By Mandisi Majavu
THEODORUS van der Kemp, the first London Missionary Society South African director, wrote in 1802 that whites, particularly the Boers in the 19th century parlance, looked at the racist vigilante Commando system as “indispensable” to violently controlling and dominating blacks.
According to van der Kemp, even back then whites liked to cry wolf about farm murders, so that they could unleash gratuitous violence on blacks.
Van der Kemp recollects that once white farmers from Bruintjis Hoogte fled en masse because “I was told of the Caffres’ intolerable depredations”. But, “more minute investigation proved the whole complaint to be a fiction, and not a single Caffre had been seen”, writes van der Kemp.
European writers such as François Le Vaillant and Robert Percival who wrote about the 19 century and the 19th century Cape Colony made analogous observations about whites in the Cape Colony.
AfriForum is the product of this history, a shameful history of racism, enslaving human beings, murder and plunder. Another product of this history is the persistent anti-black racist narrative that portrays blacks as a “warlike race”, “untractable” people, a “horrid race” that finds nothing as “gratifying to their nature as the shedding of human blood” with their Assagays.
By the late 19th century and the early 20th century, whites added another theme to the oppressive, anti-black racism narrative, namely, the so-called “Black Peril”. The narrative was borne out of an anti-black racism which was fused with a white male colonial angst about interracial sex between black men and white women. This white male colonial angst dominates the 20th century history of South Africa to the extent that it partly spawned racist laws like the Immorality Act, Mixed Marriages Act and the Group Areas Act.
Last week, the long-standing anti-black racist narrative of a “horrid”, “warlike race” was resurrected in Phoenix, Durban, by an Indian vigilante. According to newspaper reports Phoenix almost became the scene of a “full-blown race war” between blacks and Indians. The media attributes the racial animosity between blacks and Indians in Phoenix to “overzealous patrollers manning barricades that were meant to prevent looters from invading homes and businesses in Phoenix”
Some media reports have been energised by the Phoenix situation to perpetuate the long-standing anti-black racist narrative of “K***** outrages'' against Indians. The 1949 Durban riots were invoked to ignite racialised moral panics about “treacherous” and “ferocious” marauding bands of “natives'' who it was reported were out and about “vagabonding” in the Phoenix area.
If this narrative sounds familiar, that is because it is the same racist narrative that the British used to rationalise their scorched-earth tactics against Xhosa politics during the Frontier Wars.
The mindless invocation of the 1949 Durban riots also reveal (a)an (mis)understanding of the Durban riots that dismally fails to make contact with historical facts around this particular historical event.
The historical archive shows that the 1949 Durban riots were triggered by an Indian man who assaulted a black youth. According to the historical record, it was common for Indians to assault blacks in the early 20th century, largely because Indians associated blackness with marginality and inferiority.
On January 13, 1949, blacks who witnessed the assault on the black youth decided that they were no longer going to put up with racist assaults and anti-black racism and so, they intervened on the behalf of the assaulted black youth.
This incident quickly became an all-out racial brawl between blacks and Indians. It took three days before order was restored. According to the government commission of inquiry into riots in Durban, the riots left 87 blacks dead, 50 Indians, four unidentified and one European, and 1 087 people injured.
Operating in the background of the 1949 Durban riots were racial grievances blacks had nursed for years against Indians. For instance, according to Ravi Thiara, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Warwick, Indians, in the early 20th century “saw themselves as being closer to whites than” blacks, and additionally, “Indian attitudes towards Africans reflected the retention of the traditional caste system in which dark skin colour was associated with inferiority”.
Furthermore, a wealthy and powerful Indian elite used their power to prevent blacks from owning property in Durban through “employing a combination of monopoly position, underselling, and legal action,” according to Jon Soske, an assistant professor of history at McGill University and research associate at the Centre for Indian Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand.
A South African academic who has done comprehensive research on the “world of the Indian merchants in the colony at the turn” of the 20th century is Vishnu Padayachee.
What the 1949 Durban riots exposed is the same racial reality that the Phoenix situation recently revealed, and that is, blacks and Indians have historically been differently positioned against each other in the racial hierarchy, and that non-racialism and Biko’s definition of blackness has never been able to dislodge that historical fact.
According to Soske, even political alliances like the Congress Alliance between the ANC and the South African Indian Congress could not overcome the racial divide that shaped the social world of ordinary blacks and Indians in South Africa.
Honest interlocutors point out that the political solidarity that existed between blacks and Indians during apartheid has historically been “small scale”, “fragile” and did go beyond political structures like to the Congress Alliance to the social world outside politics.
According to Antoinette Burton, an American historian, South African Indians’ commitment to anti-apartheid were “rooted in powerfully India/n centered idioms that shored communal identities and rarely acknowledged the material conditions that subordinated Africans to most if not all Indians in the street, marketplace and neighbourhoods under the apartheid state and its predecessor”.
My contention is that non racialism and Biko’s definition of blackness further gave Indians a racial alibi to not critically engage with their racial positionality in relation to South African blacks. It is partly for this reason that Indian scholars like Adam Habib feel emboldened to claim blackness without showing sensitivity to the burden of blackness.
As long as South Africans refuse to engage in an honest reckoning about race and blackness in South Africa, I foresee many more Phoenix-like-situations on the political horizon. It is dishonest to use a political tactic that Biko recommended in the 1970s to political activists as a political mobilising discourse to resist apartheid as some kind of a magic wand to make oneself black when it is convenient, while living a racially segregated life sequestered from black people and where black people live and socialise.
Dr Mandisi Majavu is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University.