Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-qxdb6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T02:20:15.263Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Politics of Disembarkation: Empire, Shipping and Labor in the Port of Durban, 1897–1947

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2018

Jonathan Hyslop
Jonathan Hyslop*
Affiliation:
Colgate University and University of Pretoria
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article examines the labor politics of race in Durban harbor between 1897 and 1947. It approaches the subject from an analysis of labor in a global, and particularly a British Empire, context. The article aims to move away from a solely “national” focus on the South African state and instead to look “up” toward connections to the British Empire, the world economy, and global social and political movements, and “down” towards Durban itself. These large scale (imperial and global) and small scale (city) levels were very concretely connected by Durban's role as a port. This article contends that in order to understand the place of working class Durban in an imperial world, we need to incorporate the shipping industry into other labor histories, studying how the movement of vessels and the actions of seafarers concretely linked these spatial levels. This article provides a broad overview of the sociological “shape” of the Durban working class and focuses on four “moments” of racialized labor in Durban harbor: the riot against M.K. Gandhi in 1897, the British seamen's strike of 1925, the insurgency of black dockworkers in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and the conflicts over the presence of Indian seamen in the port during the Second World War. These events revolved around what is here called a politics of disembarkation, in which the joining of the ship to the world of the shore created a zone of conflict.

Type
Articles
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 93: Workers and Right-Wing Politics , Spring 2018 , pp. 176 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I would like to thank the Re:work program of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and its director Andreas Eckert for the Fellowship, which enabled the writing of this article, and the participants at the 2016 conference of Re:work, especially Baz Lecocq, for their helpful comments. I would also like to thank the National Research Foundation of South Africa and the Colgate University Research Council for financial support.

References

NOTES

1. Natal Mercury, 14 January 1897. Most of this issue is devoted to the events around Gandhi's landing. My account synthesizes material from several sections, so I have not differentiated between the separate articles in this and subsequent footnotes.

2. Natal Mercury, 14 January 1897.

3. Gandhi, M. K., An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Boston, 1993), 192Google Scholar.

4. Natal Mercury, 14 January 1897.

5. Natal Mercury, 14 January 1897.

6. Lake, Marilyn and Reynolds, Henry, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. For instance, van der Walt, Lucien, “The First Globalisation and Transnational Activism in Southern Africa: White Labourism, the IWW and the ICU, 1904–1934,” African Studies 66:2–3 (2007): 223–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Hein, Carola, ed., Port Cities: Dynamic Landscapes and Global Networks (London, 2011)Google Scholar.

9. Gillis, John R., The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (Chicago, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mack, John, The Sea: A Cultural History (London, 2013)Google Scholar.

10. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” available at: http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf accessed on 4 June 2016.

11. India Office Records, British Library (hereafter IOR) MSS Eur F111 494 “Confidential: Summary of the Administration of Lord Curzon of Keddleston … ,” Simla, 1905.

12. Council, Durban City, Industrial Durban (Durban, 1947)Google Scholar (hereafter DCC, Industrial Durban), 21.

13. See the advertisements in The Indian Views, 31 March 1916 for a listing of the Indian owned stores and businesses in the region.

14. Hausse, Paul La, “The Message of the Warriors: The ICU, the Laboring Poor and the Making of a Popular Political Culture in Durban, 1925–1930,” in Bonner, Phil et al. , eds., Holding their Ground: Class, Locality and Culture in 19th and 20th Century South Africa (Johannesburg, 1989), 19–56, 20Google Scholar.

15. Home, Robert K., “From Barrack Compounds to the Single-Family House: Planning Worker Housing in Colonial Natal and Northern Rhodesia,” Planning Perspectives 15 (2000): 327–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. DCC, Industrial Durban, 21.

17. There is no convincing account on the origins of the term Togt.

18. La Hausse, “Message,” 21.

19. Hausse, Paul La, “The Cows of Nongoloza”: Youth Crime and Amalaita Gangs in Durban, 1900–1936,” Journal of Southern African Studies 16:1 (1990): 79–111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20. Anonymous, Natal Province: Descriptive Guide and Official Hand-Book (Durban, 1911), 72–74Google Scholar.

21. La Hausse, “Cows of Nongoloza,” 87.

22. Maritime History Archive, Memorial University of Newfoundland, for example Crew Lists for S.S. Pongola, official number 81575.

23. Detlefsen, Gert Uwe, Die Deutschen Afrika-Linien (Bad Sageberg, 2013)Google Scholar.

24. Hyslop, Jonathan, “Zulu Seafarers in the Steamship Era: The World Voyage Narratives of Fulunge Mpofu and George Magodini,” in Critical Perspectives on Colonialism: Writing the Empire From Below, eds. Reid, Kirsty and Paisley, Fiona (London, 2014), 123–40Google Scholar.

25. Børreson, Dag Ingmar, “‘Three Black Labourers Did the Job of Two Whites’: African Labourers in Modern Norwegian Whaling,” in Navigating Colonial Orders: Norwegian Entrepreneurship in Africa and Oceania, eds. Kjerland, Kirsten Alsaker and Bertelsen, Bjorn Enge (New York/Oxford, 2015), 127–52Google Scholar.

26. Børreson, “Black Labourers,” 128.

27. Børreson, “Black Labourers,” 134.

28. Børreson, “Black Labourers,” 135–40.

29. Børreson, “Black Labourers,” 143.

30. Desai, Ashwin and Vahed, Goolam, Inside Indian Indenture: A South African Story 1860–1914 (Pretoria, 2010)Google Scholar.

31. Hyslop, Jonathan, “The Imperial Working Class Makes itself ‘White’: White Labourism in Britain, Australia and South Africa Before the First World War,” Journal of Historical Sociology 12:4 (1999): 398–421CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32. Tyau, E. S., “The Golden City of Africa,” The World's Chinese Students’ Journal 31 (1908): 51–55Google Scholar.

33. See, for example, National Archives of South Africa, Pretoria (hereafter NASA Pta) FLD 46 5/76 ‘Repatriation of Chinese Laborers 25th Batch per S/S Heliopolis sailed 16.12.07,’ Inspector E. Mates to Secretary, Foreign Labor Department, 3 December 1907.

34. NASA Pta FLD 24 AG 1-46/06 W.F. Zehnder, ‘Report on the arrival of the S/S Katherine Park’, 9 December 1905; G. Chalmers, ‘Extracts from the Surgeon-Superintendent's report S/S Katharine Park,’ December 1905.

35. Ingram, A. Forsyth, The Story of an African Port (Durban, 1899), 120Google Scholar.

36. Ingram, African Port, 120.

37. Ingram, African Port, 124.

38. Boydell, Thomas, “My Luck Was In”: With Spotlights on General Smuts (Cape Town, 1949), 33–36Google Scholar.

39. Gitsham, Ernest and Trembath, J. F., A First Account of Labour Organisation in South Africa (Durban, 1926), 164–65Google Scholar.

40. Gitsham and Trembath, First Account, 172–73.

41. Gitsham and Trembath, First Account, 20.

42. Gitsham and Trembath, First Account, 46–47.

43. Gitsham and Trembath, First Account, 45–46.

44. Gitsham and Trembath, First Account, 164–65.

45. Hirson, Baruch and Vivian, Lorraine, The Seamen's Strike of 1925 in Britain, South Africa and Australasia (London, 1992), 49Google Scholar.

46. NASA Pta SAP 86 D6/69 335/15/1 Sub-inspector J.J. MacRae, Durban to Deputy Commissioner of Police, Pietermaritzburg, 15 November 1915; Sub-Inspector J.J. McRae, Durban to Deputy Commissioner of Police, Pietermaritzburg, ‘Report on anti German disturbances Dbn 13/14 May 1915,’ 18 May 1915; Acting Deputy Commissioner of Police, Pietermaritzburg to Secretary, South African Police, 22 November 1915. See also Dedering, Tilman, “‘Avenge the Lusitania’: The Anti-German Riots in South African in 1915,” Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migrancy and Diaspora 31:3 (2013): 256–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47. Hirson and Vivian, Seamen's Strike; Hyslop, Jonathan, “A British Strike in an African Port: The Merchant Marine and Dominion Politics in Durban, 1925,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 43:5 (2015): 882–902CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48. NASA Pta BNS 1/2/80 G.W. Dick, Durban, to Secretary, Interior, Pretoria, 3 November 1925.

49. Rosenthal, Eric, Schooners and Skyscrapers (Cape Town, 1963), 194Google Scholar.

50. DCC, Industrial Durban, 21.

51. La Hausse, “Message” 21–22.

52. Marks, Shula, The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa: Class, Nationalism, and the State in Twentieth Century Natal (Johannesburg, 1986)Google Scholar.

53. Hemson, David, “Dock Workers, Labor Circulation and the Class Struggles in Durban, 1940–1959,” Journal of Southern African Studies 4:1 (1977): 88–124CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54. La Hausse, “Message,” La Hausse, “Cows.”

55. Callebert, Ralph, “Working Class Action and Informal Trade on the Durban Docks, 1930s–1950s,” Journal of Southern African Studies 38:4 (2012): 847–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56. Vinson, Robert Trent, “The Americans Are Coming”: Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa (Athens, OH, 2012)Google Scholar.

57. IOR L/P&J/12/238/10 anonymous memorandum, “The Union of Eastern Seamen” 15 January 1925; Carr, E. H., Socialism in One Country, vol. 3 (Harmondsworth, 1972), 623–24, 636–39.Google Scholar; for a striking, if unreliable, portrait of Walter and his organization see Valtin, Jan, Out of the Night (Oakland, CA, 2004)Google Scholar.

58. Featherstone, David, “Maritime Labor and Subaltern Geographies of Internationalism: Black Internationalist Seafarers’ Organising in the Interwar Period,” Political Geography 49 (2015): 7–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59. AIZ (Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung), 29, 1931.

60. The Negro Worker, 6:2, June 1932. However, tensions rapidly developed within the ISH over whether the movement was sufficiently committed to colonial struggles. This report in the Negro Worker complained of “the scant treatment given to the colonial question by the conference,” the statement presaging Padmore's subsequent expulsion from the Comintern, over his alleged nationalism.

61. Vinson, “The Americans.”

62. Vinson, “The Americans,” 72.

63. NASA Pta SAP 41 Conf 6/953/23/4, W.E. Earle, Senior inspector, CID, Pietermaritzburg, to Deputy Commissioner of Police, Pietermaritzburg, 9 November 1923.

64. Van der Walt, “First Globalisation.”

65. Marks, Ambiguities, 76.

66. La Hausse, “Message,” 21.

67. An immigrant British trade unionist, Alfred Batty, may have played a role in this split NASA Pta NTS 7665, Native Riots Commission, Minutes of Evidence 8th Day, 14 July 1929.

68. van Diemel, Raymond, In Search of “Freedom, Fair Play and Justice”: Josiah Tshangana Gumede, 1867–1947: A Biography (Belhar, 2001)Google Scholar.

69. La Hausse, “Message’” is the best account of these events; see also Marks 85–86.

70. The recent work of Hakim Adi provides an extremely interesting account of the Comintern's initiatives in the African world in the period, but my view tends to reproduce the Comintern's own, optimistic, readings of its role. Adi, Hakim, Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora (Trenton, NJ, 2013)Google Scholar.

71. Minutes of Ninth Conference CPSA 26–28 December (extracts) in Davidson, A. et al. , South Africa and the Communist International: A Documentary History volume I (London, 2003), 253Google Scholar.

72. La Hausse, “Message”.

73. La Hausse, “Message,” 48.

74. Letter from E. Dennis to ECCI 16 July 1932 in Davidson, A. et al. , South Africa and the Communist International: A Documentary History volume II (London, 2003), 29Google Scholar. Dennis was later to become the leader of the US Communist Party.

75. Letter from E. Dennis to ECCI 22 October 1932 in A. Davidson et al., South Africa and the Communist International: II 38–39.

76. Thompson, P. S., Natalians First: Separatism in South Africa 1909–1961 (Johannesburg, 1990), 107–13Google Scholar.

77. Thompson, Natalians First, 121.

78. Brookes, Edgar and Webb, Colin, A History of Natal (Pietermaritzburg, 1965), 290–91Google Scholar: Jermy Grest, The Durban Council and “Indian Penetration”: Local Politics in the 1940s (1), Seminar Paper, University of London, 1988, available at: http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/4133/1/Jeremy_Grest_-_The_Durban_city_council_and_the_indian_problem,_local_politics_in_the_1940's.pdf accessed on 30 May 2016.

79. DCC, Industrial Durban, 21.

80. Brookes and Webb, History 290–91; Grest, ‘Durban Council.’

81. Durban Municipal Archives, Magistrate's Court Record, 1939.

82. IOR L/P&J /12/630/3 Inspector A.P. Newman, New India Dock, London, to the Chief Police Officer, 30 October 1939.

83. IOR L/P& J /12/630/12 ‘V.K. Menon and the India League,’ 1939; L/P& J /12/630/2 Anonymous memo, 1939; L/P&J /12/630/6 Anonymous Memos from Police Office, West India Dock, London, to Chief Police Officer, 1 November 1939 and 2 November 1939.

84. A. Colaco, A History of the Seamen's Union, Bombay (Bombay, 1955).

85. See footnote 84.

86. NASA Pta URU 3015–3044 1939 Smuts, Pretoria to Governor General, 6 October 1939.

87. IOR L/E/9/1976 112 Commerce Department Delhi, ‘Press Note: Lascars released from Gaols,’ 22 February 1940.

88. Daily Mail 25 November 1940.

89. Available at: http://www.historybuffs.co.za/mutiny-in-durban-harborhttp://www-historybuffs-co-zawp-contentuploads201207ss-jeypore1-300x119-jpg/ accessed on 30 May 2016.

90. Munro, Archie, The Winston Specials: Troopships Via The Cape 1940–1945 (Liskeard, 2006)Google Scholar.

91. Miller, Michael, Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth Century History (Cambridge, 2014), 285–86Google Scholar.

92. NASA Pta VWN 1037 SW 443/2 Rev. John MacDowell, Durban to Minister of Social Welfare, Pretoria, 21 May 1944.

93. Missions to Seamen Office, Durban, Annual Reports of The Missions to Seamen, Durban, 1929–1945.

94. NASA Pta VWN 1037 SW 443/2 Minutes of Port Seamen's Welfare Committee Minutes 1943–1947.

95. NASA Pta VWN 1037 SW 443/2 Minutes of Port Seamen's Welfare Committee 1943–1947.

96. NASA Pta VWN 1037 SW 443/2 Minutes of Port Seamen's Welfare Committee 1943–1947, 29 September 1943.

97. NASA Pta VWN 1037 SW 443/2 Minutes of Port Seamen's Welfare Committee 1943–1947. See 14 December 1943 for the union, and 31 August 1943 and 21 September 1943 for the Seamen's Club.

98. NASA Pta VWN 1037 SW 443/2 Minutes of Port Seamen's Welfare Committee 1943–1947, 6 August 1943.

99. NASA Pta VWN 1037 SW 443/2 Minutes of Port Seamen's Welfare Committee 1943–1947.

100. NASA Pta VWN 1037 SW 443/2 Minutes of Port Seamen's Welfare Committee 1943–1947, 20 July 1943.

101. NASA Pta VWN 1037 SW 443/2 Minutes of Port Seamen's Welfare Committee 1943–1947.

102. I.C. Meer, “I Remember: Reminiscences of the Struggle for Liberation and the Role of Indian South Africans 1924–1958” (E.S. Reddy and F. Meer eds.), South African History Online, available at:  http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/i-remember-reminiscences-struggle-liberation-and-role-indian-south-africans-1924-1958-i-c accessed on 30 June 2016.

103. Swanson, Maynard, “The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony 1900–1909,” Journal of African History 18:3 (1977): 387–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

104. NASA Pta VWN 1037 SW 443/2 Minutes of Port Seamen's Welfare Committee 1943–1947, 25 May 1943.

105. NASA Pta VWN 1037 SW 443/2 Minutes of Port Seamen's Welfare Committee 1943–1947.

106. NASA Pta VWN 1037 SW 443/2 Minutes of Port Seamen's Welfare Committee 1943–1947, August 1943.

107. NASA Pta VWN 1037 SW 443/2 Minutes of Port Seamen's Welfare Committee 1943–1947, January 1944.

108. For the most insightful discussion of Smuts and the UN see: Mazower, Mark, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Future of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ, 2013)Google Scholar.

109. Grest, “Durban Council.”

110. Hemson, “Labour Circulation,” 99.

111. Callebert, “Working Class Action.”