Melancholia of Freedom: social life in an Indian township in South Africa by Thomas Blom Hansen, and: Chatsworth: the making of a South African township eds. by Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed (review)

It has become a standard cliché in South Africa today that people respond to behaviour that they cannot otherwise justify or explain by announcing that they do things according to their ‘culture’. This is intended to silence any criticism: the idea that one’s culture might be confining or tedious is not part of the discourse. As under apartheid, escaping one’s culture is hardly a good thing today in this way of thinking. You rarely if ever hear white people now, however, use the word in this way; this assumption that there is something, whether liberating or immutable, about one’s ‘culture’ is not theirs. This notion of cultures as silos can be adapted to fit the Tutuesque idea of a rainbow nation stitched together but it also fits well into the way apartheid ideologues saw the world.

At the same time, it is striking that one social science discipline, anthropology, especially in its American garb, is also hooked on ‘culture’. The positive thing about anthropology is that it has become a home for those justifiably repelled by the economistic and positivist trends that are so powerful in most other social sciences professionally. The negative thing is that, amongst many anthropologists, reifying a ‘culture’ as the key explanatory factor becomes equally problematic. As Bourdieu wrote, people respond to life in terms of a habitus but habitus can be contradictory and complex and it does not prevent change, even drastic change, in a capitalist world where everything solid melts into air, to take Marx’s phrase.

The two books under review are both recent substantial studies of the former Indian township of Chatsworth, the first major new creation of the Group Areas Act in Durban and the most populous Indian group area in the country. Does Chatsworth have a distinct culture in these respects or perhaps a culture emblematic of a broader Indian culture in South Africa? This issue is handled differently in these two projects. The Desai and Vahed volume is open-ended and diverse. It is edited by Goolam Vahed, the noted Durban historian, and Ashwin Desai, sociologist-journalist who sometimes writes (enjoyably) as though he wants to hark back to the Damon Runyon school of hard-boiled sagas of American guys and dolls. This volume is a mix of human interest stories of hardship and triumph against the odds by plucky individuals constructed from rich sociological and historical material. Many of the interviewed live or lived in ‘the flats’ where life has always been hard; respectable success stories in the bungalows are also showcased in a different category of narratives about achievement. Some of the personal testimonies are less nostalgic, don’t fit the stereotypes and there is much that is revealing and three-dimensional.

Initially the early settlers of Chatsworth were often plucked with abandon by the local state from non-descript housing, typically on the urban periphery, where they could practice a complex kind of mixed livelihood in a large family setting. Individuals would be involved in fishing, market gardening, petty commerce and wage employment, pooled together in families that emerged out of the indentured immigrant population. The location of these homes was often convenient, and a series of temples, mosques and other institutions, solidly constructed, dotted these areas, which benefited from interaction with black and white Natalians. However, home conditions were often squalid and insanitary and many of the forcibly removed were not sad to say farewell to exploitative landlords, usually Indian as well. As one poor Zanzibari told Vahed:

‘I should have been…five or six. I remember when they just load [sic] us into trucks and they brought us to these big houses. They were empty but the lights...