Reliving colonial contradictions
Exactly 70 years after King George VI stopped off at Durban’s Currie’s Fountain to greet a gathering of Indians, that racially-divided affair draws mixed memories, writes Kiru Naidoo
THE 1947 British Royal family’s visit and the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre have loomed large in my family’s political outlook. The manner in which we related to them reveals a variety of apparent contradictions. Our responses tell of power and the state, imagined affections, the quiet accommodation with colonial oppression and the strident resistance to it.
Today is exactly 70 years since King George VI stopped off at Durban’s Currie’s Fountain to greet a gathering of Indians.
Yesterday was 57 years since the apartheid security machinery mowed down 69 protesters who challenged the hated pass laws.
To remember the martyrs of Sharpeville and the tortuous road to South African freedom, I joined the ANC’s Human Right’s Day “unity walk” from the Gandhi Settlement at Bhambayi to nearby Fernham sports ground in Phoenix. It was billed as building a bridge between Indian and African communities to promote social cohesion.
The organisers should be commended for making an effort to facilitate seemingly distant neighbours reaching out to each other.
The 1947 event was a racially-divided affair. My mother was at Currie’s Fountain among a purported 65 000 people of Indian origin cheering the pampered English royals. She did not heed the call of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) to boycott the event. This was in spite of her family being well-educated, politically conscious and fairly well-heeled as small scale farmers.
My father’s family, on the other hand, were the impoverished urban proletariat living in the condemned municipal compound of Magazine Barracks on Somtseu Road.
It was from among the corporation workers that a large chunk of the 25 000 came, who in 1945 gathered at Currie’s Fountain to propel Dr Monty Naicker and the progressives in the NIC to the leadership of that organisation. The conservative bloc of AI Kajee and PR Pather were ejected for not being keen to challenge colonial oppression head on.
Among those who recruited 34 000 new members to stage the revolt was Chatsworth’s 90-year-old veteran Kay Moonsamy.
The popular adage at the time was that every home was a Congress home. Within Naicker’s ranks was the feisty Dr Kesaveloo Goonam – a Scottish-trained physician who railed against Empire and condemned the visit of the English royals.
By contrast, Kajee was to heap fawning praise in welcoming the English monarch at Currie’s Fountain. Goonam has surely had the last laugh.
As eThekwini Municipality has gone about scrubbing away colonial vestiges in the city, it renamed Prince Edward Street after Goonam to mark the location of the surgery from which she rendered great service to the poor, often at no cost.
There was a build-up to Goonam’s fit of rage. A year earlier, the NIC and its Transvaal counterpart led the passive resistance campaign against the segregationist Ghetto Act, forerunner to the 1950 Group Areas Act.
The now ailing octogenarian Ahmed Kathrada interrupted his schooling to join the campaign under the leadership of Dr Yusuf Dadoo.
My mother spoke with glowing admiration of Goonam, Dadoo and Naicker. In her teens she was well acquainted with the political and literary grandees of the day. Her aunt, Narinamah Naidu, was president of the Indian Women’s League in Pietermaritzburg and a benefactor of land to three churches, among other causes. Her circle included 1956 Treason Trialist Dawood Seedat, Cape firebrand Cissie Gool, poet HIE Dhlomo and trade unionists HA Naidoo and George Ponen.
My mother and her sisters read Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Brothers Grimm. They believed in Nehru, Gandhi, Kenyatta and the greatest nationalist wave on the march as World War II ended. But they were not going to be denied greeting the king and returning the waves of his teenage daughters, the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret.
It is embarrassing to admit, but my family were anticolonial royalists. That’s a dreadful contradiction, but tells of our multi-textured lives that unconsciously resonate in one form or the other into the present.
Ideology is a useful compass but all our lives are layered. My mother styled her hair in the manner of the later Queen Elizabeth II. Her dressmaker turned out garments not dissimilar to what the royals wore.
My dear mother was not alone in the multitextured world view in which the English royals held sway. In 1901 King Dinuzulu was among those who received the visiting Duke and Duchess of Cornwall, later King George V, and now daubed in white paint on the Howard College campus.
The written statement from Zulu royalty lamented the passing of Queen Victoria and included a pledge of “love and loyalty of our hearts”.
Further south, the royal Matanzimas named one of their son’s Kaiser when it looked as if the Germans were winning World War I. As the tide turned, the next son was called George as they hedged their bets.
At home, Old Fort Road was renamed after the iconic broadcaster, KE Masinga, which few know is abbreviated from King Edward Masinga.
To their credit, my parents schooled their children about the pains of indenture and the courageous contributions of Bram Fischer, Strini Moodley and Lilian Ngoyi. They linked British brutality in the Amritsar Massacre to Sharpville and Soweto, and pointed out that Indians were also forced to carry passes.
They rejected collaboration in the tricameral system and the local affairs committees. They took great pride in the defeat of apartheid, with my father donning a threepiece suit to join his friend Abel Moses as a party agent in the great 1994 election.
Embarrassingly, some 40 years after my mother screeched at Currie’s Fountain with Union Jack in hand, her son was invited to tea with the present Prince of Wales. For all his radical pretensions, the son arrived early, politely nibbled at cucumber sandwiches, sipped Earl Grey with a lifted pinky, and asked neither about the land nor reparations.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (The more things change, the more they stay the same.)
Kiru Naidoo chairs the advisory board of the Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre at the University of KwaZuluNatal. The university’s special collections are a treasure trove of our country’s history.