The waiting game

Love was flying across the colour line in Durban’s beachfront hotels, despite the Immorality Act. Black women were smuggled into the hotels for white men, white women were going out with rich Indian businessmen — money talked, but sometimes they fell in love — and sometimes love ended in suicide, because of the Immorality Act,” says retired waiter Eddie Naicker (57).

Now blind, Naicker lives in a sparse room at the Sol Namara Hotel in Chatsworth, yet he is sprightly and erudite, painting vivid pictures of working as a waiter at some of Durban’s famous hotels when the restaurants were whites-only spaces during apartheid.

As the catering industry continues to change, Naicker is part of that almost extinct breed from yesteryear: the career Indian waiter whose skills were gleaned from previous generations and whose efficiency — whether part-cliche, part-reality — has been installed in South African popular mythology. Some, like the waiters at the Britannia Hotel on Umgeni Road, are still hard at work, others, like Naicker, are slowly fading into the recesses of history.

Having started work as a ‘lift boy” in 1966, Naicker went on to work at six five-star hotels, including The Maharani and The Edward in Durban, and Johannesburg’s Sandton Towers and the Carlton Hotel.

His stories are vibrant and, despite the ugliness of apartheid society, without bitterness: ‘We were called names like Black Sam, we were taunted. They used to say ‘Kom hierso koelie [Come here coolie]’, but at the end of the day they would tip you R10, which in those days was like R100. There were bad-natured English-speaking whites and there were good English people, just as there were good and bad Afrikaners,” says Naicker.

Moonsamy Pillay (61), who worked at the restaurants in the Clairwood, Greyville and Scottsville racecourses in KwaZulu-Natal, remembers a neat trick to fleece particularly repugnant customers: ‘Sometimes customers would leave their winnings on the table and you’d think, ‘Hava, here’s a luck.’ We used to put cooked rice on the bottom of a plate and when you went around with a tray clearing up you’d press the plate with the rice over the winnings and notes would stick to the bottom,” he laughs.

Pillay is unapologetic: ‘That’s the waiter’s game; if my son came to me and said he needed a book for varsity that cost R80, how was I going to afford it if I was earning R250 a month? Now we have equal pay for equal work, but in those days a white man would earn R5 000 and we were getting R200 and we had to beg, borrow or steal to put our four children through varsity,” says Pillay.

Naicker says, in all his years of service, and despite being rude to people, he has never tampered with a customer’s food: ‘Within the eyes of God, we must all respect food. I’ve never seen jamaal kote, I don’t know what it looks like. I was told you could bleed to death through your anus from it, though,” he says of the mythical Indian concoction that is said to give people violent diarrhoea.

In the kitsch, dark Coimbra Bar at the Blue Waters Hotel on the beachfront, a large white man in sunglasses is speaking nonsense to no-one in particular, downing beer after beer. Barman Johnny Marimuthu (51), who has worked at places such as the Four Seasons Hotel and the Caster Hotel, smiles benignly: ‘As a barman, I’ve met many people like this over the years. You must have an ear because the customers, especially the drunks, will always speak to you.”

Yet dodgy customers weren’t always the hardest part of the job. With Indians forcibly removed from Durban’s central business district to the townships of Chatsworth and Phoenix, long shifts and lack of personal transport ensured a hard life. Every night there were two ‘waiters’ buses” at 11.30pm and 12.30am, which departed from the Killarney Hotel back to Chatsworth brimming with waiters drained by the day’s work and who had to be back at their posts, usually, at 6.30am the next morning.

‘If you start in catering as a young man, you will get soaked [with alcohol],” says Naicker, who remembers waiters stopping at the Himalaya House shebeen en route to work in the morning for ‘a nip, because many of us couldn’t get started without a shot in the morning”.

‘There is no secret to being a good waiter,” says Naicker. ‘Like any job — whether you’re working at the till in Checkers or in the post office — you need manners, and a passion for your job.”