On Durban's Docks: Zulu Workers, Rural Households, Global Labor by Ralph Callebert (review)

At a time when scholars have been increasingly drawn to the writing of oceanic histories and the mapping of global connections between port cities, Ralph Callebert's fascinating historical study of Durban's African dock workers looks not to cosmopolitan Indian Ocean networks but rather to the rural hinterlands of these predominantly Zulu migrant workers. But what at first glance seems to be an unfashionable return to the relatively neglected field of South African labour history proves to be a highly illuminating study which explores not only the world of dock work in Durban but also the rural households and livelihood strategies that sustained these workers.

Callebert's narrative is rooted in the secondary literature and based on a range of official archival and newspaper sources, but the documentary backbone of this study, and the source of its most original insights, lies in 77 interviews with former dock workers who started work in Durban between 1939 and 1959, and with women in dockworkers' households. These interviews shore up the central arguments and provide the basis for a critique of the hitherto standard history of Durban's dock workers by David Hemson (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 1979).

Where Hemson charts the rise of a relatively uncomplicated working-class consciousness among Durban's dock workers (remarkably, they went out on strike as early as 1874), Callebert argues that the label of radical proletarians ill-fits the onyathi (buffaloes), as dockworkers were popularly known. On the contrary, Callebert detects a far more complex consciousness amongst dock workers in which militant action in defence of their interests as wage earners (most noticeably in strikes and stayaways, especially during the 1940s and 1950s) sat happily with their defence of the interests of African petty traders. How does one account for this apparent contradiction? The short answer is that most dock workers were not strictly wage labourers. The longer explanation, which is the subject of On Durban's Docks, lies in the exploration of workers' livelihoods and households. Callebert's approach recognizes the close links between urban and rural economies and, following Amartya Sen, internal bargaining and cooperative conflict within households.

Supported by evidence from oral testimonies, Callebert argues in Chapter 2 that, while all dock workers invested in agricultural production in rural homesteads in Natal, Zululand, and the Eastern Cape, they did so in two broadly different ways. Some sought to maximize their wages by working extra shifts, while others (perhaps more than half) engaged in petty trade to hasten their return to rural households. This latter group engaged in small-scale commercial enterprise selling dagga, cigarettes and cheap consumables in the city (often with a female friend as partner) along with goods pilfered from ships or retrieved from wharf-side spillage. Critically, these goods were also sold by workers' wives in reserves. Dock workers' households were thus reproduced in three discrete sites: at the docks, in the rural areas and in the growing African areas (and later, townships) on the outskirts of Durban. These livelihood strategies were facilitated by the fact that most African dock workers were, at least before the demise of casual labour in Durban in 1959, togt (casual) migrant labourers who worked shifts and frequently returned home.

This discussion provides the basis for the following three chapters which develop the theme of dock workers and rural households. Chapter 3 maps urban and rural linkages and offers a nuanced conceptualization of the household while Chapter 4 explores gender and generational relations within these households. Perhaps the most original part of the book is to be found in Chapter 5 which explores how pilferage and the bribery of supervisors by dock workers became a way of combining wage labour with small scale entrepreneurialism - a central theme of the book. While Callebert never denies that Durban's dock workers had the capacity for militant action, as an industrial working class he argues that their combination of...