Back in the day

The nation met at Pumpy Naidoo’s Goodwill Lounge in Victoria Street — black, coloured, Indian — the food flowed, the booze flowed, the best musicians played and the women were liberal with their favours. This was the life, man. We were living in the First World and that is what the National Party wanted to stamp out. They thought they could destroy the real South Africa — what a bunch of fucking twits!” says retired journalist Farook Khan, reminiscing about his time on the beat for Drum magazine and the Golden City Post in the Fifties and Sixties.

For the old timers who remember the Grey Street casbah area in Durban during the Fifties, those were the wonder years of sporting excellence, when ‘men and boys were separated by this amazing game called soccer or, if you really wanted to show your strength, boxing, or your brute force, wrestling,” says Khan. With the National Party assuming power in 1948 and legislation such as the Group Areas Act being passed at the beginning of the decade, it was also a time of uncertainty, when things became increasingly political. Forced removals to townships such as Phoenix and Chatsworth were looming and life had a certain transience, compelling one to live harder. Gangsters stepped out in Savile Row suits as sharp as the razors in their pockets and notions of white supremacy were being overturned every day.

Nostalgia and hyperbole will always be handmaidens to the past. But, for those who experienced the street brawls and stick fights, the broken goal-posts after a Dharam Mohan screamer, the smoky, jazz-filled nights at the Goodwill Lounge or Himalaya Hotel and the mass political gatherings at Red Square (now a parking lot), reimagining time and place as an amalgamation of Paris’s Left Bank and New Orleans’ Latin Quarter — with dashes of Al Capone’s Chicago all spiced with films and fashion from Hollywood and Bollywood — is inescapable.

‘My wife always says I am still stuck in that time,” says writer Aziz Hassim, whose novel The Lotus People crosses over into that era as it moves from 19th-century India to post-apartheid South Africa. ‘Those were glorious days and those stories must be told,” says Hassim. He identified the casbah area as running from Darby Street near Greyville Racecourse in the north to Pine Street in the central business district, from Soldiers Way up to Warwick Avenue on the fringe of the Berea. It was a place where the ‘real South Africa” converged.

Hassim speaks of street-smart young black men affecting coloured accents and ‘choons” to be allowed into pubs, while Khan digs up newspaper clippings from the Post about a white man applying to the Department of Home Affairs to be reclassified as coloured so he could marry his lover — this after the harsh Immorality Act of 1950.

Influenced by Hollywood films such as The Street With No Name, the gangsters who emerged in the Fifties were intrinsically linked to the area’s mythology. According to Hassim there were always street gangs, but the infamous Crimson League had its roots as a vigilante group formed by businessmen in the area who were tired of being hit by a gang of ‘raw thieves who would walk into shops, extort, steal and do as they pleased”.

‘Legend has it that one of the old ballies [men] said: ‘Destroy the bastards, let the streets run crimson with their blood.’ And that’s how the name came about. Then the businessmen realised that there was more to life than running a shop, that there was easy money to be made and that they could be a law unto themselves,” says Hassim.

With the Crimson League spreading its tentacles, a turf war broke out when the gang tried to move into the Salot family’s territory. Old Man Salot and his sons — Lighty, Mascot, Gloves and Dee — ran legitimate businesses, such as a taxi-operation from Durban harbour into the CBD, until they were threatened. What ensued was a bloody war that, ‘according to legend, Big Daddy, who was the head of the the Big Five [the Crimson League’s board of directors], ordered the murder of Lighty Salot and insisted his head be chopped in two with a tomahawk,” says Khan. ‘They got some young guys to take out Lighty, but then the Salots started flexing their muscles and they started taking out the Big Five. Strangely enough, they did it using iron bars and a tomahawk.”

With black musicians slowly being allowed to play to white audiences in white establishments, the Salots become ‘the patrons of the arts”, according to Khan, as they allegedly started running marijuana into white hotels and clubs. Hassim emphasises that the gangs operated with a degree of benevolence toward the community around them. Their main rackets were running fah-fee (gambling) schools, selling black-market cinema tickets, love interests (if a young woman ran away with somebody of a different caste or religion, someone her family deemed inappropriate, the gang would return her for a fee) and extorting money from businesses.

‘The only really lousy thing was their extorting of big businesses, but these business were indirectly extorting their workers, so you judge the morality there,” says Hassim.

Activist and author Phyllis Naidoo remembers an incident when the Dutchene Gang from Old Dutch Road in the neighbourhood where she used to live came to her assistance: ‘I was having a problem with my husband — not MD Naidoo, that other fellow — and he set a gang on me. Just as they circled me, the Dutchenes appeared from absolutely nowhere and circled them. They kept asking me, ‘Are you all right, teacher? Are you all right?’ I could walk anywhere in Durban and feel safe.”

‘The police only cared about enforcing apartheid. And they didn’t even try to come into the casbah, because they were never sure if they could get out. So we turned to the gangs if we needed something done,” says Hassim. If the gangsters assumed near-mythical status, so too did the sportsmen during that era.

‘[Papwa Sewgolum] gave great hope to the Indian community. His victories proved that people who weren’t white were just as good, if not better, and deserved the same political, social and economic rights,” says Judge Chris Nicholson, who wrote the biography Papwa Sewgolum: From Pariah to Legend.

Sewgolum, with his unorthodox reverse grip, beat Gary Player at the 1965 Natal Open. It was the year that Player was at the top of his game, winning the World Cup Invitational, United States Open, South African Open and Australian Open. Sewgolum was, in later years, banned from playing in South Africa and had his passport revoked, which ultimately ended his career.

Hassim feels apartheid helped break down the sense of community that developed during those years. With forced removals to ghettos in Phoenix and Chatsworth, the gangs’ influence dwindled as those areas which spewed forth their own mafia and soon ‘everybody was connected.”

Townships didn’t have sports grounds, gymnasiums and cinemas — only Mandrax — and community profiles changed. Freedoms were crushed and, with that, hope.

‘I know of good, committed men who didn’t want to go to jail just because they housed their families in areas which were now considered ‘white’, so they committed suicide,” says Khan, rifling through a copy of the Post. He points to a story about an Indian woman caught en flagrante with a white man in a car, and another of an old tailor who slit his throat after unsuccessfully spending eight years trying to bring his new wife from India to South Africa.

‘We wrote the stories to keep all of it alive, even the absurd bullshit of apartheid society. We dealt with fact and not comment, and we showed what was happening. Everything.”

A community in black and white

The Durban Art Gallery hosts an exhibition of images from watershed Fifties South African magazine Drum. The show is curated by Riason Naidoo, past coordinator of the Department of Arts and Culture initiative to restore ancient manuscripts found in Timbuktu, Mali.

In 2004, Naidoo curated a groundbreaking exhibition of the images of veteran photographer Ranjith Kally, whose work also appears on the current exhibition. The Indian in Drum in the Fifties opened on May 24 at the Durban Art Gallery, where Naidoo previously functioned as education and media officer.

‘At its peak, Drum magazine had a readership of 450 000, distributed as far as the Caribbean and the United States, with stories emanating from Sophiatown, Victoria Street and District Six,” says Naidoo.

‘Due to the material condition of the past, South Africans remain a people who know little of each other, where stereotypes created under apartheid perpetuate to this day. The exhibition was conceived to restore a lived historical memory recalling an unofficial Indian history that confronts labels of the homogenous Indian, symbolised by the likes of the wealthy Indian shopkeeper. It reveals a rich and varied Fifties culture, beyond the borders of Sophiatown.”

The photographs were taken by some of the most outstanding practitioners of the era — names such as Kally, GR Naidoo, Gopal Naransamy and Barney Desai. According to Naidoo, they can now take their places in the hall of fame alongside legends such as Jürgen Schadeberg, Bob Gosani, Peter Magubane and Alf Khumalo, whose work is also represented in the exhibition.

The Indian in Drum in the Fifties expands on this rich past with cinema owners in Fordsburg, glamour models, trapeze artists, the Seine fishing community and ballroom dancers, confirmation of a more multifaceted South African Indian history than the static, homogenous one that has thus far been represented.

The exhibition runs at The Durban Art Gallery on the 2nd floor of the Durban City Hall in Smith Street until July 23 and entry is free. For more information, call (031) 311 2269.

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