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Life histories of race and space in the making of Wentworth and Merebank, South Durban

2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 65; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00020180600771808

1469-2872

Sharad Chari,

Anthropological Studies and Insights

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I thank David Moore and Lance van Sittert the invitation to participate in a commemoration of the work of Bill Freund. I am grateful for comment and encouragement from an astute referee, as well as from a seminar at the School of Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, including Keith Breckenridge, Catherine Burns, Ashwin Desai, Des D'Sa, Gillian Hart, Alan Moolman, Robert Morrell, Vishnu Padayachee, Raj Patel, Caroline Skinner and Michelle Simon. I am most grateful to Derrick McBride and other residents in Wentworth and Merebank for hours of patient conversation. Where I have fallen short here, I aim to incorporate their insights in the larger research project. Notes 1. Both of these recent works offer a rich Southern African tradition of scholarship on oral and life history. 2. The anti-humanism linking Neitzsche, Heidegger and Foucault has – or is read to have – the latter as its prime target. In marked contrast, the anti-colonial humanism of Fanon, Cesaire and Biko reflects on the infrahumanity of life under colonial and racial violence. While it is important to hold onto the critique of metaphysics, and to Foucault's prophetic call for the end of man, it might also be important to ask under what conditions it is important to envision a different ‘new man’, as do the concluding lines of Fanon's (1963 Fanon, F. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press. [Google Scholar]:316) Wretched of the Earth – “For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.” For a careful treatment of humanism, anti-humanism, post-humanism, and Fanon's revolutionary humanism, see Pithouse 2005 Pithouse, R. 2005. Frantz Fanon and the Rationality of Revolt Unpublished MA Thesis. University of KwaZulu-Natal [Google Scholar]. 3. By ‘cultural production’, I follow Paul Willis to mean ongoing, creative reinterpretation in daily life, necessary for ‘cultural reproduction’, or the maintenance of ideologies, discourses and persisting cultural forms, which in turn are necessary for people to participate in concrete acts of ‘social reproduction’, which enable the durability of social institutions. On ‘black cultural production’, I am guided by Stuart Hall's historicisation of this concept in a period of ascendant US popular cultural imperialism and proliferating forms of decolonisation, broadly considered, in which ‘black’ signifies periodic struggle over claims to authenticity, which inevitably confront the tensions between the importance of struggle and the elusiveness of a secure metaphysics of black experience. As Grant Farred reflects in the wake of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, through which black struggle and enfranchisement are exalted while white property and privilege remain secure, precisely because these moments are differently valorised by various forms of black cultural production, neither complicity nor resistance are guaranteed. As Farred puts it, “The black intellectual's work is never done.” 4. Foucault uses the term biopower to refer to a new type of power over life in seventeenth century Europe, combining discipline and exploitation of the body, and regulation of biological processes of ‘populations’ – fertility, mortality, health, welfare. “This bio-power was without question an indistinguishable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes.” Biopolitical regulation, “present at every level of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions (the family and the army, schools and the police, individual medicine and the administration of collective bodies), operated in the sphere of economic processes, their development, and the forces working to sustain them. They also acted as factors of segregation and social hierarchization … guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony” (1978:139-141). It would be a mistake to take the very last teleological phase too seriously, rather than seeing biopower as a site of struggle. Keith Breckenridge (2005 Breckenridge, K. 2005. Verwoerd's Bureau of Proof: Total Information in the Making of Apartheid. History Workshop Journal, 59: 83–108. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]:105) challenges this kind of teleology, for instance to show how Verwoerd's pass system for Africans was “a costly and long-lasting catastrophe”. 5. Talal Asad's response to Eric Wolf is an important contrast to Freund; he argues that the idea of incorporating ‘people without a history’ must come to terms with the history of capitalism as already, unequally, the history of various peoples, and that there are other histories to be told through the “traditions and practices by which people's desires were once constructed if we are to recount precisely how they made (or failed to make) their own history” (1987:604). Asad argues that such histories require a conception of culture that goes beyond the incorporating voices in order to tell a truer story of global capitalism. 6. As mentioned, I use Willis' (1981) Willis, P. 1981. Cultural Production is Different from Cultural Reproduction is Different from Social Reproduction is Different from Production. Interchange, 12(2–3)[Crossref] , [Google Scholar] notion of ‘cultural production’ to mean ongoing, creative reinterpretation in daily life, rather than quaint idioms, dress, food, and so on. Dubow's (1987) Dubow, S. 1994. Ethnic Euphemisms and Racial Echoes. Journal of Southern African Studies, 20(3): 355–370. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] historical treatment of the ‘culture’ concept is useful in a different way; Dubow argues that 1920s social anthropology provided English speaking intellectuals in South Africa a concept of ‘culture’ that fused liberalism and ‘scientific racism’ through ‘racial upliftment’. 7. Interview with Derrick McBride. I have changed all names of living people, unless the individual has asked to retain their real name. 8. Marx (1857 ‘Introduction’ to 1973 [1939]:84) argues that the presentation of individuals as subject to external forces is historically specific to the epoch with the most elaborated form of ‘society’: “Only in the eighteenth century, in ‘civil society’, do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.” Van Onselen (1993 Van Onselen, C. 1993. Peasants Speak. The Reconstruction of Rural Life from Oral Testimony. Journal of Peasant Studies, 20(3): 494–514. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]:498-505) argues for situating the individual in a ‘hierarchy of mediations’ from the immediate family – in this case of a 90 year old sharecropper – to his extended family, to his age cohort of other sharecroppers, to the white landowners who they worked under, or to the latter's families; the entirety cross-checked with other forms of documentary and public evidence. 9. The Nama people were forcibly removed by the British colonial government from the Richtersveld region surrounding Alexander Bay in the Northern Cape, after the discovery of diamonds in the area. For more on the Richtersveld community's claim to land and mineral rights, against the state-owned mining company, Alexcor, which has been mining in the Richtersveld since 1927, see the 2001 Richtersveld decision of the Land Claims Court, accessible from http://www.lrc.org.za/Judgements/judgements_landclaims.asp; see also “Land claim could change the destiny of a people”, 20.4.2005, Mail & Guardian, accessed from http://www.lrc.org.za/Articles. 10. Derrick McBride, n.d., “Coloured Landlessness”, photocopy with thanks from McBride. Treasure Beach is a more middle-class part of Wentworth, rising on the hillside overlooking the oil refineries rather than the sea. 11. In different ways, Cooper (1994) Cooper, F. 1994. Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History. The American Historical Review, 99(5): 1516–1545. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], Hart (2002) Hart, G. 2002. Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar] and Bozzoli (2004) Breckenridge, K. 2005. Verwoerd's Bureau of Proof: Total Information in the Making of Apartheid. History Workshop Journal, 59: 83–108. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] emphasize divergent spatial histories. 12. There is a politics to this broad definition of racism as heterophobia, which treats anti-Semitism within the rubric of comparative racisms rather than as a singular form of ethnic chauvinism in contrast to biological racism, as has largely happened in the US academy (Patterson 2003 Patterson, O. 2003. Racism's Evolution, Review of. Racism: A Short History by George M. Frederickson” Book Reviews, Contexts, 2(1): 61–5. [Google Scholar]). 13. I am indebted to Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work for clarifying this formulation; for instance Gilmore (2002) Gilmore, R. W. 2002. Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography. Professional Geographer, : 15–24. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]. 14. For instance, the “Introduction” in Marks and Trapido (1987) Marks, S. and Trapido, S. 1987. The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa, London: Longman. [Google Scholar]; Dubow (1987) Dubow, S. 1987. “Race, Civilisation and Culture: The Elaboration of Segregationist Discourse in the Inter-War Years”. In The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa, Edited by: Marks, S. and Trapido, S. London: Longman. [Google Scholar]; Goldin (1987) Goldin, I. 1987. “The Reconstitution of Coloured Identity in the Western Cape”. In The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa Edited by: Marks, S. and Trapido, S. 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In Under Construction: ‘race’ and identity in South Africa today, Edited by: Distiller, N. and Steyn, M. 51–66. Johannesburg: Heinemann. [Google Scholar]. 15. In practice, this is some distance from Gerhard Maré's (2001) Maré, G. 2001. Race Counts in Contemporary South Africa: ‘An Illusion of Ordinariness’. Transformation, 47: 75–93. [Google Scholar] critique of the banality of race thinking, in which the very use of racial categories risks reproducing racism. 16. Ann Stoler (1995) Stoler, A. L. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, NC: Duke University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] has long argued for the importance of intimate realms for the reproduction of racial theory and practice. 17. As Memmi puts it, the experience of racism “remains a conflict between two modes of membership in social contexts that provide the mediations and generalizations, the images and arguments that sustain and valorise its alibis and myths. In sum, racism is a cultural, social, and historical presupposition” (2002:32). What are the specific forms this presupposition has taken in shaping South African realities? 18. Scholars of Durban are indebted to Dianne Scott (1994) Scott, D. 1994. Communal Space Construction: The Rise and Fall of Clairwood and District Phd Dissertation in Geography. Durban: University of Natal [Google Scholar] for this source, in her important and careful historical geography of Clairwood and surrounding areas in the southern periphery of the expanding city. Scott's work is foundational for scholarship and provided the ongoing research of Stephen Sparks (2002 Sparks, S. 2002. “‘Playing at Public Health’: The Search for Control in South Durban 1860–1932”. Honours Thesis, History and African Studies Seminar, Department of History, University of KwaZulu-Natal, http://www.history.und.ac.za/ [Google Scholar], 2004 Sparks, S. 2004. “‘Stink, Maar uit die Verkeerde Rigting’: Pollution, Politics and Petroleum Refining in South Africa, 1948–1960” MA Thesis. Durban: Department of History, University of KwaZulu-Natal [Google Scholar], 2005 Sparks, S. Civic Culture, ‘Environmentalism’ and Pollution in Durban: The Case of Wentworth Refinery. History and African Studies Seminar. Durban. Department of History, University of KwaZulu-Natal. http://www.history.und.ac.za/ [Google Scholar]) on the class and environmental histories surrounding the refineries, and the social history of South Durban more generally. Scott benefited from conversations with the late Billy Juggernath, who, unfortunately I was not able to meet. Thanks to Sparks for being co-conspirator in gaining access to Juggernath's memoirs through his son, Sunjith Juggernath, to whom we are grateful. 19. Memoirs of Balbhadur Juggernath, n.d. (ca. 1989), in possession of his family in Merebank, p 1. 20. The classic essay being M.N. Srinivas (c.1960) Srinivas, M. N. ca.1960. “The Study of Disputes in an Indian Village”. In The Dominant Caste and other Essays, 116–122. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]. 21. Interview with Mrs Chetty, 18 December 2002. 22. Juggernath concurs with Freund (1995 Freund, W. 1995. Insiders and Outsiders: The Indian Working Class of Durban, 1910–1990, London: James Currey. [Google Scholar]:9) in that “In South Africa, caste was never effectively revived” save for the occasional panchayat or village governing body, and some form of endogamy. 23. Practice-based theories of caste emerged only in the late twentieth century with ethnographies by M.N. Srinivas, Louis Dumont and others. 24. As Freund notes, I think rightly, indentured labourers probably became Indian only in South Africa, and the reconstitution of the family was a crucial part of this. What remains unanswered are the ways in which very different kinship systems – broadly, bridewealth systems from South India, and dowry systems from the North – were resolved in remaking the ‘Hindu Indian family’. Shaik (2004) Shaik, N. Labouring Under the Law: Exploring the Agency of Indian Women Under Indenture in Colonial Natal, 1860–1911. History and African Studies Seminar. Department of History, University of KwaZulu-Natal. http://www.history.und.ac.za/ [Google Scholar] provides a fascinating rethinking of the history of women in indenture. 25. “There are a number of families presently living in Merebank, whose parents originally lived within our close proximity. With these families we have very close ties. With some we even have marriage relations.” Juggernath's Memoirs, p 34b. 26. Freund (1995 Freund, W. 1995. Insiders and Outsiders: The Indian Working Class of Durban, 1910–1990, London: James Currey. [Google Scholar]:35-6) presumes that the joint family “must have represented the single most important task of Indians coming out of the indenture experience”, though he does note that they were inegalitarian, particularly from the perspective of women and younger members.