posed a direct challenge to the older organization and forced it to clarify its position on a series of questions, most significantly cooperation with other non-European groups. At the same time, the new leadership of the Indian Congress, the Radicals, pursued a closer working relationship with the ANC. The ensuing debate over cooperation versus unity between the ANC and other groups revived an older discussion about the place of the Indian in Africa and contributed to a broader reflection on the racial basis of African nationalism. In effect, it raised the question of the nation’s internal and external boundaries.

      After the Indian government invited ANC president Dr. A. B. Xuma to travel to the UN, it became evident to the ANC leadership that their relationship with the Indian Congress (and their attitude toward Indians) was a matter with international ramifications. On 9 March 1947, the presidents of the ANC, Transvaal Indian Congress, and Natal Indian Congress—Xuma, Dr. Yusuf Dadoo, and Dr. Monty Naicker—released a statement of common interests following a meeting in Johannesburg. The Doctors’ Pact, as it came to be known, announced that “a Joint Declaration of co-operation is imperative for the working out of a practical basis of co-operation between the National Organizations of the non-European peoples.”2 An important breakthrough, the pact reflected the competition between political organizations (especially the Unity Movement, the ANC, and the Communist Party) and the rivalry between different factions within the ANC itself. Shortly after it was signed, the Natal ANC leadership refused to implement it.

      These rapid changes occurred against the background of two transformative events: the establishment of the UN in October 1945 and the 1947 independence of India and Pakistan. Far reaching in their geopolitical implications, these developments were also philosophical ruptures in the form that Susan Buck-Morrs attributes to the Haitian Revolution of the late eighteenth century.3 By creating a new global context for anticolonial politics (and the discourse of politics in general), they generated an intellectual space for the reconceptualization of “universal history”: the extension of the Enlightenment project of modernity beyond the limiting boundary of colonial racism.4 Although dominated by Anglo-American interests (as reflected by South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts’ role in drafting the preamble to its charter), the UN suggested the possibility of a world after empire for many African thinkers.5 Conceptualized in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of Europeans Jews, this new order presupposed two founding principles: the sovereign nation-state and the international legal framework of universal human rights. In asserting the capacity of a heterogeneous people for democracy, Indian independence represented a realization of this vision which, simultaneously, challenged the normative Western ideal of the homogenous nation. Although the partition of Indian and Pakistan underscored the limitations of this achievement, India nevertheless provided African nationalists with a new model for thinking about sovereignty and nationhood.

      This chapter

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