EXTRACT: ’For activists, the test was to find ways of organising that both acknowledged and challenged existing racial categories imposed by the apartheid state, while prefiguring the non-racialism and progressive eroding of poverty and inequality that was envisaged in the society to come.’
THERE were murmurings of the revival of the NIC from the late 1960s. The city of Durban, in which these discussions were taking place was the site of renewed anti-apartheid organising and debate. Steve Biko and a coterie of university students were propagating the philosophy of Black Consciousness that preached unity of the oppressed and disenfranchised, and sought to galvanise Africans, Coloureds, and Indians into a single organisation.
Workers were also on the march, pounding the streets of Durban in the 1973 strikes and signalling the possibility of collective organisation. Emergent subjectivities reached back into old organisations, others willed new ones into existence. These stirrings after a period of relative “quietism” have come to be seen as the “Durban Moment”.
The NIC was officially revived in 1971 in an environment of renewed anti-apartheid politics combined with dislocation and uncertainty, as new residents of the bare townships on the city’s edge began to build their cultural and sporting organisations once more, while others who had escaped the dragnet, faced the constant spectre of a piece of paper commanding them to leave their home.
But just as the state sought to hem Indians into tight racial corners, so new opportunities were opening. As the 1970s unfolded, the state’s “own (racial) affairs” policy kicked in and the apartheid civil service offered long-term job security.
For the first time, Indians were graduating in substantial numbers with professional qualifications from the newly constructed University of Durban-Westville (UDW). Many, taking advantage of relaxed inter-provincial movement, found well-paying jobs in the country's economic epicentre on the Highveld. Thousands of teachers, degrees in hand, were able to imagine a stable middle-class life as the schooling system expanded, and opportunities for promotion increased.
In many senses, as much as the headlines were grabbed by the debates over the “I” in the NIC, the newly revived organisation was also propelled by movements on the ground as people in the new Group Areas began to organise and confront the authorities on issues that affected their everyday lives.
One of the first examples was the banning in 1973 of Indian-owned buses in Chatsworth to force commuters onto trains. It spurred commuters and bus-owners into massive protests. The newly minted NIC leadership responded with solidarity work, giving it an early taste of mass organisation after nearly a decade on the side-lines. The flooding of Tin Town on the Springfield Flats in 1976 once more saw the NIC come to the fore.
This form of community support gave impetus to the formation of the Phoenix Working Committee (PWC) and Chatsworth Housing Action Committee (CHAC). These experiments in community organising eventually led to the establishment of the Durban Housing Action Committee (DHAC).
For activists, the test was to find ways of organising that both acknowledged and challenged existing racial categories imposed by the apartheid state, while prefiguring the non-racialism and progressive eroding of poverty and inequality that was envisaged in the society to come.
In the chapters ahead we detail these developments.
The NIC also had to contend with the often hostile and deeply divisive debates that emerged between the adherents of the BCM, who argued for a People’s Congress, and those who wanted to retain the “I” in the NIC. While Steve Biko was rebuffed by the NIC, he ironically faced a blacklash for what some of his comrades saw as too close a relationship with Indians.
NIC activists were far from wilting flowers in defending themselves against those they saw as a challenge to their dominance of the progressive voice of the Indian community. The problem with the BCM, according to senior NIC figure Paul David, was that it was “an idea mainly in the head… The leading lights in the BCM were all students.
“You compare that to the way the Congress movement grew among students. We were not just students… We were involved everywhere at a practical level. And so the idea that that this was just a notion was not our weakness. But it was certainly a problem with the BCM. It was debate, debate, debate”.
The leftist Non-European Unity Movement, formed in the Cape in 1943, and whose membership comprised mainly of intellectuals, was written off as a talking shop whose members “would come to meetings and put up this rhetoric”, according to NIC executive member Thumba Pillay, who noted “that is where action ended”.
Or as NIC executive member Jerry Coovadia put it, “the Unity Movement guys were full of reams of criticism, but it’s easy to be like them. They can give you a dissertation on everything but they will not do a damn thing to make anything happen. They were great theoreticians. They knew everything about say, Lenin. Lenin’s second wife was this and third wife was this and, but they couldn’t translate history into anything meaningful”.
In this study, we situate discussion about the “I” in the NIC in the broader context of the liberation movement and the orientation of the ANC. Despite the narrative of the “unbreakable thread of non-racialism”, the issue of membership of non-Africans dogged the ANC. The approach from the inauguration of the alliance between the Indian Congresses and the ANC, which envisioned “equality under African leadership”, lent itself to a fog about what non-racialism meant in practice. Robben Island itself was not immune from the debate.
In a purported ANC leadership contest between Nelson Mandela and Govan Mbeki on Robben Island, that split along so-called nationalist and communist lines, the right of non-Africans to vote in the leadership struggle was questioned.
According to Ahmed Kathrada, who was imprisoned on Robben Island at the time, as the debate rose to a crescendo, everything pointed towards an election. The “Communist bloc” realised that in order to have a fighting chance, they needed to reduce the number of potential Mandela supporters… They argued that because the ANC constitution limited membership to Africans, Indian and Coloured comrades would not be allowed to vote.
The ANC opened its membership to non-Africans at the Morogoro Conference of 1969, but they were excluded from standing for election to the national executive. They could, though, be members of the newly created Revolutionary Council, and Yusuf Dadoo, an Indian, was its vice-chairperson, alongside Reg September, a Coloured, and the white Communist, Joe Slovo.
But the ANC “had to tread carefully, always wary of the ideological force of hard-core Africanists among its members (and political rivals)". It was only at the Kabwe Conference in 1985 that the ANC’s national executive committee (NEC) was thrown open to non-Africans.
This storyline over ways of organising, and African leadership and non-racialism sparked by the NIC’s revival, and the challenge of BCM runs through this book. Stated baldly, the NIC was an ethnic/racial organisation committed to the building of a non-racial South Africa.
To this end, it was always haunted by a Janus-faced gaze; seeking to reach out and develop links with Africans while defending the need to organise Indians separately. There were many nuances to this position, complicated by the seeming paradox of an ANC which espoused non-racialism while emphasising African leadership. This conundrum was a persistent theme which the NIC had to negotiate throughout this period.
This Janus-faced gaze fed into allegations of an Indian cabal which surfaced in the 1980s and which continues to live into the present…This study interrogates how the allegations of “cabals” emerged and were maintained in various discursive forms. There were several sightings of the cabal in different locations: the NIC cabal in which a small leadership group supposedly made key decisions in the UDF and the ANC underground, that seeped above ground post-1990.
We pursue the different threads of these assertions which refuse to leave the stage despite the demise of the NIC…
Given the important role played by the NIC in the last decade of the anti-apartheid Struggle, and the continuing resonance of the issues it grappled with especially the lingering chestnut of race, this is an important and compelling story of people committed to destroying apartheid, and dreaming of a new society that would be built out of the ashes.
**This is an edited extract from “Colour, Class and Community – The Natal Indian Congress, 1971-1994”, by Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed.
**Desai is a professor of sociology at the University of Johannesburg and Vahed is an Associate Professor in the Discipline of History, Society and Social Change at the UKZN Howard College Campus.
***Published by Wits University Press. A limited number of signed copies are available from Ike’s Bookshop, 48a Florida Road.