LIVELIHOOD STRATEGIES OF DOCK WORKERS IN DURBAN, c. 1900-1959 by Ralph Frans Callebert A thesis submitted to the Department of History in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (September, 2011) Copyright © Ralph Frans Callebert, 2011 Abstract This dissertation examines the livelihood strategies of African dock workers in Durban, South Africa, between the Anglo-Boer War and the 1959 strikes. These labourers did not conform to common conceptions of radical dock workers or conservative African migrant workers. While Marxist scholars have been correct to stress the working class consciousness of Durban’s dock workers, this consciousness was also more ambiguous. These workers and their leaders displayed a peculiar mix of concern for workers’ issues and defences of the rights and interests of African traders. Many of Durban’s dock workers were not only wage labourers. In fact, only a minority had wages as their only source of income. The Reserve economy played a role in sustaining the consumption levels of their households and, more importantly, more than half of the former dock workers interviewed for this research engaged in some form of commercial enterprise, often based on the pilferage and sale of cargoes. Some also teamed up with township women who sold pilfered goods while the men were at work. This combination of commercial strategies and wage labour has often been overlooked in the literature. By looking at these livelihood strategies, this dissertation considers how rural and urban economies interacted in households’ strategies and reinterprets the reproduction of labour and the household in order to move beyond dichotomies of proletarian versus rural consciousness. The dock workers’ households were neither proletarian households that were forced to reside in the countryside because of apartheid, nor traditional rural homesteads with a missing migrant member. The households were reproduced in three geographically separate spheres of production and consumption, none of which could reproduce the household on its own. These spheres were dependent on each other, but also separate, as physical distance gave the different ii household members some autonomy. Such multi-nodal households not only bridged the rural and the urban, but equally straddled the formal/informal divide. For many, their employment on the docks made their commercial enterprises possible, which allowed them to retire early from urban wage labour. Consequently, the interests of wage labourers could not be divorced from those of African small-scale entrepreneurs. iii Acknowledgements Many people have helped me in different ways during this doctoral degree. Without their assistance, I would never have been able to research and write this dissertation. Most importantly, this research would have been impossible without the help of Sibongo Dlamini and the co- operation of sixty-seven interviewees, sixty-five of whom were once dock workers. I cannot and will not claim that this dissertation can in any way represent their lived experiences, but I do hope to have captured at least an accurate description and analysis of their livelihood strategies and to have done justice to their stories. It is after all only the labour of the working class that makes it possible for others to engage in intellectual labour. My supervisors at Queen’s University, Marc Epprecht and Robert Shenton, have provided both intellectual and practical guidance and challenged me to think in new ways about African and South African history, and to question my own ideas. Bill Freund, with whom I worked on my M.A. at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, also provided important guidance, encouragement, and feedback throughout my research and writing, both while I was a student at UKZN and afterwards. I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to work with and learn from these exceptional scholars. I am also grateful to David Hemson, who wrote a landmark dissertation on dock workers in Durban in the 1970s and has given me valuable advice. I also wish to thank David Moore for his hospitality while I was doing research in Johannesburg and for his advice ever since I first met him at UKZN. I want to thank the School of Politics at UKZN for accommodating me during my research in Durban. The staff, archivists, and librarians at the Killie Campbell Africana Library and Campbell Collections at UKZN, the Historical Paper Collection at the University of the Witwatersrand, and the South African National Archives depositories in Durban, iv Pietermaritzburg, and Pretoria have been very helpful and friendly. I also had the opportunity to discuss this research with Wandile Mzamo and Yoga Thinnasagren at the South African Container Stevedores in Durban and they have allowed me to browse through the holdings of the company’s in-house museum. I owe further gratitude to Lorraine Thabisile Nkosi, for searching through issues of the isiZulu newspaper Ilanga lase Natal and translating articles, and to Jennifer Grek Martin, for making the two maps in this dissertation. This research has been made possible by generous financial assistance from the Southern African Research Centre in the form of the Keppel-Jones Award. Queen’s University and the Department of History also provided several grants: the Graduate History Award, the Timothy C.S. Franks Research Travel Fund, and the Dorothy Warne Chambers Memorial Fellowship. Several chapters have benefited from feedback on presentations at the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg, the History Department at UKZN in Durban, the North Eastern Workshop on Southern Africa in Burlington, VT, and the Annual Conferences of the Canadian Association for African Studies at Carleton University (2010) and York University (2011). My deepest gratitude, however, is to my parents and my husband. My parents, Marc Callebert and Greta Cauwelier, have supported me unconditionally in my choices to continue studying and to move to far-away places. My husband, Raji Singh Soni, has been a source of support, honest criticism, and above all love and laughter throughout much of this degree. Having been able to share, and share in, both frustration and joy in person or (while I was in South Africa for research) over Skype and telephone, has carried me through the difficult moments that inevitably come with the researching and writing of a PhD dissertation. v Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ ii Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... iv Abbreviations .................................................................................................................................. ix Glossary .......................................................................................................................................... xi List of Maps ................................................................................................................................... xii Chapter 1: Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1 Livelihood strategies .................................................................................................................... 8 The argument of the dissertation ................................................................................................ 14 The structure of the dissertation ................................................................................................. 17 Section 1 ........................................................................................................................................ 21 Sipho’s day .................................................................................................................................... 21 Chapter 2: Labour and society in the early twentieth century ....................................................... 26 The origins of migrant labour in Southern Africa ...................................................................... 27 Durban at the turn of the century ............................................................................................... 33 The Anglo-Boer War and its effects .......................................................................................... 40 Dock work in Durban ................................................................................................................. 50 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 54 Chapter 3: The Port of Durban and its hinterland, 1910s to 1950s ................................................ 56 The port of Durban ..................................................................................................................... 56 Crisis and survival in rural Natal and Zululand ......................................................................... 70 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 82 Chapter 4: Labour, politics, and the city, 1910s to 1950s .............................................................. 83 The 1910s and 1920s ................................................................................................................