Aziz Hassim: Novelist who captured life in the Casbah
1935-2013
AZIZ Hassim, who has died in Durban at the age of 77, wrote an extraordinary account of life in the Casbah, an area of the city that was home to generations of Indians and as lively a raucous, crooked, cut-throat, inspiring, happy and tragic environment as you would find anywhere.
Hassim captured it all in his debut novel, The Lotus People, which he wrote in his mid-60s. It won the 2001 Sanlam Literary Award for an unpublished novel and was a contender for the Sunday Times Alan Paton fiction award in 2004.
Although he spent most of his working life as a book-keeper, he had always been an inveterate storyteller and a marvellous raconteur. He was never happier than when in full flight and would not be interrupted.
“Just hang on. Am I telling the story or are you telling the story?” he would demand.
The story of the Casbah was one that had been eating away at him for years. He had made notes on hundreds of bits of paper and spent every spare minute in the Durban library reading newspapers and whatever he could find in the documentation centre at the University of Durban-Westville.
He had the autodidact’s distrust of professional historians and official histories. If you wanted the real stuff of people’s lives you had to speak to them, he said. And read newspapers. He swore by newspapers, which he felt were the voice of the people, and he loved newspaper profiles.
Above all, though, the story of the Casbah was one he had lived since being born there on September 21 1935. The family trade was hairdressing and his father and uncle had a little barber shop in the Casbah called, impressively enough, Embassy Hairdressers.
In reality, they barely scraped a living from it and Hassim had to leave school at 14 to help to support the family. He cleaned ships in the port and sold the communist newspaper, The Guardian, on the streets. The money he saved he kept in The Guardian’s offices, but the security police raided them and took it all.
Hassim practically lived on the streets, doing jobs that took him into the underworld of gangsters, criminals, prostitutes, hustlers and shady businessmen, all the characters whose stories he was subsequently to immortalise.
He learnt how to play snooker well enough to make money as a hustler. At the age of 23, his older sister arranged for him to marry 17-year-old Zohra, and the first tin of formula they bought for their baby daughter, now a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, came from his snooker earnings. He also boxed for money and had his nose broken in the process.
In his 20s he worked as a bookkeeper for a family of traders. He learnt about the Durban system of book-keeping, faithfully captured in his novel, where you kept two
He explored the underworld of criminals, prostitutes and hustlers
sets of books, one which was declared and one which was not.
Being the book-keeper in the back room, nobody noticed him and he heard and saw a lot more than he was supposed to see about how commercial transactions took place. He regarded the rich Indian trading elite as exploitative rogues who hid the true origins of their wealth beneath a veneer of respectability.
His family had no social status, and he was profoundly sceptical of those who claimed superiority based on their wealth and had a sharp nose for pretension. He had seen how they made their money, he said, and there was nothing respectable about it.
Hassim’s second novel, Revenge of Kali, was not the literary tour de force of his first novel, but it stirred up more controversy. Hindu fundamentalists thought it highly disrespectful that he, a Muslim, could name his book after a Hindu goddess, and Muslim fundamentalists were upset that a Muslim should bestow such prominence on a Hindu goddess.
It was provocative because, although a commemoration of the 1860 settlers from India, it made no attempt to sanitise their story. Commemorations should not only be about the virtuous things in a people’s history, he felt. It was important to write about the bad things Indians did and not just position them as victims.
The Lotus People, he said, was “what apartheid did to the Indian community”. Revenge of Kali, published in 2009, was “what the Indians did to themselves”.
Although he was not a political activist, Hassim knew all about the cruelties, injustices and fear of those days and he felt marked by racism.
He worked at Syfrets for many years, where he facilitated loans for Indian businesses and felt that racism had kept him from progressing. All his life he could never quite bring himself to trust whites. He made exceptions of his two white sons-in-law, however.
His third book, The Agony of Valliamma , published last year, was written as a children’s fable about a young Indian activist in Johannesburg at the turn of the century.
Hassim, who wrote with extraordinary ease and fluency, was somewhat bemused by the fame and attention that accompanied The Lotus People in particular.
He never quite got over the fact that graduate students, who came to see him from Denmark, India and the United States, would choose to write their dissertations on The Lotus People.
He certainly never let any of it go to his head. On a panel he was asked what he thought about something. “When I was young,” he responded, “my mother told me what to think, then my wife told me what to think, then my daughters told me what to think. So, you know, I don’t know what to think.”
Hassim, who developed a lung disease from smoking, had a weak heart and, finally, pneumonia, is survived by his wife Zohra and four adult children. — Chris Barron