The turbulent history of Durban’s Indian community is on show in two theatre productions and a photographic exhibition in the city
Alexander Sudheim
The World Conference against Racism provided a moment for the international community to take a long, hard look at difficult issues. The climate also provided an opportunity for local communities to reflect on their cultural identity in contemporary South Africa.
One such group has been the Indian community of Durban the largest Indian community outside India whose turbulent ride through South African history is documented in a brace of important theatre productions and an exhibition in Durban.
One of the classic protest plays from the Seventies is Kessie Govender’s Working Class Hero, a bitterly funny polemic
about the Indian community’s fraught relationship with apartheid. Govender wrote the play to “expose the double standards evinced by many South African Indians during the apartheid era”. The play, set on a construction site (audience members beware of flying bricks, mortar and wheelbarrows), shows the malicious and patronising attitude of an Indian chargehand and bricklayer toward their black “boy”, Frank, brilliantly portrayed by Govender.
The bricklayer’s brother arrives at the site looking for work. He is a university student who is appalled by his friends’ treatment of Frank.
“Its bad enough for him to be oppressed by the white man’s hatred and laws, but then to get Indian prejudice too now that’s a heavy burden,” he tells his brother.
“You shut up. I’ve got nothing to do with politics!” yells the brother.
His sibling retorts: “You’ve had everything to do with politics since you were born in a hospital reserved for blacks.”
Not required to carry the dreaded “dompas” nor quite as severely affected by job reservation, the Indian is shown caught in a limbo between the oppressor and the oppressed, cosying up to the former and distancing himself from the latter. Or, as Frank puts it: “The Indian he like it too much the colour bar.”
Unsurprisingly, when the play was first shown in Durban’s Stable Theatre in 1977, Govender faced the wrath of the Indian community. With the help of Indians whose rancour he had incurred, special branch policemen beat him up so badly he suffered fractured bones and a perforated eardrum.
Despite the 25-year lapse since the play’s inaugural performance, it remains fresh and relevant by virtue of its ability to steer clear of didactic resolutions. The characters are all too human; the gravitas is leavened by caustic wit and Govender eschews slogans and political grandstanding in favour of simply presenting the slice of life that he uncovered during the years he worked in the building trade.
Also dealing with Indian identity during the apartheid years is Imperial Ghetto, the remarkable exhibition of black-and-white photographs taken by Omar Badsha in Durban’s Grey Street area during the Eighties. The district was also referred to as the city’s “alternative CBD”. Badsha achieves great success in capturing the irony of the streets of this sprawling ghetto named after “Queen Victoria, her children and their retinue of imperial warmongers”, as he puts it.
“The ghetto grew,” he says, “as the poor and illiterate from the African and Indian countryside, together with the Bombay merchant, poured into the city to find themselves having to live cheek by jowl, being forced to bond because of their common disabilities and to create new identities in the margins of the white colonial city.”
Badsha echoes the concerns of Working Class Hero when he says: “The pictures are about growing up in the shadow of the 1949 race riots and the heroic efforts of the Dadoos, Naickers and the hundreds of socialist and congress activists to overturn the legacy of Gandhi’s Indianness and to forge an inclusive Africanness”.
Badsha’s own grandparents left the shores of Gujarat more than a century ago, a time that forms the starting point for another cultural exploration of Indian history and identity in South Africa.
The sumptuous dance-drama Sunghursh traces the history of the Indian people from before their migration from India to the present day, incorporating all the upheavals that took place along the way.
More of a celebration of Indian culture with a historic overview, the production adopts no political stance but elects to “tell the story and let the viewer draw his own conclusions”, says scriptwriter Rakesh Maharaj.
“The story starts in 1800 with the pure folk dances of India. Then we move to South Africa and the early struggle of Indians to establish themselves in Natal. The narrative moves from the Gandhi era to the post-Gandhi era of the Doctors’ Pact when Indians and Africans joined forces against apartheid. The 1949 riots, the Group Areas Act, the Freedom Charter, the armed struggle, the 1976 student uprising, the release of [Nelson] Mandela all these figure in the show,” says Maharaj.
The historical dimension is provided by narrative interludes, but the bulk of the production is made up by the spirited action provided by the Nateshwar Dance Company under the direction of Smeetha Maharaj.
The dances subtly mirror the storyline by moving from traditional to contemporary and culminating in a spectacular township dance sequence incorporating just about every dance style alive in South Africa today.
A vibrant, entertaining celebration of Indian culture that nevertheless remains politically conscious, Sung-hursh provides a potted history of South Africa’s Indian community and an interesting springboard into the darker realms of Indian identity explored by Imperial Ghetto and Working Class Hero.
The details
Working Class Hero runs at The Playhouse Little Theatre until September 15; Imperial Ghetto is on show at the Durban Art Gallery until September 20, and Sunghursh runs at The Playhouse Drama until September 16.