From 1956 to 1963 Zuleikha Mayat, a self-described housewife living in the port city of Durban on the eastern coast of South Africa, contributed a weekly column to Indian Views, a newspaper published in Gujarati and English. It was one of the first instances in which the opinions, musings, thoughts and ideas of a Muslim woman were regularly aired in Southern African print. Under the heading ‘Fahmida's World’, Mayat brought a signature liveliness and humour, as well as a sharp moral eye, to bear on topics that ranged from child care to apartheid, from unemployment to the launching of Sputnik. Although in later years an editor billed the column as ‘Mainly for Women’, Mayat's ambition had always been to speak across the gender divides. Blending domestic and political concerns, she articulated a view of the social good to a diasporic community that was rooted locally but also deeply integrated in Indian social networks of family and village.
This article is a narrative account of how Zuleikha Mayat came to write for Indian Views – a story that reveals, at an interpersonal level, what has been observed more broadly about print culture's interface between public and private spaces in the imagining of community. It highlights how a geographically scattered sub-group of Southern Africa's immigrant Indian population – trading-class, Gujarati-speaking Muslims – were linked as a reading public through a newspaper. But it also demonstrates how literacy and the family enterprises that constituted local print capitalism in Durban provided a material means of enforcing existing networks of gaam and family, which had leveraged migrant economic survival in politically hostile territory for more than seven decades.
This story of Indian Views is an attempt to shift the focus of studies of Indians from a specifically South African setting to incorporate the wider Indian Ocean/Southern African region. It is a modest contribution to an important long-term undertaking that will provide a clearer understanding of Indian diasporic experience in this part of the African continent, drawing out the deep linkages among people of Indian ancestry in Southern African countries as well as with family and other networks in the South Asian subcontinent.Footnote 1 Religious contact, as well as business and marriage association, continued for many decades. The existence of a weighty volume, The South African Indian Who's Who and Commercial Directory: incorporating Southern and Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland and Portuguese East Africa 1938–40 (Bramdaw Reference Bramdaw1939), demonstrates a sense of attachment that crossed provincial and national borders.
The case of Indian Views also reflects another important trend with regard to the Indian Ocean region. Edward Simpson and Kai Kresse, introducing a recent collection of studies, point out that the centuries-long movement of both goods and people across the Indian Ocean has not produced a cosmopolitan society. On the contrary, we see in the experience of Gujarati migrants an example of how endogamy, carefully maintained religious practices, community-specific leadership structures and language facilitated the establishment of boundaries of caste, class, religion and ethnicity (Simpson and Kresse Reference Simpson, Kresse, Simpson and Kresse2008: 13). The Gujarati Muslim community that was imagined through local print culture maintained its many differences and divisions through the patterns of marriage and travel that reproduced strong links to India.
INDIAN VIEWS FROM SOUTH AFRICAN SHORES
Despite the broad national perspective its title appeared to claim, the readership of Indian Views was composed mainly of the trading ‘passenger’ classes of Muslims of Indian origin, a small but significant segment of the Indian diaspora of Southern Africa. In mid-century, South African Indians, who made up the largest readership of the paper, constituted a small reading public. The number of people of Indian birth or ancestry living in South Africa has always been comparatively low, constituting around 2.5 per cent of the total population. In 1946 there were 282,000 Indians in South Africa, 228,000 of them in Natal. About a quarter of the diasporic population were Muslim, of whom 43,656 resided in Natal and 26,891 in the Transvaal. The adult Muslim population in these provinces, aged nineteen and over, was even smaller: 17,000 and 11,000 respectively. Within the Indian population at large, literacy rates were low (almost 80 per cent of Indian adults could not read). This, together with poverty, meant that newspapers were a luxury for many. The ‘Indian press’ competed for small readerships.
Even so, a respectable array of Indian newspapers had been available from the turn of the century. These were usually family-owned and often family-run. P. S. Aiyar's two papers – Indian World (1898) and Colonial Indian News (1899–1901) – were soon followed by Indian Opinion (1903),Footnote 2 Osman Ahmed's Al Islam (1907–10) and African Chronicle (1908–21; 1929–30),Footnote 3Indian Views from 1914, and two short-lived Hindi-language newspapers, The Dharma Vir (1916–18) and Hindi (1922–5), which were published by Swami Bhawani Dayal.Footnote 4 Both Indian Views and Indian Opinion were published in Gujarati and English. Gujarati was the language of prosperous traders whose financial support was crucial. Indian World, Colonial Indian News and African Chronicle were published in Tamil and English and were supported by South Indian passenger migrants, many of whom came via Mauritius.
By mid-century, a vibrant print culture existed in Durban, with newspapers that were ‘first and foremost political journals intent on championing the campaign for full citizenship’ (Hellman 1949: 504). They were notably communal in this quest. Ellen Hellman of the Institution of Race Relations expressed the view that
the Indian press is a militant one and it is almost exclusively a communal press concerned with matters affecting the Indian community. … It is on very rare occasions that the Indian papers publish items which are not linked directly or indirectly with the community for which they cater. What international events they deal with, the Indian papers view through purely Indian eyes: news from abroad consists mostly of news from India, about India or about reactions in other countries to the way South Africa treats its Indian citizens.Footnote 5
Some of these papers proved fragile. In 1937, Chamberlain Nakasa began the monthly New Outlook which, although collapsing two years later from financial constraints, was important in cutting the journalistic teeth of a young editorial board that included B. Asher, Dr Goonam, Farooqi Mehtar and I. C. Meer. In January 1940, the first issue of Call was published by Communist Party members Cassim Amra, Dawood Seedat, George Ponnen, A. K. M. Docrat, and H. A. Naidoo, supporting trade unions and opposing South Africa's participation in the Second World War. It folded in October due to police harassment and lack of finances (Indian Views, 26 January 1940). From June 1946, I. C. Meer edited the Passive Resister, published by the Transvaal Passive Resistance Council. Searchlight, another voice of the left, ran from August to December 1946. But there were the stalwart publications as well. Manilal Gandhi, assisted by his wife Sushila Behn, ran Indian Opinion after the departure of his father, Mohandas K. Gandhi, who had launched the paper in 1903. In 1940, Dhanee Bramdaw started The Leader, which would run for almost six decades. Bramdaw, who was a journalist with the Natal Witness, described the paper as ‘an independent organ, owing no allegiance to any group or body’ in his editorial, but it favoured radical voices in Indian politics. The Leader was the first Indian newspaper to be sold on the streets of Durban.Footnote 6
By mid-century, Indian Views was well established as the most important paper catering to South African Indians of the Muslim trading classes. It was based at 137 Grey Street, Durban, where in 1907 Osman Ahmed Effendi, using the same press, had launched the very first Muslim newspaper in Natal, Al-Islam: Religious and Political Mohammedan Organ in South Africa. Footnote 7 One of its early editors, Molvie Ahmed Mukhtar Siddiqui, originally from Meerat City near New Delhi, travelled around the Transvaal and to Delagoa Bay in Mozambique collecting subscriptions for the paper.Footnote 8Al-Islam folded in 1910, but Osman Ahmed's business peers and co-religionists, who formed a tight and also nomadic social network, enabled Indian Views to emerge and fill its vacated niche.
The Views founder was Mohammed Cassim Anglia, Gandhi's great political adversary in Natal. Born in Rander, Surat, in 1869, Anglia moved to Mauritius with his father in 1887, and until his father died worked for Hajee Ajum Goolam Hoosen, who had business houses in Mauritius, Bombay and Calcutta. In the early 1890s, Anglia returned to Rander where he resumed working for Hajee Ajum and also served as municipal councillor. Fluent in English, French, Gujarati and Dutch, he was sent by his employer to the Transvaal in 1897 and, a year later, to Natal. Here, now accompanied by his wife Fatima and son Cassim, Anglia opened a retail business, M. C. Anglia & Co., at 339 Pine Street in Durban; he also operated as a shipping agent for the Natal Direct Line. Very soon he became a prominent figure in local politics. When Gandhi launched his first passive resistance campaign in 1907–8, Anglia was imprisoned in the Transvaal during a period which coincided with the holy month of Ramadaan when Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset. Gandhi noted that Muslim prisoners were very ‘particular about their namaaz [prayer] and roza [fast]’, and Anglia was appointed Imam to lead Muslim prisoners in their five daily prayers (Indian Opinion, 23 January 1909). When, in October 1908, Gandhi was sent to Johannesburg in his prison clothing and was forced to walk from the railway station to the prison carrying his luggage, he later recounted that ‘when Mr Anglia came to know how I was to go, there were tears in his eyes’ (Indian Opinion, 16 January 1909). Yet the bond between Gandhi and Anglia deteriorated over the next few years.
As joint secretary of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC), Anglia headed a delegation to England in 1909, where he met with imperial government officials to register Indian concerns over the forthcoming Union of South Africa. Later he gave evidence to the Solomon Commission that investigated the grievances of Indians in 1914. He became a fierce critic of passive resistance, arguing that it was hardening the response of whites against Indians. Following the Indian Relief Act of 1914, which Smuts described as ‘a final settlement’ of the ‘Indian Question’, Anglia published the inaugural issue of Indian Views. Footnote 9 It contained a sarcastic attack on Gandhi:
We understand that it is his intention to shake the dust of South Africa from his feet but we should like him to remain here for a time at any rate so that he could see the amount of suffering and hardship he has bequeathed to our misguided countrymen. (Indian Views, 10 July 1914)
Anglia sent copies of the first edition to the two white-owned dailies, the Natal Mercury and the Natal Advertiser. On 11 July, the Mercury reported that
Yesterday saw the first issue of a new paper called the Indian Views. There is, judging by the absence of any foreword or editorial introduction, no particular reason for or definite aim in view in establishing the new periodical. The title is certainly apposite, for no attempt whatever is made to supply anything but views on the subject dealt with. (Quoted in Indian Views, 17 July 1914)
Two days later, the Advertiser similarly remarked that
No Introduction is offered, and so far as can be seen the publication is an anonymous one. We note that the journal is exceedingly well printed and turned out and this reflects credit on the Union Printing Press from which it emanates. … However, the reading matter in the English portion indicates that the views of the paper coincide with those expressed elsewhere in declaring dissatisfaction with the Indian Relief Bill … . (Quoted in Indian Views, 17 July 1914)
Five years after his paper's somewhat inauspicious debut, Anglia died and Indian Views was sold to Ebrahim Jeewa, a printer and seller of Islamic books whose family had established Union Printing Press as well as a number of other businesses in Grey Street. Anglia, Osman Ahmed and Jeewa were all known to each other: for example, they had all been part of a delegation of Muslims from Natal, visiting the Transvaal to raise funds for a mosque, and had dined together with the firm of Hajee Yusuf Mia.Footnote 10 Jeewa ran Indian Views until 1939, when he relocated to India in order to educate his daughters at Aligarh.
The newspaper was taken over by one of its journalists, Moosa (M. I.) Meer, a family friend. Yet, as Unus Meer remembers, Ebrahim Jeewa's brother Ismail ‘continued helping the Views … more or less in a honorary capacity … helping M. I. Meer in the financial side, you know. M. I. Meer was never a good businessman … he was an intellectual and more interested in writing’ (Interview, Unus Meer, 14 December 2008). Farouk Meer concurs. He recollects that ‘Ebrahim Jeewa was hard on money, counted every penny meticulously and was a good bookkeeper. We all knew that when it came to finances, everything came from Jeewa’ (Interview, Farouk Meer, 17 March 2009).
Hailing from a family of pioneers in Waschbank and Dundee, M. I. Meer had lived in Kimberley with his uncle Ahmed Variawa, who owned shops in Douglas. Meer returned to Surat around 1922 and married his cousin, Katija Meer; their son was born in Surat in 1924. Returning to Douglas without his family, M. I. fell in love with a white woman, Rachel Farrell, whom he married. She took a Muslim name, Amina. As Moosa's nephew Unus Meer points out, ‘those were the days when it was unheard [for] whites and Indians to have any sort of relationship. He eloped with her and came to Durban … it created quite a furore in the local white community’ (Interview, Unus Meer, 14 December 2008). M. I. and Amina moved to Durban, where they were joined by Khatija who arrived from Surat. Both wives and their children lived in the same home, one filled with political debate, civic enthusiasm and modernist views on religious life. Amina and M. I. Meer's daughter Fatima was born in 1928. She would become a Professor of Sociology at Natal University and a well-known anti-apartheid activist.
At the time Meer took over Indian Views, career journalism was beginning to come into its own. Ritson Road in Warwick Avenue became known as Durban's ‘Fleet Street’. From No. 62, the Sastri College magazine was edited in 1939 by I. C. Meer, who wrote also for the Passive Resister, the Cape Standard and the Guardian. Dhanee Bramdaw edited The Leader from No. 64. Ranji Nowbath, who wrote a column for The Leader under the pen name ‘The Fakir’, lived at No. 84. I. C. Meer would write that ‘of all the journalists on Ritson Road, perhaps the person with the least formal education was M. I. Meer, having completed only Standard Five, and yet he was admired by all his colleagues as a brilliant writer in English, Gujarati and Urdu. His prose and poetry until this day continue to receive just acclamation’ (Reddy and Meer Reference Reddy and Meer2006: 147).
While he did not have much opportunity for formal education, M. I. Meer grew up in a highly stimulating environment. I. C. Meer would write that his father Chota Meer's shop was considered a ‘university’. The nineteen Indian males living in Waschbank during the First World War met there every evening to discuss Indian opposition to British imperialism. M. I. and A. I. read important items from overseas and local newspapers, or recited poems which the group then discussed.Footnote 11 M. I. Meer was a voracious reader. His home had a room called ‘Library’ which had books from the floor to the ceiling. It contained books of every kind – politics, religion, and literature. M. I. Meer had read all of them. It is said that when the children were not sure of the origins of a Shakepeare quote, they asked him and he rarely let them down. One of the big attractions of Indian Views was that the works of Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, Charles Dickens and others were serialized in Gujarati. The public eagerly awaited each issue. Ismail Manjra describes M. I. Meer as ‘a simple down-to-earth man who was highly intellectual, well informed on national and international affairs … he had a very powerful pen’. Manjra recalls for example that M. I. Meer once had a dispute with a moulana from Tongaat who came from the village of Diva (meaning ‘light’) and the article carried the heading, ‘Moulana: the issue is as clear as light’ (Interview, Ismail Manjra, 16 March 2009).
The printing press was based on the ground floor of the Madressa Arcade at 137 Grey Street. The English typesetters of Indian Views in 1936–7 were Chamberlain Nakasa and his brother Alpheus. Chamberlain also authored books that were used in African schools as text books. ‘Typesetting was then a laborious process,’ I. C. Meer recalled, ‘in that each letter had to be set manually, one by one; and the reverse process was required after printing was over to put the types back into the appropriate type trays.’ He also remembered that Chamberlain's son Nat, who later became a well-known writer and editor of Drum, would as a boy come into the office on Saturdays to help with typesetting. The office was also a gathering point for upcountry visitors. I. C. Meer again:
I remember how the Indian Views office and Mullah's Cafe became important venues where Transvaal Indians called after booking their passage to India on the British India ships at Shaikh Himed's. The Views office, they claimed, provided them with much food for thought before they proceeded to Mullah's Cafe for samoosas, biryani and Mullah Chacha's famous Bombay Crush. The visit to the Views was also made on their return from India or Mecca. Such visits paid handsome dividends as the Views published in its news columns the names of those going to and returning from overseas. And sometimes even the photograph of the traveller appeared. (Reddy and Meer Reference Reddy and Meer2006: 98)
M. I. Meer's success with Indian Views was linked in important ways to the hospitality he showed to these travellers, many of whom were subscribers as well as personal acquaintances and friends. We have seen that the majority of readers were Gujarati-speaking Muslims, many of whom were traders and fairly affluent. The selling price of Indian Views, ninepence in 1949, was more than twice that of Indian Opinion (fourpence) making its cost prohibitive for most Indians (Hellman Reference Hellman1949: 506).
Running a newspaper required enormous energy and M. I. Meer crafted its reading public through concerted labour and with a personal hand. He traversed the roads of Southern Africa, city to city and town to town. Indian Views received subscriptions by post from all over South Africa, as well as Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Mozambique, Nyasaland (Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), yet subscribers rarely paid on time. Meer, with his driver and close friend Omar Khan, would travel to these countries in an old Ford, later a Dodge, to collect subscriptions. He would be away from Durban for up to six months at a time. His son Ahmed Meer recalls that he had both to ‘write the editorials and … also, apart from that, go to these countries to get subscriptions. So he was out very often, although he was the [newspaper's] main policy maker’ (Interview, Ahmed Meer, 17 February 2009). As his sons reached their teenage years, and Omar Khan became well known to subscribers, M. I. Meer focused more on the newspaper while Khan-Saab (as the boys knew him) travelled together with M. I. Meer's sons Farouk, Siddique and Mohammed – and neighbours like Hassen Mall and his brother Bhai Gora – to collect subscriptions during school vacations. The Mozambique beaches and buck-hunting ventures in the bush were highlights for the boys, according to Farouk Meer. Subscribers were also hosts to this travelling party. They would pay their subs of £1 11s 6d per annum and provide their guests with supper, a place to sleep, breakfast and padkos (Afrikaans: literally, ‘road food’) as they headed off to their next destination. According to Farouk Meer, there was occasional ‘haggling with clients insisting “I [have already] paid”’ but, thanks to Ebrahim Jeewa, everything was meticulously recorded. Some clients paid for three to four years as this made ‘life easier for everyone’. At its height the newspaper had around 5,000 subscribers and, since newspapers were typically passed around among friends and family, it had significantly more readers. The disparateFootnote 12 readership of Indian Views represented a community galvanized in its self-imaginary, and as a public, not only through the textual medium of a Gujarat-English newspaper that spoke to lives lived on both sides of the ocean, but through the personal exertions of Moosa Meer, networking the lower portion of Africa in a dusty car.
Indian Views was published on Wednesdays. The area around the press, the Grey Street complex, contained a large number of Muslims. For most, this was their main source of information and ‘education’, as Gujarati was their main language of communication. Here, they found news and analysis on religious issues, local and international politics – especially regarding India and Pakistan – as well as some of the masterpieces of English literature translated into Gujarati. According to Unus Meer, the content of Indian Views can be characterized by three main political orientations during his uncle's tenure (Interview, Unus Meer, 14 December 2008). The first was that it was energetically ‘Muslim-orientated … [and expressed] very, very strong support for Pakistan’. Although the newspaper did not promote communal divisions between Hindus and Muslims in Natal, it articulated a strong pro-Muslim League line on the question of the partition of India – an issue that proved contentious locally – and Kashmir. Many young Muslims were inspired by the creation of Pakistan, among them Ahmed Deedat, who founded the Islamic Propagation Centre in 1957. He emigrated to Pakistan in 1949 and was asked by a journalist, during a visit to that country in 1987, what motivated him to relocate there for three years:
I happened to be here (Pakistan) in 1949, 1950, 1951. You see, I came in the 1950s for a special purpose. I migrated from South Africa where I had a settled life, a good job, good home and I was moved by the spirit of an Islamic state that, I want to go to Pakistan with my wife and children. We just migrated with everything we had. I settled down here in Karachi. I wanted to be a good Muslim, that's what brought me here. I wasn't forced by any circumstances because when this Pakistan idea came into being around the 1940s, I was very young but I was for it. They wanted to establish an Islamic state. We had no Islamic state where we could permeate Islam so with that enthusiasm I came here and I lived here for three years. (Interview, Ahmed Deedat, 1987)
This identification with Pakistan should not, however, be construed as implying communal religious tension in Natal. When India achieved independence on 15 August 1947, the Natal Indian Congress appealed to all Indians to close their places of business and asked religious bodies to hold ‘special services for the safety and progress of our Motherland’. A meeting was held at Durban's Albert Park, attended by 15,000, where the flags of India and Pakistan were unfurled side by side, and pictures of Nehru, Jinnah and other leaders were hung on stage (The Leader, 2 September 1947). Gujaratis who were both Muslim and Indian were seemingly able to straddle these identities.
A second feature of Indian Views, according to Unus Meer, was that M. I. Meer ‘was basically a conservative politically. He supported the Natal Indian Organization [NIO] and not [the Natal Indian] Congress [NIC]’, which had been radicalized in 1945. In both instances he was at odds with his own family. His daughter Fatima and her husband I. C. Meer were members of the NIC and the South African Communist Party, and his own brother, A. I. Meer, was an NIC office bearer. M. I. Meer believed in debate, however, and allowed the radicals to express their views in his paper. His home in Pinetown (he lived in Ritson Road, moved to Pinetown – twelve miles inland – and then back to the same house in Ritson Road when he lost his 25-acre farm to Group Areas legislation) was open to all. Visitors included Congress notables Ahmed Kathrada, Yusuf Dadoo, and Monty Naicker (Interview, Farouk Meer, 17 March 2009). And once the more radical factions took over the NIC in 1945, M. I. Meer gave them his full support.
As a third major theme, Moosa Meer was ‘very strong’ in promoting a progressive interpretation of Islam. He called for the use of science, for example, in deciding the start of the Muslim lunar month; contrary to the traditional view that Muslims could only eat the meat of animals when the name of God had been invoked at the time of slaughter, he expressed the view that they could eat meat as long as the name of another deity was not taken during the slaughtering process; and he also said that God would be the final arbiter as to whether non-Muslims would go to heaven or hell. These views brought him into conflict with the Ulema and many ordinary Muslims. Unus Meer recalls that ‘he would quote extensively from various hadiths and all sorts of things. And this thing went on – so much so that it created ill-feeling … once he had to have a bodyguard to go around for some months.’
To these three lines of thought promoted by Views, we can add a fourth, the position of Muslim women. Meer championed the cause of the education of Muslim girls and, in his own family, all of his daughters were well-educated professionals at a time when this was uncommon. Aside from the scholar, Fatima, a second daughter Ayesha became a lawyer and a third, Razia, a teacher. Meer gave prominence in his paper to a speech just delivered by Agent-General Sir Kurma Reddy at the Mitchell Crescent Indian Girls School in which he noted with regret that, among the total school population of 49, there was not a single Muslim girl (Indian Views, 2 October 1931).
In 1944 Meer printed a letter written by an 18-year-old Muslim girl living in the highveld of the Transvaal that argued for higher levels of education for girls. In a style that revealed not only a principled passion concerning this matter but also the author's sharp wit, it concluded with the plea: ‘Will not our parents realise that in these modern times we would prefer a good sound education which would equip us to face the future, rather than have them shower on us gifts of clothes or sending us to bioscopes [cinemas, a common South African usage] or weddings as recompense? If the girl of today is given a chance, the woman of tomorrow will be able to bring up better Muslims and citizens’ (Indian Views, 1 September 1944). The letter was signed ‘Miss Zuleikha Bismillah of Potchefstroom’.
‘MISS ZULEIKHA BISMILLAH OF POTCHEFSTROOM’
On his journey to collect subscription money, one of M. I. Meer's stopovers was Potchefstroom and the many Muslim-owned shops that lined King Edward Street. In one of these lived Zuleikha Bismillah. She was in many ways typical of third-generation ‘passenger’ migrants of Gujarati heritage living in the Transvaal. Fluent in Gujarati and Afrikaans, and with some Urdu and Arabic from Madressa, a bit of Sotho and later, through a correspondence course, the English in which she would write, Mayat grew up in a multicultural world. The Bismillah shop was a fulcrum of buying and selling, where news was exchanged along with goods and money. It purveyed low prices, odd-job employment and tasty snacks. And it was a place where people of all colours, creeds and languages engaged with each other around the practical realities of supplying families and farms. She would later describe this local mix of affability and conflict in her memoir A Treasure Trove of Memories, recalling childhood years that shaped her view of community as an unproblematic combination of local and diasporic realities.
Zuleikha Bismillah's family shared the transoceanic history of the Muslims who would become the principal readership of Indian Views. She remembers listening attentively as a young girl to the stories of her grandfather, Hassim Bismillah, who had arrived in South Africa in 1881, among thousands of other young entrepreneurs from villages in Gujarat. He hawked goods in Johannesburg for several years before the discovery of gold on the Rand made it commercially lucrative for him to settle with a shop on the route between the Kimberley diamond fields and the mineral wealth of Johannesburg. Returning to India to marry, he later brought his wife and first child to join him – a common migration pattern and household strategy that his son Mohammed, Zuleikha's father, would maintain. Migrant flows of family included cousins, brothers and nephews who were sponsored to embark on new economic ventures or extend existing ones. As was the case in many towns around rural Southern Africa, collections of agnatic households expanded into communities that could reproduce locally the practices and culinary traditions of a faraway home. Political discrimination and legal exclusions mapped out immigrant neighbourhoods with linguistic and ethnic, but increasingly racialized, identifications. By the 1890s there were about 15,000 Indians in the two Boer republics, most in the Transvaal with a small number in the Orange Free State. Legislation curtailing rights for these immigrants began with Law 3 of 1885, which denied citizenship to ‘the native races of Asia, including so-called Coolies, Arabs, Malays, and Mohammedan subjects of the Turkish Empire’. ‘Asiatics’ could only own fixed property in racially designated areas. Other laws followed, including the ‘Black Act’ of 1907 that compelled Asian males to be registered and fingerprinted, and to carry a pass. In the absence of state support, diasporic communities mobilized their own resources and identities to provide for themselves. They founded places of worship and schools for children, solidifying strong communal and linguistic identities while continuing to look to family networks across the Ocean.
Yet, even through the period of Zuleikha's childhood, racial segregation in Potchefstroom was complicated by the blurred boundaries of everyday life. Her grandfather, ‘the Arabier, as [white locals] referred to him, was a respected person and Dada could never pinpoint when that term had been replaced with the derogatory Koelie, which was a label his sons and grandsons would have to cope with’ (Mayat Reference Mayat1996: 51). For the nineteenth-century merchant, cultural intermixing was intrinsic to success, and Hassim had applied himself to learning the languages and folkways of his clientele. Even after setting up his shop, he continued to travel to the farms of Dutch-speaking customers. Sometimes, if it became late, he stayed in their homes. Hassim discovered that his reading and writing skills were greatly valued by some of his less literate hosts, farmers who had suffered in the Anglo-Boer War and were, partly as a result, comparatively deprived of education. As new formulas of power emerged in the twentieth century, however, existing anxieties over the race issue would develop new legal and political weaponry, and militant Indian newspapers would call upon diasporic sentiment as well as local solidarities in a march for citizenship rights.
The earliest racial exclusions involved education. Until Grade 6, the Bismillah children, like others in the community, attended the local school for Indians (and built by Indians). There was no high school that Indians were permitted to attend. Mayat remembers the frustration of her own ambitions from early on:
Potchestroom was the hub of education for the whites. Name it, they've got colleges there for arts, music, gymnasiums, handicrafts … . But none of them would let me in. My father tried very hard to get me into one of them, maybe as a part-time student. The only people who responded positively were the Roman Catholic nuns. They said, ‘Look, we will gladly take her, but she will have to come after hours, because there will be an outcry.’ Now, ‘After hours’? What? I'm working! And they have their evening mass and so on. So that didn't work out. (Interview, Zuleikha Mayat, 13 February 2009)Footnote 13
Gender, too, was a prohibitive reality. Families who could afford it sent sons away to Waterval Institute in Johannesburg or Sastri College in Durban, to live with relatives while they received further schooling. After high school, Medicine and Law were preferred professional degrees for boys from affluent families. But sending daughters away was almost unheard of in Zuleikha's childhood. Of the four daughters in the family, Zuleikha was the only one to further her studies. She had developed a love of reading, nurtured by the enthusiasm of her Chinese neighbour friend Pengy, who loved to discuss literature and who read aloud to the Bismillah daughters, keeping them perpetually supplied with magazines and books. Pengy ‘was an elder sister to all of us and she used to buy a lot of books, and my [eldest] sister used to, you know, join with her to buy books. So we read everything in her library – lots of novels [like] Gone with the Wind and The Rains Came.’ Zuleikha's sisters and brothers used their Eid money one year to buy a volume of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. Understanding Zuleikha's special ambitions for education, her sisters were supportive, sometimes taking on her chores so that she had extra time for studying through the correspondence courses she completed in the evenings, after attending to her other responsibilities.
As Zuleikha Bismillah worked to complete her high school education she discovered that she had a gift as a writer, an intellectual orientation, and a capacity for expressing strong views. When she decided to experiment with her public voice by writing some of her views down as letters to a newspaper, Indian Views was the obvious candidate. It was a paper to which her father subscribed and which was passed around among family and friends:
My father would read it first and, before we could read it, it had gone to his friends and to a cousin – and, by the time it came back, you know, it was really not in much condition … but then we would have it. Sometimes you would read it before the friends came if my father had finished. But we were reading – it was a paper that we really looked forward to.
The contents of the paper, having been widely read, would become the centre of an equally wide-ranging discussion forum that linked the local community to events across the Indian Ocean (even goings-on in particular villages like Dabhel, from which the Bismillahs hailed) and in other regions of South Africa. Mayat reflects that reading Indian Views
really got the community together. It told you about your old regions in India, what was happening in India, what was happening on the political level in India, the social level. It also dealt with the Transvaal things [and] there will be articles from the Cape – so you would get a sense that you were part of a big community and you were linked to it and, you know, friends used to gather together to discuss the paper. Now, although women were not part of this discussion, my mother was always hovering in the background, serving and so on, so she would hear something and, later on, talk to my father about it, so even if we hadn't been present, we would hear the conversation afterwards.
Mayat remembers Moosa Meer from her childhood, long before she moved to Durban where they would develop a professional relationship. His regular visits to ‘Potch’ made him a familiar figure to all the Bismillah children. He
used to come, you know, with his Indian Views. It was run in a sort of very un-businesslike method. He used to produce, send it out to people who were interested and then write to them, ‘Why don't you send me the subscriptions?’, and they wouldn't respond. So, once a year he used to make a trip through the Transvaal and up to Maputo and so on, to collect the subscriptions. Normally people would pay for two, three, four years of subscriptions, back payment and forward payment and so on. I used to see him come to the shop [every] one or two years.
Literacy opened up the world in a fundamental way to Zuleikha Bismillah with the publication of her first letter in Indian Views arguing for higher education. It received a response, published in a later issue. Mahomed Mayat was a friend and fellow medical student (at the University of the Witwatersrand) of Zuleikha's brother Abdulhak. Mayat wrote: ‘The numerous articles on the education of girls is a healthy sign of the awakening of the Community to the importance of Learning.’ Moreover, he continued, because educated men preferred to marry educated women, it would be ‘politic’ to ensure that there be appropriate ratios of educated women for the ‘welfare of the Community’. His concern on this issue was, evidently, also personal. This public exchange was followed by a private correspondence that went on for almost two years. Mahomed learned through her brother that the determined young woman was trying to complete her Standard Eight through a distance-learning course, that she aspired to be a doctor, and that she wished to strengthen her maths skills. Decades later, Zuleikha recalls that ‘this was his opening gambit. He sent me some notes on algebra and so on. And slowly, then, I replied, and then he'd write.’
[This was all] without the parents knowing about it. I mean, I used to tell our messenger, you know, who was the delivery boy to go and get the post, and I used to wait on the veranda and as soon as the post came, I'd collect it first, take my letters, and then give the rest [laughs].
Through writing, the two young people shared ideas and discussed their views on ‘all of interesting things. Not “I love you” and “you love me” and that sort of business. It was really at an intellectual level.’ Although positioned to marry a cousin, Zuleikha's correspondence with Mahomed instead made it possible for formal marriage negotiations to be carried out between the Bismillahs of Potchefstroom and the Mayats of Durban.
Letter writing had also won her a friend in Durban who would provide a further connection to Indian Views. Zohra Meer was an only child in the family with whom her brother Abdulhak lived while attending Sastri College and, knowing his sister's passion for writing, he suggested to the two girls that they become pen pals. The epistolary friendship that developed afforded Zuleikha an independent link to Durban. Zohra ‘was collecting subs for the Guardian which was a [news]paper I had not heard of and I immediately subscribed. She also wrote [about] collecting funds for the Indian TB Association, FOSA, and I responded by digging into my pocket money and cajoling parents and siblings to add to it.’Footnote 14 By the time she arrived in Durban in 1947, Zuleikha Mayat's energies as a writer were known among the larger Meer family, including Zohra's cousin Fatima – and Fatima's father, Moosa Meer, the editor of Indian Views.
FAHMIDA'S PEN
Through additional correspondence education, Zuleikha Mayat earned a certificate in journalism so that when, in early 1956, her friend Fatima Meer suggested to her father that she write for the Views, Mayat was in a position to accept the challenge. ‘Fahmida's World’ began to appear under her eponymous nom de plume. The name ‘Fahmida’ means ‘intelligent’ or ‘wise’ in Persian and Mayat believes she ‘must have read an Urdu novel around that time. Actually, when I started, Moulana Mia from Waterval Institute, Johannesburg, sent a message that the spelling … should be “Fehmida”, not “Fah” but “Feh”, but we never changed it … I liked it very much.’ As Fahmida, Mayat developed an outspoken public voice, one of the first Muslim women whose musings, thoughts, ideas and anecdotes were regularly published. She wrote for over six years, until 1963 when Moosa Meer died. By then, too, the responsibilities of three children as well as leadership of a civic association, the Women's Cultural Group, and the editing of the Group's famous cookbook Indian Delights, required her concerted attention.
Despite the subtitle ‘Women's Page’ or ‘Mainly for Women’ that an editor sometimes added to the column, Zuleikha did not think of Fahmida's World as an exclusively women's world at all. ‘Fahmida lived in the world and she observed everything and she was part of everything so she had to write – this is why it is such a mixed column. You don't find me sticking to any one subject.’ That a woman could speak on serious subjects was a contentious idea, and in her column on 14 March 1956 she appealed directly to her readers on this question:
Were it the intention of our creator to make of women cooking and childbearing automatons, then why were we given the faculties of independent thought and reasoning power? No, friends, a woman's world is the central point around which society and life revolves. Some of my friends accuse that this column is not typical of women's affairs. That for instance it should contain recipes, hints on housekeeping and advice as to the upbringing of children. That is dependent entirely as to one's conception of what is a women's world. Whilst recipes and training of the young are most important in our lives such advice should come from specialists in these respective fields and not from novices like Fahmida. Granny is any day a better teacher than I shall ever be in these matters. To my mind what is rightly a woman's world is an awareness of the social and political conditions of our environment, of the country and the world.
Fahmida was explicit that this meant ‘not just an interest but a very active participation in these affairs; even more than men since we are not burdened with the responsibilities of being the bread winners of the family. The South African housewife especially can do a great deal to make this world a better place since as a leisured class most of our work is done by servants’ (Indian Views, ‘Fahmida's World’, 14 March 1956).
Over the years, Mayat would develop a sense of how class, Islam and modernity came together in the figure of the modern, post-war housewife – an educated and civically minded family woman who, though denied formal citizenship in the nation where her labours were engaged in the project of social upliftment, was nonetheless morally and religiously required to develop both her own mind and the welfare of others. Mayat's writings posed a modernist challenge with regard to the status of women in Islam by advocating, among other things, space for women in mosques, education for girls, and interpreting Islam in a way that showed women to be equal partners in public affairs.Footnote 15
Although by and large his paper catered to a conservative community, M. I. Meer never censored her thoughts:
Of course my English was not so good at that time. Come on, man! [Learning it] through a correspondence college in an Afrikaans speaking town! So the compositor would sometimes pick up mistakes and go and tell the old man [M. I. Meer]. He said if it's a spelling mistake or something you do it, but her ideas don't change!
Mayat worked with a mental image of her readership, focused on her uncles in the Transvaal, as she wrote down thoughts and assertions which she knew might stir things up – but ‘I had to get through what I wanted to say’.
Fahmida's column addressed the issue of community: the imperatives of progress in the modern world, the public and private hierarchies that made up social life in South Africa, the ethical triumphs and breaches of daily life. She discussed the underpayment of retail assistants, was outspoken against inhumane behaviour in everyday life (for example, that of a ‘pimply faced’ white postal official to an illiterate African woman), scolded her compatriots for ethnic and class prejudices, advocated the education of Muslim girls, and wrote short stories that gave a personal meaning to the devastation caused by legal developments, such as the denial of national entry to the Indian wives of migrants working in South Africa and, later, the implementation of the Group Areas Acts.Footnote 16
Through her column, Mayat gave expression to a domestic vision of multicultural nationhood. South Africa, Fahmida mused, was like ‘a bottle of chow-chow pickle’, a spicy, home-made concoction in which something wholly new is made out of diverse ingredients. It was cultural mixing and exchange that made the nation a rich and interesting place to live. In a series of columns written in June 1957, as the Group Areas Act began to take effect, Fahmida fancies herself on a psychiatrist's couch and describes a troubling nightmare: in her dream, a worried gentleman who had willingly moved into the new ‘Indian’ Group Area of Lenasia gave her a warning.
Do not go and reside in any of the areas set aside for your own group or you will rue the day as surely as I do, both economically and socially. God intended South Africa to be a stew pot of many races and cultures and in that way it retains the tang and piquancy of the chow-chow pickle. Dividing it in unnatural barriers makes it insipid.
Fahmida continues:
In this inexplicable dream, I stood helplessly watching as Lenasia turned into a huge bottle of pickle. The gentleman was hunting at fever pitch in the bottle, but it contained not the delicious little varieties usually associated with chow-chow pickles. Instead there was an endless number of mangoes, ripe mangoes, small mangoes, big mangoes, mangoes, mangoes, mangoes. …
Through a culinary metaphor, Zuleikha Mayat brought political narrative into association with the world of kitchens, home life and women. As a housewifely vision of pluralism and community, the chow-chow pickle jar expressed a value that opposed the apartheid dream of purity preserved in separate containers. If, across the Atlantic, Silvia Plath was using the image of a ‘bell jar’ to express the confinements of gender ideology, Fahmida's bottle was laden with a local, diasporic ‘feminine mystique’. Far from rejecting the role and figure of the modern housewife, Zuleikha's pen harnessed its power – its rootedness in discourses of progressivism and advancement. Eschewing the label of ‘feminist’ and remaining distant from movement politics, Mayat was yet a strong voice advocating a dignified status for women in the diasporic community:
I knew [my words were] going through to the community because lots of people – not only the young girls – the older women would comment on it. [Then they would] tell me ‘you know, this is not right’, maybe trying to tell me also ‘you can focus on it’. You see the ulemas in those days and even now, when they stand on the platform the first thing they attack are women – their dressing, the hairstyles and ‘they are going out’ and so on. So one very old lady, [who] was my father-in-law's sister, mentioned one day when we were all sitting together, she says, ‘You know, why don't somebody tell the moulanas that there are other people that they can lash, why do they just pick on women all the time? We are tired of this issue.’ Obviously they wanted their views expressed, so I would pick this up and try and get it some way into the columns. … I think [Fahmida's World] was really a conduit, you know, of concern of the community.
CONCLUSIONS
M. C. Anglia started out wanting a platform to articulate a moderate political perspective, but Indian Views eventually came to represent a Gujarati Muslim perspective. Under Moosa Meer's editorship, it was a conduit for enforcing existing social networks as well as offering intellectual content that galvanized a sense of community among its geographically disparate readership. The story of how Zuleikha Mayat, raised in small-town Potchefstroom, came to write for the newspaper underscores these linkages and their personal nature. Indian Views was a channel for Mayat's agency as a citizen and as a woman: her writing was an important factor in opening up her opportunities for marriage and, eventually, the public voice which would enable her to offer her modern and moral social vision in the fraught political context of post-war South Africa.
This brief and intimate history of Indian Views suggests that print culture shapes histories and identities that move between the local and the transoceanic in ways not easily captured when an Indian Ocean Studies perspective excludes African Studies approaches, or vice versa. In the words of Simpson and Kresse, the history of the Indian Ocean is that of ‘the ever changing community of strangers’, which dissolves the idea of transoceanic ‘community’ with ‘shared history’.Footnote 17 The socially diverse Gujarati Muslim publics of Indian Views, geographically located in Southern Africa but invested in the various meridians of contact with the South Asian sub-continent, could – as a readership – imagine new zones of diasporic connection and new platforms of identity. Voices like Zuleikha Mayat's spoke of the domestic in terms that grounded community concerns on African soil. News about the newly created state of Pakistan, and content which confirmed the religious links to the Hijaz site of the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Madinah, confirmed identifications that were broader than the villages of Gujarat. Intermittent, face-to-face contact with the newspaper's Durban-based production unit contributed to a conception of Gujarati Muslimness that was personal and local, even if spatially dispersed. Language and common class interests were important in forging a form of ‘community’ among Hindu, Muslim and Parsi Gujaratis, while racial oppression helped grow and sustain a broader Indian identity across class, caste, ethnic and language divides.
