Essay: Anti-blackness as a point of familiarity for SA Indians

[I originally wrote this for a class last year but reworked it for here. When researching this piece, I found precious little about antiblack racism and model minority in south africa so i’m putting this out in the internet so we can continue/start discussion. Disclaimer1: race is not fixed, but the social realities attached to it are. Antiblackness is not fixed, but the social realities of it are.]

I’m going to use the moment of Julius Malema’s speech at the fourth birthday celebration in Durban this year as one to analyse the flow of power between Black and Indian people in SA. There are many other moments — AmaNdiya being banned, Indian middle-class housewives not paying helpers properly, Indian people saying the n-word — but this moment happened recently, and I couldn’t miss how steamed some family I know, was about Malema’s comments.

Some of his rousing speech was directly addressed Indian shop owners and what Malema stated as their “sub-human” (Malema, 2017) treatment of African staff. On a closer reading of his statement, you see that Malema has not disorientated South African public, despite the unwarranted backlash from a variety of brown people — he is in fact highlighting Indo-African conflicts and South African Indian racism that can be traced to the times of indenture (Vahed and Desai, 2010a) and perhaps, before then.

So, how do I — as a person coming from a history of indenture make sense of this of both Malema’s comment and the Indian reactions to it? This essay looks at Malema’s comments in depth, and at how Indian South Africans, South African Indians, Indians, people of South Asian descent (we have many names and have not entirely settled in any of them) have reacted to these statements — and what it says about belonging, inter-racial relations and identity. This essay specifically addresses the figuration of Indian people created through the lineage of indentured labour and to a lesser extent, I look at the figure of the passenger or merchant Indian. It is out of the scope of this essay to truly grapple with the heterogeneity of Indianness (this concept is in flux, but this paper goes into it further) in South Africa, such as history of South Asian slaves in the Western Cape. For more information on the Indian slave diaspora, this thesis is a good place to start.

Master Coolie arrives again and again and again

What happens past the point of recognition?

It was at the EFF’s fourth anniversary celebrations in Durban that Malema said: “We also want to call upon our fellow Indians here in Natal to respect Africans. They are ill-treating them worse than Afrikaners will do. We don’t want that to continue here in Natal. This is not anti-Indian statement, it is the truth. If we tell whites the truth, if we tell blacks the truth — we can tell Indians as well,”(Malema, 2017).

Malema clearly states his point and in doing so, has tapped into discussions about the place of Indian people in South Africa — just as he has addressed the place of Black and white people in South Africa. Malema addresses shop owners, harking back to tropes of the stranger trader that come to be associated with Indian people, as well as of the conniving businessperson, who has, according to the same speech by Malema, “captured the ANC [in Durban]”. The differences between Indian people like the Gupta family (who came with massive wealth in India to work and live in post-apartheid South Africa) and that of ex-indentured Indian people in South Africa is a topic for another essay, too. Of importance to this essay, however, is that they are perceived to be one and the same. The Indian figure invoked in this speech is a homogeneous vision — and one which South African Indian people see themselves as, and are seen from the outside (Vahed and Desai, 2010b). The EFF has made much of their fan-base by appealing to people who need “bread and butter issues” addressed — the same issues that Vahed and Desai (2010b) state working class Indian people are invested in. So why the fighting? for resources, services, a home? Well, we have to rewind a bit.

In the creation of a ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the relationship between Black and Indian people, it is important to understand how Indian indentured labourers slotted into the wider colonial project occurring in India and South Africa. The first appearance of Indian people in the colonial public sphere in Durban (barring slavery, which disorients and complicates singular narratives about the Indian people in South Africa) in the same place that Malema said his speech locates the Indians he refers to from the Indians of past.

From Vahed and Desai’s Inside Indian Indenture we get this narrative from the white Natal Mercury editor: “A very remarkable scene was the landing of the first batch of Indian indentured labourers and one well worth remembrance and record. The swarthy hordes came pouring out of the boat’s hold […] A queer, comical, foreign-looking, very Oriental-like crowd. The men, with their huge muslin turbans, bare scraggy skin-bones, and coloured garments; the women with their flashing eyes, long dishevelled pitchy hair, with their half covered, well-formed figures and keen inquisitive glance […] they were all evidently beings of a different race and kind to any we have yet seen. Master Coolie seems to make himself quite at home.” (Vahed and Desai, 2010a: 62)

From there Vahed and Desai describe the role of indentured labourers: they functioned on the side of the British Empire against amaZulu in Natal. There was a shortage of “ultra-cheap labour” (Vahed and Desai, 2010a: 62) on the various plantations that the British set up in the area. Indentured labourers were forced to fill the gap — a contentious position to be slotted into.

The merchant class came slightly after the original group of indentured labourers in 1860. Their place has been problematised publicly since the 1950s. Robert Sobukwe said the following of both the indentured coolies and the merchants who came to South Africa from India: “This group came to this country not as imperialists or colonialists, but as indentured labourers. In the South African set-up of today, this group is an oppressed minority.

“But there are some members of this group, the merchant class in particular, who have become tainted with the virus of cultural supremacy and national arrogance. This class identifies itself by and large with the oppressor but, significantly, this is the group, which provides the political leadership of the Indian people in South Africa. And all that the politics of this class have meant up to now is preservation and defence of the sectional interests of the Indian merchant class.” This echoes the same points Malema spoke to: he was not addressing Indian dockworkers, teachers, or factory workers — but specifically shop owners.

Sobukwe continues: “The down-trodden, poor ‘stinking coolies’ of Natal who, alone, as a result of the pressure of material conditions, can identify themselves with the indigenous African majority in the struggle to overthrow White supremacy, have not yet produced their leadership.” (Sobukwe, 1959)

Violent clashes, leading to multiple injuries for Black and Indian people occurred in 1949. As Vahed and Desai (2010b: 3) note, “this violent experience haunted Indo-Africans relations throughout the period of apartheid […] tension between Indian and African was a persistent feature of the landscape and continues into the present.”

So, what to make of the constant reappearance of the exploitative trader? It is a homogenous figure, one that coalesces with the colonial invention of the Coolie and actual, racist practices and beliefs held firmly by Indian people towards Black people.

The misrecognition of the Indian figure is interesting, as it plays to years of the same narrative, in the same discursive space of the formal, political sphere.

“While their everyday lives are increasingly distant from India, they remain “Indian” in the eyes of fellow South Africans and to themselves.” (Vahed and Desai, 2010b: 4).

Mupotsa (2015: 191) describes an example from Lacan that further illustrates the point of mis/recognition of South African Indians of themselves. “The mirror has the function of linking our individual psyches with the outside in the process of subjectivation.” The example given is of an infant coming to understand their body and how they look through the image in the mirror. The infant however, can only understand their body when that idealised projection from the mirror “connects with and is produced through language.” As Mupotsa (191) goes on to state, bodies are “always already produced out of socio-historical and cultural understandings within the symbolic order.”

When thinking about Malema calling out Indian business owners, and demanding “respect for Africans from Indians”, the argument of Indian ‘looks’ is very important, as the example shows. Sobukwe and Malema can be seen to be part of a south african counterpublic. Malema’s comments also function as destabilising the superstructure of post-apartheid South Africa — of non-racialism in particular. As Ahmed (2006) points out, this disorientation could be the beginning of a new line of thought — in this case rethinking the relationship between Black and Indian people, and South African Indians re-evaluating their/our racist orientation and assumed superiority over Black people.

To the diaspora, what is familiar?

“It is not that disorientation is always radical. Bodies that experience disorientation can be defensive […] as they search for a place to reground and reorientate their relationship to the world.” (Ahmed, 2006: 158).

Ahmed puts her finger on the issue — commentary from many Indian people has been to ignore the comments, over-exaggerate them, point to affirmative action as discriminatory towards Indian people (wrong!) or outright counter it with racist comments about Malema. Minority Front (a political party aimed at the South African working class in Kwa-Zulu Natal primarily) reacted with a mixture of political rhetoric about the Rainbow Nation by stating that Malema’s comments were “trying very hard to frustrate the democratic gains of social cohesion and nation building and is deepening the divide between blacks and Indians” (Naidoo, 2017).

It seems, by looking at this comment, that the jagged point of familiarity that South African Indian people hold on to when Black people call their/ our racist behaviour to account is the democratic project. The difference is acknowledged, but only in the negative — to dismiss the entirety of Malema’s points. A laager around Indian anti-blackness and racism is built, or rather, maintained.

Examining another post-colonial context — that of the Caribbean, with the same kinds of indentured labour system and immigration of peoples from India, proves helpful in contextualising how South African Indians of indentured descent are seen, and see themselves and their bodies in the formal political, public sphere.

Fanon (1969) explains that the French defeat in 1945 as well as the growing popularity and significance of Negritude, led to the following metaphysical crisis of the West Indian. “In every West Indian, before the war of 1939, there was not only the certainty of a superiority over the African, but the certainty of a fundamental difference. The African was a Negro and the West Indian a European” (Fanon, 1969: 20)

“After the West Indian was obliged, under the pressure of European racists, to abandon positions which were essentially fragile; because they were absurd, because they were incorrect, because they were alienating, a new generation came into being […] Then, with his eyes on Africa, the West Indian was to hail it.” (Fanon, 1969: 26–27)

This statement from Fanon highlights some of the ideas of anti-blackness that permeate Indian communities — whether middle or working class, merchant or ex-indentured. Butler’s discussion in The Psychic Life of Power (1997) is particularly useful here. Butler uses Althusser’s example of the policeman hailing a subject, and the subject’s turn towards the policeman as interpellation (Butler, 1997: 9). “The subject is itself a site of this ambivalence in which the subject emerges both as the effect of a prior power and as the condition of possibility for a radically conditioned form of agency.” The West Indian, in Fanon’s Martinique, is one that uses their agency to orient themselves to Africa and blackness.

Fanon terms the trajectory of West Indians after 1945 as the search for the “great black mirage” (Fanon, 1969: 27), however, what is of importance here is the interplay between Africans and West Indians once West Indians realised they were not in fact Europeans.

“They said to the Africans, “Don’t pay attention to my white skin, my soul is as black as yours, and that is what matters.” But the Africans were too resentful of them to allow them so easy a turnabout. Recognized in their blackness […] in what fifteen years before had been sin, they resented any encroachment on the West Indian’s part in this realm. The West Indian had said no to the white man; the African was saying no to the West Indian.” (Fanon, 1969: 26)

What is relevant to South African Indians is pre-metaphysical crisis, so to say. Vahed and Lal (2013) have written extensively on the invented traditions of indentured peoples in South Africa, and how indentured labourers sense of identity (whether produced through caste, region or language) was figuratively and literally dislocated and disorientated from the homeland, India. A position, and perhaps a familiar place to ground themselves in South African Indianness is made clearer by the apartheid hierarchy of resources and rigidity of racial positions (however fictitious and cruel). Malema’s comments are situated in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, and the ‘Indian’ category is perhaps looser on a surface level, but the ideas of Indianness produced through colonialism and apartheid continue. South African Indians were placed below white people in this hierarchy — leading to better services, than people designated as Coloured and African, whom they were ‘above’.

Vahed and Desai (2010b: 3) corroborate this by noting that interaction between Black and Indian people “is largely superficial at the levels of day-to-day interaction and socialisation. Apartheid contributed to this distancing by legally separating “races” but questions of affirmative action and access to resources are reproducing old stereotypes in new ways.”

“Bound to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms and names that are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its own existence outside itself, in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent.” (Butler, 1997: 20)

This seems to align with the comments made by Indian people who dismiss, ignore and get angry at Malema’s call to Indian people to do better. Although racial discrimination shaped the social conditions of my family — their place, seemingly cemented during apartheid — became their space of familiarity. But why live, love and accumulate so much wealth (as a minority group in South Africa, Indians make up 14% of millionaires post-1994 (Fakie, 2017)) in a place where you are racist to majority of the country? The answer may come from Berlant (2006), whose concept of cruel optimism explains the affective reasoning and tendency of people to be attached to desires that offer “compromised conditions of possibility” (Berlant, 2006: 21). “One makes affective bargains about the costliness of one’s attachments, usually unconscious ones, most of which keep one in the proximity of desire/attrition.” (Berlant, 2006: 21).

As diasporic individuals, South African Indians have been inextricably tied to the social conditions of different symbolic orders. Their sense of home, place in South Africa has been contested and that feeling of not ‘being black or white’ that Fanon (speaking about West Indians) alludes to, may have led to the current position of attachment to India as better than South Africa, due, in part, to racist ideas of Africa and Black people. The ugliness of white supremacy has changed the ways that Indian people view themselves, and as a defense, they/we hold onto racist and anti-black ways.

This essay does not argue that Indian people have hardened and unchanging views of race and racism, but, for now the situation is that anti-blackness, and its attendant racism, is the orientation of South African Indians and more work is needed — more self reflection, and acting in ways that may seem unfamiliar and destabilise privilege, but could lead to new ways of being here.

Some other references (I haven’t read all of them!):

South Asians, it’s time to call out our anti-blackness

The unpleasant reality of Gandhi in South Africa

Anti-blackness in Asian-American Communities

Workshop plan on confronting anti-blackness in South Asian communities by Queer South Asian National Network. If anyone is interested in doing this in Jozi let me kno!

References:

· Ahmed, Sara. 2006. “Introduction: Find Your Way” & “Conclusion: Disorientation and Queer Objects” in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 1–24; 157–179.

· Berlant, Lauren. 2006. “Cruel Optimism” in differences: A journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 17 (3): 20–36.

· Butler, Judith. 1997. “Introduction” in Psychic Life of Power. Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press. pp. 1–30.

· Fakie, Ayesha. 2017. Daily Maverick. Let’s talk about Indian privilege in apartheid South Africa. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2017-08-30-lets-talk-about-indian-privilege-in-apartheid-south-africa/#.Wa0vk8gjHIX. Accessed on 1 September 2017.

· Fanon, Frantz. 1969. “West Indians and Africans” in Toward the African revolution: political essays. New York: Grove Press. pp. 17–28.

· Fraser, Nancy. 1991. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy” in Justice Interruptus: Critical reflections on the ‘postsocialist’ condition. New York & London: Routledge, pp. 69–98.

· Lal, Vinay and Vahed, Goolam. 2013. Hinduism in South Africa: Caste, Ethnicity and Invented Traditions 1860-Present. Journal of Social Anthropology. 4(1–2): pp 1–15.

· Mupotsa, Danai. 2015. “The promise of happiness: desire, attachment and freedom in post/apartheid South Africa” in Critical Arts 29 (2): 183–198.

· Malema, Julius. 2017. Trending SA. Julius Malema Gives Strong warning to Indians. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9QLyKUEDNU. Accessed on 1 September 2017.

· Naidoo, Yasantha. 2017. TimesLive. ‘Indians who own shops don’t pay our people’ — Malema’s racial remarks condemned. https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2017-07-31-indians-who-own-shops-dont-pay-our-people-malemas-racial-remarks-condemned/ . Accessed on 1 September 2017.

· Patel Dadi, Aaisha. 2017. Mail & Guardian. Malema might have a point about South African Indian people. https://mg.co.za/article/2017-08-02-malema-might-have-a-point-about-south-african-indian-people. Accessed on 1 September 2017.

· Sobukwe, Robert. 1959. Robert Sobukwe Inaugural Speech, April 1959 http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/robert-sobukwe-inaugural-speech-april-1959. Accessed on 1 September 2017.

· Vahed, Goolam & Desai, Ashwin. 2010a. Inside Indian Indenture. A South African Story, 1860–1914. Cape Town: HSRC Press.

Vahed, Goolam & Desai, Ashwin. 2010b. Identity and Belonging in Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Case of Indian South Africans. Journal of Social Science. 25 (1–2–3): pp. 1–12.