Abstract
This article tries to look beyond what I call the spatial forgeries of racial capitalism in early 20th century Durban, South Africa, a set of renditions of the ocean and the city, to make sense of quite a surprising and relatively unremarked set of events. In a period of racial and xenophobic vitriol, Black subalterns from the Indian Ocean who had lived through harsh periods of indentured labour slowly and concertedly transformed the urban periphery and interstices. I trace three moves through which Indian indentured labour was ‘shoaled’ on South Africa’s racial shores, the way mixed Black populations in the urban periphery and interstices ‘built’ marginal and interstitial infrastructure to support their communal survival, and the way they literally ‘rooted’ themselves in place in ways that make Durban distinctive as an 'Indian' city on African shores, in partial complicity with a deepening landscape of racial segregation. What is clear is that these forms of spatial praxis accomplished nothing less than the decisive dissolution of the fantasy of a white city by the Afro-Indian sea. The complexities of this account also offer a cautionary tale with respect to our own desires for spacetimes of marronage to prove ‘successful’.
You can see here … the true aetiology of some of the powerful images of country [or ocean] and city, when unalienated experience is the rural [or oceanic] past and realistic experience is the urban future. If we take only the images, we can swing from one to the other, but without illumination. For we have really to look, in country [ocean] and city alike, at the real social processes of alienation, separation, externality, abstraction. And we have to do this not only critically, in the necessary history of rural [oceanic] and urban capitalism, but substantially, by affirming the experiences which in many millions of lives are discovered and rediscovered, very often under pressure: experiences of directness, connection, mutuality, sharing. (Williams, 1975: 298)
This turn-of-the-century photograph (Figure 1) stages Durban harbour from a southern bank through a dramatic curtain of banana trees, ‘imposed,’ as the caption drily admits. Raymond Williams’ comment appear precisely directed at this contrast of country and city, as he points us to consider the submerged dialectics of peripheral and oceanic life in this representation of South Africa’s main Indian Ocean port city, Durban. With Williams in mind, I read this photograph as more than just an idealization of jungled, tropical periphery opening up to boats gently rocking on a placid bay. On closer inspection, and introspection, this photograph begs more questions than certitudes. Ought the urban periphery not be a jungle but a banana plantation toiled by indentured labour, and why are these workers absent? Williams perennially asked a variant of this question. What might the Black African woman leaning on the bottom of the frame signify, or what might her presence invite? How does the form of the photograph convey so clearly that this was not a scene for the naked eye but one painstakingly constructed in the darkroom? What do we make of a photograph that flaunts its fabrication even as it seeks to reassure its intended audiences of a racial order of things? 1
‘Banana Plants Imposed on a View of the Point from the Bluff, 1880-1900’ ©Local History Museum, Durban.
In his last book, Cedric Robinson (2007: iii), perhaps the most original author of the term ‘racial capitalism’ – which is to acknowledge other genealogies, also from South Africa 2 – turned his attention to what he called the ‘forgeries of memory and meaning’ in forms of representation that dissimulate the process in which ‘racial regimes tend to wear thin over time’. What is striking is that Robinson makes this careful argument with reference to ‘racial regimes’ rather than ‘racial capitalism’ in general, a point, I think, he would have engaged. Indeed, we might assume in our time of widespread disintegration of capitalist certitudes about regular or sustainable work, accumulation, financialization, personhood and relations with nature that capitalist geographies also ‘wear thin over time’. In times like these, in (Harvey, 1982) geographic terms, the search for a ‘spatial fix’ to capital’s crisis tendencies become increasingly uncertain and desparate, more like the junkie’s fix than durable resolution. The heat of the South African War of 1899–1902, the time of this ambiguously dated photograph, was witness to many such yearnings for imperial certitude in the wake of widespread racial-capitalist uncertainty.
Williams (1975) concludes his classic text by asking the reader to consider how the opposition of country and city, like other powerful binaries, ought to be understood as produced through dialectical processes that give these binaries and their associated social, spatial and literary forms specific power in specific places and times; it is fundamentally an argument for a genealogical approach to a Marxist critique of capitalism and imperialism. At the end of this text, he argues that the metropole – colony binary is another iteration of this form of thought, whose genealogies might be traced with similar care. This is this spirit with which I begin with the opposition of the ocean and the city, not exactly to lure the reader into a comprehensive catalogue of what this dualism might name, and certainly not to read ‘the ocean’ as merely an aspect of ‘the country’: that would be to miss Williams’ point entirely. Rather, I read the opening photograph as an invitation to reconsider oceanic processes as constitutive of landscapes occluded by the forgeries of racial consciousness.
This article is part of long-term ethnographic and archival research conducted between 2002 and 2012 for a project called Apartheid Remains which asks how people live with and refuse a century of racial capitalism in neighbourhoods surrounding oil refineries in the city of Durban, South Africa. Today, the neighbourhoods of Wentworth and Merebank in South Durban remain trapped by the legacies of apartheid’s racial Group Areas, including their racialization as ‘Coloured’ and ‘Indian’ respectively, as well as long-term ill-health as neighbours of oil refineries and other polluting industry in a patchwork industrial–residential valley. The larger project explores how these areas have been crucibles of opposition before, during and after apartheid. The space and time of this article lies much earlier, in the early decades of the 20th century.
Here, I focus on what lay beyond the forgeries of official discourse and urban policy at I time in which City Hall fiercely defended a fantasy of consolidating a white English city on the African Indian Ocean. This view was at considerable odds with the reality of an industrial port, a bustling mercantile centre and constant movement of multiracial working classes including municipal employees, dockworkers, petty traders and other working people moving through the city to its rural–urban hinterlands. The most important thorn in the side of City Hall’s realization of its racial fantasy was the presence of multi-class, multi-ethnic and, by the early 20th century, multi-generational, mixed Black populations in Durban who had lost their ties to distant homeland and were rooting themselves in the urban landscape in new ways that would increasingly be racialized collectively as ‘Indian’. City Hall’s racial fear and loathing – broadcast in the quaintly phallic discourse of ‘Indian penetration’ – focused on primarily Gujarati Muslim and Hindu mercantile classes transforming the facades of the Central Business District, blending Art Deco with Islam, announcing their presence in the Casbah around the Grey Street Mosque complex. What escaped City Hall’s gaze, however, was a slow, steady and deliberate realm of subaltern spatial praxis in Durban’s interstices and peripheries.
The lands south of the port and city centre were the site of these processes, ignored by officialdom and historiography in its wake. Since the dawn of the century, City Hall held a steady eye on the marshlands south of the city, the idealized foreground in the opening photograph (Figure 1), as prized flatland in a city of hills, perfect for industrialization. And as it saw these peripheral lands slowly worked and transformed by subaltern denizens, it was so possessed by its racial fantasy of a white Durban that it never quite realized that this subaltern activity was slowly and steadily building another city. This other, pervasive history of subaltern space-making is the subject of this article: an art of liminal space-making that would forge some of Durban’s most distinctive features as an African Indian Ocean city.
Indeed, as we attend to the notion of urban liminality, we must beware of a pornography of subaltern suffering, and a romance of the liminal. I read the Black woman at the bottom of the photograph as wilfully refusing any such consolation. The spectacularization and commodification of Black suffering demands more careful attention to the erasures that the forgeries of racial capitalism produce. Moreover, it is not enough to simply decry forgeries like this photograph for their conservative hopes; that would be akin to what Williams calls reading images ‘without illumination’. What is lost in a narrowly discursive analysis is a historical-materialist understanding of the failure of capitalism to make the city conform to an official racial fantasy, as well as the fugitive convivialities that emerge its the wake. We are forced, then, to think beyond the literal contrast of the ocean and the city proposed in the opening photograph, to ask what relations of alienation, abstraction and dispossession, but also conviviality and space-making it attempts to foreclose. We might then read this photograph as an artefact of subalternity in the sense that Gayatri Spivak suggests, not as repressed subject but as the process of ‘disclosure through effacement’. 3
As a second work of photographic subaltnernization, consider Figure 2, a photograph, from 1942, from Durban during the Second World War, with another Black woman at its focal point.
‘Barbed wire entanglements erected,’ undated (ca 1942). ©Local History Museum, Durban.
This is a photograph of the segregated central beach of Durban in a tangle of barbed wire meant to deter Japanese invasion from the sea, following the sighting of a submarine off the coast. On the photograph’s left is a muscled white man, perhaps an off-duty serviceman, glancing at a white woman with children, aided by a Black nanny. Another white woman raises her child onto a post, with Durban’s mid-century modern buildings as a backdrop. At the visual centre is a Black woman in white, her domestic servitude enabling the baroque reality that surrounds her, her body language figuratively refusing interpellation by photographer and viewer as simply enjoying a barbed beach in a world war.
Between these two powerfully ambiguous Figures 1 and 2, both with Black women as witness to the possibility of simplistic reading, lies the argument of this article. Between the contexts in which the women in these photographs came to be photographed, lies a set of complex historical geographies of racial capitalist transformation of space and personhood. A booming industrial port at the time of the South African War, the context of the first photograph, became, by the second photograph, a confidently racist city experimenting with racial urban planning during the exigencies of world war. Durban’s wartime experiments in racial planning would be a harbinger of apartheid’s Group Areas racial planning. Occluded in both photographs is the dramatic subaltern production of space that these photographs cannot see at all through their forgeries of the ocean and the city.
I must pause with a necessary question: is my use of the term ‘Black’ also a kind of forgery? What is to be made of my wilfully ahistorical and coalitional use of the term? Some people racialized as Indian and Coloured in Merebank and Wentworth, in the 1970s and 1980s, sought to throw off their ascribed racialization to affirm a capacious conception of Black solidarity. What does it mean to self-consciously hinge one's politics on this fragile hope?
In an important set of pieces in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Stuart Hall offers a set of insights that are particularly germaine to this question. An 1988 essay republished in Hall (1996) distinguishes a moment in which people emerging from a diversity of traditions, identities and experiences sought a shared expression of their experiences of racism through the category ‘Black,’ and that that this became important for the articulation of a coalitional conception of Black politics in postcolonial Britain. By the late 1980s, in the shadows of Black Power, following internal critiques from Black feminist and queer artists and scholars, Hall argues that there had been a decisive shift in Black cultural politics. In fact, he diagnoses two conjunctural shifts with respect to Blackness on film. The first was marked by the entry of Black filmmakers taking the reins of representation, attempting to respond to prior misrepresentations of Black lives on film, racist ‘forgeries’ in Robinson’s sense. The 1980s, he thought, witnessed a shift ‘from a struggle over the relations of representation to the politics of representation itself’ (165); this marked, in his famous phrasing ‘the end of a certain critical innocence in black cultural politics’ (170).
Hall’s phrasing is characteristically precise. The ‘innocent’ conception of Blackness relied on notions of authenticity but it was also critical, and it remains important in response to the blunt forms of racial violence that continue to surround us. He does not exactly mean that the older moment is entirely dead, but rather that the diversity, mixity and diasporic quality of Black experiences would now be impossible to avoid in both art and politics. A 1992 piece republished as Hall (1993) returns to Black popular culture as a terrain of contradiction and struggle, in which ‘Black’ cannot be a category of essence, but that is what gives it a new kind of power. As bell hooks (1991: 175) responds to Hall in a lucid exchange, ‘being black isn’t really good enough for me: I want to know what your cultural politics are’ (Hall, 1993: 112–113).
My cultural politics come from a specific moment, and this is where I must be clear that I use the term Black anachronistically within the blizzard of changing racial categories across 20th century South Africa and into the 21st. In the early 1970s, the Black Consciousness movement came together around the charismatic Bantu Stephen ‘Steve’ Biko, resident in South Durban in exactly the neighbourhoods that are at the centre of my broader study. Inspired by Biko’s thought, several young people racialized as Indian and Coloured took on a conception of Blackness that refused their given racial affiliation. I use the word Black anachronistically with this 1970s political conjuncture in mind, for its affinities to the thought of Stuart Hall and bell hooks. In uneasy compromise to historical method, I sometimes offer the term ‘mixed Black’ as a way of acknowledging that people lived entangled lives that were harbingers of a coalitional Black Politics of the future, even if that coalitional form would prove to be fragile and evasive, as it still is. Hall’s method clarifies our work of assembling the past as not simply recuperative but also a work of curation with hopes for the future. Hence this wilfulness, with apologies to my more doggedly historicist readers.
This article works in three moves. In the following section, I explore how trans-oceanic Indian indentured labour ‘shoaled’ specific people on South Africa’s racial shores, launching a process of space-making. The next section turns to their infrastructural ‘building’ in a slow and steady transformation of rural–urban landscape. Finally, I show how Durban Indians engaged in agrarian and ritual practice that enabled them to transform space as they transformed themselves, thereby ‘rooting’ themselves in the city. I conclude with the provocation that this geography of marronage points to: that the slave gardens of the dispossessed were the building blocks of Durban’s difference, a difference that meant nothing less than the steady and decisive dissolution of the fantasy of a white city by the Afro-Indian sea.
Shoaled: Oceanic histories and their spatial aftermath
The shoal creates a rupture and at the same time opens up analytical possibilities … (King, 2019: 4)
The topography of Durban (2012 [1952]). Credits: Mina Moshkeri, LSE Design Unit, 2012. Drawn from Department of Economics, University of Natal (1952).
We might read this map as a tale of two cities. The first confirms the mythologized repetitions of officialdom, in which an originary land grab of 6096 acres is presented as an endowment, a gift of nature. In this spatial parable, the British ‘1820 Settlers’ set out from the Cape Colony eastward to contain the frontiers of Xhosa territory, and they stayed on in Natal, drawing more settlers until the region was annexed by the Cape in 1845. When Durban became a municipality in 1854, it marked as ‘natural’ territorial boundaries the Umgeni and Umbilo Rivers, the Indian Ocean and Bay of Natal and the Berea Ridge, geographical boundaries that are the basis of Figure 3. 4 However, this map also marks what concerns me in this article: a second, emergent city, effaced in the generic label ‘Indian Gardens’. What the mapmakers could not envision is that this innocuous term ‘discloses through effacement’ the spatial practice of mixed Black people transforming marshlands, lowlands and riverbanks in the early decades of the century, reclaiming literal shoals for a different form of life than that offered by the colonial city.
Understanding this requires returning to histories of land, labour and capital, within and beyond the sanctioned vision from City Hall. With its foundational endowment, the municipality used phased land sales and, particularly after 1866, land lease as a source of revenue. This was the gift that kept on giving. Short-term leaseholds encouraged Durbanites to invest in freehold property just beyond city limits in Bellair near Cato Manor, Seaview and South Coast Junction near Clairwood on the map. The city encouraged white suburbanization on peripheries exempt from municipal rates and serviced by rail and tram lines. The city’s monopoly of land also pushed ‘non-European’ settlement to the urban fringe, where working-class whites often saw them as competitors for peri-urban land within reach of work, markets and the city center. 5 But who were these ‘Non-Europeans’ who would plant ‘Indian Gardens’ on Figure 3?
This question takes us to the powerful influence of Natal’s sugar plantation capital, whose recourse to imperial recruitment of indentured labour from British India would remake Durban’s geographies beyond expectation. Importantly, unlike other plantation geographies, plantation capital in Natal acted in consort with the broader imperatives of capital accumulation particularly as seen by the city, in its phased release of land for other uses.
The indentured labour system moved approximately 150,000 people from Bihar and the Madras Presidency to Natal between 1860 and 1911. Their descendents imagined these migrant streams in ethno-linguistic terms, first as Calcutties and Madrasis for ports of departure, then as Hindis and Tamils, the latter including Telugus from the Tamil country. There is much to say about the early phase of indenture, including the adoption of last names, unheard of in contexts of origin, and in possible experiments with social mobility through re-naming, but these are footnotes to migration to a hostile land in which most of these attempts at mobility would prove futile. What is striking is that many Durban Indians refer to their indentured ancestors as ‘1860 Settlers,’ implicitly citing the British ‘1820 Settlers,’ an act of colonial mimesis that drew little notice. Defenders of indenture argued that former labourers were granted land to become peasants, but what was more probable was that some people fought for and achieved relative gains under conditions of extreme hardship.
Another strand of migrants paid for their passage, and after the 1870s, these ‘passenger Indians’ included Hindu and Muslim Gujarati merchants, shopkeepers, clerks and workers, many of whom fanned out into peripheral towns. A mixed class of peasant-workers, petty traders and shopkeepers bridged periodic labour with access to small bits of land. 6 Some planters in the 1860s and 1870s rented out 10–20 acre plots to former indentured labourers to access their labour in times of shortage as well as to clear land for expansion (Hughes, 2011). 7 The Wragg Commission of 1885–1887 suggested that former indentured workers were turning ‘waste and unproductive land’ into ‘gardens planted with vegetables, tobacco, maize [and] fruit trees’. 8 Historians and novelist have noted the importance of the slave plot for survival under duress, but in post-indenture Durban, the slave plot and its produce were slowly changing the city, as Durbanites became reliant on cheap produce from ‘gardens’ in formerly neglected and peripheral land.
Some people took note of this process with consternation, including African residents in the Inanda Mission Reserve to the North-West of Durban who reported to the Natal Native Commission of 1881 their fears of Indian ‘Coolies’ as prone to self-exploitation and dense habitation that meant that Africans would be ‘elbowed out of the country’. 9 Notions of Indian farmers as prone to Chayanovian self-exploitation recur over the next several decades; one account from the late 1930s or early 1940s argues that ‘the requirements of an Asiatic are so small that the very smallest profit of his productions will suffice to keep the body and soul together’ so that it is no surprise ‘that the vegetable market is almost completely supplied by the coolies’. 10 European anti-semitism provided the racial form through which the idea of the Indian as embodiment of economic and biological threat could circulate widely, but the dispersed rural–urban geography of fruit and vegetable farming and marketing provided its spatial integument. 11
City Hall had attempted decades earlier, unsuccessfully, to segregate Indians in a ‘location’. 12 Instead, using sanitation discourse, the Dealer’s Act of 1897 empowered the municipality to control and contain Indian mercantile presence in the Grey Street enclave. In the ensuing century, the organic intellectuals of this area, photographer Omar Badsha and novelist Aziz Hassim, would call ‘the Casbah’ the heart of Indian business and residence in the city center. 13 But while the colonial state loathed Indian presence, it prided its efficient and coercive exclusion of Africans from the city. In the first decade of the 20th century, South Africa’s cities used the plague as pretext for segregation in differently violent ways; Johannesburg was the most coercive. Durban prided its municipal monopoly on the brewing and sale of sorghum beer to fund the building of segregated ‘locations,’ schools, hospitals and minimalist welfare. 14 But what City Hall did not notice were the spatial practices of mixed Black subalterns in the inhospitable spaces between white settlement and African exclusion, forging their own forms of life.
How did people emerging from indenture, in their recollection, attend to being shoaled on African shores? An indispensable source from South Durban is the Diary of Bulbhadur Juggernath, written retrospectively by a retired pensioner. 15 Writing about his ancestor, Dhani, Juggernath documents a group of former indentured labourers whom he calls ‘pioneers’ moving to today’s Merebank in 1914, which, through their labours, ‘resembled village India,’ with cows, poultry and vegetable farms on the marshy banks of the Umlaas River; they marketed produce in town, sold milk in the village and built homes for joint families. 16 In a remarkable aside, Jaggarnath narrates Dhani’s wife Surjee engaged in religious practice with a group of Kabir panthees, followers of the syncretic Indian mystic Kabir, who, after the day’s agricultural labour, played music on a kanjari, sang songs, smoked ganja cheelum (marijuana) and rejected caste and affirmed ‘the equality of mankind’. This remarkable aside suggests radically altered forms of life after indenture akin to the forms of mutuality that Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (2000) argue were produced by the dispossessed across the Atlantic world. There is a wonderful syncretism in this poetics of marronage in an African Indian Ocean city.
Another pensioner, retired apartheid-era politician K Laloo, 93 years when I interviewed him in 2003, described in vivid detail how, following their indenture contracts, his itinerant settled to farm in Ifafa to the south of Durban, where they accessed a large piece of fertile land on annual rent. With a curious turn of phrase, he said they ‘cut the bush and made a garden colony,’ indexing the 19th century British term for state or company-provided housing estates as in ‘railway colonies,’ but more precisely the Latin ‘colonia’ for a settled farm. Whatever its buried genealogies, Laloo’s term carries a collectivist sentiment, bolstered by memories of mutuality between ‘Guru bhais’ or devotees of the same guru who engaged in a form of labour exchange called the ‘peti’ system. By the 1920s, when Laloo was 10 years old, he recalls his parents leasing land from one of the large Indian landlords in the Durban region, EM Paruk, who rented land in separate areas to white and Indian tenants. This fragment of familial memory shows how an emerging Indian mutuality emerged within a regime of large landholding and tenancy in apparent complicity with official racial segregation.
In the early decades of the century, ‘Indian squatters’ occupied land owned by speculators, north and west of the city and in the southern flatlands labelled ‘Indian Gardens’ in the map above. 17 Rather than an ‘illegal’ seizure of space, this was a slow and steady occupation of space through the cadastre and land market. We know little about the grafting of farming skill and practice from agrarian Madras or Bihar to Natal, but we do know that these peasant-workers were farming maize, sweet potatoes and tobacco for African markets; fruit and vegetables for the general market in town; and aubergine, garlic, yams and spices for Indian consumption. 18 As in other foodways, the metaphor of grafting is apt in the reconstitution of culinary tradition, for instance as fermented mielie meal or maize meal replaced fermented rice as Tamil ‘sour porridge’. Former indentured labour, now peasant-workers, found a niche in the rural–urban periphery and the products of their labour permeated the food system.
In his important history of the Indian working class in Natal, Bill Freund argues that Indian smallholdings depended on family labour, but we know very little about reconstitutions of gender, kinship and family in these contexts, let alone what made them ‘Indian,’ given that kinship systems in their alleged places of origin in India were going through their own through dramatic transformations in India. 19 Both social history and popular forms like Jugernath’s Diary remain underwritten by a gendered and racial ideology of the resilient Indian family as central to the productivity of peasant-worker livelihoods, as racial capitalism slips into the background.
Less affluent people cannot as easily recall heroic narratives of Indian familial survival as the basis of accumulation; for the majority, the past was a set of mixed Black and laboured landscapes connecting dispersed peasant-worker settlements. Many have no recollection of their families receiving small allotments promised by indenture contracts. Yet, several narratives turn to the precise geographies in which formerly indentured and other working-class people could make a living, in exactly the areas labelled ‘Indian gardens’ above. Renditions of these areas combine the sylvan and idyllic with harsh realities of poverty after indenture, as if to highlight that there were no halcyon days of communal poverty through the Great Depression.
The regime of farming in ‘Indian gardens,’ primarily oriented to subsistence and locality, reached a peak in the 1920s when, in Freund’s terms, the possibility of an ‘Indian peasantry’ in the urban periphery was squeezed out by segregationism and proletarianization. 20 Unable to survive on farming alone, Indians were increasingly employed in the municipality, the Natal Government Railways, hotels and restaurants, as domestic servants and in industrial workshops emerging south of the harbor. 21 Depeasantization offered young people new avenues of experience, as well as of education. However, many peasant-workers continued to hold onto market gardens, dairy, poultry and fishing as sources of partial livelihood alongside new opportunities.
For several households, these peripheral lands were sites for building a home, offering resources to joint families, sometimes with mixed-race relationships at a remove from the city centre. Jeya’s maternal great-grandmother arrived from South India with the skills of a traditional healer and midwife, and after a period of widowhood, she married a Welshman, converted to Methodism, and headed a large, interracial family in a great house on Mere Street; importantly, this couple engaged in communal welfare as an incipient cosmopolitan, mixed middle-class commitment.
In this and other stories of post-indenture households in the periphery, what is striking is the detailed description of houses. Wood and iron houses signify hardship, self-determination and autoconstruction, with room for additions along with the fruit of additional familial labour. The affective investment in these kinds of dwellings, often posed in racialized distinction from the houses of today’s shackdwellers, take us to the next moment in the building of another city in the interstices of a hostile one.
Building: Liminal infrastructures in the foibles of reform
The differential and slow process of spatial transformation took a sharp turn as Indians, as Indians, began to take a stronger interest in their communal improvement. One site of this active building of the infrastructure of an Indian Durban is in spatial practice associated with subaltern religiosity. As an important caveat, it is important to note that early 20th century Indian religiosity, as we know from the foundational work of historian Goolam Vahed, was extremely syncretic, much to the consternation of Hindu and Muslim social reformers coming through South Africa from late colonial India. 22
Temple building began with the Ganesha Temple in the plantation lands of Mount Edgecombe in 1898, perhaps as a means of stabilitizing the plantation workforce, and temple-building continued along the sugar fields north and south of Durban. 23 Just as with houses, the materiality of building is remembered with care. Early temples were built of wattle and daub with thatched roofs, with organic deities emerging from the sugar fields; in time they were constructed with wood and iron, and finally as permanent structures incorporating the masonry of master builders revisiting temple styles from South Indian and North Indian traditions. 24
Master temple builders from India included Kistappa Reddy of North Arcot in the Tamil country who built temples at Mount Edgecombe, Umbilo, Pietermaritzburg and up and down the Natal coast from the 1910s to the 1930s; Reddy also ran the Ganesa Printing Press, the first bus service from Cato Manor, a taxi business, a grocer’s shop, tearoom and dairy farm, showing that temple-building was part of infrastructural production. 25 Three more Tamils – Kothanar Ramsamy Pillay of Pudukotai, Barasakthi Naiker and Tamil scholar Alaga Pillay of Madurai – and a Gujarati called Ramjee built the rest of Natal’s ‘permanent temples’ in the 1920s and 1930s. 26 At an astonishingly fast pace, a multiplicity of Hindu gods emigrated to South Africa, consecrated in temples across the city from Seacow Lake and Mt Edgecombe to Cato Manor and Jacobs, Esperanza and Pampanyoni to Magazine and Railway Barracks, Sometsu Road and Umgeni Road to Bellair and Umbilo: across areas of Indian working-class habitation. 27 Close on the heels of these gods, priests and teachers followed, and temple compounds became public spaces with vernacular schools, community halls and festivals celebrated in the open air. 28
At the Muslim heart of the Casbah, a poignant event clarifies this collective sacralization of Indian settlement. The grave of an unknown indentured Indian was retrospectively re-cast as the tomb of a wandering Sufi mystic, to imaginatively situate an emplaced saint vital to the cosmology of South Asian Islam on Durban’s shores. 29 The shrine of Badsha Pir continues to be central to Muslim Durban, a silent tribute to an unknown indentured labourer in the heart of the bustling city. In effect, the figure of the indentured labourer is sacralized and gently worked into the ontology of Indian Muslim settlement, part of building the infrastructure of an Indian city.
As with the first moment of space-making, observers watched with deep consternation. In the 1910s, religious reformers from India were desperate to stamp out religious syncretism, such as Hindu participation in the Muslim festival of Muharram. In their efforts at reform, these figures linked dispersed devotees in an emergent associational life across market gardening areas. Swami Shankeranand established Hindu associations across peripheral areas; urged investment in cooperatives, education and political representation; and started the Indian Farmer’s Association for Hindu market gardeners in 1908. 30 Many of the goals of reformers like Shankeranand about a modernized Hinduism remained unrealized; they could not eradicate subaltern forms of popular religiosity including fire-walking, the ‘six-foot dance’ or therakoot, worship of mother goddess Draupadi as Garon Gon; or the Kavadi ritual involving spirit possession and carrying the kavadi, or the Mariamman ‘porridge festival’ held on Good Friday since 1910. 31 Unwittingly, however, religious reformers helped connect dispersed market gardeners, who in turn rejected much of their reformism. A disapproving white reporter at the Umbilo Temple in 1935 sees devotees ‘drawn from all over the Borough; each community arrived in procession on their own, accompanied by one or more sacred images drawn on low wagons or carts’. 32 What he saw were Tamil forms of demotic religiosity that had become spatial tactics to occupy the city.
These spatial tactics varied across religiosity and livelihood, but remained incongruous to officialdom. Consider what ensued when Indian market gardeners shifted from hawking outside the Grey Street Mosque to the covered ‘early morning market’ on Victoria Street.
33
Following a failed attempt by City Hall to co-opt the Indian Farmer’s Association’s through a Council-controlled market for ‘Hindus,’ the City conceded to the early morning ‘squatters market,’ named for sellers who squatted on the ground, an institution threatened periodically with removal in 1968–1971 and 2009–2010.
34
In the early 20th century, this early morning market was self-consciously about stallholders and hawkers taking space. To white opinion, this was part of a multisensory occupation of the city that one writer likens to military control: The way coolies have accomandeered this thoroughfare one would believe they had assumed military control, the road being completely blocked with carts and boxes. At night no lights are bout and the men make camp fires to sleep…To complete the picture we have a miniature coolie temple, with its tom-toms, the halt, the lamps, the blind, and, during the last season, there was a band.
35
In this complex milieu, Indians had built a presence in the city centre and in the interstices under conditions of antipathy, xenophobia and racism, with persistent threats of repatriation. The inner city provided respite in the Casbah surrounding the Grey Street Mosque complex, with Gujarati Hindu and Muslim merchant families investing in property, establishing shops in Victorian arcades and building the finest Art Deco façades in Southern Africa. 39 This building of Indian presence was always shaped, however, by the simultaneously harsh limits to African work, movement and urbanization, through the Stallard Doctrine of 1922 and the Native (Urban Areas) Act of 1923. 40 Indian critics of this hardening racial segregation were muffled by the withdrawal of municipal franchise in 1925. 41 In this shifting geography of racial capitalism, and in complicated complicity with it, mixed Black subalterns had been concertedly building an Indian Durban that would enable some figures to gain close proximity to the workings of the racial state, while others would become among its strongest critics.
Rooting: Autoconstruction as self-making
In this final moment, former indentured labourers and working-class passenger Indians rooted themselves in place, transforming themselves in relation to the landscape they had altered beyond colonial recognition. The prose of officialdom, as I have mentioned, had been obsessed with either encouraging Indian repatriation or segregation. Debates over repatriation were an important part of the Round Table Conference in Cape Town, including representatives from the Government of India. The resulting Cape Town Agreement offered a striking solution: the state was to support ‘standards of living’ of permanently settled Indians, while those who could not conform to ‘western standards of living’ would face ‘assisted emigration’ back to India or to other countries in which such ‘standards of living’ were not a norm. 42 In the background, imperial discourse distinguished ‘white men’s countries’ where ‘western’ norms might be expected from colonies governed by the Colonial Office where they would not be: these were places where ‘self-government’ would be inappropriate, which could accommodate ‘assisted emigration’. This field of colonial power/knowledge presumed a biopolitical caesura across imperial geographies at such a spectacular scale that it was destined to fail on the weight of its own hubris. At a different scale of praxis in Durban, something more lasting was at work.
Indian organizations in Durban responded in varied ways, some agreeing to repatriation, others protesting vehemently. 43 Rumors circulated of ships with false bottoms disgorging people into seas, of repatriation to unknown lands on false pretexts, or of return only to be compelled by Brahmins into expensive purifying rites for crossing kala pani, the dark-water. 44 Importantly, the follow-up Second Round Table Conference of 1932 showed a clear shift in official discourse from repatriation to segregation, with the South African government representative surmising that 80% of Indians were South African born and unlikely to be able to return. 45
In the British India of the 1930s, ‘colonial born’ Indians were also no longer necessary to the swadeshi cause, as anticolonial nationalism became more territorially eugenic. John Kelly and Martha Kaplan argue insightfully that these and other indentured migrants became ‘Indians’ in racial and quotidian terms, with the capacity for antiracist critique, precisely as they became less useful to anticolonial nationalism in the Indian subcontinent. 46 Some Indian elite commentators saw ‘colonial born’ Indians through colonial discourses of tropical degeneration, as people who had been so altered by colonialism that they could only live out their lives in ‘the colonies,’ meaning not India but the ‘tropical colonies’ of the plantation belt to which they apparently acculturated. Bhawani Dayal Sannyasi and Banarsidas Chaturvedi’s (1931) independent commission on Indians repatriated from South Africa drew authority from various figures including MK Gandhi, who states unequivocally that the colonial born are ‘neither Indian nor Colonial’ and that ‘the tropical Colonies must be glad to have them in preference to raw recruits who have to be initiated.’ 47
Gandhi’s antipathy to indentured labour in his time in South Africa is well documented, but what is striking is the way in which he threw his ideological weight into an Indian nationalism articulated to the motherland. Clarifying the realities of the 1930s, Kelly and Kaplan argue that ‘in the didactic public culture of the Indian National Congress, the indenture colonies moved from a cause for intervention, uplift, and rescue to a tragic political problem,’ and that the Indian National Congress of the 1930s warned of the abjection of the returned colonial born Indian. 48 As a reterritorialized Indian nationalism in India sought security in a ‘eugenic sense of place,’ it abrogated representation of its working-class diasporas across the global plantation belt. 49
What became of these diasporas dispossessed by Indian nationalism in the twilight of the British Empire? This question returns us to the slow and steady infrastructural building of a recognizable subaltern Indian geography in the liminal spaces of the city. Consider Gandhi’s insights in precisely this landscape. When he sought to save his newspaper Indian Opinion from financial ruin, Gandhi moved his press to a farm in Inanda in the vicinity of ‘Indian gardens’ where settler-workers could build wood-and-iron homes. 50 The autoconstruction and self-making at the Phoenix Settlement were a seedbed for Gandhi’s emerging theory of praxis; as he put it, ‘Phoenix is intended to be a nursery for producing the right men [sic] and right Indians.’ 51 Might Gandhi have learnt this ‘experiment with truth’ from the praxis of other ex-indentured market gardeners around him who were engaged in the slow and deliberate transformation of self and landscape?
If so, we might speculate further on the praxis of these artful denizens. Writing on the Tamil country in South India from which a substantial share of these people had come, Anand Pandian argues that late 19th century colonial ‘improvement’ revived a much older Tamil ethos of panpā
The ruse of marronage
I began with photographic forgeries of memory and have sought to show in three movements how people forcibly moved through indentured labour were shoaled on hostile shores, how then managed to transform these shoals by building an enduring infrastructure of habitation, and how they rooted themselves firmly by transforming themselves in relation to it. All this was surrounded by official hostility. By the 1940s, this process of space-making would become a recognizable geography of Indian communal welfare, including schools, colleges, hospitals and care facilities for the elderly, infirm and destitute. 53 This infrastructure of Indian biopolitical concern would be radicalize at moments as well, particularly in the biopolitical revolt against apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s, when several activists sought to discard their racialization as Indian for a broader conception of Black politics. The Indian peasantry of the early century was not entirely extinguished either, so much so that in 1949, at the onset of apartheid, one estimate had Indian farmers providing 75% of Durban’s vegetable produce. 54 Between the death of the peasantry and the birth of the infrastructure of communal welfare, the early decades of the century witnessed the remarkable event in which the ‘gardens’ of recent indentured labourers became the building blocks of a dispersed and yet unmistakably Indian city of Durban.
In a most insightful engagement with the remains of marronage in South Africa, Gabeba Baderoon (2014) dwells on the impossibilities of affirming two centuries of slave-holding in the Cape on South African social and cultural life. Baderoon asks how it is possible that the subjection, violence and humiliation of more than 60,000 enslaved people through a pass system, forced prostitution and sexual violence could not leave a trace, not least in extremely high rates of gender-based violence that attach to the skin of specifically raced people. 55 Her response is wrapped in the historiographic and poetic challenges that Indian Ocean histories of slavery and indenture offer to a South Africa that turns its back to these histories, in contrast to the hyper-availability of the cultural and political archives of the Black Atlantic. Through a powerful set of rewritings, Baderoon offers a Black feminist praxis of regarding the intimate wounds and debts of deprivation in land, labour, livelihood, embodiment and belonging that mark the present, and that keep the legacies of these submerged Indian Ocean histories active.
To Baderoon’s insightful writings on South African marronage, I offer the counter-gift proposed by subaltern space-making in this account of ocean and city: that marronage, the stealthy occupation of space by the dispossesed, can, in a sense, be a ‘success’. I put it in this form because the account I give also points to marronage itself as a ruse. Hiding behind enthnoracial subjectivation as ‘Indian,’ distanced from nationalism knitting territory and population in a place called India, mixed Black people emerging from difficult histories of oceanic movement, dispossession, unfree labour and urban discrimination forged slow ways of mutually transforming unwanted lands and selves. In a period of widespread African dispossession – which, again, makes my coalitional use of the word ‘Black’ obviously wilful – this subaltern occupation would become the grounds of Indian subjectivity, emplacement, welfare, as well as occasionally of militant solidarity with Black liberation for a different Mzansi. What we can say with clarity is that despite the persisting forgeries of colonial knowledge, subalterns from the Afro-Indian sea effectively dissolved of the fantasy of a white city decades before apartheid.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.