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

David Hemson put the dockworkers of Durban, South Africa's chief port, on the historical map in a doctoral thesis and some important shorter writing, convincingly demonstrating the organizational capacity and militancy of these migrants from Zululand, Durban's hinterland. Now Ralph Callebert returns to this scene and reconsiders the historical place of the dockers. While he does not dispute Hemson's story, he rejects Hemson's sense of where this militant workforce, "radical and strikeprone" (1), was going. If Hemson saw dockworkers as moving toward a situation where they might possess the proverbial right to the city and take their place as part of a classic proletariat, Callebert positions them, at least prior to 1959 when casualization came to a close and dockworkers were obliged to shift to contracts, as men simply eager to earn the best money possible. The dockworker wanted to use what he earned to purchase cattle, amass a lobola price so as to marry, and get established as a mnumzane, a Zulu household head and thus a man of respect placed within the succession approved by the ancestors. Callebert wants to explore not just work experience but what he calls men's livelihood strategies. He tries to balance their search for creativity and empowerment with acknowledgment of the constraints on their lives.

Callebert bases his argument on more than seventy interviews with dockers of the 1950s as well as their family members, allowing for numerous stories to illustrate his argument. The men remembered very arduous and dangerous work, walking on unreliable planks with heavy loads in and out of hot and humid ship holds. In this, the onyathi or buffalos, as they liked to be called, took pride in manly achievements. It was not work that could extend far into middle age, but more like an extended initiation to manhood that brought in relatively good money. A strength of the book is Callebert's efforts to unpack the household, to understand the perspective of the wives left behind and the ensuing struggles that usually accompanied cooperation. Yet he argues that in the end, women valued rural household stability the most.

Before 1959—and here Callebert's ideas are reminiscent of Fred Cooper's well-known writing on the Mombasa (Kenya) docks—these workers had certain options. They could decide each day whether or not to look for work. They might or might not be able to get accommodation and food from employers. When they got accommodation, it was miserable, uncomfortable but free. Many sought to minimize expenses in Durban. Work arrangements depended on relations with overseers, black and white, and the Zulu-like work hierarchy in place. Above all, there was the possibility of pilfering. This was largely tolerated as part of the harbor way of life so long as one was talking about bushels of corn, rice, beans, or the like. These goods then found their way to small shops, often back home, which were organized by girlfriends or wives.

Thus, the workers straddled the line separating proletarians from petty capitalists. Some made more of a living from commerce than from dock porterage. Following Harold Wolpe's classic thesis, Callebert emphasizes the importance of a workforce still able to retreat to land available through ancestry and custom albeit with customary resources gradually declining. Callebert's interviewees often seem to have gotten what they wanted, or enough did so to confirm this belief system.

The men were capable of militant action and organization but, while very conscious of the significant inequalities of South African society, they were also deeply conservative. They shunned most city ways. If they had city girlfriends, they rarely turned them into wives. They liked to go to Cato Manor, the uncontrolled shackland within walking distance, get drunk on the weekend, and enjoy festivities. This was a sort of free zone, poorly incorporated into Durban, yet it was certainly not home: "[In] the...