The tip-off about a young Pakistani crew who were into punk music was proving as fruitless as a mango tree planted into a block of cement. Instead of an Asian Dub Foundation-esque group of musical guerillas chanting down Thabo Mbeki’s Babylon and fornicating with South African flags, I found an alt-rock band comprising Indian and Chinese kids from middle-class suburbia.
Cutting my losses, I headed into Durban’s central business district in search of something, anything, that overturned the usual Western stereotypes of Pakistanis as waiters in tandoori restaurants, pirate DVD sellers or religious zealots funding the clash of civilisations from their telephone-booth-size paan kiosks.
Saturday night and Albert Street is thick with the smell of tandoor ovens and the sounds of Bollywood music. Local families move between the notes towards the restaurants in this enclave which, over the past five or six years, has started to resemble the Pakistani/Bangladeshi quarter of the Grey Street casbah.
It is probably the only place in Durban where one can pick up a charger or a chintzy plastic cover for a cellphone at 11 at night. The street-side CD vendor is still out, selling everything from Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan recordings to Islamic nursery rhymes for R30.
The Bangladeshi tea room is pumping Bollywood beats and people are playing pool. Young men — some in beards and kurthas, others in jeans and T-shirts with gold chains around their necks — are gathering on the corner of Albert and Prince Edward streets to while away the next few hours chatting and planning the evening ahead.
There are virtually no women on the streets, aside from the wives and daughters of local families accompanied by their fathers and brothers.
The norm, it seems, is that Pakistani and Bangladeshi men make their journey to South Africa unfettered by their wives, daughters and girlfriends.
Ashafak Bhatti, maitre’d at Bismillah’s, a recent offshoot of the popular Pakistani restaurant in Fordsburg, Johannesburg, tells me he has been in South Africa for nine years and his wife will visit him in two months — for the first time.
‘I don’t like South African girls because sometimes they rob us,” says Imraan Khan (25), who works as a waiter in Bismillah’s. ‘They just use us for our money and when we don’t have any, we don’t see them,” he says.
That the ex-pat Pakistani and Bangladeshi community is male-dominated and relatively insular is obvious, which raises questions about the extent of the cultural impact on South Africa of the increasing influx of these immigrants: Islam maintains that a sense of fraternity exists with locals, yet, in the majority, the men seem to keep to themselves, working almost seven days a week and whiling away their spare time watching Bollywood films and listening to classical and modern Eastern music.
Khan is a Bangladeshi who left his birthplace because he ‘wanted to get an outside knowledge of the world, which I wouldn’t have if I stayed in Feni.
‘I don’t have time to listen to South African music, so I don’t know it very well,” he says. Khan has lived here for a year and a half and spends most of his spare time on the Internet, watching Bollywood DVDs and listening to music from the Indian subcontinent.
It is a view shared by many on the streets. It would, perhaps, be overly optimistic and unfair to insist on some mangling of musical genres drawing from Africa, the West and the East coming out of this immigrant population. After all, that there are no Durban bands drawing on indigenous, Indian and Western musical forms to create a new sound, in the manner of the ‘British Asian Underground” of the Nineties.
Considering the proliferation, for decades, of North and South Indian restaurants and those that draw on the Pakistani traditions in Durban, the culinary impact is also limited. Nothing new has been introduced to the South African palate, unless, of course, one considers a variation on the spicing of dishes.
In the main, engagement between South Africans and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis seems to exist over food and the memory of a constructed homeland. But perhaps this is just the beginning.
Tasty titbits
Bismillah’s Restaurant
85 Albert Street, Durban. Tel: (031) 301 9285
Much cheaper than the fine-dining restaurants in Morningside and Musgrave, Bismillah’s speciality is, of course, the Tandoori chicken (R19 for a quarter chicken with chips), which is more subtly spiced than most of its Pakistani counterparts. Recommended is the Chicken Tikka Masala (R29), which is enveloped in a pungent tomato-based sauce, the ingredients of which are more closely guarded than the details of Bush’s ‘fact-finding” mission through Lahore’s red-light district.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
A name and sublime voice synonymous with qawwali music and its modernisation, Khan has recorded with Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder on the Dead Man Walking soundtrack, been sampled by artists such as Asian Dub Foundation and Fundamental and possessed the vocal range of a demigod. He recorded more than 100 albums before his death in 1997. Check out Guiseppe Asaro’s 1999 documentary, A Voice from Heaven. — Niren Tolsi