Hawkers fade into times past
Bureaucracy and racial repression led to fresh food sellers’ demise
LIKE double decker buses and the VW Beetle, it will not be long before the sight of hawker vans plying their trade in the streets of Durban becomes a faded memory.
A few decades ago, scores of fruit and vegetable hawkers were a regular feature of suburban life, especially in the historically white parts of the city such as the Berea, Umbilo, Musgrave and Morningside.
Changes in lifestyle and shopping habits now see hawkers going the way of transistor radios, typewriters, home delivered milk and cheque books. Soon they will become the subject of “The Lekker Old Days” Facebook posts.
When I sat down with Kala Krishna Venkatrathnam recently and showed him a black and white photograph of him as a young man in his late 20s serving an English-looking customer next to his van, his face lit up like a child finding a longlost toy. He had just traded in his Dodge van and purchased a Mercedes-Benz purpose-built van “from the box”.
Wearing a dustcoat, the photo shows him then sporting a full head of hair. But that was about 60 years ago.
Now 88, mostly bald and still sprightly for his age, Venkatrathnam recounted how he and his father would leave home at 2am to go to the Warwick Avenue fresh produce market. They would load fruit and vegetables on a horse cart.
The horse cart would thereafter be parked in one spot in a suburb and from there he and his father would carry fresh produce in baskets slung from two ends of a bamboo pole balanced on their shoulders. They would walk from house to house, every weekday, come rain, hail or sweltering sunshine.
Later motorised transport replaced the horse cart and Venkatrathnam would travel throughout the city selling his goods.
He said all his regular customers knew him by his “house” name, Bobby, that was given to him by his parents. At least the upper crust fair-skinned residents of Durban did not call him “Sammy” – a name that many whites insensitively reserved for all Indian hawkers.
Venkatrathnam said he knew the names of all his customers and even what fruit and vegetables each family preferred.
Frozen food was a rarity and, hence, most families bought food while it was still fresh. After 25 years of hawking, he changed jobs and opened a factory that made lounge suites. His relatives continued with the hawking business for many more years.
Until recently, Puntan’s Hill, an area known as an Andhra enclave for its large Telugu-speaking community, was home to most of Durban’s hawkers. The hawking trade passed on from one generation to another. While the proliferation of supermarket chains, mega fresh produce outlets and a culture of cooking frozen food, has been the death knell for hawkers, a few continue to courageously keep their dwindling customer base happy.
But while hawkers fade into times past, the pain brought down to bear on them by bureaucracy and racial repression for more than a century cannot be erased from historical records.
In a paper published two decades ago, academic Goolam Vahed wrote of how the activities of Indian hawkers brought them into conflict with the Durban municipality that was committed to its white electorate and which passed a myriad laws to “peripheralise” hawkers.
When Indians had completed their contracts as near slaves on the sugar plantations, railways or coal mines, many turned to hawking as a form of decent employment.
However, the efforts of Indian street traders to earn an honest living did not tie in with white ideas of a “civilised” city and every effort was made to eliminate and restrict their activities.
More than 100 years ago, the Durban Town Council (DTC) introduced trading licences for hawkers to be selective about who and how many people were allowed to trade.
Goolam noted that when hawkers paid for their licence, the DTC supplied them with a badge that they had to wear on “their arm above the elbow, or exhibit on their basket or pack”. It was an offence not to display the badge.
To lessen the competition that hawkers posed to established trade, a by-law prohibited them from taking up a fixed or permanent position”. They had to keep moving so that they could not build up a clientele and this also limited the amount and types of goods that they could carry.
White-owned retail businesses in Durban also frequently petitioned the DTC that they were “very seriously prejudiced by the indiscriminate and unchecked manner in which the Indian hawkers are now carrying on business”. They protested that as their rents, overheads and living expenses “are very high” compared to hawkers, the latter should be prohibited from operating in “the same neighbourhood where there are established European businesses”.
Indian flower sellers were also targeted by the DTC and initially, they too could not sell their flowers from a specific spot. This posed a problem because it meant water had to be carried around to keep the flowers fresh.
Indian flower sellers requested permission to place their “baskets of flowers on the edge of the water drainage”.
Permission was refused because the chief constable reported that “there has already been considerable complaints made by European florists… It would be highly injudicious to deviate from the by-law, especially as regards Indians who are prone to take advantage of any little concession”.
It was many years later that Indian flower sellers were allowed to place their baskets on the pavements of the then West, Gardiner and Church streets near the Post Office.
Even then, Indian flower sellers were despised. In October 1924, white florists petitioned the DTC to put a stop to street flower selling “which interferes with our legitimate business for which we pay rent and rates for the use of our shops. The competition is unfair in every way… Those who desire to sell flowers should do so in shops which are rated by the Corporation…”.
It is clear that long before the Nationalist government had introduced apartheid, Durban’s planners and policy-makers had a racist bent and were determined to suppress and restrict hawking by Indians in white areas.
Street traders were seen as a distasteful and repulsive anomaly, and an impediment to achieving a “beautiful” modern city.
If only I can today take some of those long-dead bigoted city fathers for a slow walk through grimy Durban CBD after 5pm…
Devan is a media consultant and social commentator. Share your thoughts with him on: yogind@meropa.co.za