Apartheid South Africa: 1994-1999 Anand Si

233 Pages·2012·7.74 MB·English

Perceptions of and Responses to Transformation among people of Indian Origin in Post
Apartheid South Africa: 1994-1999
By
Anand Singh
Submitted in part-fulfillment for a Ph.D. in Anthropology, Univenity of Durban-Westville.
Dedicated to
All the ethnic minorities in the world, for peaceful co-existence and multi
culturalism,
." and
to my mother, my wife Jaysbree and children Janitra, Jivesh and Lasila.
ABSTRACT
The theme of this dissertation is reflected in its title and was written to capture this particular
. . . ... ..
".
historical juncture in post-apartheid South Africa. It was inspired by a variety of fact-ors, including
, .
the harsh historical experiences of the Indian population since their arrival as indentured labourers
in 1860, the current reassertion of ethnic identities and widespread ethnically based conflicts
throughout the world, and the minority rights campaign that is gaining momentum in Europe. The
significance of the last point is that West European countries generally enjoy the status as
trendsetters on social policy issues, and the rest of the developing world often tends to follow suit.
In this respect, this dissertation attempts to illustrate how the views of the Indian minority on
transformation, in between the 1994 and 1999 democratic general elections, have been influenced
and shaped. Their experiences were important in ascertaining their perceptions and responses to
transformation. Research was carried out in the Greater Durban Area across class boundaries,
covering suburbs such as Reservoir Hills, Clare Estate, Asherville, Overport, Phoenix and
Chatsworth. The outcome of this effort is contained in 229 pages consisting of ten chapters. It is
viewed in the context of the circumstances that prevailed just before the county's first democratic
general election of 27 April 1994, up to the period of the next general election of 2 June 1999. Of
central concern here were the dynamics surrounding the inevitable transfer of power from the White
minority to representatives of the Black majority, and how the smallest ethnic minority i.e. the
people of Indian origin, were reacting to this process. Research was carried out on the issues about
which respondents felt very strongly. These translated into chapters on the history of violence
against Indians in South Africa, the widespread impoverishment that is overshadowed by the
visibility of the Indian middle and upper classes, their perceptions of informal settlements, Indian
priviledge versus African empowerment in the public transport sector in Durban, finding new
schools, and emigration - viewed as a solution to some and a dream to others.
CONTENTS
Chapter One: Introduction
1
The Justification for the study
7
Contextualising class and ethnicity
12
The areas of fieldwork
13
Methodology
19
A synopsis of what lies ahead
Chapter Two: The history of ethnicity and violence against Indians in South Africa
20
Introduction
22
Polity, Economy and Society
26
Indian immigration
28
Structural violence
Physical Violence
35
The violence in perspective
40
Conclusion
Chapter Three: Reproducing the underdass among Indians: Variation and Fluidity in
household composition in Phoenix, Durban
Introduction 42
46
The Indian joint family: history and experience
Residential turnover: a brief appreciation 58
Residential turnover in Phoenix: a profile 50
The joint family as kinship responsibility 52
The joint family in the spirit of fostering
Joint family as economic necessity
Conclusion 59
Chapter Four: Confronting political transformation as an ethnic minority: cultural
entrepreneurship and the culturalisation of politics
Introduction 62
Contextualising the 'cuHuralisation' process 64
A brief history of South African Indian politics 68
From tactical co-optation to total immersion 72
From uncertainty to Minority Front 78
Conclusion 82
Chapter Five: On the ground: Perceptions of and Responses to change since April 1994
Introduction 84
A profile of the interviewees from 1996 to 1998 90
An analysis of the responses 96
Some predominant socio-political trends 105
Conclusion 107
Chapter six: Residents perceptions of informal settlements
the situation in Clare Estate
109
Introduction
110
A brief insight into Canaan
114
Some early responses
117
Individual perceptions and organised responses
122
Conclusion
Chapter seven: Small business opportunities and informal settlements
125
Introduction
An insight into the unlicensed traders operations 128
Their relationships with African clientele 136
A few significant events and ambiguous ethnography 140
Conclusion 145
Chapter eight: Public transport in Durban - Indian priviledge versus African
empowerment
Introduction 147
The rise of the African taxi industry: 1977-1978 153
Indian buses and African taxis 157
Residents, buses and taxis 164
Conclusion 167
Chapter nine: Finding a new school in post-apartheid South Africa
Introduction 169
The history of Indian education 170
The present state of schools in three areas 173
Looking out - White institutions as a solution for the best education 181
Networking - kinship, neighbourhood and friendship as resources 184
Conclusion 187
Chapter ten: Emigration - a solution to some and a dream to others
Introduction 189
Understanding motivation for emigration 190
Analysing responses 191
Who did you vote for in 1994 and who will you vote for in 1999 198
Emigration - not an individual choice 202
Conclusion 206
Conclusion
208
References
220
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
This thesis is about people of Indian origin in post-apartheid South Africa. It focuses on
issues of historical and contemporary interest, especially within the population in several of
the city of Durban's predominantly Indian suburbs. The work should be viewed in the
context of the particular historical circumstances that have prevailed since just before the
country's first democratic general election on 27 April 1994, up to the period of the next
general election of 2 June 1999. The social, political and economic factors that have
dominated this period have been of immense interest both nationally and internationally.
The intrigue surrounding the inevitable switching of power from more than three hundred
years of White political and economic domination to African majority rule was what caught
the attention of the entire world (Sparks 1994). A central concern here was the position of
the minorities in this emerging transitional democracy. The world would not have been
surprised if the country deteriorated into a state of civil war and if the most powerful of its
minorities, the Whites, engaged in a protracted war to claim their own territory and self-rule.
Indeed such attempts were made by right-wingers both among Whites and Zulus, but
without much success. The periods of ethnic and racial tension were short lived and
dissipated through careful maneuvering, especially through the leadership and charisma of
Nelson Mandela. Both Afrikaners and Zulus considered themselves threatened minorities
and articulated their fears in emotive rhetoric and acts of violence. Other minorities such as
Indians and Coloureds reacted more passively to change. The options that were available to
both these population groups restricted them to this type of reaction. Their minority statuses
and marginal integration into the military structures forbade them from responding to
transformation in the ways that Afrikaners and Zulus had done. A glimpse into how
transformation has impacted on people of Indian origin is provided below. Five aspects will
be covered in this introduction viz. justification for the study, contextual ising class and
ethnicity, the areas of fieldwork, methodology (literature survey and fieldwork) and a
synopsis of what lies ahead.
The issues: Justification for the study
In the late 1960s the Economic Commission for Latin America, dominated by the
underdevelopment/dependency school which was inspired by Andre Gunder Frank (1969),
came to enjoy predominance in explaining the position of peripheral countries in the world
political economy. This school emphasized the unequal relationship between the
that were the chief supplier of minerals and
industrialized west and the developing
raw materials. While their analysis was initially centred on economic explanations. they
soon came to realise the character of their political leadership, the low levels of skills. and
the class and ethnic composition of the Latin populace. This often way not
just in Latin America but in Africa as well to ethnic conflicts, despotic and corrupt
leadership, and even lesser commitment from the ruling elite to steer countries away from
such quagmires.
In addressing South Africa's imminent transition to democracy and focussing on policy
perspectives for the future, Schlemmer (1991: 15) argued that politics in South Africa is
often oversimplified and has weakened the capacity of South African social science to deal
with the real complexities of change in the system. Often, the competition for political
power is seen as a Black (African)-White divide that ignores the role and contribution of
other minorities such as Indians in regional and national politics. Schlemmer added that the
models for transition in Southern Africa are distinctly unappetising, especially when viewed
against the background of the widespread problems in the region since independence. Post
independence leaders in Africa misled themselves into believing that they could administer
their countries adequately without the assistance of their White adversaries. Half of White
Rhodesians fled Zimbabwe which was starving of foreign capital, Lesotho was under
prolonged military Mozambique and Angola were implementing scientific social
reeducation camps, and had crude East European equipment which could not be repaired.
The consequences of all of these efforts were disastrous and had to be abandoned for lack of
creative and responsible leadership. Other writers such as Good (1999) have supported this
claim by illustrating how the rise of wealth and power within the cattle owning economy of
Botswana has been accompanied by creation of poverty and weakness. Olivier de
Sardan (1999: 28) unhesitatingly placed the failures in Africa in the 'corruption complex',
because as he puts it "Corruption (that is to say the 'corruption complex') has become, in
almost all African countries, a common and routine element of the functioning of the
administrative and para-administrative apparatus, from top to bottom." South Africa too is
showing similar directions of elitism, decline state capacity, embezzlement and
predominance (as Good refers to the African leadership), is swiftly turning democracy into
mere electoralism. Human, financial, organisational, and material resources have been
dissipated on a very large scale. After the 1994 election, ''the government, in the
assessment of the Minister of Public Service and Administration, decided 'unscientifically'
on a target of cutting 300 000 civil service jobs in three years, and wasted RIOOO million on
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programmes which robbed the bureaucracy of its best brains, but retained those, whom Zola
Skweyiya said, 'you would like to have retrenched'" (Good 1997: 548). The failures in
Africa prompted the late Mozambican President Samora Machel to say to President Robert
Mugabe soon after he took over Zimbabwe: "Keep your Whites. " (Richburg 1997: 191).
South African politics is also undergoing radical re-engineering along ethnic and racial
lines, not withstanding the problems of the past. This thesis, while not unaware of the
external environment in which South Africa operates viz. the global economy, focuses on
the internal dynamics of South Africa's democratic transition. In particular its focus is on
race and ethnic relations with particular reference to the Indian minority. For more than
four decades since 1948, legislation required citizens to detennine their aspirations along
ethnic and racial lines. The 1950 Population Registration Act which divided South Africa's
population into four racial categories viz. White, Indian, Coloured and African, and which
also identified Africans by ethnic group, provided the basis for differentiated access to
economic and political opportunities. This gave rise to a significant degree of in-group
solidarity within the racial and ethnic categories as each tried to either protect their
privileges or oppose the constrictions that were imposed upon them. Out of this situation
emerged cleavages that are bound to make the transfonnation process in post-Apartheid
South Africa as sensitive to racial and ethnic issues as possible. This situation exists at a
time when ethnic tensions in countries such as Rwanda, Burundi, Nigeria, Yugoslavia,
Chechnya and Dagestan, among others, have flared up in ways that have been extremely
costly to human lives and socio-political stability. The end of the Cold War has ushered in
an unbridled build-up of anns in many of the strife tom countries as well as new kinds of
political demands that are rooted in ethnic mobilisation. Understanding Indians perceptions
of and responses to transfonnation would require some attention on the politics of the rest of
Africa as well as those of South Africa, since these factors are instrumental in detennining
the nature of such issues.
An interesting comment by a student was made one day on the politics in Africa. In March
1997 when I took an M.A. class in Social Policy that had mainly African students, a debate
emerged around the topic of the role of the state and international aid in developing
countries. This was the period during which Mobuto Sese-seko was facing finn opposition
from the Laurent Kabila led forces in what was then Zaire - presently renamed the
Democratic Republic of Congo. Most of the students were emphatically against the
international "donor" agencies. Enthusiasm among them to bash the International Monetary
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Fund and the World Bank for its role in Africa reached high and emotional levels, especially
with reference to what little economic and political stability was achieved in Zaire. Their
accounts of how Sese-seko was co-opted and neutralised by these institutions and their
surrogate multi-national corporations, as they plundered the economic resources of the
country, demonstrated a high level of political consciousness. They clearly wanted to see a
South Africa free from the alliances with exploitative international agencies, trusting that
the ANC led government was going to steer clear of them. But their enthusiasm was
dampened and brought to an abrupt halt by an incisive response from a Nigerian student
who retorted: "listen my South African brothers and sisters, the problem in Africa is not
with the external powers. The problem here is that African leaders are weak and they
have sold us out. Do you know if you have a referendum in Zaire to-day the people will
ask for the French to return, and if you have a referendum in Nigeria today, they will ask
for the British to return. That is because most of my country's oil revenue has been
stolen by the Nigerian army generals who have put all the money in the Swiss banks -
more than four hundred billion U.S. dollars! I am telling you, the Nigerian leaders have
put my country five hundred years behind time .... If you look at the problem facing your
own country today, it is going the same way with corruption. You will learn very
soon .... "
In a sense, the student's statement enjoyed resonance with views that were generally
associated with conservative thinking during apartheid, although he was certainly not
influenced by it. His disappointment emerged out of his experiences in his own country,
which had the misfortune of several coup d'etats in less than ten years. The political
emancipation in most African countries after colonialism has been stifled by lack of vision,
systematic plundering of state resources and mismanagement of the positive financial
reserves and functional infrastructures that were left behind (Hyden 1983; Hill 1986; Good
1986; Carmen 1996). A classic case in point is provided in Hill's (1986) coverage of
Kwame Nkrumah's Convention People's Party's attempt to acquire support in the 1950s by
providing cocoa farmers with official grants for replanting of their cocoa farms after they
were devastated by swollen shoot disease. There was no account of how these funds were
actually used and no threat of fanns being expropriated if the grants were not repaid through
increased production, until years later when a commission of inquiry discovered that
farmers were putting the money to other uses. A widespread practice was to devote the cash
to building houses in Accra for letting, leading to a sharp reduction in cocoa production and
consequently to a reduction in state revenue. Similarly, Good's (1986) investigation into the
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massive annual losses of maize in Zambia in the 1980s, led him to discover a virtual
absence of proper planning and massive pilfering of funds in almost every government
Ministry. Every year there was insufficient fuel, no spare parts for transport vehicles,
insufficient jute bags to store the maize, no grading of roads - making it difficult for trucks
to collect the maize during the rainy season from farms away from the main road, among a
range of other problems. In Zimbabwe as well the central province of Gokwe continue to
suffer isolation from the rest of the country because of the lack of proper infrastructure that
should allow for dual movements of supplies in and out of the region (Breslin 1994). While
the farmers sell their produce to the neighbouring towns and cities there is no in-flow of
goods to Gokwe that allows for ready access to basic goods and immediate needs. This has
produced a desperate situation that has led people to eating dogs and adding grass to their
maize meal in order to stretch its lasting capacity. Farmers have also been forced to sell
their implements to buy food and pay for their children's education in order to break their
reliance on agriculture. Such situations across Africa has led Hyden (1983: x), in his search
for alternative forms of governance in the continent, to comment:
As most of Africa's new states are reaching the age of a human generation, very
few can look back on a period of real progress ... To many foreign businesses
eager to find new markets and new wealth, Africa has become a pit that
swallows their money with little or no return. This is a judgement that applies
not only to 'socialist' or 'Marxist-Leninist' regimes but also to those
characterised by a 'free' economy, for example Nigeria, Sudan and Zaire ... In
spite of receiving colossal amounts of aid, they argue, countries Uke Tanzania
and Zambia show no progress; instead their economies show signs of moving
backwards ....
Soon after the end of colonial rule Whites, who were the most privileged in the civil service
and who were selectively trained to operate it, emigrated in droves to the industrialised
countries. This migratory movement created a vacuum in administrative positions that
made it difficult for the newly independent countries to effectively continue with the
functioning of these institutions in sustainable ways. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa the
state has all but lost its role as the instrument for development and political stability. In
other countries such as Rwanda, Burundi, Nigeria, Sudan and Somalia, the state has been
instrumental in fostering political instability and the breakdown of civil society (Richburg
1998). This has given rise to ethnic conflicts of genocidal proportions in some countries,
which in turn led to a virtual breakdown of the infrastructures in others. Interviewees for
this project were aware of these situations and were generally critical of them. The
expUlsion of the Indians from Uganda in 1974, the restrictions imposed by the governments
of Malawi and Tanzania on Indians to freely engage in commercial activities, and two
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