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C H A P T E R 4 Autonomy, Freedom, and Political Speech As the rift between the Zulu-speaking majority and the Indians deepened in the 1950s, mass mobilizations of Indians subsided dramatically. By the end of the 1950s, the once-powerful Indian organizations, the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) and the transvaal Indian Congress (tIC), were reduced to shadows.1 The two organizations sustained themselves mainly through already-existing kin and community networks among the wealthier and well-educated Gujaratis. Left-leaning, nonracial forces had a strong standing in the Indian community in South africa until the onslaught of apartheid. Much of it was premised on the wellorganized labor movement and the presence of accomplished leaders from Yusuf Dadoo of the 1940s and ’50s to Jay Naidoo, the student activist turned trade union activist who headed South africa’s strongest trade union movement, COSatU, for nine years and later became a minister in Mandela’s cabinet.2 From the 1960s onward, the critique of apartheid came mainly from the upwardly mobile and educated sections . The legacy of the trade union movement was a high capacity for organization and what I termed “recalcitrance” among working-class Indians. however, the spatial and social isolation of Indians in new townships demobilized political interest among several generations of Indians. The memories of the 1940s and ’50s lingered but gradually fossilized into mythical structures rather than active networks. In their stead, a broadly defensive attitude of internal consolidation emerged. to some, this indicated nothing but a resurfacing of the old clannishness that was characteristic of Indian culture. as Jay Naidoo writes in his autobiographical account, “The clannishness of the Location—the fact that tamils married tamils, Calcuttias Calcuttias, Malays Malays, Koknies Koknies, Khojas Khojas . . . was absurd and regrettable. The whites set up barriers and we, in our own petty way, set up barriers as well” (1990, 127). This process of introversion coincided with the moment of intensification of the aNC’s campaigns and passive resistance protests in the late 1950s, which caused incipient capital flight and precipitated a serious economic and fiscal crisis (Innes 1984). The response of the state was swift and brutal. after the infamous gunning down of dozens of people at a rally in Sharpeville in 1961, political parties were Autonomy, Freedom, and Political Speech • 143 banned, leaders were arrested, and political activity among people of color was strictly monitored and violently repressed in the following decades. The new Indian social world that was born in those decades slowly became more affluent and underpinned by basic welfare provisions. Living conditions became more equalized than earlier, albeit at a low level, within the township itself. The immersion of Indians and other people of color in new surroundings that were dominated by an emerging consumer-oriented lifestyle but devoid of political freedom seemed to work, at least for some time. as arendt writes about prosperity under conditions of unfreedom, “The Greeks knew very well that a reasonable tyrant worked to great advantage when it came to the city’s welfare . . . the arts, both material and intellectual, flourished within it. . . . Citizens were banished to their homes, and the agora, the space where interaction of equals was played out, was deserted” (2005, 119). Under tyranny, however egalitarian in its effects, both words and deeds are subsumed under the functions of mere laboring and doing. For arendt, there can be no true freedom, and thus no true politics or transformative “action,” without the freedom to meet, mingle, and speak to one’s equals (120). apartheid did indeed abolish any possibility of a multiracial agora. Instead, consultative organs were set up to “represent” the point of view of the country’s communities and race groups to the government. In the new township areas and in older areas of Indian settlement, the impact of the Group areas act was deep and painful. expropriations of land, razing of older houses that had been lived in for generations, and forced removals still affected thousands of families each year. This was not a time for open protest in the conventional sense. as Lal described the period to me: today it seems strange, but in those years it seemed that the whites were going to stay in power forever. We were busy making things work for us . . . all my mother cared about was to get a new vegetable garden. We wanted to go to school and get a job. You cannot imagine how things changed—new buildings shooting up everywhere, shopping malls...

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