the general obligations of citizenship. Indeed, every demarcation of ethnic boundaries requires the negotiation or disavowal of an ethical disposition toward others.41 More profoundly, this relationship was ethical because it incorporated an open-ended negotiation with the other within the historical process of creating a South African identity. This openness was possible because the ultimate basis of inclusive nationalism was a shared commitment to transcendent ideals.
This understanding had significant repercussions for the meaning of liberation. As philosopher Gillian Rose warns in a different context, recognition entails the discovery of “the self-relation of the other as the challenge of one’s own self-relation.”42 If national identity is inseparable from the other’s ideas and practices of community, freedom can no longer be expressed in terms of asserting independence, but instead requires a deepening of entanglement.43 Consequently, self-determination becomes a set of relationships that required continual elaboration both within and beyond the borders of the national state: it possessed an external and internal dimension.44 This form of belonging also created vulnerability and, therefore, the possibility of particularly brutal and wounding forms of violence.45 Of the many problems that this vision posed, one stands out. Could this understanding of nation expand to include the white settler population, which was committed to defending its apartheid—the Afrikaans word for “separation”—by force? In the context of the protracted fight against white supremacy, this question became entangled within a second debate: Was it possible to achieve democracy without civil war?
THE NATAL CRUCIBLE
Located on the southwestern rim of the Indian Ocean, the province of Natal was a world composed of multiple worlds. Not only did each of these social universes, in turn, contain other milieus (nested inside one another much like a series of fitted Russian dolls), the worlds abutted and overlapped, creating a complex pattern that changed forms depending on the viewer’s perspective. In the first instance, it was conquest and settler society that bound these realities together. Beginning in the late 1830s, Afrikaner and then English incursion established a white presence in the region that slowly expanded over the course of the next two decades. As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe argues, colonial invasion was “a structure not an event”: the violence of settlement continues to exist as an ongoing process embodied and reproduced by the institutions of colonial civil society.46 In the case of Natal, these institutions developed through the gradual incorporation of the region into broader international networks: the administrative structures and political institutions that linked the colony to the British Empire (Natal was later the most English of South Africa’s four provinces); the port that opened Natal to the currents of the Indian Ocean and the global capitalist economy; and the schools and mission stations that made Christianity a central presence, including (by the end of the nineteenth century) African American missionaries who would form a vital connection to the Black Atlantic.47
While such forces drew the colony together, they failed to destroy and fully assimilate the region’s preexisting societies, most importantly the powerful Zulu Kingdom, which defended its independence until 1879. Even as significant numbers of Africans came to live on mission stations or in reserves (Natal was also a pioneer of indirect rule), converted to Christianity, and entered into the colony’s economy as migrant workers, the continued existence of an autonomous Zulu way of life—symbolized by the monarchy and the royal house—contributed to a profound consciousness of belonging and indigenousness across an increasingly differentiated African population.48 Furthermore, the continual violence of conquest may have integrated settlers and Africans into a range of hierarchal formations, but the settler state was not yet strong enough to restructure social relations according to a single, overarching racial order. A binary discourse of race burnished the increasing heterogeneity of both white and African society. Among Natal’s Africans, new social categories proliferated and combined: urban and rural, Christian and traditional, aspirant middle class and migrant worker—each generating different versions of a common Zulu identity.49
Into this chaotic and inchoate universe, the SS Truro (sailing from the southern Indian port of Madras) brought 342 workers of South Asian origin on 16 November 1860.50 The ship’s list tells its own story of distinct and interwoven worlds. The passengers included men, women, and children whose “castes” were identified variously as Christian, Muslim, Rajput, Gentoo, Pariah, Malabar, Myset, and unknown. Ten days later, a second ship (whose voyage started over a thousand miles north in Calcutta) arrived bearing a cargo of people from an equally diffuse range of backgrounds. Because most Africans still retained access to land (and therefore a measure of independence from the colonial economy), Natal’s coastal planters turned to the indenture system—developed in the Caribbean after the abolition of slavery in 1834—to support the colony’s struggling sugar industry. By the time that the colony terminated the system in 1911, 152,184 indentured workers had come to Natal. In their powerful account, Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed capture the motivations that drove people into contracted servitude: fathers chasing means to support families in the midst of imperialism’s economic ravages; “untouchables” hoping to escape caste oppression; young men thirsting for adventure or elusive fortune; widows and single women escaping forms of patriarchal constraint; and unfortunates simply defrauded by recruiters.51 After the conclusion of their contracts, a significant number remained in Natal despite the hardships of poverty and colonial racism. Others signed new contracts after returning to India or traveled back to South Africa on their own tickets.
These migrants largely originated in two different regions of the subcontinent (the Tamil- and Telugu-speaking south and the Bhojpuri-speaking plane of the Ganges River), spoke at least seven distinct Indian languages, and carried (willingly or not) numerous religious, village, familial, and occupational identities.52 Nonetheless, the momentous act of boarding a ship together began a long process of discarding, reconfiguring, and expanding notions of self and community that would eventually produce a common sense of Indianness across persistent ethnic, class, and religious divides. As Desai and Vahed underscore, Indian immigrants to Natal resisted the colonial labor system, in part, by struggling to create new homes: the construction of a shared India through places of worship, festivals, new family traditions, plays, songs, and dress.53 The relationship with an Indian past was not automatic, but complex, selective, and contested. The formation of the Colonial Born Indian Association in 1911 reflected the growing sense, at least among a literate stratum of former indentured workers, of common political interests among a population that planned to stay. At the same time, the establishment of regional, language, and religious associations—which became the central focus of community outside the family—and the influence of Hindu missionaries encouraged an inward-looking social life that assumed some caste-like elements and further insulated Indians from interaction with Africans.54
Following the indentured population, a second group of South Asian migrants, sometimes traveling through Mauritius or East Africa, began to arrive during the 1870s. Generally described as “passengers” (since they paid their own fares) and identified with the male figure of the Gujarati merchant, this group—as Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie shows—was considerably more diverse in gender, origin, and occupation.55 Involved in almost every aspect of Natal’s economy (from agriculture to blacksmithing), many passengers retained close ties to India, returning home to visit or marry, and they soon began to establish institutions in South Africa on the basis of religion, language, and (more rarely) caste. In the late nineteenth century, this group stressed its distinction from “coolies” (a derogatory term for unskilled labor that was also used as a slur against Indians) on religious or racial grounds. In an effort to differentiate their legal status from the formerly indentured, for example, some Indian Muslims asserted an “Arab” identity. As newer migrants followed opportunities across South Africa, they established communities in the Transvaal and the Western Cape (with Indian populations of 9,979 and 10,242 in 1909, respectively) of significantly different ethno-religious compositions and demographic weight than in Natal.56 This layer created a new hierarchy among South African Indians, which overlapped partially with the division between Muslims and Hindus/Christians, while interspersing Indians within the
