A definitive history is a dead history. The historian’s job is to take a story—sometimes familiar, sometime new—and make it resonate in the urgency of the present. If I have managed to accomplish this task in the least, it is due to Omar’s example.
Finally, I dedicate this book to Kate Elizabeth Creasey. In and between Toronto, Johannesburg, Istanbul, Cape Town, Los Angeles, Durbin, and Montreal, our life together runs like an invisible thread through these pages. Her strength, courage, love, brilliance, and forgiveness have made me better in every way.
Note on Language
This is a book about permutations of race. Race appears as a set of social relationships, as a way of talking about and understanding the world, and as an object of intellectual debate and political struggle. As part of its argument, I analyze the production of an African-Indian racial divide by a number of mechanisms, including colonial policies, regimes of urban space, nationalist rhetoric, and everyday social practices. Yet even as this book tracks the far-reaching consequences of this division, it argues against attributing homogeneity to “Africans” and “Indians” as groups or assuming that these categories are adequate for understanding the complexity of identity and social life in mid-century Natal. In depicting both the power and limitations of racial categories, I have given considerable attention to the importance of language. When this book refers to African or Indian newspapers, stores, neighborhoods, political organizations, and individuals, it is marking the effects of how social life was organized and coded in racialized terms. When this book discusses groups as the object of stereotype or racial fantasy, it refers to “the Indian” or “the merchant” in the singular. Because language tends to reify complex historical processes, it is important to reflect—continuously—on the work that description is doing. I ask that the reader keep this challenge in mind.
This is also a book about ideas. I have reconstructed intellectual debates by analyzing the terms employed by contemporaries and, when possible, I have relied on texts produced during the period in question rather than interviews or memoirs from later moments. Some of these terms were critiqued and displaced by later generations of activists. “Non-European,” which was widely used during the 1940s–’50s, was rejected by the Black Consciousness Movement of the 1960s–’70s on the basis that it reduced black identity to a mere negation. An epithet in North America, Coloured is used in South Africa to refer to Afrikaans-speaking communities of “mixed” racial background. Some see both terms as colonial holdovers. In their place, later generations employed the term Black in a capacious sense to designate all communities oppressed by apartheid racial structures. While I am strongly sympathetic to these arguments, importing this language into my text would have been anachronistic and obscured the precise contours of debate during the period in question. On a few occasions, I do employ Black to interrupt the excessive reiteration of other racial categories. Hopefully, this use will be clear in context.
Histories of the antiapartheid struggle are sometimes filled with dozens of acronyms for different political organizations. For the uninitiated reader, these can be intimidating and confusing. In order to increase the accessibility of this book, I have tried to avoid acronyms as much as possible, for example by using Indian Congress for NIC (Natal Indian Congress) or Communist Party for CPSA (Communist Party of South Africa, which was banned in 1950 and reformed in the early 1950s as the South African Communist Party, SACP). I have made this choice advisedly. An organization’s name is a banner of struggle—some activists understandably interpret getting it wrong as a sign of disrespect. I hope that the greater readability of this text will serve to justify this decision.
INTRODUCTION
The Internal Frontier of the Nation-State
ON 19 February 1948, the Pietermaritzburg-based journal Inkundla ya Bantu (The people’s forum) published a lengthy piece of news analysis entitled “Bambulaleleni Ugandhi?” or “Why did they kill Gandhi?” At one level, the article offered a disarmingly simple answer: the culprit in question was the Indian people as a whole. India murdered Gandhi because he represented the ideal of Hindu-Muslim equality within a single nation. (The author’s failure to name Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, reinforced this attribution of collective responsibility.) According to the article, Gandhi had argued that the Hindu and Muslim “tribes” (uqobo, segments or parts of a totality) should unite in the struggle for independence, but Muslims began to agitate for a separate country when they realized that the Hindu majority would come to power, reducing them to “slaves.” Asserting their right to rule, a younger generation of Hindus began to attack Muslims and, after Gandhi attempted to reconcile the two sides, murdered their former leader as a traitor to their national aspirations. The author apportioned blame equally: Gandhi’s vision had been undermined by the secessionist politics of an anxious minority and the violent retaliation of a majority in ascendance. Consequently, the country—as both a people and a political project—stood under judgment before the court of global opinion. However, if the article initially summoned its readership to identify with this international tribunal, it then shifted perspectives and projected Africans into the position of the defendant. Directly addressing its readership, it admonished Africans to draw from the lessons of division and violence: “The wages of stabbing each other is death. It is a way of running away from the truth.” At this point, the article presented Partition and Gandhi’s death as foreshadowing Africa’s own future, or at least one possible scenario. The world should not, it argued, condemn Indians: “given the opportunity, they can build a great nation.” With these words, the author defended not only the viability of Gandhi’s vision of plural nationhood, but the very possibility of national sovereignty beyond the West and its norms.1
This piece was one of hundreds, if not thousands, of items about India that appeared in newspapers written by and for black South Africans in the 1940s. And this profusion of coverage, centered on the changes sweeping the British Empire and their implications for South Africa, was only one moment in a much longer conversation that began in the late nineteenth century and continues to the present. From Gandhi’s first political campaign in Johannesburg in the 1890s to today’s BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) group of emerging economies, India has served as an essential reference point for South African politics and black political thinkers. If Gandhi’s twenty-one years in South Africa are the most well-known episode in this history, they form only one strand of a larger and considerably more complex story. Other major figures of the Indian independence struggle traveled to South Africa, including Indian National Congress president Gopal Krishna Gokhale (who toured the country in 1912), the iconic poetess and nationalist politician Sarojini Naidu in 1924, and a young Indira Nehru during the 1940s. South African journalists, writers, and students journeyed in the other direction; for example, the African National Congress (ANC) leader S. S. Thema (Gandhi advised him that the ANC should abandon Western pretensions and go “about with only a tiny clout around your loins”2), the future president of the ANC Albert Luthuli, and Fort Hare professor D. D. T. Jabavu, who published a book on his experiences in isiXhosa titled In India and East Africa.3 Journeys by intellectuals and anticolonial militants occurred against the backdrop of the legacy of indentured Indian labor in the South African province of Natal, political and administrative linkages between the colonies, and the mass circulation of newspapers, books, spices, religious icons, films, and other culture-bearing commodities.4 Most significantly, the two countries were bound by the communities of Indian descent that built lives and homes across South Africa.
These connections provided a reference and resource for the antiapartheid struggle. In November 1980, the acting president of the ANC, Oliver Tambo, accepted the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding on behalf of Nelson Mandela, then imprisoned on Robben Island. Speaking in New Delhi, Tambo praised “the striking role of India in the development of the struggle for national and social liberation in South Africa,” including labor actions carried out by indentured workers in nineteenth-century Natal, India’s case against South Africa’s racial policies at the first meeting of the United Nations (UN)
