The Shape of the Durban Harbor Working Class

Despite Durban's growing economic importance, it was rather a small city compared with the world's great trading centers of the time. The peacetime population in the first decade of the twentieth century was well under 100,000. Official figures from 1911 showed that the 36,289 whites and 37,599 Indians vastly outnumbered the 19,245 Africans.Footnote ¹² The white working class clustered in the suburbs near the harbor, while the elite resided in the airy hills of the Berea, overlooking the town. Prosperous Indian merchants, mostly Gujarati in origin, were concentrated just north of the harbor in the Grey Street area, where they formed the center of a remarkable network of retailers stretching through Natal, the Transvaal, and beyond.Footnote ¹³ Indenture-completed Telugu and Tamil workers from southern India provided much of the workforce in the city's light industries and market gardening sector. Africans were overwhelmingly male migrants, mostly from Zulu-speaking areas, but with an increasing proportion from Basutoland and the Transkei. There was a dramatic preponderance of male migrants, with very few African women in the city. As the male migrants grew in numbers, private and municipal worker hostels spread across the town. In 1908, the Durban Council established a monopoly over the selling of sorghum beer (utshwala), distributed through official beer halls, and in the subsequent twenty years, the municipality made a profit of over £500,000 off of the brew.Footnote ¹⁴ This enabled the management of the African workforce at minimal cost to white taxpayers, and the “Durban system” became widely emulated by British authorities elsewhere in Africa.Footnote ¹⁵ However, the project was always threatened by the men's preference for illegal drinking clubs. The small number of African women in the city—only 1,152 by official figuresFootnote ¹⁶—were prominent in the long-term growth of these enterprises.

Some long-term patterns of working class life in the harbor area were already established at the turn of the century. There was a core of African migrant laborers, constituting the core of the dockworkers and living on the Point in the so-called Togt barracks.Footnote ¹⁷ The men had a self-image as the hardest and toughest of workers, calling themselves Ozinyathi, meaning buffaloes.Footnote ¹⁸ They were day laborers, receiving a Togt badge, which enabled them to look for work, and which could be withdrawn by the authorities. The supply of labor tended to be inadequate, because of the continuing strength of African subsistence agriculture. But this was to change in the subsequent decade, with the Natal authorities’ crushing of the Bambatha Rising of 1906, which ensured the effectiveness of a poll tax, forcing rural men to seek paid employment. Although the municipality was to establish a system of hostels across the town, the Point barracks were to retain a central importance for dock laborers across the period dealt with in this paper. Young African migrant men in the city developed a culture of distinctively dressed “amalaita” groups, which engaged in ritualized stick fighting competitions and sang Zulu military regimental hymns, reflecting an assertiveness that would feed into later protests.Footnote ¹⁹

In the post-Boer War period, the Esplanade, the coastal strip north of the Point, developed as a resort and hotel area, catering to up-country tourists and passengers arriving on the liners.Footnote ²⁰ This trade, of course, required numerous catering workers, and they were especially drawn from the Indian population. An important part in connecting the harbor and this area was played by the rickshaw service, established by local entrepreneurs in the early 1890s. It was also manned by African migrants, and took passengers and seamen into town. The African labor force was highly regionalized, with concentrations of workers from particular chiefdoms: There was a strong representation of the Qwabe among Togt workers, men from Mahlabatini among rickshaw pullers, and so forth.Footnote ²¹

Yet such a description also sets up the working class of the city in a fairly conventional way. For its workforce comprised also those who worked on the ships in the harbor, and they have attracted almost no attention from South African labor historians. The Union Castle Line (UC), which became the dominant passenger carrier to Durban well before the First World War, drew most of its crews from Southampton, and they generally returned intact to their home port with minimal interaction onshore. Other lines serving the port made increasing use of Asian, African, and Caribbean workers. Many of these workers transferred ships in the port, and a few beat the system and stole ashore. The crew lists of Bullard King's Natal Direct Line, a competitor of UC until its take-over by the bigger company in 1919, show extensive recruitment of workers in Bombay and Calcutta, most of whom returned to India, but some of whom took their discharges or deserted in Durban or other Indian Ocean ports.Footnote ²² There were several international companies that contested the passenger routes to South Africa with the British. Especially notable here was the activity of the German East Africa Line, which put in a strong challenge in the passenger trade before the First World War and made a remarkable come-back thereafter, despite the post-war confiscation of a large number of German ships.Footnote ²³ Each of these challengers had their own pattern of recruitment. The sailing ships (until the 1920s) and tramp steamers of a number of European countries also contested British dominance in the cargo trades—German, Swedish, Norwegian companies and later, Greek. However, the very tight restrictions on seamen prevented the formation of the “sailor town” that was typical of large ports. Little attention has been given to the rather few, but interesting, African and white seamen who voyaged from Durban on international steamers and on the government Jarrah wood transports from Australia.Footnote ²⁴ There was at least one particular cluster of African ocean-going workers, which has been documented, though, in the whaling industry.Footnote ²⁵ In 1908, Norwegian businessmen set up a whaling station on the Durban Bluff at the south end of the harbor, which, with one brief interruption toward the end of the First World War and after overcoming some internecine competition, was to survive till the 1970s.Footnote ²⁶ The workers in the shore-based processing plant and on the whale boats were Zulu speakers from the Eshowe area in northern Natal. They were recruited through Norwegian missionaries, who had a strong following in that area.Footnote ²⁷ The Norwegian-origin merchants also, in the early years of the industry, deployed some of their African workers on the freezing South Atlantic islands of Kerguelen and South Georgia, where they worked in appalling conditions.Footnote ²⁸ Whales caught near the Natal coast were winched ashore and processed at the Durban whaling station. In 1935, the station was employing about 30 white and 500 Zulu workers.Footnote ²⁹

It is important not to make the assumption that there was an automatic anti-colonial solidarity of the African and Indian communities in the city. On the contrary, tensions were deep. They were to culminate in 1949 in a lethal pogrom by African workers against Indians. To some extent these conflicts were the result of structural economic factors. African workers were frequently in debt to Indian merchants, or were the tenants of Indian landlords. However, there was also an ideological element at work. As Desai and Vahed show, Indian political leaders often claimed a privileged status in relation to Africans.Footnote ³⁰ Gandhi in particular, saw Indians as having special relationship to Britain within the Empire, based on the promises of Queen Victoria after the Uprising of the late 1850s. The founder of satyagraha, throughout his time in South Africa, never called unambiguously for Indian independence, and sought, essentially, for a better deal for Indians within the empire.

The Power of White Laborism

It may be tempting to put the actions of the white workers who protested at the Point in January 1897 down to specifically southern African white racism. But as we have seen, they appealed for justification of their actions not just to their economic interests but to a British identity, and this links them to a much broader global context. As I have argued elsewhere, there was within late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain and its settler colonies, a strand of globalized politics which I have called White Laborism.Footnote ³¹ White workers in Britain and its diaspora felt themselves under threat from capitalists’ recruitment of the cheap labor of Asian and African workers, and appealed for protectionist measures to both the imperial and colonial governments. These politics could often be accompanied by deep social radicalism in relation to inequality within white society. Yet as the railwaymen's banner suggests, it was also frequently connected to a notion of special rights as imperial subjects of British descent. And although rooted in economic fears, White Laborism took sustenance from current “scientific” racial ideology, which was sometimes deeply internalized by activists. Connected by the rapid movement of white workers across the Empire, this ideological assemblage had a significant influence on the shape of world politics, most notably in the adoption in 1901 of the White Australia policy, excluding workers of color from immigrating to that country. The globalized project of White Laborism would be extremely strong in Durban through the end of the 1920s, and continue to exert an enduring influence until around 1947. (It is worth noting that for much of this time, white Durbanites were more preoccupied with the imagined threat of Indian immigration and economic competition than with what they tended to see as the lesser danger to their position posed by African workers). Durban's white workers thus adhered to a shifting combination of anti-capitalist, racist, and imperial loyalist notions.

Natal was economically controlled by an oligarchy of Durban merchants, manufacturers, coal owners, and an overlapping coastal and inland class of plantation owners and commercial agriculturalists. But up to the 1930s, they faced some serious trouble from immigrant British labor activists organized in trade unions. Some of these were branches of British organizations such as the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, but the workers also built their own local union and political formations. These political forms were initially somewhat ephemeral, but did secure some representatives on the Durban town council and in the colonial legislature. From 1909, white working-class activists supported the South African Labor Party (SALP). The SALP eventually, in 1924, entered the South African government as a minority coalition partner to J.B.M. Hertzog's Afrikaner Nationalists.

The hegemony of racial labor exclusionism was demonstrated by Durban's handling of the remarkable episode of the transportation of Chinese workers during the so-called Chinese labor experiment on the mines in the Transvaal, from 1904 to 1907. The political importance of the avoidance of any possibility that these 60,000 workers would enter the Natal workforce resulted in them being situated in a “legal grey hole,” in which they were excluded from any social contact with the Natal colony as they passed through it. Chinese workers were placed in isolation in facilities at their point of recruitment, notably the camp at Chinwangtao. There they were photographed, vaccinated, and screened for “Asiatic diseases.” They were shipped on the vessels of China-centered British shipping companies, under close supervision of the Foreign Labor Department of the Transvaal.Footnote ³² On arrival in Durban, the Chinese workers were closely guarded, and moved immediately to a camp at Jacobs on the western side of the harbor, which had been used as a concentration camp in the Boer War. They were then placed on sealed trains, which took them to the Transvaal, where they were largely confined to closed compounds from which they were only allowed out once a week. On their return to China, the process was repeated.Footnote ³³ The voyages were closely supervised by bureaucrats and medical officers, not primarily for altruistic reasons, but because the conditions of Indian indentured laborers had already made indenture practices an international political issue, and the British administrators in Transvaal hoped to avoid a scandal. A typical Durban-bound steamer carried about 2,000 workers.Footnote ³⁴

Workers of two institutions were the core of the white labor politics of the port of Durban: the railway workshop and the municipality. When Natal Government Railways (NGR) made its connection to Johannesburg in 1895, it transformed the economic prospects of Durban, by linking it to the biggest market of the subcontinent. Close to the harbor lay the railway workshop, at the time by far the biggest industrial facility in the city. As of 1899, the workshop had 785 white, 263 Indian and 196 African employees. Footnote ³⁵ Among white workers, there was a British-style apprenticeship system.Footnote ³⁶ Skilled men earned a respectable 10 to 12 shillings a day.Footnote ³⁷ The harbor initially had a separate workshop on the Point, but in 1907 it was amalgamated with the railway workshop.Footnote ³⁸ After the Union of South Africa was created, NGR was incorporated to South African Railways, which also eventually took over the running of Durban harbor. The municipality had a well-organized bureaucracy and provided a range of services, including taking over the originally privately-owned trams, which were the most important form of public transport.

Probably the most significant leader among the railwaymen was A.L. Clark, a Scotsman who immigrated to Natal in 1881 as a twenty-two-year old.Footnote ³⁹ In the post-Boer War period, together with another Scot, Harry Norrie, he formed a group of supporters of the Clarion, the paper of the English socialist Robert Blatchford, which they later transformed into a small Marxist group called the Social Democratic Federation. Norrie spoke regularly in the town gardens, his meetings becoming something of a forum for local labor militants.Footnote ⁴⁰ There was thus a real streak of militancy in the local unions. In 1909, a strike in the NGR workshop against overtime spread throughout the colony's railway system. It failed, leading to the blacklisting of 400 workers, but in the long run, railway unionism continued to grow.Footnote ⁴¹ Tramway workers engaged in a long-running series of industrial actions, culminating in a nine-week strike in 1921.Footnote ⁴² In 1920, in response to the dismissal of the popular Assistant Town Clerk H.H. Kemp, municipal employees evoked the rhetoric of the “Soviet,” and seized the council offices—albeit only for a day.Footnote ⁴³

All of this activity was, however, within the framework of White Laborism. As we saw in the 1897 protest, white workers in Durban, militantly critical of capital and the town's social hierarchy as they might be, felt especially threatened by Indian labor competition and were viciously hostile to Indian immigration. Clark and Norrie's professed Marxism does not seem to have taken them outside this framework. Clark, in 1919, initiated an attempt to organize “all grades” of workers into a National Union of Railway and Harbour Services, but this meant only white workers.Footnote ⁴⁴ H.H. Kemp was a vociferous anti-Indian and advocate of Natal separation from South Africa on the grounds of anti-Afrikaner chauvinism.Footnote ⁴⁵

White Laborism in Durban was strongly linked to imperial loyalism, which could reach rabidly jingoistic levels at times of crisis. Following the 1915 sinking of the Lusitiania—a political moment of oceanic imagination if ever there was one—there were severe anti-German riots in the area immediately around the harbor, in which white workers, and especially the men in the railway workshop, appear to have played a major role. Large-scale arson took place against the hotels, shops, and factories allegedly owned by the city's small German population (and those belonging to Jews with German-sounding names). Police records suggest that the riots were in fact manipulated by a small group of local elites, who instigated the crowds to attack their competitors in the liquor trade. The riots were only put down by the deployment of marines from a British naval vessel in the harbor.Footnote ⁴⁶

The worldwide 1925 British seamen's strike against wage reductions, interacted with Durban White Laborism and the complexities of Natal's relationship with India, in a remarkable moment of political “disembarkation.” The strike was opposed by the largest British union in the sector, the National Sailors' and Firemen's Union. It had been initiated by a smaller organization, the Amalgamated Marine Workers Union (AMWU), with the support of the British Communist Party's National Minority Movement, which aimed to organize the disaffected trade union militants under party leadership. The strike achieved little in the UK itself, but became significant in foreign ports, especially in Australia and New Zealand.Footnote ⁴⁷ It was also especially effective in South Africa, because the AMWU was the dominant union in Southampton, the home port of the UC, which was by far the most important passenger service on the South Africa run. The UC also carried a significant amount of South African cargo, especially the economically important fruit exports. The militants who led the strike seem to have deliberately aimed to start it up in the strategic choke-points of the colonial harbors. Jonathan Potter, an Australian syndicalist who was one of the initiators of the action, told a Durban official: “Well Sir, I've done my job. I joined the ‘Sandgate Castle’ to bring the men out on strike and I've succeeded. That's my part. I am now quite content to be returned home.”Footnote ⁴⁸

In terms of the political dynamics of Durban, the UC management made a cardinal political error at the start of the strike, when they threatened to bring Indian “lascar” seamen from Bombay to man the ships in South Africa. This resulted in an outpouring of fury by the Natal white labor militants, with H.H. Kemp to the fore of the populist politics that erupted. But it also swung middle- and upper-class opinion in Durban behind the sailors, in a way which would not otherwise have been the case. Seamen, normally closely restricted in the port, were allowed to come ashore and given official support in finding accommodation. Thus, the strike enjoyed a hospitable political environment in Durban, with UC management, and later the South African government itself, complaining of the lack of effective action by local officials against the strikers. In this case, “Britishness” trumped class identity for the upper strata, while nicely coincided for white working-class Durbanites.

This strike was the high-water mark of British immigrant white-labor politics in the port. By the 1930s, an earlier generation of turn of the century British working-class artisans, many of whom had emigrated during the gold boom of 1890–1906, were beginning to fade away, and their children often enjoyed upward mobility into the middle classes. Although more Afrikaner white workers began to appear in the port, especially as the 1924–1939 governments of General Hertzog used the railways and other public services to create employment for their constituency, these workers were largely hegemonized by nationalist rather than labor ideology. However, what the remnants of labor politics in Durban did was to make any perceived breach of the labor “color bar” in the city actually or potentially politically explosive.

Insurgency and Global Radical Politics ca. 1920–1942

The decade of the First World War saw a wave of wartime import-substituting secondary industrialization. The value of manufacturing in Natal—almost all of which was centered in Durban—went up from £ 4,434,562 in 1911 to £ 23,790,541 in 1921.Footnote ⁴⁹ Combined with the collapse of African subsistence agriculture, this fostered a growth of Durban's overall population to 144,834 in 1921. The African population was now 37,236 (but still only 3,224 of these were women).Footnote ⁵⁰ Perhaps 15,000 of the men were domestic workers. Numerous shack settlements sprang up on the periphery of the town.Footnote ⁵¹ By 1921, there were 56,397 whites and Indians numbered 47,341, the shift in this balance towards whites reflecting the effectiveness of the suppression of Indian immigration.

In the mid-1920s, the longstanding domination of the politics of the harbor area by white workers was challenged by the emergence of the first wave of labor-political organization by black dockworkers. The history of these mobilizations has been exceptionally well researched, in the work of Shula Marks,Footnote ⁵² Dave Hemson,Footnote ⁵³ Paul La Hausse,Footnote ⁵⁴ and Ralph Callebert.Footnote ⁵⁵ However, one dimension that has perhaps been insufficiently emphasized in this locally-focused literature, is the way in which these political struggles were also a struggle of political imaginaries of the oceans. This period was one in which two extremely potent visions of the seas challenged that of the British Empire on a global stage. The one was the Garveyite movement's project of a Pan-African shipping line that would return the African diaspora of the New World to a future African Empire. Though in reality the Black Star Line was a somewhat farcical episode, Marcus Garvey's ships sailed through the imagination of the colonized world far more effectively than they did the seas, providing a popular counter-point to the world-wide image of power constituted by colonial shipping. Seamen seem to have been particularly attracted to Garveyism, and their disembarkations across the African world had important political consequences for the spread of the message.Footnote ⁵⁶ The other radical maritime vision was that of the Communist International, which saw seamen and harbor workers as a genuinely world-wide working class, a section of the proletariat perfectly placed to challenge the imperial powers, and especially Britain, at the very points where the economic sinews of the Empire connected. A global strategy of winning over workers in the maritime industry, under the banner of the International of Seafarers and HarborWorkers, led from Hamburg by its Secretary, Albert Walter, was the focus of enormous Comintern energy in the 1920s and early 1930s.Footnote ⁵⁷ At this time, the Comintern made a particular effort to organize African and black New World ports, using the magazine Negro Worker, edited by George Padmore, as its vehicle.Footnote ⁵⁸ At this moment, Durban was to take on a particular significance for the Comintern: it took up the death of a young Communist organizer, Johannes Nkosi, at the hands of Durban police in December 1930 as its cause. In mid-1931, for example, a headline in the Berlin Communist Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung declared that “The Black Race Rallies to the Red Front,” including a picture of Nkosi in a striking visual panorama of global anti-racist insurgency.Footnote ⁵⁹ At a 1932 “World Congress of Seamen” held at ISH Headquarters in Altona, Padmore hailed the recent labor insurgency in Durban.Footnote ⁶⁰

The politics involved were some of aspiration though, because the direct political successes of both Garveyites and Communists in Durban in this era were relatively negligible. No durable Garveyite organization was built there, and the Communist Party remained extremely weak through the inter-war period. However, what both movements did do was, on the one hand, to inspire locally-fashioned movements that were partly derivative of their ideas, and on the other, to evoke a disproportionate fear on the part of settler officialdom and society.

Just after the First World War, black seamen from the western hemisphere began to bring the militant doctrines of Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association to Durban and the Natal hinterland. Garveyism provided the impetus for apocalyptic rumors that swept southern Africa from around 1919, that a black American navy was coming to liberate Africans from the white yoke. Visiting sailors were certainly one vector through which these stories got a hold.Footnote ⁶¹ For example, in 1920, police reported on a sailor called Moses, recently arrived from New York, who had come ashore at Durban and addressed a meeting, telling his audience that “Marcus Garvey was the man to be relied upon … who would free Africa … the first vessel of the fleet was named “Fredrick Douglas” (sic) and had been sailing to different places….”Footnote ⁶² In 1923, an African American called Holan told a public meeting in Pietermaritzburg, presided over by African National Congress (ANC) activist J.T. Gumede, that “When you have combined, we will come to you and send millions of natives to teach you to rule yourself.”Footnote ⁶³ Subsequent police investigations revealed that Holan was a sailor, who had also addressed meetings in Durban the previous year.

Officialdom was delivered from the task of tracking this external threat by the rapid implosion of Garvey's movement, but his seaman-disciples helped prepare the way for the spread of the home-grown Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU). Started in Cape Town in 1919 by the Nyasaland migrant Clements Kadalie, and initially reflecting a hybrid of syndicalist and Garveyite influences, the ICU became, during the 1920s, the first black mass political movement of modern South Africa.Footnote ⁶⁴

The ICU was established in Durban in 1925 by A.W.G. Champion, a mission-educated ex-policeman and former mine clerk and a small landowner. He was among the members of the African lower middle class pushed toward a more radical position by the extreme racial policies of the Hertzog government. Champion had been recruited by Kadalie to start up the movement in Durban, and did so with great success. He proved particularly adept at bringing legal pressure to bear upon the Durban City Council over restrictive measures they had applied, for example, succeeding in abolishing the night curfew on black residents.Footnote ⁶⁵ The ICU recruited on a large scale among dockworkers. They also found support among car-drivers, garage workers, waiters, rickshaw pullers, and domestic servants.Footnote ⁶⁶ However, the very success of Champion appears to have been rooted in a skillful linking of the cultural capital of the Christian Zulu elite, of which he was part, with the militancy and politics of the predominantly Zulu-speaking workers, which produced a strong regional identity for the movement. As the charismatic Champion built a regional fiefdom, he faced increasing tensions with Kadalie and the national organization. At the end of 1927, Kadalie had Champion suspended over alleged financial irregularities. Champion formed a new organization, the ICUyaseNatal (ICUyN), and received almost unanimous backing from his Durban and regional constituency.Footnote ⁶⁷

The late 1920s certainly saw a push by the Communist Party leadership to take the lead in the dockworker movement in Durban. At the time, the SACP had an advantage in the form of their alliance with a pro-Communist faction led by J.T. Gumede, who briefly managed to capture the leadership of the ANC during this period, before being displaced by a more conservative group. Gumede was drawn into global Communist networks in a significant way, traveling to Europe in 1927, where he attended the founding conference of the Comintern-sponsored League Against Imperialism in Brussels. He also went to Moscow, where he participated in the celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution and was introduced to Stalin himself.Footnote ⁶⁸

In May 1929, the ICUyN established a “Anti-Kaffir Beer Manufacturing League,” protesting the municipality's beer monopoly. Dockworkers smashed the official Point Beer Hall. After a dispute with an official over the brewing of non-alcoholic beer, the Point workers called for a boycott of beer halls, and held a meeting calling for strike action. An ICUyN meeting endorsed the boycott, although Champion was clearly somewhat nervous about it. A mass meeting at Cartwright's Flats took place. J.T. Gumede appeared and put forward positions based on the ANC radicals’ support of the Communist Party's “Black Republic” slogan, while Champion focused on the local issues. The boycott spread across the city. A white motorist was killed by protestors. Champion now tried to stop the protest, but a mob of 600 white vigilantes appeared and besieged the ICUyN Hall. They were confronted by many times their number of African workers. Violent clashes ended with six workers and two vigilantes dead. On 14 November 1929, the extremely reactionary Minister of Justice, Oswald Pirow, arrived in the city. Seven hundred members of a national “Police Mobile Squadron” were used to raid worker's compounds and illegal drinking clubs. They checked poll-tax receipts, confiscated alcohol, arrested over 2,000 people, and extracted £ 5,000 in back taxes. The boycott of the beer halls was wound down. Through 1930, tensions continued. Champion was temporarily banished from Durban by the authorities. The Communist Party made a renewed attempt to influence the situation. At the end of 1930 it launched a pass-burning campaign. At a Cartwright's Flat meeting on “Dingaan's Day,” 16 December 1930, Johannes Nkosi was stabbed to death by African police officers.Footnote ⁶⁹

Communist Party activists were certainly at work in these events and the Comintern even dispatched traveling representatives to check on the operations of the party from time to time.Footnote ⁷⁰ But the party was by no means in control of what happened in Durban. Privately, they were all too aware of the limits to their influence in the harbor. Party leader Albert Nzula commented in 1929: “What did we do? The masses in Durban were moving forward and we told them to keep cool, the forces against you are so big, you have to keep cool … A disbelief in the native masses having the spirit to fight for their rights … has resulted in the party lagging behind the masses.”Footnote ⁷¹

Ultimately, the harborside movement crumbled because, while on the one hand, Champion and the elite leadership were incorporated by the authorities and the worker activists were repressed, on the other, the Communist Party's politics did not prove able to offer a workable alternative to the Zulu populism of the ICUyN.Footnote ⁷² A commission of inquiry into the 1929 events criticized the city's management of black workers and called for the building of accommodations for married workers in the city. Inquiries by the City Council identified low wages, lack of family housing, and the absence of recreation facilities as problems. The council introduced measures to address some of these questions. In January 1930, a Native Advisory Board (NAB) for Durban was established by the council. Champion at this point became visibly more conservative, closely aligned with the anti-Gumede faction of the ANC and the deposed but popular Zulu King, Dinizulu, who had previously been anti-ICUyN. After Champion was allowed to return to Durban in 1934, he became a much more conciliatory figure in local politics. The NAB system (despite its lack of real power), new housing, and other reforms, gave the local elite enough concessions to contain them for the present.

The Communists were not able to connect with the identity politics of rural migrants in the way that the ICUyN had. They lacked, for example, sensitivity to established notions of hierarchy—during the anti-pass campaign, Johannes Nkosi was taunted by dockworkers, who asked whether his parents knew what he was doing.Footnote ⁷³ When Eugene Dennis, an American Comintern emissary, visited Durban in 1932, he did his best to be politically optimistic, but the evidence was very much against him. In his reports to Moscow, Dennis claimed the party had about 200 members in the city, mostly dock workers, in 1928, although his formulations suggest that these were mainly “paper” members. He also claimed that about another 400 had been recruited at the time of the Dingaan's Day protest. However, virtually all of them had been deported to rural areas almost immediately, leaving a total Durban membership of about sixty members in the city at the start of 1932.Footnote ⁷⁴ Dennis placed great store by the prospects of the small Seamen and Harbour Workers Union in South African ports, and especially in Durban. He claimed that forty percent of the Durban whaling workers had been organized by this Communist-led union, and that a strike in that sector had only been prevented by a premature ending of the whaling season. A Seamen's Club had been formed in Durban as a base for proselytization, and Dennis was distinctly upbeat on the future of seamen's militancy. Footnote ⁷⁵ However, not much that is visible in the archival record ever came of these hopes.

The power of the ICUyN moment had been the connection between politically skilled elite leaders like Champion and the rural migrant dockworkers and other laborers. With the introduction of the Native Advisory Board and the Durban authorities’ subsequent building of family housing in a way which favored the elite, the connection was broken. Garveyites and Communists had differing, powerful visions of the Black and Red Oceans in South Africa. They had real effects in Durban, but not entirely the ones that their apostles envisaged, as local actors reworked those ideologies in very specific local ways. In Champion's movement, radical militancy combined with Zulu particularism.

Anti-Indian Politics and Global War 1939–1945

As the South African Labor Party's support in Durban gradually declined, the torch of anti-Indian populism passed to a new force. In 1933, Jan Smuts's pro-imperial South African Party was constrained by the Great Depression to enter into a coalition with Prime Minister Hertzog's Afrikaner Nationalists. A section of British loyalists, especially in Natal, were unable to stomach what they saw as Smuts's move away from British commitment and capitulation to the idea of a constitutional separation of the country from the imperial center. This group split away from the SAP to form the Dominion Party under Colonel Charles Stallard.Footnote ⁷⁶

Though the Dominion Party was not a success nationally, it was exceptionally strong among whites in and around Durban. In the 1936 provincial elections, it got slightly more votes overall in the city than Hertzog and Smuts's new United Party, and in the 1938 general election, it won four Durban seats, including the elite Berea and the more working-class, harborside Point and Greyville constituencies.Footnote ⁷⁷ This electoral pattern resulted in a strong fusion of the DP's loftier constitutional goals with white Durban's anti-Indian populism. By the end of the thirties, as some working-class and lower middle-class whites in Durban had become more affluent, they were increasingly tending to move out of the lower lying suburbs near the harbor, like Greyville. These properties began to be bought up by Indian merchants. The result was a white outcry, stirred up by the Dominionites and other racists, against what the local white political leadership liked to refer to as Indian “penetration.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Durban was now a city of about quarter of a million people, divided into roughly numerically equal white, African, and Indian segments,Footnote ⁷⁹ and white populists had the sense that the demographic balance was shifting against them.

With the outbreak of the war, the Hertzog-Smuts parliamentary coalition was wrecked over the issue of whether to remain neutral, as Hertzog and his Afrikaner nationalists wanted, or to support Britain, as advocated by Smuts. Smuts won a parliamentary majority and resumed the Prime Ministership, initiating a vigorous policy of South African military and economic participation in the Empire's war effort. Smuts needed the support of the Dominionites and brought Stallard into his cabinet, which entailed concessions to their anti-Indian views. The consequence was that Smuts, over the next several years, truckled to white Durbanites by passing a series of laws against expanded Indian property ownership.Footnote ⁸⁰

At the very beginning of the war, a dramatic development, which began in Durban, had changed the imperial attitude to the Indian seamen or “lascars.” On 13 September 1939, sixty-three Indian Muslim seamen from the Bullard King company ship SS Umvoti appeared in the Durban magistrate's court after refusing to sail. The next day they were sentenced to six months hard labor.Footnote ⁸¹ This was the first moment of a worldwide revolt by Indian seamen. In Cape Town on 11 September, mutiny broke out among “lascars” on the Clan Line ship SS Clan Alpine, and later in the month on the same company's SS Clan Buchanan. The trouble on the Clan Alpine was temporarily resolved without immediate resort to the courts by negotiations between the South African harbor authorities and the sailor's representatives, but the result was that the ship sailed on to London, carrying its dispute to the imperial metropolis.Footnote ⁸² But even before it arrived, the strike spread to British, and later to Australian and Burmese, harbors.

The organization of this important strike is still poorly understood by labor historians. Both Communists and Indian nationalists had taken a stance against the war, so both had an interest in encouraging the action. In the UK, the India League of left-nationalist Krishna Menon and Communist activists played a key role in supporting it.Footnote ⁸³ But it seems possible that pre-war preparation of the action was undertaken by the Seamen's Union of Bombay, led by the anti-Communist Goan Socialist O.C. Mendes, which had organized a major strike in its home port in 1938,Footnote ⁸⁴ and by the Seamen's Union of Calcutta, led by Aftab Ali, who was aligned with Menon, and had an ambiguous relation to the British Communists.Footnote ⁸⁵

The central issues of the strike related to war bonuses and pay. Coming at the beginning of a war in which shipping would play a vital part, the strike was a serious threat to British security. The London cabinet applied pressure to the shipping companies to settle the dispute, leading to significant concessions to the strikers. There were massive wage increases. In the Durban case, the need to get transport moving led to the personal intervention of Prime Minister Smuts, to have Edris Allee and his sixty-two companions from the Umvoti released after they had served only a few weeks of their sentence.Footnote ⁸⁶ By February 1940, almost all the seamen imprisoned in the strike around the world had been let go.Footnote ⁸⁷

Slightly later, during Churchill's coalition government, the British Ministry of Labor under Ernest Bevin became strongly committed to improvements in lascar working conditions, and Bevin himself made a speech in which he denounced the use of the term “Lascar” as inherently discriminatory.Footnote ⁸⁸ Nevertheless, tensions among this workforce remained high. In 1942 there was a spectacular riot in Durban harbor by the Indian crew onboard the SS Jeypore.Footnote ⁸⁹ The British authorities were anxious to avoid any action that might trigger a repeat of 1939's disruption of wartime supply routes.

The harbor of Durban became crucial to the British war effort between mid-1940 and mid-1943, when the Mediterranean was almost impassable to British supply ships and troop transports, necessitating the use of a round-Africa route to reach the Middle East and Asia.Footnote ⁹⁰ The needs of the British merchant marine, which by now was heavily reliant on so-called lascars, dictated that large numbers of Indian seamen, transferring between ships, needed to be accommodated in Durban, often for quite long periods. This went very much against the established exclusionary practices in the city, but South Africa really had very little choice in the matter. One of the implications of Smuts's integration of South Africa into the imperial war machine was that considerable elements of sovereignty were surrendered. This was especially true in ports, where the gigantic task of moving the troops around the world was seen as necessitating a considerable harborside role for the British Ministry of War Transport (MOWT). MOWT's Southern and East African representative between 1942 and 1944, Charles Wurzburg, a former director of the Glen Shipping Line, became a power in the land.Footnote ⁹¹ MOWT representatives were installed in the individual ports. The British National Union of Seamen appointed representatives in Durban who played a role in coordinating the movement of sailors. The MOWT needed Indian seamen in the port, whether white Durban liked it or not. These seafarers had to live somewhere, and most of this slack was taken up by Indian boarding housekeepers in the Durban city center and inner suburbs, paid by the shipping companies. This resulted in slum landlordism of exactly the kind that could be manipulated by the anti-Indian propaganda of the Dominion Party. Welfare officers began to report atrocious housing conditions among the Indian seafarers.

The British government was extremely concerned about the management of seamen in general, given their pivotal role in sustaining the war economy, and a model for the construction of seamen's welfare committees was developed in British ports. In April 1943, following discussions with the Union government, the MOWT's Durban representative, J.H. Hankinson, initiated a Durban Port Seamen's Welfare Committee, comprising representatives of seamen's welfare organizations, the shipping industry, government departments, the police, and military authorities.Footnote ⁹² The committee was able to draw on the resources of the Anglican Church's Mission to Seamen, which already had a very active program to support and house British seamen and to support (but, importantly, not to accommodate) “lascars,”Footnote ⁹³ and the Seamen's Institute, a charitable organization which provided accommodation to white seamen (but apparently not to seamen of color). A striking feature of the committee was the later addition of representatives of the National Union of Seamen, who, as well as disciplining their own members, attained a sort of managerial status over the Indian seamen who were excluded from their ranks. Despite an often acrimonious relationship with the Pretoria bureaucrats, who were felt by the committee to be giving it insufficient recognition and paying too little regard to its recommendations, the committee had a real impact on Durban over the next few years. It coordinated the existing welfare services for seamen, provided support for the numerous sailors who were shipwrecked as a result of submarine attacks,Footnote ⁹⁴ improved health education and treatment in the city's venereal disease units,Footnote ⁹⁵ and looked after the personal needs of seamen in long-term tuberculosis treatment in the Springfield clinic. It also took a somewhat racially egalitarian stance in advocating equal pensions for white and “Colored” South African seamen.Footnote ⁹⁶ The committee was suspicious of labor radicalism though, and encouraged the authorities to pursue the small—and apparently not very effective—South African Maritime Union and the International Seamen's Club, which they believed to be Communist-influenced.Footnote ⁹⁷ They were particularly alarmed by an International Seamen's Club Meeting on 5 July 1943, which attracted 300 people.Footnote ⁹⁸

The housing and movement of lascar seamen, though, was the particular focus of the Seamen's Welfare Committee. The management of lascars in Durban produced a complicated politics of disembarkation. The British representatives on the Seamen's Welfare Committee wanted to be seen, from the point of their government's efforts in the steering of public opinion in India, as treating the lascars fairly. The South African representatives were under strong political pressure to close down the boarding houses, which were very visible examples of the increased Indian presence in the city center, and to maintain white Natal's exclusionist immigration policies. A sub-committee was set up to investigate the lascar housing situation. Its report painted a picture of Dickensian squalor in the boarding houses—extreme overcrowding, inadequate sanitation, and unhygienic eating facilities.Footnote ⁹⁹ The committee also uncovered a system of corruption around the lascar boarding houses. In many cases shipping companies sent whole ship's crews to particular premises. But intermediary agents demanded kickbacks from boarding house owners for arranging this, and those owners who did not pay up did not receive these large groups of boarders.

At a meeting in July 1943 the committee “expressed perturbation at the number of men in Durban awaiting repatriation, and referred to the loss to the war effort of the valuable services of the men because of their lengthy stays here awaiting accommodation in oncarrying vehicles. There was the additional problem their presence created from a welfare point of view.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Common ground was found in the vigorous pursuit of an interest in moving workers into more circumscribed accommodation and back to the ships. British officials wanted that from the point of view of labor efficiency, and the South Africans because of their desire to move the men off the Durban streets and out of the country as soon as possible. The committee's main recommendation on housing involved placing the men, as far as possible, in the newly expanded Indian Immigration Barracks.Footnote ¹⁰¹ They favored the closure of the boarding houses in most cases. They were not absolutely unfair to Indian landlords—the activist I.C. Meer recalled in his memoirs that Indian students had themselves campaigned against the behavior of these boarding house proprietors.Footnote ¹⁰² And the committee reported favorably on a few landlords. But the general mode was perhaps an example of what Maynard Swanson famously called the “Sanitation Syndrome,” in which real or imagined health problems become a stalking horse for segregationist politics.Footnote ¹⁰³

The committee succeeded in its aims. Most importantly, the concentration of the lascars in the immigration barracks made their movements easier to regulate. But much else was done to move them along. For example, information was gathered about sailors who had been arrested, “so that seamen would not be wrongly classed as deserters, and also for the purpose of allowing any vessel to take steps, if possible to secure the quick release of men essential for the maintenance of the ship at sea.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Captains were to be “advised immediately upon the arrest of a seaman in order that the ship may be able to render such assistance to the seaman in order to enable him to proceed with his ship.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The committee even paid attention to such minutiae as persuading the minister of justice to give instructions that imprisoned seamen were not to have their heads shaven, as was the usual practice, so that their “convict” appearance would not deter captains from hiring them. In August 1943, the committee enthusiastically reported that Hankinson had arranged for the repatriation of 560 Indian and Goanese Seafarers.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ By January 1944 the committee was able to state that it had been responsible for moving on “the large number of Lascar and British and Allied seamen who had been at this port for a period of 4 to 8 months.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

The committee clearly favored a move from a situation where sailor accommodation was integrated into the town, to one that, by placing the lascars in an immigration facility, defined the presence of Indian seamen as an immigration problem, and one to be addressed through repatriation. To this extent, their views coincided with both the British government's interests in utilizing the seamen's labor in the Merchant Navy, and the white Natalians’ determination to prevent further Indian immigration. The exclusionary logic of the policy that Natal had adopted toward Indians in 1897 was not, in the end, disrupted.