Available Light Extract
Over the course of 1948, Malan’s government began to consolidate its authority
over the state bureaucracy by replacing monolingual English speakers with its
Afrikaans-speaking supporters. The hope was that a more motivated state would enforce
already existing regulations. Meanwhile, the government planned an aggressive
legislative agenda to build off the Union’s preexisting segregationist regime. Interracial
marriage was already illegal; Malan’s administration would outlaw interracial
sex. African residents were already confined to urban townships and rural reserves;
Group Areas legislation would redefine spaces across the country and disaggregate
mixed neighborhoods like Grey Street. With the war’s end, the Communist Party
and other potential troublemakers were already being surveilled; Malan’s government
would ban them from aboveground existence. Both government and business
slowed as usual over the year-end “festive season,” anticipating a busy year to come.
January 1949 was the height of summer in Durban. On Thursday afternoon,
January 13, a fight broke out down the road from the Goodwill Lounge, after an Indian
cart peddler violently attacked a young African named George Madondo, who
later claimed only to have been looking through a restaurant’s window. “Suddenly
someone grabbed me from behind and pushed me,” Madondo told a reporter. “It
was a big Indian. . . . Then the glass broke, and I fell with my head bleeding.” Victoria
Street was packed at the time, full of African and Indian workers on their way
home or to the bus rank. By the time Madondo regained his bearings, “other Natives
had caught the Indian.” A pitched battle broke out and spread quickly through
the neighborhood. Dozens of people ended up in the hospital after large groups
of African men careened through the District, smashing windows and breaking
into stores, while Indians responded in kind, raining bricks, stones, or glass bottles
down onto the crowds from the rooftops. Fires broke out across the area.
Thursday’s violence petered out with nightfall, leaving clothes, shoes, and discarded
goods scattered on the streets. The next morning it started again, as people
who resented their treatment at the hands of Indian bus and storeowners, among
other slights, unleashed their anger on Ismail and his neighbors’ homes. The Badsha
family patriarch commanded 7 Douglas Lane’s front room, from where he could
look out over the veranda and see the block of flats then under construction across
the narrow street. That was where he smoked his pipe or welcomed his grandchildren
up onto his lap. On Friday morning someone threw a brick through the front
room’s window, shattering glass onto the floor. Chorta had joined his brothers to
debrief the previous day’s events; he grabbed a hunting rifle, ran out onto the street,
and fired a single round skywards. Smoke from the day before still hung in the air.
Years later, Omar would claim this event as his earliest memory.
Ismail’s family was fortunate to only suffer a broken window; some neighbors
lost their stock or their shops. As Friday ended and Saturday began, it was apparent
that Grey Street’s residents were many times more fortunate than their poorer confederates
who lived further afield, in places like Cato Manor, where the African and
Indian working class were jumbled together in indistinguishable shacks. Terrible
violence broke out there over the weekend. On Booth Road in Cato Manor, “Indian
buses were burned and every Indian house or shop . . . was destroyed.” Indian
children were trapped in a house and burned alive. When an African man tried to
rescue them, he too was trapped and killed. Rumors circulated of a widespread uprising,
rape, and looting; in some places the reality was not much better.
Ebrahim and his brothers kept their rifles close at hand until the police and
South African military finally acted to get the situation under control. The final toll
counted nearly two hundred people dead, thousands injured, and almost half of
Durban’s Indian population displaced. Community welfare organizations tried to
care for the “pitiful clusters of refugees, clutching the little valuables rescued from
their homes,” who sought shelter at local police stations or huddled together in
open fields. Ismail and Ebrahim’s family remained secure on Douglas Lane, while
many of their politically involved neighbors fretted about what the violence meant
for African and Indian unity.
Some people called the events a riot, others a pogrom. Whatever the terminology,
in time the three awful days became a literal textbook example of “ethnic
riots.”50 In what remained of January and the months that followed, however, the
NIC and the ANC’s response was more triage than sociological analysis. Xuma condemned
the violence, although other ANC representatives conceded that Africans
did have some legitimate grievances. Indian community leaders meanwhile tried
to assuage residents’ fears that it could happen again. The argument became that
the only way to prevent such things was to demonstrate solidarity with the African
majority, in word and deed. Together, the ANC and NIC leaders stated that “the
fundamental and basic causes of the disturbances are traceable to the political, economic
and social structure of this country . . . and the preaching in high places of
racial hatred and intolerance.”