Internal Frontiers. Jon Soske
Vishnu Padayachee, and Thembisa Waetjen. Bill Freund, who hosted me during research trips to Durban, has been a wonderful friend and teacher. His boundless erudition and seminal research on Natal have been central to my education.
In addition to Bill, several other scholars read and commented on my manuscript. This book has gained significantly from the insights of Thomas Blom Hansen, Aisha Khan, Surendra Bhana, Sharad Chari, Mark Hunter, and Joseph Lelyveld.
In 2014, I received a Mellon Fellowship to spend a semester at the Center for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape, where I completed the process of conceptualizing this book. The CHR is a peerless space and the opportunity to participate in its discussions has been invaluable. Heidi Grunebaum, who invited me to CHR, helped me think through the idea of a global moment of Partition. In numerous discussions, Patricia Hayes deepened my understanding of the aesthetic dimensions of resistance politics. I am grateful for the exmaple and scholarship of Suren Pillay, Ciraj Rassool, Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, and Gary Minkley. More than any other historian, Premesh Lalu’s work has shaped how I understand the problem space of African nationalist thought. My debt to him is immense.
Since moving to Montreal, I have enjoyed the advice and support of Subho Basu, Laura Madokoro, Elizabeth Elbourne, Gwyn Campbell, Tassos Anastassiadis, Lorenz Lüthi, Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, Rachel Berger, Andrew Ivaska, Rachel Sandwell, Monica Patterson, Suzanne Morton, Allan Greer, Malek Abisaab, Monica Popescu, Laila Parsons, Catherine Desbarats, Catherine Lu, Elena Razlogova, and Selin Murat. Renee Saucier, Yasmine Mosimann, and Lauren Laframboise provided research assistance. Working with Rajee Paña Jeji Shergill on the Info Bomb exhibition greatly enriched my understanding of Partition. Thank you to Jim Morris for his friendship in the last days of finishing this project.
Antoinette Burton, who read two versions of this manuscript, was unstintingly generous in her feedback and criticisms. One of the great joys of this project was thinking through some of its questions in collaboration with her. Paul Landau vetted material, answered queries, and (most importantly) his scholarship helped me understand the great historical depth of the inclusive tradition within African political culture. While finishing this book, I have been inspired by the courage and philosophical conviction of Rashad Ramazanov and Konul Ismayilova.
Over the past ten years, I have received advice, encouragement, and support from too many people to list. I am deeply grateful to Phiroze Vasunia, Marcus Rediker, Vijay Prashad, Giancarlo Casale, Gabeba Baderoon, Sean Jacobs, Dan Magaziner, T. J. Tallie, Neelika Jayawardane, Sana Aiyer, Alex Lichtenstein, David William Cohen, Marissa Moorman, Farzanah Badsha, Christopher J. Lee, Allison Schachter, James Brennan, Centime Zeleke, Frank Wilderson III, Teresa Barnes, Orhan Esen, Zuba Wai, Franco Barchiesi, Timur Hammond, Clapperton Mavhunga, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Sarah Balakrishnan, Shannon Walsh, Serhan Lokman, Robert Vinson, Prabhu Mohapatra, Suraiya Faroqhi, Erdem Kabadayı, Robin D. G. Kelley, Imraan Coovadia, Derek Peterson, Jean Allman, Gail Gerhart, Peter Limb, Allen Isaacman, Nima Fahimian, Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, Kelyn Roberts, Peggy Kamuf, Quincy R. Lehr, Anna Norris, Octavio Guerra, Chimurenga Magazine (especially Ntone Edjabe, Stacy Hardy, and Achal Prabhala), South African History Online (Mads Nørgaard, Jeeva Rajgopaul, and many others), Şiirci Kafe, Maia Woolner, Ashraf Jamal, Christopher Cozier, Tsitsi Jaji, Jill Kelly, Nafisa Sheik, Nick R. Smith, Meghan Healy-Clancy, Jo Soske, and the Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun).
Most importantly, I have received guidance and wisdom from individuals who participated in the organizations discussed in this book and encountered their intellectual worlds as living traditions of struggle. More than anything else, these conversations helped me see past political texts, as important as these are, and understand ideas as embodied in organizational cultures, symbolism, personal relationships, and ways of being. Raymond Suttner read some of my early writing on Luthuli and provided encouragement and generative insight. Bobby Marie and Phumi Mtetwa, in a crucial conversation, complicated my rather American understanding of South African racial dynamics. I have learned important things from Ahmed Kathrada, Jay Naidoo, Shamim Meer, Joe Phaahla, Amina Cachalia, Ebrahim Ismail Ebrahim, Elinor Sisulu, Zwelakhe Sisulu, Jerry Coovadia, David Hemson, Tony Mpanza, Derek Powell, Ismail Nagdee, and Tom Manthata. Bhekisizwe Ngwenya introduced me to Pan-Africanist Congress veterans in Soweto, helped me with isiZulu, and watched my back. Although comrades from the Black Consciousness Movement might disagree with some of my conclusions, I owe much to them. Thank you to Sadeque Variava, Anver Randera, Karen Randera, Saths Cooper, Jerry Waja, Zithule Cindi, Lybon Mabasa, Yosuf Veriava, and all the supporters of the Abu Asvat Institute for Nation Building.
In 2006, I interviewed Billy Nair at his favorite restaurant on a beachfront near Tongaat, north of Durban. Early the next morning, he woke me with a phone call in order to observe that I did not appreciate the symbolic power of the 1955 Freedom Charter. He asked me to imagine what it was like for him, a young Indian trade unionist in his mid-twenties, to travel from Durban to Johannesburg and stand on the stage of the Congress of the People on 26 June 1955. In front of the most representative gathering in South Africa’s history, and surrounded by comrades of every conceivable background, Nair spoke on behalf not of Indians, but of all South Africa’s working people. This story has stayed with me while writing this book. So has a very different anecdote from the indomitable Phyllis Naidoo. While selling the Guardian newspaper with an African comrade, Phyllis and her companion got caught in the rain. She insisted that he come home, take off his soaking clothes, and then warm up in a bath. She waited for him to emerge and eventually, after almost an hour had passed, knocked on the door to see what was wrong. Phyllis was surprised by the privilege revealed by her shock at the response. “I never imagined,” he moaned, “that this thing would feel so good.”
This book would not have been finished without the friendship and mentorship of Omar Badsha. As a trade unionist, antiapartheid activist, photographer, and historian, Omar has been thinking about these questions for over five decades. At each stage of writing, I shared sections with Omar, always to receive sharp-eyed criticism and his version of encouragement: “It raises the right questions.” Eventually I grew frustrated: When was I going to find some answers? As I finish this book, I believe I understand what he was saying to me. A definitive history is a dead history. The historian’s job is to take a story—sometimes familiar, sometime new—and make it resonate in the urgency of the present. If I have managed to accomplish this task in the least, it is due to Omar’s example.
Finally, I dedicate this book to Kate Elizabeth Creasey. In and between Toronto, Johannesburg, Istanbul, Cape Town, Los Angeles, Durbin, and Montreal, our life together runs like an invisible thread through these pages. Her strength, courage, love, brilliance, and forgiveness have made me better in every way.
Note on Language
This is a book about permutations of race. Race appears as a set of social relationships, as a way of talking about and understanding the world, and as an object of intellectual debate and political struggle. As part of its argument, I analyze the production of an African-Indian racial divide by a number of mechanisms, including colonial policies, regimes of urban space, nationalist rhetoric, and everyday social practices. Yet even as this book tracks the far-reaching consequences of this division, it argues against attributing homogeneity to “Africans” and “Indians” as groups or assuming that these categories are adequate for understanding the complexity of identity and social life in mid-century Natal. In depicting both the power and limitations of racial categories, I have given considerable attention to the importance of language. When this book refers to African or Indian newspapers, stores, neighborhoods, political organizations, and individuals, it is marking the effects of how social life was organized and coded in racialized terms. When this book discusses groups as the object of stereotype or racial fantasy, it refers to “the Indian” or “the merchant” in the singular. Because language tends to reify complex historical processes, it is important to reflect—continuously—on the work that description is doing. I ask that the reader keep this challenge in mind.
This is also a book about ideas. I have reconstructed intellectual debates by analyzing the terms employed by contemporaries and, when possible, I have relied on texts produced during the period in question rather than interviews or memoirs from later moments. Some of these terms were critiqued