and Urban Space in Durban
Chapter 2. Beyond the “Native Question”: Xuma, Lembede, and the Event of Indian Independence
Chapter 3. “That Lightning that Struck”: The 1949 Durban Riots and the Crisis of African Nationalism
Chapter 4. The Racial Politics of Home: Sex, Feminine Virtue, and the Boundaries of the Nation
Chapter 6. The Natal Synthesis: Inclusive Nationalism and the Unity of the ANC
Preface and Acknowledgments
In July 2004, I visited Durban for the first time, where one of my guides was the late and dearly missed historian Jeff Guy. After finishing lunch, he introduced me to his children, Joe and Heli, who had arrived at the same café. He suggested that we speak, since I had expressed interest in postapartheid social movements and they had been active in some of these campaigns. The next day, we met for a coffee at a seaside café and, among many other things, they talked about the way that the local African National Congress (ANC) invoked historical inequalities between Africans and Indians in order to undercut service delivery protests in Indian townships such as Chatsworth, in effect using racial divisions to attack the very kinds of activism that had helped bring the ANC to power. After our conversation, I walked through the Grey Street neighborhood in downtown Durban, absorbed in the markets, shops, colonnades, mosques and minarets, and curry stalls. In a very hazy and undeveloped fashion, I started to wonder about the place of this Indian Ocean city in the history of South Africa and the significance of the Indian diaspora, as well as Indian and African racial divisions, for the development of the liberation struggle and African nationalism.
The research that I finished in 2009 sought to integrate Indian and African histories in Durban within a single narrative while providing a critical account of how the antiapartheid struggle addressed the question of the also-colonized other. Strongly influenced by Walter Rodney’s seminal History of the Guyanese Working People, I felt the conviction that the ANC had failed to overcome—and perhaps exacerbated—racial divisions by building a superficial alliance from above rather than class unity from below. Against an official rhetoric and historiography that stressed nonracialism, my research spent considerable time uncovering Natal’s fraught racial histories and the currents of racial thinking within the liberation organizations. Nationalism, I believed, was inevitably haunted by the specter of race. While this research informs the present book, I draw rather different conclusions in the account that follows. While Natal’s racial divisions were (and remain) stark, they form only one part of a more complex and interesting story about how race was lived in black communities in the early days of apartheid. Moreover, my research did not fully appreciate the awareness within the ANC of both these racial dynamics and the dangerous entanglements between racial and nationalist thinking. There was a philosophical audacity to the ANC’s vision of inclusive African nationalism that—in the current age of managerial multiculturalism—is easy to misrecognize. While still critical in its approach, Internal Frontiers is far more interested in the power of African nationalist thought and the ANC’s attempt to rethink the meaning of nation in the midst of life and death struggles. As I attempt to show, the effort to reimagine African nationalism in radically open terms was one of the twentieth century’s major intellectual achievements.
I conducted my research in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. Given Toronto’s location within a geography etched by the British Empire, the city was a fertile space to begin to reflect on these questions. Not only did I benefit from the mentorship and advice of a wonderful community of Africanist scholars, my colleagues, friends, and collaborators also invited me to think through my project in relationship to parallel and connected histories across South Asia, the Caribbean, and Palestine. I am deeply grateful to Alissa Trotz, Michelle Murphy, Melanie Newton, Ritu Birla, Rick Halpern, Jens Hanssen, Shivrang Setlur, Brian Beaton, Doris Bergen, John Saul, Natalie Zemon Davis, Lauren Dimonte, Richard Iton, Ato Quayson, Christopher Linhares, Terrance Ranger, Melanie Sampson, Dickson Eyoh, J. Edward Chamberlin, Ian Hacking, Lorna Goodison, Luis Jacob, Chris Curreri, Lauren Lydic, and Antoinette Handley. Sean Hawkins was a generous and supportive mentor who insisted on the ethical stakes of the historian’s craft. Choosing to study with him was one of the best decisions of my life. Melissa Levin listened and argued with me patiently over the course of a decade. Her friendship has improved every word of this book. While finishing my research, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Hillina Seife, Haema Sivanesan, and Tejpal Ajji on the South-South: Interruptions and Encounters exhibition. Their friendships, and other opportunities to work with the South Asian Visual Art Centre, have greatly enriched my understanding of the issues explored in these pages.
Since my first research trip to South Africa in 2006, I have found a generous and welcoming community of scholars at the University of the Witwatersrand. During this and subsequent trips, I was repeatedly humbled by the willingness of South African colleagues to share their knowledge, research, and resources. Through the friendships of Ronit Frenkel and Pamila Gupta, I was introduced to the discussions regarding South Africa–India connections and Indian Ocean studies that eventually evolved into the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA), where I was Postdoctoral Fellow from 2009 to 2011. These conversations were crucial to the development of this project. I would like to thank Ronit, Pamila, Juan Orrantia, Natasha Erlank, Zen Marie, Phillip Bonner, Noor Nieftagodien, Madhumita Lahiri, Achille Mbembe, Dan Ojwang, Bhekizizwe Peterson, Shireen Hassim, Rehana Ebrahim-Vally, Thembinkosi Goniwe, Kelly Gillespie, and Kevin “Owl” Heydenrych. As director of CISA, Dilip Menon provided institutional support and, more importantly, our conversations enriched my understanding of intellectual history. This book is much stronger due to the comments and criticisms of Arianna Lissoni over the course of several years. Liz Gunner’s knowledge of Natal and Zulu culture have been an inexhaustible resource. Lungile Madywabe helped me with isiZulu translations. Working on the film African-Indian Odyssey with Hina Saiyada was a vital experience. I hope that my many discussions with Sarah Nuttall, and the influence of her scholarship, are evident in the pages that follow.
Isabel Hofmeyr, mentor extraordinaire, deserves her own paragraph. Since my first conference paper, she has been able to see—far beyond me—the potential of this project and gently encouraged me to go further. If not for her wisdom, brilliant insights, and scholarly example, this book would not have been written.
I had the opportunity to present two of the book’s chapters, 3 and 4, at the history seminar at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. For a historian of Durban, the seminar was an invaluable space, an opportunity for comment and critique from scholars who have dedicated their careers to Natal and its history. In addition to Jeff, I owe debts to Catherine Burns, Julie Parle, Goolam