Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (12 page)

So in the first half of the century, no major Indian leader sought any coalition with Africans or spoke of them as brothers and sisters in the fight against racism. When the Natal Native Congress, later to become the African National Congress, was inaugurated in 1912 with a gathering of seven hundred people in Durban to agitate for equality, most of the Indians remained distant. In 1939, answering a black South African leader's question about the wisdom of forming an "Indo-African nonwhite united front," Gandhi wrote publicly that it would be a mistake: "The Indians are a microscopic minority ... You, on the other hand, are the sons of the soil who are being robbed of your inheritance. You are bound to resist that. Yours is a far bigger issue. It ought not to be mixed up with that of the Indian."

By contrast, Jawaharlal Nehru, using a situation in Ceylon in the same year to discuss the diaspora as a whole, counseled Indians abroad to forget their separate identity. They must commit to bettering their new countries, he said, and ally with the local people in their struggles.

Nehru was ahead of his time; in South Africa, Gandhi's message had the stronger pull. During Gandhi's years as a South African, there were no joint meetings, joint protests, or joint statements. This suited his people well, though years after his departure it would come back to haunt them.

For if Indians were reared in misinformation about Africans, Africans experienced a steady stream of negative information about Indians. In a mixed working class the two groups might have interacted, developed the beginnings of a camaraderie based on economic oppression. But the whites were careful to segregate their factories and mines. With the entrepreneurial class of Indians, the Gujaratis, those who wistfully thought of themselves as near-white, black Africans neither felt nor had any opportunity to feel a kinship. The Indians deserved to be treated as pariahs, to be cast out, for they were milking the country of its wealth, the propagandists accused; most of all they were exploiting the black man.

Indeed, when the black man looked up, he did not see the white man, who was if anything a distant shadow in government and superstructure. When poor and working-class black Durbanites looked around, they could see that it was Indians who employed their women at less than subsistence wages for domestic work, Indians who ran the shoddy bus lines into the city, Indians on whose land squatters erected shacks and paid for the privilege, Indians at whose stores they must shop for goods that always seemed too high in price, too low in quality.

It did not matter that these Indians were in many cases scarcely better off than their customers, nor that the deep causes of inequality lay in the pale hands of power that manipulated them both like puppet strings.
Back to India
was the whites' rallying cry and deepest hope; and it came to seem a solution to some portion of the masses of black Africans as well.

The Indians, campaigning as they did in the halls of power with declarations and petitions, with logic and outrage and appeals to human rights, neglected to wage any kind of campaign at all among their neighbors, or to build a solid coalition. And while or because Africans had no official power, they had the power all men have, which Gandhi had harnessed so effectively in a peaceful way but which, whipped up by white rhetoric, might easily turn violent. For even the desperate, without resources, have one last resort: the power latent in the human body to resist, to struggle, to rage.

All that was needed to explode this tinderbox of racial tension and economic oppression was a spark. It came at five o'clock on a Thursday evening, January 13, 1949, on Victoria Street, two blocks from G. C. Kapitan & Son Vegetarian Restaurant.

In the afternoon, something started a fight between a fourteen-year-old African boy and a sixteen-year-old Indian shop assistant in Durban's vegetable market. The African slapped the Indian, who complained to his boss—an older Indian man who retaliated by thrashing the African boy in the street.

It was rush hour, crowds surging from Grey Street and from downtown toward the bus terminal—"masses of irritable human beings," a white commission would later write. Human beings, black and brown, made more irritable by long suffering: poverty, ill treatment, injustice, despair.

And rage; surely there was rage.

"In the tussle the Native's head accidentally crashed through glass of a shop window," said the report, "and in withdrawing it the boy received cuts behind the ears, which caused the blood to flow."

For Africans passing by, it was as if the grim blur of their daily reality came into sudden, gruesome focus: here was an Indian man beating a bleeding African child.

That single tableau contained every Indian shopkeeper contemptuously calling out
kaffir
or
boy
or the generic
Jim;
every Indian housewife treating a servant worse than a slave; every Indian bus driver arrogantly refusing to give change; every Indian slumlord charging exorbitant rent for a few square feet of tin and tarp, shacks with no floors and holes in the walls. Held in that moment, as if in a freeze-frame, was the utter helplessness of the Africans' situation: kept on impoverished reserves; allowed into the cities only with passes and then only for the precise period of their workday; crowded into rickety buses and comfortless housing; robbed of any hope for protest or redress; and constantly at the mercy of oppressors—not whites, who were out of reach and in any case against whom rebellion was impossible, an act of suicide, but of these lowly intermediaries, these men and women with skins nearly as dark as theirs, raised for some inscrutable reason above black Africans, given a bevy of privileges they themselves did not have. Indians had shops, homes, jobs, sit-down meals; Africans, when they were allowed into the city at all, crouched on the sidewalk eating curry and bread with their hands.

For three days the blood flowed: African, Indian, and even a little white blood—the worst riots in Durban's history. Rioters terrorized Durban's central Indian district and the outlying areas, where poor Indians lived in shacks. Unchecked by police, they moved from looting and beating to arson, rape, killing. A white woman drove by in a car shouting,—The Government is with you, see, the police are not shooting you! White men watched from office windows and balconies, with something like glee.—Serves the coolies right, says one.—Too bad they got the wrong Indians, says another; for most of the dead were poor Indians, not shopkeepers.

Arun Gandhi, the Mahatma's grandson, was sixteen years old, born and raised in Durban; he witnessed police "rounding up the African gangs only to let them off at a quieter spot to loot, kill and pillage. Policemen and gangs of white youth also robbed the Indian shops of what they could get after the rioters had broken the windows."

On Grey Street, rioters threw brickbats into shop windows. Above, Indian families cowered in the flats, listened to the mayhem, prayed. The majestic mosque was spared. So was the small restaurant at 154 Grey Street; perhaps its D
RINK
C
OCA
-C
OLA
and J
ALEBI
, P
ICKLES
, C
HILLI
B
ITES
signs did not tempt as strongly as the goods in nearby stores. And flames did not swallow the apartment where Ganda was living with his wife, son, two granddaughters, and his daughter-in-law, eight months pregnant. They were surviving another of South Africa's trials.

At last, the police and the military started shooting. By the time it was over, armored cars were rolling through Durban's streets. Two hundred Africans and Indians were dead, more than a thousand injured, including women and children raped. Three factories, 710 stores, and 1,532 homes were damaged or destroyed. Hundreds of families, both Indian and African, were suddenly homeless. Many would languish in makeshift refugee camps for months. The Grey Street merchants did their part for disaster relief; the Surat Hindu Association, in which Ganda was active, housed three hundred Indian refugees in its hall. And the city shut down. Among the disruptions, deliveries of newspapers and bread were suspended.

A contemporary report called the unrest the worst violence ever seen in the heart of a "civilized," Western city in peacetime. That assessment may still hold true; certainly the Durban riots had a higher death toll than the worst twentieth-century race riots in the United States: Watts, Detroit, South-Central Los Angeles. As with those uprisings, the Durban violence was so sudden and fierce that it seemed to rise out of nowhere. In fact, it had been a long time in the making.

In the dominant imagination, the riots served to confirm a vision of Africans as volatile, savage, animal. Above all, they were proof of the new government's thesis: that the races needed to be separated.

The logic of apartheid is difficult to follow, for it seems from our vantage point a strange kind of illogic. Liberal multiculturalism takes for granted that the route to racial harmony is mutual understanding, and the route to understanding is contact, exposure, conversation. So our modern studies show that those who know actual black people, or gay people, or whatever minority is being studied, are more likely to hold positive impressions of that minority group as a whole. To turn a stereotype into a human being requires, we now believe, some form of human connection.

This is a relatively new idea, perhaps only a generation or two old. In the Age of Imperialism, when the definition of
human
was "man" and the definition of
man
was "white," none of this was obvious. Various theories and catechisms explained the presence of "lesser" races; they were the white man's burden, for example, his to educate and convert, much as he was to tame the beasts of the wild and use them for his own needs; or they were descended from Cain, the killer, in a kind of doubling of original sin. Perhaps segregation began with the essential prejudice of colonialism. The invading powers took their desire to avoid the primitive, unclean, heathen, and made of it a theory, or several. There was
safety and sanitation
in the fortified white ghettos that the British built at the core of their colonial capitals; there was
separate but equal
in the American South. Behind it all was a powerfully primitive perception of race, ethnicity, or tribe as a human being's defining characteristic. Hindus and Muslims would be better off if each group had its own state; Native American tribes could be divided and ruled. It was a simple premise: that the races would get along better if completely separate. But this is to ascribe to it a kind of innocence—for "the races" did not begin on equal terms, nor did they have an equal capacity to assert their desires. In South Africa, as perhaps elsewhere, "get along better" was code for "serve white interests better." And "separate" was a euphemism for cruelly, desperately unequal.

To be fair, though, the idea of absolute equality was just as unimaginable to many Indians. Certainly my ancestors, who came with their caste pride, grafted it onto the social hierarchies of their adopted lands.

"Kaffirs" and "coloureds,"
goriyaas
(whites) and
kariyaas
(blacks),
chinaas
and
jewtkaas
were all slotted into a mindset already accustomed to order. Perhaps the fact that Khatris considered themselves second from the top back home, below the priestly caste and above the merchants and laborers, made them comfortable being so in South Africa—below the whites, above the blacks. They might even have seen it as an extension of the caste ideology, millennia-old, that one's place in the hierarchy is based on karma accrued in previous lives. Regardless of actual occupation, caste status offered a sense of secure identity in relation to others, which coincided comfortably with South Africa's racial system. As long as our people were comfortably near the status to which they felt their karma entitled them, left unmolested in business and not consigned to the bottom of the pecking order, they did not protest too much.

Apartheid respected that status to a certain extent; it gave the Indians and "coloureds," as mixed-race people were known, a higher status than it accorded to the native Africans. Taking inspiration from Hitler's comprehensive racial registration system, the government in 1950 passed the Population Registration Act. In South Africa no such obscenity as yellow stars was necessary; most people wore their designations on their skin. But in cases where skin was insufficient, the registration system provided backup, measuring ethnicity by parental and grandparental blood and, in some cases, by the kink of the hair.

If South Africa's Indians had experienced life before apartheid as a patchwork of restrictions to be dodged and negotiated, afterward this would come to seem a blessing. The patchwork became a straitjacket. Racial registration was the basis for comprehensive legislation that viewed everything—residence, work, voting, property ownership, taxes—through a racial lens. The strictest laws from each region were adopted and nationalized. And where the law was open to interpretation, the most restrictive interpretations were taken. Loopholes closed and covert justifications such as sanitation fell by the wayside. Now the reasons were overtly what they always had been covertly: the desire to make South Africa a white man's country, and the belief that whites were superior, so that nonwhites should be accommodated only insofar as they met white needs.

Like other nonwhites in South Africa, the people of Grey Street chafed against apartheid's restrictions. The new tactics of repression demanded a new response. Suddenly the war was being fought on all fronts: internationally, at the United Nations and in the world press; nationally and provincially, at the ballot box and in the courts; and in the streets, where organizers traveled among the people, rallying and bringing what relief they could to South Africa's vast disenfranchised masses. As the regime cracked down on dissent as well, some of these strategies began to seem dangerous. Certain natural gathering places became known as safe meeting grounds.