Available Light: Omar Badsha and the Struggle for Change in South Africa 0821425625, 9780821425626

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AVAILABLE LIGHT

NEW AFRICAN HISTORIES SERIES EDITORS: JEAN ALLMAN, ALLEN ISAACMAN, DEREK R. PETERSON, AND CARINA RAY

David William Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, The Risks of Knowledge Belinda Bozzoli, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid Gary Kynoch, We Are Fighting the World Stephanie Newell, The Forger’s Tale Jacob A. Tropp, Natures of Colonial Change Jan Bender Shetler, Imagining Serengeti Cheikh Anta Babou, Fighting the Greater Jihad Marc Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa? Marissa J. Moorman, Intonations Karen E. Flint, Healing Traditions Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola, editors, Recasting the Past Moses E. Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown Emily S. Burrill, Richard L. Roberts, and Elizabeth Thornberry, editors, Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa Daniel R. Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets Emily Lynn Osborn, Our New Husbands Are Here Robert Trent Vinson, The Americans Are Coming! James R. Brennan, Taifa Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts, editors, Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake David M. Gordon, Invisible Agents Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara S. Isaacman, Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development Stephanie Newell, The Power to Name Gibril R. Cole, The Krio of West Africa Matthew M. Heaton, Black Skin, White Coats Meredith Terretta, Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence Paolo Israel, In Step with the Times Michelle R. Moyd, Violent Intermediaries Abosede A. George, Making Modern Girls Alicia C. Decker, In Idi Amin’s Shadow Rachel Jean-­Baptiste, Conjugal Rights Shobana Shankar, Who Shall Enter Paradise? Emily S. Burrill, States of Marriage Todd Cleveland, Diamonds in the Rough Carina E. Ray, Crossing the Color Line

Sarah Van Beurden, Authentically African Giacomo Macola, The Gun in Central Africa Lynn Schler, Nation on Board Julie MacArthur, Cartography and the Political Imagination Abou B. Bamba, African Miracle, African Mirage Daniel Magaziner, The Art of Life in South Africa Paul Ocobock, An Uncertain Age Keren Weitzberg, We Do Not Have Borders Nuno Domingos, Football and Colonialism Jeffrey S. Ahlman, Living with Nkrumahism Bianca Murillo, Market Encounters Laura Fair, Reel Pleasures Thomas F. McDow, Buying Time Jon Soske, Internal Frontiers Elizabeth W. Giorgis, Modernist Art in Ethiopia Matthew V. Bender, Water Brings No Harm David Morton, Age of Concrete Marissa J. Moorman, Powerful Frequencies Ndubueze L. Mbah, Emergent Masculinities Judith A. Byfield, The Great Upheaval Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley, editors, Ambivalent Mari K. Webel, The Politics of Disease Control Kara Moskowitz, Seeing Like a Citizen Jacob Dlamini, Safari Nation Alice Wiemers, Village Work Cheikh Anta Babou, The Muridiyya on the Move Laura Ann Twagira, Embodied Engineering Marissa Mika, Africanizing Oncology Holly Hanson, To Speak and Be Heard Paul S. Landau, Spear Saheed Aderinto, Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa Katherine Bruce-­Lockhart, Carceral Afterlives Natasha Erlank, Convening Black Intimacy in Early Twentieth-­Century South Africa Morgan J. Robinson, A Language for the World Faeeza Ballim, Apartheid’s Leviathan Nicole Eggers, Unruly Ideas Mark W. Deets, A Country of Defiance Patrick William Otim, Acholi Intellectuals Ademide Adelusi-­Adeluyi, Imagine Lagos Daniel Magaziner, Available Light

AVAILABLE LIGHT OMAR BADSHA AND THE STRUGGLE

O H I O U N I V E R S I T Y P R E SS

AT H E N S

FOR CHANGE IN SOUTH AFRICA

DANIEL MAGAZINER

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701 ohioswallow​.com © 2024 by Ohio University Press All rights reserved To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-­1154 or (740) 593-­4536 (fax). Printed in the United States of America Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-­free paper ∞ ™ 34 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24     5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Magaziner, Daniel R., author. Title: Available light : Omar Badsha and the struggle for change in South Africa / Daniel Magaziner. Other titles: New African histories series. Description: Athens : Ohio University Press, 2024. | Series: New African histories | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2024017238 | ISBN 9780821425626 (paperback) | ISBN 9780821425619 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780821425633 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Badsha, Omar. | Photographers—­South Africa—­Biography. | Artists—­South Africa—­Biography. | Political activists—­South Africa—­Biography. | Archivists—­South Africa—­Biography. | South Africa—­Politics and government—­ 1948–­1994. | South Africa—­Politics and government—­1994–­ Classification: LCC DT1949.B342 M34 2024 | DDC 968.06092—­dc23/eng/20240415 LC record available at https://​lccn​.loc​.gov​/2024017238

For Farzanah and Leila and Liya and Micah

Art is an antidote to madness. —­Patrice Nganang

And now that I’ve become older I’ve learned how to brush over My history and how it’s sequenced —­Parquet Courts

CONTENTS



List of Illustrations

xi

Preface

xvii

Acknowledgments

xxi

Chapter 1

The Back Room

3

Chapter 2 Douglas Lane 1880s–­1950s 23 Chapter 3 Durban 1960s 54 Chapter 4 Natal 1970s 100 Chapter 5 South Africa 1980s 133 Chapter 6 Millennium 1990s–­2020s 199 Notes

237

Bibliography

277

Index

295

I L LU S T R AT I O N S

MAPS

0.1 Indian Ocean world

xxv

0.2 Central Durban

xxvi

0.3 Natal and KwaZulux

xxvii

0.4 South Africa

xxvii

FIGURES

0.1 Timeline 1.1

Self-­portrait, undated (mid-­1960s)

xxviii–xix 5

1.2 Diary sample, March 1968

6

1.3 Ebrahim Badsha and children, 1950

9

1.4 “Students marching to funeral of COSAS member, Kwa Mashu, 1981,” by Omar Badsha 13 1.5 Portrait of Omar Badsha

15

1.6 Omar Badsha and Dumile Feni at the Durban Art Gallery, 1966

16

1.7 Untitled (mother and child), by Omar Badsha, 1971

17

1.8 “For Ayesha,” by Omar Badsha, undated

18

2.1 Imperial Ottoman Red Crescent Society, Durban Shop Assistant’s Committee 26 2.2 Ebrahim Badsha and siblings, undated

31

2.3 “Man with loudspeakers, Badsha Pir celebration,” by Omar Badsha, 1981 32

I l l u st rat i o n s xii

2.4 Badsha family portrait, undated (1940s?)

36

2.5 Ebrahim Badsha on Douglas Lane, undated (1950s?)

43

2.6 Nils Solberg with unidentified student, undated (1950s)

45

2.7 Students at BICA, undated (1950s)

46

2.8 Douglas Lane interior

47

2.9 Ebrahim Badsha painting, undated (1950s)

48

2.10 “Grey Street,” by Omar Badsha, 1978

51

2.11 Miriam Badsha, undated (1950s?)

52

2.12 Omar Badsha and siblings on Douglas Lane, 1957 or 1958?

53

3.1 Omar Badsha in father’s room on Douglas Lane, late 1950s?

56

3.2 Omar Badsha at the Orient Islamic School, early 1960s?

58

3.3a–­b Cato Manor march, March 1960

59, 61

3.4 Untitled portrait of Miriam Badsha by Ebrahim Badsha, 1961

63

3.5 Untitled (mother and child), by Omar Badsha, undated (1960s)

65

3.6 The Three Penny Game, by Omar Badsha, 1965

72

3.7 Untitled (mother and child), by Omar Badsha, undated (1960s)

75

3.8 Untitled (family outside), by Omar Badsha, undated (1960s)

77

3.9 Mafika Gwala (1946–­2014), by Omar Badsha, undated (early 1980s)

80

3.10 Omar Badsha and Dumile Feni sculpting on Douglas Lane, 1966

86

3.11 Omar Badsha and Dumile Feni with Stricken Household, 1966

87

3.12 Omar Badsha and Dumile Feni at the Durban Art Gallery, 1966

88

3.13 An Artist Contemplating Suicide, by Dumile Feni, 1967

91

3.14 Untitled (figure in landscape), by Omar Badsha, undated (1967 or 1968?)

94

3.15 Black Mother / Birth by Omar Badsha, 1969

96

3.16 Untitled (birds with concrete blocks), by Omar Badsha, 1973

98

4.1 “Mewa Ramgobin,” by Omar Badsha, 1970

107

4.2 “Street performance, Victoria Street,” photograph by Omar Badsha, 1981 112 4.3 Labor organizers Desmond Matabela, David Hemson, Junerose Nala, and Harriet Bolton attend a strike meeting, 1973

114

4.4 A group of striking textile workers, Consolidated Textile Mills, 1973 116 4.5 Worker addressing assembly of Coronation Brick workers, 1973

117

4.6 Self-­portrait, by Omar Badsha, 1972

121

4.7 Group portrait of labor organizers and activists at a seminar, 1974

123

4.8 “Irene Dlamini and baby, Secretary of Chemical Workers International Union, Gale Street,” 1978 129 4.9 “Demolished building, Grey Street,” by Omar Badsha, 1984

132

5.1 Moosa Badsha, undated (1980s?)

139

5.2 “Alpheus Mthethwa and children, St. Wendolin’s,” by Omar Badsha, 1978 141 5.3 John Gomas, by Omar Badsha, 1978

142

5.4 Farzanah Badsha and Rassool Badsha, photograph by Omar Badsha, 1978

143

5.5 Letter to Farzanah, by Omar Badsha, published 1979

148

5.6 “Recent arrivals Inanda,” by Omar Badsha, 1979

149

5.7 “Thandeka and Mulelani Maphumulo, children of ex–­Robben Island detainee,” by Omar Badsha, 1979 150 5.8 “Park, Chapel Street, Overport,” by Omar Badsha, 1979

151

5.9 “Dr. Essop Jassat, Mrs. Nokukhanya Luthuli, and Mrs. Albertina Sisulu at a political conference, Durban, 1983,” by Omar Badsha, 1983 158 5.10 “A prayer to open a meeting of the Amouti Residents Association,” by Omar Badsha, undated (early 1980s) 161 5.11 “Stevedore and his wife, Amouti,” by Omar Badsha, undated (early 1980s)

163 xiii

I l l u st rat i o n s

I l l u st rat i o n s xiv

5.12 “Shebeen owner and child, Amouti,” by Omar Badsha, undated (early 1980s) 164 5.13 “Teacher with her class of eighty children, Amouti,” by Omar Badsha, undated (early 1980s) 164 5.14 “Mr. Rattan, storekeeper and landlord, Amouti,” by Omar Badsha, undated (early 1980s)

166

5.15 “Induna Nkonyane, Amouti,” by Omar Badsha, undated (early 1980s) 167 5.16 “Inkatha pallbearers at funeral of Induna Nkonyane, Amouti,” Omar Badsha, undated (early 1980s) 167 5.17 “Disabled shoemaker whose shop was demolished a few weeks later, Amouti,” by Omar Badsha, undated (early 1980s) 168 5.18 “Ela Ramgobin and residents talk to pressmen after the demolition of shacks at Phoenix Store,” by Omar Badsha, undated (early 1980s) 169 5.19 “June 16th commemoration meeting, Gandhi Settlement,” by Omar Badsha, undated (early 1980s)

169

5.20 Farzanah Badsha, by Omar Badsha, undated (early 1980s)

171

5.21 Farzanah Badsha and Omar Badsha, by Tim Beserer, undated (early 1980s) 173 5.22 Omar Badsha running a film processing workshop, undated (mid-­1980s)

175

5.23 “Classroom, Rooigrond,” by Wendy Schwegmann, 1984

178

5.24 “Funeral in KwaMashu of two ANC soldiers killed in clashes with the police outside Stanger,” by Omar Badsha, 1984 180 5.25 “Office cleaner, Johannesburg,” by Lesley Lawson

182

5.26 Untitled (1986 is the year of Umkhonto we Sizwe . . .), by Omar Badsha, 1986 187 5.27 “Victoria Mxenge, UDF leader, YMCA, Beatrice Street,” by Omar Badsha, 1984

188

5.28 Phoenix Settlement, Inanda, by Omar Badsha, 1985

189

5.29 Untitled (Cape Town), by Ebrahim Badsha, 1972, inscribed “To my darling princesses Farzanah and Leila,” 1987

191

5.30 Omar Badsha and protesters at the University of Cape Town, undated (late 1980s) 194 6.1 Dumile Feni in New York, by Omar Badsha, 1990

202

6.2 ANC national conference, Durban, by Omar Badsha, 1991

207

6.3 ANC national conference, Durban, by Omar Badsha, 1991

208

6.4 Omar Badsha at the opening of Seedtimes 225 6.5 Omar Badsha, photograph by the author, 2019

233

6.6 “Garment worker, Queen Street,” by Omar Badsha, 1986

235

xv

I l l u st rat i o n s

P R E FAC E

How much does a memory weigh? —­Leyla McCalla, “Memory Song” The last time I saw Omar, we got into an argument. It was partially my fault; I was back in Cape Town after a three-­year, COVID-­induced hiatus. It was hot, and with load shedding, sleeping was difficult. I was jetlagged and ornery and less patient than I ought to have been, especially because I knew how conversations about this book tended to go. For the past many months, staring at each other’s digital avatar on our computer screens, we had sparred over what he thought were this book’s many “errors.” Some were factual, which I conceded and corrected; others were interpretative or analytical, and I pushed back. His assessment of my capacities was often withering. “You’re a s**t historian,” Omar said on more than one occasion. And even this judgment was preferable to his other conclusions, the profanity of which greatly amused my son when he overheard me and Omar going at it while home from school because of a COVID exposure.1 But I am Omar’s s**t historian, and as he once lamented, he is “stuck with me.”2 We have known each other since 2013, when we met to discuss my research on art education under apartheid. When the book that resulted came out, I asked Omar to join me in conversation to help launch it in Cape Town; he graciously agreed. At some point during the dinner that followed, he invited me to write his biography. I remember laughing—­I could not imagine issuing so bold an invitation—­but then I thought about it. I had been in his house; I could only imagine the wealth of materials there, in his boxes, his binders, on his walls, in his memories. I also knew the rudiments of his life story and the details of his career. A project on Omar Badsha would allow me to bring together the threads that had animated my previous books: the first, on political consciousness and commitment during the 1970s; the second, on the alternative meaning making that some South Africans embraced, under the duress of apartheid.3 To study Omar’s life would be to synthesize the dialectic I had

P r e fac e xviii

constructed: it would be about art and commitment, meaning making and self-­ making, all in the context of the struggle, both for change in South Africa’s past and, given that I had first met Omar in his capacity as CEO of South African History Online, the struggle over history in South Africa’s present.4 I traveled back to Cape Town in February 2018 with my voice recorder and a long list of questions. After tea, we sat down in his living room, and I asked him about his grandparents. Four-­plus years and one global pandemic later, I was back in that living room, looking through a binder of contact sheets when he challenged how I had framed what he describes as his earliest memory—­the January 1949 racial pogroms that swept through his Durban neighborhood. He had been three and a half at the time. The scholarship on memory and my own experience suggest that it is unlikely that he could recall those events as perfectly as he contended, and I wrote it that way, describing the sense memory that the events evoked and reflecting on what it meant that he narrates his life from that moment.5 Back in the living room, he accused me of calling him a liar for implying that he cannot remember what he claims to. Frustrated and tired, I sputtered something about “the scholarship.” Omar was livid. “Fuck your scholarship,” he retorted. Things quickly escalated. “Get out of my house. Don’t come back.”6 My mind raced—­I had years poured into this project, which had helped to keep me sane during long months confined to my home during high COVID. Like many people, I have spent the 2020s thinking about mortality and community; the multigenerational sweep of biography and its focus on the relationally constituted human subject made the pandemic easier to bear. This project kept me working, which in turn helped me to better understand how projects have and continue to be therapeutic and necessary for Omar. I tried to defuse the situation, conceding that scholarship is sometimes wrong. We calmed down and moved on to other things; this project continued. The book in your hands—­or on your screen—­is the result. This book is a hybrid neither-­nor, both-­and project. It is a biography and a work of history, interested not only in what the study of an individual life reveals about a person, but about what it meant to live in successive times and places, surrounded by other individuals who related to and shaped the subject at the study’s core. It is authorized, in the sense that Omar gave me access to his memories and his wondrous archives. But I am the book’s author; the errors—­whether of fact or interpretation—­are my own. I complemented the memories and archives that he offered with research in archives in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban, in London and New York, and online when in-­person research was no longer possible. He introduced me to people to interview and I tracked down others. I tried to keep the fact that this was only one possible story about art, activism, and history in

mind; scholarship being scholarship, the footnotes and bibliography attest to how I thought horizontally while pursuing the vertical thread of Omar’s life and line, from the grandparents with whom we began our conversations, through the conversations we had as the book went to press. I doubt I will ever write another study of a living subject. Doing so is complicated and emotionally draining. Omar provokes strong emotions in those he encounters—­there is frustration and anger and intense loyalty and love, sometimes all at once. Prose can be insufficient to capture such complexity. People are layered and difficult to capture in their multitudes; people with tightly held beliefs and barely repressed traumas, losses, and pain are especially sensitive to anything they think approaches misrepresentation. Oral history scholarship advises researchers to be aware of and to interrogate the “specific feelings” that interviewees “evoke in us.”7 Omar has certainly evoked specific feelings in me; I try to watch these feelings and thoughts as they project across the screen of my mind and to correct for them when transferring ideas to my fingers. I hope that I have succeeded, and I am sure that I have failed. Alessandro Portelli has written that “the diversity of oral history consists in the fact that ‘wrong’ statements are still ‘psychologically true’ and this truth may be equally as important as factually reliable accounts.”8 Few things are more treasured, more intimate, than memory. Omar remembers the 1949 pogrom in the way that he remembers it; from that memory, he narrates his self, or at least the one he eventually shared with me nearly seven decades later. People “are our memories,” Elizabeth Tonkin writes; we “shape our futures in light of past experience—­or what we understand to have been past experience.”9 This is a book about struggles over truth and over memory, and both the desire for—­and the fear of—­representation. This is a book about an archivist who is also an activist, an artist, and a historian, and another historian who has tried to make both narrative and scholarly sense from those archival traces. This book brings together memory and history, damned scholarship and fallible narrators, in pursuit of basic questions and provisional truths: What does it mean to live and to create under circumstances not of our choosing, as we all must do? What does it mean to struggle? What comfort does struggle yield, what satisfaction and peace, and at what cost?

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P r e fac e

AC K N O W L E D G M E N T S

I begin with the obvious: this book would not exist without Omar. I don’t totally understand why you trusted me with your stories, your memories, and your archives, but I am glad that you did, even if I don’t always show it. Thinking about your life has been one of the great honors of my own. We don’t agree on everything (or most things), and I’m sure this book’s being out in the world will provide more opportunities for us not to see eye to eye. But I’m here for that, as you have, in your own way, been patient with my ignorance, my mistakes, my errors, of interpretation and fact, while always answering my questions and making sure that the images look just right. What this book teaches, about South Africa, about the twentieth century, about life in general, is to your credit. All the errors are, of course, my own. I’m grateful to all the people in South Africa, the US, the UK, Belgium and beyond who shared their memories and archives with me, from family photographs to accessioned materials in Westville, Durban, Cape Town, Johannesburg, London, New Haven, and New York. Nasima was more understanding than I had any right to expect. Farzanah and Leila talked to me about the hard things and the good things and then kept in touch when the world shut down and I couldn’t make it back to Cape Town. It brings me joy to call them friends, although I recognize that the circumstances of our friendships come with a lot of baggage. Thank you for helping me to come back home with a full belly and wonderful gifts from Fabricate. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to sort through your baby pictures and narrate your childhoods; it is an honor to dedicate this book to you. Right when I started this project, the ways I was accustomed to talking to and learning from colleagues changed dramatically. Hlonipha Mokoena remains a constant; so does Jonny Steinberg. Joey, Berno, and Sebastian provided my home away from home at the very beginning; what fun it is now to see their new lives in the second-­greatest city in the world. Before things shut down, I was able to share very early versions of this work in Atlanta and Boston, and at Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard. Thanks to Dan Hodgkinson, Simukai Chigudu, Joel Cabrita, Jim Campbell (my first professor), Gabrielle Hecht, and engaged audiences for making those visits

Ac k n o w l e d g m e n ts xxii

possible. On the other side of a global pandemic, I was fortunate to share an updated version with colleagues from McGill and Concordia in Montreal (my thanks to Khalid Medani and Andy Ivaska for facilitating) and with colleagues on the other side of the world, at Yale-­NUS and NUS in Singapore. Unsuspecting generations of students in “A History of South Africa” and “The World Circa 2000” helped me figure out what story I wanted to tell. Perhaps my greatest debt is to my friends who made the time to read this entire book, sometimes in multiple iterations. Jill Kelly and Shobana Shankar guided me to improve this project in so many ways. Sean Jacobs has been a stalwart, generously sharing his own deep knowledge of South African history, culture, and politics, and his decades’ long friendship with and affection for Omar. I’m lucky that our own friendship extends to mediocre Thai food in Prospect Heights, low-­stakes whining about our families, the occasional walk in the park, and the even more rare Nets win. It took a while for this book to find a home and I am so glad that it ended up somewhere so familiar. Thanks to Derek, Jacob, Allen, and Carina for believing in the project, and to Beth, Rick, and Addie for patiently working through issues of image resolution and such that I don’t really understand. Colleagues, administration, and staff at Yale have done amazing work keeping our programs running, online, masked, and not. Michael, Steph, Cajetan, Cristin, and Norah in the Council of African Studies; Deanna and Lina for the accounting behind the scenes; John Beecher for helping to make Omar’s images the most beautiful part of this book. Support from the Whitney Humanities Center and Macmillan Center made my research possible. Thanks to Dana, Essie, Liza, and Marcy in the history department; to Katie Loftyn in the dean’s office, for her consistent support; to Alan and Anne for dinners in New York and dynamic classrooms in New Haven; Paul and Sam and Nana and Ben and Bob and the grad students who have been such a part of these past many years: Thuto, Efe, Amanda, Marius, Liezl, Kathryn, Tony, Yasmina, Allegra, Mikhail, now Louise and Kate. Michaela, who helps to run book reviews for the Journal of African History; my fellow editors there, for the invasive COVID tests, the diligent scholarship, and the camaraderie: Emily, who mentored me, Shane, Marissa, Moses, Michelle, Reynolds, and Sam. Robert Repino at the other OUP for keeping faith with our project, which is bound to be finished at some point, right? My students, one of whom—­Megan Briggs—­created the timeline, and another of whom—­Ann Sarnak—­first wrote a brilliant thesis about some of the events this book considers, and later spent many, many hours transcribing my interviews. I am incredibly grateful, as I am to Vivian Hawkinson for designing the maps. This book was conceived during the freedom that tenure offered, and then written in stolen moments before the kids woke up for remote school and I girded

myself for too many hours spent on Zoom. Generous friends provided time and space, especially Sean and Jessica, who gave Katy, Ghost, and me a week to breathe when we needed it most. Some of my best writing resulted. I finished my first draft while dodging Omicron and reintroducing myself to the world outside my door. Given the times, the fact that this book exists—­that I exist—­is about much more than the typical academic gratitude that I shared above. However real and essential that was, this book and this life are equally due to people and institutions not usually mentioned in this genre of writing. Today, typing on my kitchen table, I am grateful to be constituted of and sustained by the Brooklyn Angels softball team (Coaches Jordy, Caleb, and Joe), the catcher, and all the other players. Windsor Mountain Summer Camp. Kings College Sitters on Facebook, successive generations of whom got my son from place to place. The BFS colleagues and their supporters. The teachers and coaches who continue to nurture our children. My family who I could not see for a while and who I wish I saw more: my parents, Fred and Phyllis; Drew, Sayeh, Rafa, Remy and Desi; my family out west: Amy, Jesse, Laura, Casey, Joey, Chuck, and Joan. My cousins, their spouses, and their incredible kids. Friends from past lives who remain so central in this one, especially Mukoma wa Ngugi, Jenny Mann, and Guy Ortolano. Go Birddawgs. Cherry blossoms in Greenwood Cemetery in April 2020. The kiss of sun and sea at Lambert’s Cove. That flower so deeply blue along the side of the trail. That one small tree in Prospect Park that gets the light just right. My neighbors when they’re quiet, and when they’re not. Bats flying out at dusk. Cheerios. Skymiles. Dr. Martin. Jae at Electric Lotus Tattoo. Birdsong when the sun refuses to go. Whoever designed the Iverson stepping over Trump T-shirt. That rock and the waves that lap it, and the peace that comes when I think of water and stone, no matter where I am and what I’m doing. Lab Shul. Robert, my coach. Tara, my therapist. Keith, Tom, Jess, and Erica, who kept a weekly Zoom alive and wonderful over the course of a challenging year. Tim was on Zoom too, and has been there from before the chuppah and after the B Mitzvah tent, for drinks in the revolving restaurant and books about beavers and other obsessions, and consistent, loyal love and care. Naaborko, Zora, and Miles for Vietnamese food in coastal Connecticut, the Driverless Train in Canary Wharf, and so much more. Old friends Jamie, Shomit, Toly, Lloyd, Josh, and their wondrous families, for conversation, laughter, and joyful release. Our Brooklyn family with whom we raised our own. I name names because in ways big and small, you all made this book possible, even when you didn’t know that was what you were doing. Lori, Kiesean, Luke, Miles, and Nico; Kate, Ed, Hannah, and Benny; Gabe, Marjan, Naila, and Jules; Saskia, Julian, Luna, and Ines; April, Marc, Leo, and Kingston. The

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Ac k n o w l e d g m e n ts xxiv

lofted ceiling at Grand Central, and the bathrooms down below. A perfectly timed transfer at Franklin. That breeze that sometimes reminds you that Union Station is near the sea. Tidal inlets seen from the New Haven Line; Cape Town and the Atlantic seen from the trails on Table Mountain. Jogging in the dark with the dog. Ghost himself, and even Spazzle and Kazoo. That moment in Dance Yrself Clean when you do. A cigarette, sometimes, and a beer and a tiny glimpse of the sky at night. What joy and what privilege, even and especially when it’s hard. That’s how I feel to share my home and my life with Katy Hansen. Her laugh is the one sound I cannot live without. I might not always love you, but long as there are stars above you, you’ll never need to doubt it. God only knows what I’d be without you. Thank you for living this book with me. Thank you for reminding me to stay positive and to trust. Here’s to the bumps and the hard times and the quiet moments and the raucous ones, fast walks up and down in the soaking rain and the sun on your back before you plunge into the crystalline Bohinj or the muddy Colorado. To our kids’ eyes looking back at us, and the deep happiness our lives together give me. Here’s to adventures to come, both near and far. Brandon Graham. Nick Foles. Bryce Harper. Always Tyrese, sometimes Joel. Crown Heights. New York. Nandor the Relentless. Nadia and Lazlo. Gizmo, even Colin Robinson. Time, and the perspective to watch it pass. Liya turned nine the day before I left to begin this project with Omar (which was the same day Brandon and Nick did their thing). Micah was only five. She’s now fifteen, in high school, and soon enough he’ll be twelve. They are my babies and their own wondrous people. Time is a jet plane and being their dad makes the ride worthwhile. Ultimately, this is a book about a family, about the saga of living meaningfully in time, generation after generation. Everything I know about that I learned from being in a family myself, and seeing the world pivot, from my grandparents, now gone, through my parents, through Katy and me, to Liya and Micah. The world is a mess, and I am in love with their future. May yours be a generation that knows peace and brings closer the repair of the world. May your lives be beautiful and fulfilling, like you have made mine. It may not be much of a gift, and it’s certainly not one you asked for, but nevertheless, this book is for you.

Map 0.1. Indian Ocean world

Map 0.2. Central Durban

Map 0.3. Natal and KwaZulu

Map 0.4. South Africa

Figure 0.1. Timeline

AVAILABLE LIGHT

Chapter 1 THE BAC K ROOM Struggle is when You have to lower your eyes And steer time —­Mafika Gwala, “Gumba Gumba, Gumba” THE HOUSE ON DOUGLAS LANE was on the lower slopes of a great hill, just across

the railroad lines from Durban’s central business district. It had a small outbuilding in the backyard. It was stifling in the humidity and leaked a bit in the rain, although the green canopy of the Umdoni tree overhead provided some shelter from both. That back room, separate from the rest of the house, was where Omar stayed. He was the eldest son of a family that had lived for more than fifty years on South Africa’s southeastern coast, most of them on Douglas Lane. In 1967, he spent most of his time in that back room, although the damp air left him with a recurrent flu. There he had books, pamphlets, newspapers, inks and pencils, with which he grappled daily in his ongoing quest to be an artist. He was angsty, tense, frustrated; he obtained a Lufthansa-­branded weekly planner and used it as a diary, seeking to capture in its pages his yearning for a “change of atmosphere,” for himself, his family, and his country.1 He wrote and he drew and in between he walked around the neighborhood. It was impossible to separate his own situation from what he saw in the surrounding streets. His was a cosmopolitan part of Durban; although many of his neighbors were, like Omar, of Gujarati Muslim descent, there were also Hindus, Christians and even Jews nearby. During the daylight, the neighborhood—­known as Wills Road, for a nearby street—­was bustling, lively, diverse. After dark, the white neighborhoods higher up the hill were guarded by both the police and the government’s

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segregationist laws. These laws—­known as apartheid—­were increasingly penetrating the neighborhood, the diversity of which offended the state’s mania for clear divisions between people. Some neighbors were being compelled to move away from the city center, to segregated townships on the fringes of the city. Their houses were bulldozed in their wake. A planned freeway would rend the community in half. “There is a sadness that eats my district,” Omar reflected after returning from one outing. “Apartheid is like a cloth, slipped over the face of a man, choking us.”2 The threat of suffocation came closer still. Early in 1967, Omar’s father received a letter informing them that that they would have to vacate their home under the dictates of the government’s notorious Group Areas Act. Ebrahim Badsha was sociable and extroverted; he was also quick to anger. He, too, had wanted to be an artist but was repeatedly frustrated by a lack of opportunity and social pressure to earn a living for his family. The letter was vague about timeline and particulars, but it carried terrible weight. The mood on Douglas Lane frequently soured. Omar and Ebrahim argued, repeatedly, vehemently. Omar turned twenty-­two years old in June, under the shadow of expulsion. Nineteen sixty-­seven’s slow-­motion suffocation was in stark contrast to the beginning of the decade, when a broad-­based movement to end racial discrimination had touched nearly every community and found widespread support within many of the country’s diverse communities—­Omar’s included. Omar had been a student when activism reached a fever pitch in 1960; only fifteen, he had become involved in the Durban Students’ Union, a mostly Indian student group dedicated to replacing white minority rule with a representative, race-­neutral, and economically equitable system. In the DSU, he came under the sway of Jeevan Desai, one of the organization’s leaders. Desai was a college student, from the same neighborhood, connected to activists across the country. He was assured, impassioned, eloquent. He preached a politics that reasoned that, since apartheid divided, the absolute, nonnegotiable foundation of resistance to it ought to be unity of South Africa’s oppressed peoples. Organizations, in their constitution, their maintenance, and their practices, had to be everything that the state was not: democratic, transparent, rule abiding, and open to all. Members of groups like the DSU or other organizations might know themselves or each other as “Africans” or “Indians,” “Christians,” “Jews,” or “Muslims,” “communists” or “nationalists,” even “whites,” but what really mattered was their shared commitment to their organization’s goals. Nonracialists like Desai did not deny the salience of race; rather, they claimed that nonracialism provided a road map to unmaking the world that racism and its cousins—­colonialism, class repression, inequality, apartheid—­had so violently constructed.

Figure 1.1. Self-­portrait, undated (mid-­1960s)

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Omar had found ideas like Desai’s heady and inspiring, especially in the context of the conservative propaganda that emanated from both the state and his schools. Not surprisingly, the government drew a different conclusion and banned Desai from public life, placing him under house arrest and making it impossible for the promising student to earn a living. Omar and Desai lost touch after the banning, but Desai’s ideas became principles by which the younger man would try to live his life. Holding to those ideals was never easy. Apartheid was relentless. First came the expulsion order. Then came the even more awful news that Desai—­still in his twenties—­had died. The press reported that he had walked into the Indian Ocean and drowned. The police called it suicide, since Desai could not swim, but rumors swirled that the government’s Special Branch had been involved. Desai had been “one of the best of the old guard here in Durban,” Omar mourned. “He taught me my politics.” Police surveillance and collective anxiety made it difficult for there to be a proper burial, although Desai’s dwindling company of comrades did their best to mark his passing.3 When trying to read or draw, Omar thought about the costs of struggle. He considered his family’s predicament and Desai’s death. He lost track of his task easily. He was frequently startled to find himself staring blankly at the paper tacked to his wall, or frozen with his head cocked, lost in the rain drumming on the roof. He yearned for something different, something better. Activists had once envisioned a future that broke totally with apartheid, colonialism, racism, and poverty. They

Figure 1.2. Diary sample, March 1968, photograph by the author

had resisted the machinations of a powerful state, only to falter when the state had pushed back, with deadly force. Desai was gone. What did his death mean, for Omar, for Durban, for South Africa? Omar was an artist, a reader, an observer, a quiet participant, developing his own critiques, theories, and responses to apartheid. He wanted to be a revolutionary, yet “my accomplishments amount to so little that an ant could stand on them.” That realization arrested him. An anthill was something, however small; perhaps its tiny elevation might be a foundation.4 He sought out like-­minded others, a new generation of activists, a network like that frayed collective that had mourned Desai. He cultivated friendships with other artists from Durban and beyond. He celebrated their talents and learned from how they distilled and related their experiences. He went to galleries and cafés and listened to poetry. In his friends, he recognized the same frustrated energy, that determination that something had to change. They were poets, writers, artists. Sometimes cowed in public, in private spaces they imagined a different South Africa, a different world. They carried their own histories, their own traumas; Omar certainly carried his. Writing, reciting, drinking, drawing, debating, they sought a way through their wounded selves. South Africa was big, its government massive, its power seemingly absolute. Omar was an ant. The state could crush him under foot. But the more he read, the more people he met, the more he was convinced that there were other ants, in rooms like his, in Durban, across the country, antennae prickling with invisible signals, moving around, coming to new alignments and renewed purposes. He was increasingly convinced that, in time, “things [might] go like before,” back before he had met Desai, when there had been protests, marches, and fearless confrontations with the state.5 He hunted for evidence in the streets, in his growing networks, in the newspapers, in his art, in his own self. Occasionally, his task appeared before him with remarkable clarity. “I want to forge the links with the future,” he declared to his diary, so that “what they enjoy is what we wanted to enjoy.”6 Time passed. He wrote and read, sketched and listened to the rain. He was sometimes melancholic, occasionally inspired, often stubbornly resolute. He argued with his family and sought solace in books, pens, paper, and friends. The apartheid state made plans for his neighborhood. Omar Badsha made plans of his own. MEMORY, ARC HIVES, IMAGES

In Omar’s recounting, his story and history cannot be separated. He plots his consciousness beginning from the January 1949 pogroms that swept through Durban and forced a racial reckoning between Indians and Africans in apartheid’s earliest days. He narrates his childhood by reference to events of local and national importance—­the

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Congress of the People, the Women’s March, the stockroom employees at Mohamedy’s who talked to him about the Communist Party and brought him to his first clandestine meeting. High school was punctuated by reports of resistance to forced removals in nearby Cato Manor and violent repression in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre in the Transvaal. Young adulthood was the era of the armed struggle and the struggling, enduring underground; his twenties were marked by resurgent trade unionism and overt activism; his thirties by his increasing prominence in the conjoined spheres of art and struggle, as a cofounder of the Afrapix photographers’ collective that did so much to shape how the struggle against apartheid was depicted and understood; his forties by the transition to democracy, during which many people thought the connection between aesthetics and politics ought to be sundered in the name of “normalcy.” In the twenty-­first century his relationship with history has grown even more intensively entangled, as the founder and CEO of South African History Online (SAHO), one of the African continent’s most significant independent historical archives and content producers and one of the more comprehensive—­if chaotic—­history-­focused initiatives anywhere. To know Omar, to listen to his stories, to hear how he narrates who he is and where he has been, is to get a crash course in more than fifty years of South African political history.7 And yet, it is also true that one could tell his country’s story without his. Omar is not an icon of the struggle on par with the Mandelas, Bikos, Fischers, Maharajs, Kathradas, Dadoos, or Ebrahims whose published biographies are part of what Bank and Jacobs call South Africa’s “life history industry.”8 So why this book, why yet another South African biography, especially of someone like Omar? Biography is an industry: nearly one thousand biographies of prominent South Africans have been published since 1994, focused especially on those South Africans who lived laudable lives during the long decades of the struggle. Such life histories help people who are “groping towards reimagining political possibilities,” Bank and Jacobs propose, suggesting that the focus on past lives has grown especially meaningful in the face of contemporary South Africa’s multiple disappointments.9 As a social historian, I am troubled by this abundance. I am temperamentally and methodologically opposed to the very premise that “outstanding individuals” have been the most consequential historical actors. Indeed, biography offends my most tightly held methodological truth, which is that good historical research and writing needs to be anti-­teleological above all. If we seek to understand how and why people acted a certain way in the past, I believe that we must do whatever we can to renounce what we know about the outcomes of their lives; in other words, we must seek contingency, not prophecy. Biography’s method is teleological, in that the biographer knows that their subject has historical “value” (whatever that means)

Figure 1.3. Ebrahim Badsha and children, unknown photographer, 1950,

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and turns to the past to explain how that value came to be. Biography can instruct, it can moralize, mourn, extol, or warn, it can illustrate the past, but it is not history.10 Moreover, the more I investigated Omar’s life and encountered those people who knew him best, I was struck by how frequently they chafed at the prospect that his life merited biographical treatment. “We are just ordinary people,” Nasima, Omar’s ex-­wife insisted. “We lived ordinary lives.”11 He was, as one anonymous peer reviewer of an earlier draft of this book put it, a “mid-­level cadre,” one among many thousands of ordinary (to adopt Nasima’s framing) South Africans who played lesser and greater roles in resisting racial and class oppression during the long decades before 1994 and since. Omar penned no great treatises, gave no historic speeches. If he had not suggested to me that I write this book—­and if that suggestion had not come at a moment in my own career when such a thing was feasible—­it is unclear whether Omar’s biography would be added to the impressive stack of volumes. Thus the question remains: Why Omar? Longevity is part of the answer, and so is individuality. “Mid-­level” is apt; until Afrapix and SAHO, Omar was a participant more frequently than he was someone who shaped events. Yet he was a particular sort of participant. Terribly dyslexic, he struggled in school and was treated brutally because of it. Nevertheless, from an early age he was an inveterate and eager diarist; over the course of his decades, he filled notebooks, loose-­leaf scraps, even precious sheets of toilet paper with his distinct, nearly illegible scrawl. When his father, Ebrahim, passed away in 2003, Omar and his daughters were forced to reckon with the reality that their grandfather was a hoarder: “There was no space even to put down a cup of tea,” Omar’s eldest daughter, Farzanah, recalled.12 Any visitor to Omar’s house in Cape Town knows that Omar is not that different. His archive is scattershot, uneven, and random—­medical records, visitor passes, accumulated ephemera, paper and more paper, boxes where affidavits detailing abusive conditions in Pietermaritzburg textile mills mix with Afrapix meeting minutes and publication schedules for SAHO’s various endeavors. Given that he has spent the last two decades curating a website that is largely an open-­access archive, it is perhaps not surprising that Omar’s own archive could support no mean number of inquiries into the various aspects of South African history. But it remains an idiosyncratic and subjective archive, through which we see the archivist repeatedly trying to make sense of both his own self and his role in history. Omar struggled to finish high school; unlike many of those famed leaders who have been subject to biographical analysis, he never went to university, nor attained the heights of any recognized movement or profession. Omar is an “organic intellectual,” in the Gramscian sense, self-­taught, self-­aware, and committed to his own hard-­won, tightly held analysis of the world.13

Dig a layer deeper into the boxes and there are different kinds of sources, which help to explain how and why the archive came to be. Omar’s political archive is impressive, but somewhat redundant—­although historians could write wonderful work based on Omar’s materials, we have also managed fine without his boxes. Counterintuitively, it is the more personal material adjacent to the meeting minutes and political pamphlets that makes Omar’s story worth telling, because it is in the ephemera of his “ordinary” South African life that we can see how activism was born at the intersection of desire and need, in the lives of those who maintained it. Three decades after 1994, the struggle’s sureties have been replaced with uncertainty and pessimism. The scholarship has reworked the twentieth century’s last modernization narrative into a more ambiguous tale better suited to the anti-­progress that marks the twenty-­first. Nations tell themselves myths; scholars increasingly focus on middle people, cultural brokers, the meaning making that was possible under circumstances not of people’s choosing: on ambiguities, uncertainties, betrayals, the incomplete, the incoherent, the partial, and the failed.14 The fixation on ambiguity captures something true and obscures something essential. As a class, Indian South Africans were quintessential middle people, those perennial foreigners that Yuri Slezkine defined as “service nomads” or, more suggestively, as “Mercurians,” stuck in the middle of an epochal conflict between two communities—­expatriate European and locally African—­who contested the right to be South Africa’s rightful “natives” (or as Slezkine schematizes it, Apollonians).15 Indian South Africans were what Jon Soske calls “the also-­colonized,” sometimes wealthier and better positioned than the African majority—­in some areas, very much so—­while also enduring all the social, political, economic, and psychological hardships that came with being “non-­white” under apartheid rule.16 Indian South Africans’ middling position was a categorical truth. But for people like Omar, there were more personal truths that articulated with the national system. Omar’s Badshas were not wealthy or successful; Ebrahim worked for his better-­off neighbors, applying his creative talent to the rather mundane tasks of signwriting and advertisement printing. Omar’s mother, Miriam, was severely mentally ill; much later in life she would be described as schizophrenic, although when Omar still lived at home, he and his siblings lacked the vocabulary to diagnosis her condition. At times there could be love in the house, while at others there was anger and bitter recrimination, which spilled over into conflict and, eventually, to Ebrahim sending Miriam away. In other words, whether politically or personally, by the time he turned fifteen in 1960, Omar was aware that, as Anna Tsing puts it, “precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others,” of not being “in control, even of ourselves.” In her work, Tsing is studying how people navigate the uncertainties of the world after progress,

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when “everything is in flux, including our ability to survive.” A “precarious world is a world without teleology,” she concludes. Tsing is thinking about the twenty-­first century, not about apartheid South Africa in the middle of the twentieth—­but her analysis is apposite nonetheless.17 To read Omar’s diaries across the 1960s is to track someone a-sea on a very fragile raft; school provided no safe harbor, nor did home, nor organizations like the DSU, nor, faced with apartheid’s wrecking balls, were places like 7 Douglas Lane and the surrounding neighborhood, as secure as they appeared. Our explorations in ambiguity have embraced this anti-­teleological ethos.18 But we must remember that meaning is most precious when circumstances are most precarious. “The Struggle” was always a myth, a collective delusion, a useful fiction. History does not go anywhere, as a rule; faced with circumstances beyond their individual control, people manufacture necessary illusions, what Joan Scott called “collective fantasies” that “infuse interest with desire and seem to provide an answer to the impossible question of identity, to the subjects’ quest for wholeness and coherence.”19 “Democracy” might be such a fantasy; “revolution” more fantastic still.20 When we cling to our fantasies tightly enough, we can become convinced they are real; this might be delusional, it might be dissociative, it might not be the model of psychological health. But it is necessary. Fantasy can be a form of subjectivation, as scholars of different belief systems have demonstrated.21 By committing oneself to useful illusions about the future, people in Omar’s position made “the choice to go on living, to insist upon life—­with its suffering and its joys,” which, the feminist philosopher Lisa Tessman reminds us, “is an existential choice of great significance under oppression.”22 Omar’s collected documents and scribbled-­on scraps constitute an archive that offers views into a succession of personal, familial, and quotidian realities from the 1960s until today; the archive is a repository of insights about political movements from the DSU and APDUSA, to TUACC and the CWIU, to Afrapix, the Second Carnegie Project, the CWC, FOSACO and SAHO, and to the individual who made such movements his life’s work. Encountering the books, the boxes, and the person, it is surprisingly easy to overlook the images. But they are there—­printed on white paper fading to yellow, stacked dozens high on every available flat surface, or gathered into binders, decades of accumulated negatives developed into contact sheets or not, book shelves weighed down with volumes of his monographs23 or the multiple-­authored collections for which he served as contributor, editor, organizer, or catalyst.24 It is difficult to comprehend this abundance; absent Omar’s narration and extraordinary recall for names, faces, and places, the photographs blend into a familiar seriality. There are the interiors, with the poor, dignified families determined to make things

work; there are the never-­ending meetings, comrades gathered on a dais, declaiming in front of banners bearing the injunction “Don’t Vote in Apartheid Elections” or “UDF Unites, Apartheid Divides” or “Every Act of Culture is an Act of Resistance.” There are the funerals, the rallies, the confrontations. Omar himself rarely appears in these photographs, other than via his lens. Based on this second archive, Omar is indeed “a giant of South African documentary photography,” as Tiffany Willoughby-­Herard concludes.25 The images are an extraordinary source. John Berger put it best: “No other relic or text from the past can offer such direct testimony about the world which surrounded other people at other times. In this respect images are more precise and richer than literature.”26 The historian of photography Darren Newbury has traced a rich vein of South African documentary practice that stretched from 1948 to 1994 and beyond; in a time and place where censorship and repression so clearly determined which words might be printed and distributed, images were bright flashes of insight whose truth value was undeniable. “There could hardly be a society in which the politics of making and showing images was more apparent,” Newbury contends. This is the value of the photographic archive: unlike Omar’s scribblings, many of which are

Figure 1.4. “Students marching to funeral of COSAS member, KwaMashu, 1981,”

photograph by Omar Badsha

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trying retrospectively to order and make sense of his experiences, the images “interrupt the flow of time, opening up a space for critical reflection, and the possibility of dialogue between past and present.”27 Historians have grown accustomed to including visual imagery or other objects as the springboard for scholarly analysis. What Horsley calls the “visual or pictorial” turn is well under way in the discipline at large and especially in African history, which is a field always thirsty for sources that might help to recover experiences that state or colonial archives obscure.28 Art historians, cultural critics, and others more adept and practiced than I have written about Omar’s oeuvre and placed his work in the context of the South African documentary tradition, the conjunction of art and politics, and the social history of the neighborhood where he grew up, or Inanda, a few dozen kilometers north of Durban, which became the center of both his political and working life in the early 1980s.29 Critics are aware that photographs are mere flashes (even when the photographer, in Omar’s case, never used a flash himself), as revealing for what they do not show as what they do; “the value of the photographic archive . . . lies not in presenting the past ‘as it really happened,’” Newbury advises.30 Indeed, and especially in Omar’s case, given that most of his images carried an explicit political purpose and ask to be read and understood accordingly. But they are eloquent evidence nonetheless, especially when considered in conversation with the other visual objects that proliferate in Omar’s house. There is, for example, the bronzed sculpture Portrait of Omar Badsha, by Dumile Feni, “South Africa’s best-­known art star” during the 1960s who was also Omar’s beloved collaborator and a frequent guest in the back room on Douglas Lane, before Dumile went into exile in 1968.31 Omar carried this and other sculptures with him in his friend’s absence. And not only the sculptures: there are Dumile’s drawings, clear-­eyed and brutal depictions of Black South African life, mediated through a vivid imagination; there are also photographs of the friends working together, or standing in front of a canvas together, or just sitting quietly. And there is more: Ebrahim’s paintings and pencil sketches, for example, and, scattered around the small house, wrapped in bubble wrap for protection, or stashed behind bookshelves, gathering dust and avoiding the sun, dozens and dozens of Omar’s own graphic works. This second visual archive offers profound insights into Omar’s personal trajectory; that story in turn speaks eloquently to that choice that Tessman defined, to “insist upon life” amid oppression. Omar began seriously to draw after leaving school in 1964. He experimented with different sorts of scenes; he produced prize-­ winning work in 1965 and began to take seriously the prospect of being a working artist thereafter. Yet the more he worked, the more his output reflected a fundamental, recurring motif: mothers—­usually wearing a head covering, as Miriam always did—­and their infant children. These are not pleasant, domestic scenes; rather,

Figure 1.5. Portrait of Omar Badsha, by Dumile Feni, photograph by the author

Figure 1.6. Omar Badsha and Dumile Feni at the Durban Art Gallery, photograph by Moosa Badsha, 1966

befitting the reality that “mother” was an open question in his household and a wound in his psyche, in Omar’s drawings mothers stare vacantly in the middle distance, never tenderly at their offspring. They are often bound—­confined to bed, sometimes restrained with what look like straps, sometimes chained and jailed, their head coverings mutating into handcuffs that lock them in place. Art historians have tended to overlook Omar’s graphic works, given the abundance and accomplishment of his photography. Were they to look more closely, those familiar with the trajectory of South African graphics would note the obvious resonance between Omar’s and Dumile’s work, both of which featured stark depictions of family life under apartheid, in which human beings were distorted by trauma and history. Yet over the course of the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, something shifted: Omar’s mothers—­and their children—­gradually grew beaks, acquired feathers, and became birds. This shift from the observably personal to something more allusive and generalizable had been his goal since meeting Dumile in 1966. In Dumile’s starkly honest work, Omar admired that his friend had shouldered the responsibility “to bare man’s ‘sins.’” Dumile “says all he wants to say,” Omar wrote, and South Africa is “what he says.”32 Omar struggled to find a visual language to match Dumile’s; his family scenes were personal and honest, but he struggled to speak to broader social concerns. His difficulties frustrated and motivated him. “The artist

Figure 1.7. Untitled (mother and child), by Omar Badsha, 1971

trains himself to see more in what he goes through than others,” he reflected; only then could the artist send “a message to his fellow man,” to show anyone who encounters the work not only “what he”—­the artist—­“is,” but also who the audience is. The task of the artist was thus to make “his individuality universal.” The mother could not be only his mother, in other words; she needed to be South Africa’s.33 So he turned his people into birds. In one pencil drawing, he depicted a mother raising her fourth child—­a bird—­high above the other three, who grasp and whine. In other graphics—­including one of his best known, Black Mother, which won a national competition in 1969 and prompted his first solo exhibition the next year—­the

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Figure 1.8. “For Ayesha,” by Omar Badsha, undated

mothers became avian themselves. Occasionally, the humans were replaced entirely by birds, albeit ones whose feet were frequently encased in cement blocks and who could not fly. You did not need to know the details of South African history to sense what was happening there. Via art, Omar did not erase the uniquely troubled circumstances of his growing up; family remained a preoccupation, its depiction a compulsion. But by making his people birds, Omar found a way to dissolve Douglas Lane’s noxiousness into something bigger and more meaningful: apartheid’s race and class oppression meant that he was not the only bird weighed down. “Art,” Arthur Danto writes, “uses experience to carry us beyond experience.”34 At the turn of the 1970s, Omar’s earthbound flock demonstrated, in his own modest way, what T. J. Clark noted about Picasso’s depictions of human monstrosity. Out of the artist’s “revulsion from the world around them can come, in times of catastrophe, the fullest recognition of what catastrophe is—­how it enters and structures everyday life.”35 The work was tighter and more eloquent. It was more therapeutic. POLITICS AS THERAPY, A .K.A . AVAIL ABLE LIGHT

While some historians have pursued the visual or pictorial turn, in recent years others have explored the psychoanalytical, or what Mxolisi Mchunu describes as the “psycho-­social,” approach to human experience. Such an approach “recognizes that there is a close, ongoing interaction between an individual’s psychological state and his or her social environment.”36 Mchunu’s study is focused on the affective experience and afterlives of traumatic violence in KwaZulu-­Natal. Although his account is irreducible, given its emphasis on his personal experience and those of his loved ones, his focus on the psycho-­social accords with Sean Field’s oral histories of displacement and forced removals in and around Cape Town. Unlike Mchunu, Field did not experience these traumas firsthand; his intention is to develop a method that allows researchers and their subjects to speak to each other over the chasm of a traumatic past, to “dialogically work through the initial rupture” by listening empathetically, resolved that there is nothing the researcher can do to fix what has been broken.37 In their work, both Fields and Mchunu gesture toward Shula Marks’s much earlier argument that historians need to comprehend “the complex relationship of individual psychology with a culture bounded social order.”38 And as Marks’s successors indicate, in South Africa and elsewhere, many “psycho-­social” studies must necessarily address the legacies of trauma, for both persons and societies. Indeed, both Mchunu and Field offer their work as a corrective to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and similar “national processes [that] fail to recognize that . . . traumatized individuals live in a world of [their] unique circumstances.”39 Omar’s traumas were of a different order than those endured by their subjects, but

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they were significant nonetheless. Much of the scholarship on the psycho-­social—­ what Derek Hook calls the “psychopolitical”—­is focused on generating a vocabulary to help historians and others understand how traumatic pasts are carried into traumatized presents.40 “The norms, the ideals, the lived sensibilities of apartheid—­ are simultaneously psychical and societal, because, simply enough, these two dimensions are thoroughly intertwined,” Hook explains.41 So long as “intense past experiences [continue to] leave profound and at times uncomfortable emotional traces,” South Africans need the generative uncertainties of collective therapy, as do many postcolonial, post-­conflict, and racially conflicted societies.42 Scholarship like Hook’s, like Mchunu’s, like Field’s can help us grasp this. But when we think about both Omar’s birds and his abandonment of art to work as a union organizer shortly after finding this new language, his story reminds us that traumatized people can find their own therapy, in unlikely places—­in Omar’s case, in politics.43 Dumile was Omar’s most important initial artistic interlocutor, whose reputation was based on his willingness to show Black South Africans’ bodies as many Black South Africans knew them to be. Omar’s birds became his answer to Dumile’s example. In 1968, Dumile left; Omar stayed. Other than art, his primary preoccupation was carrying messages between the small, isolated cells that were all that remained of “the movement” in and around Durban, while working with local activists to help the families of the detained and banned preserve a certain level of dignity against the overwhelming force of apartheid’s disdain. That pursuit of dignity over trauma led Omar to the labor movement and the world around a University of Natal politics lecturer named Rick Turner, who, like Steve Biko, was theorizing what small-­d democracy—­humanism—­meant in the South African context. In the unions, Omar met workers who were literally disfigured, whose arms had been scarred by being plunged into vats of chemicals or who had had acid thrown onto their faces. When he reemerged as an artist at the end of the 1970s—­now with a camera—­he was no longer interested in showing dehumanization. He was, in other words, no longer fixated on trauma but instead vied to capture the essential and the humane, the wholeness he knew apartheid denied to Black people and that, perhaps, he feared he himself lacked. When he took empathetic pictures of drug addicts or shackdwellers in Inanda, he was keeping his own ghosts at bay. In his archive there are pictures of birds flocking on a Durban street, but those were birds, nothing more. Omar’s dizzying array of human subjects were people and, mediated through his lens, they, like him, found solace in the fantasy that all this history was leading somewhere. Omar never learned to use a flash and worked by available light.44 This was a personal, aesthetic choice that I have come to understand metaphorically as a counter-­telos. Available light cannot know the future. Available light is not

romantic. It makes few pronouncements. Available light knows that tomorrow it could rain and that the day after might be bright. Available light is all about the cracks, because that is how the light gets in. To see by available light is to persist, until it fades, and you cannot. Omar was raised Muslim, although today the faith lingers mostly in his rhetorical conventions and the ritual calendar that he does not really observe. When he speaks about Islam, it is frequently to note how the faith’s insistence on the unity of believers made him question how those high ideals had become disconnected from the household, neighborhood, and society in which he lived, which was so fundamentally divided by sect, caste, gender, race, and class. Scholars have demonstrated how similar observations led many Muslims to see the broad-­based movement against apartheid as a jihad, an exertion or struggle toward justice.45 In places like South Africa, where injustice is the rule, the Qur’an enjoins Muslims to fight “until there exists no tumult and oppression and there prevails justice and faith in God.”46 Omar eschews Islamic authority; he justifies his life not by reference to sacred texts or religious teachers, but to ideological foundations—­ socialism, nonracialism, humanism, democracy—­and secular mentors, all of which he frequently groups under the broad tent of “the struggle,” as many South Africans do. For Omar, “the struggle” was bigger than the legal system called “apartheid,” and in this the theological resonance with jihad is hard to ignore. Theologians advise us that there will be setbacks. To commit to jihad, to struggle, is not to be guaranteed victory, but to persist unto the dying of the light. To struggle is to work and to know Omar is to know his projects. As far back as his teens, he was concerned with finding and maintaining disciplines, occupations, work that he made him feel good about himself, about his area, and about the future.47 First there was the family (chap. 2), then the student movement, the underground, simultaneous with mothers and birds (chap. 3), trade unionism during the so-­called Durban Moment (chap. 4), comrades in the cultural movement, a family of his own, collaborations with activists both foreign and local (chap. 5), eventually an archive, more projects, this and other books (chap. 6). Some projects died a natural death, as projects tend to do; others ended in a swirl of recrimination and ill-­feeling; researching this book required navigating complicated and layered relationships and learning how to hold ill-­feeling in tension with appreciation and nostalgia. I have thought a lot about the occasional anger that my research questions provoked. Martin Hägglund has considered how people live rich, if messy, human lives through work—­not labor, but the regular, ongoing act of “sustaining purpose by attaching [themselves] to what [they] see.”48 Hägglund’s model is somewhat abstract and removed from real-­world political situations, but it resonates with examples from political movements in South Africa and elsewhere.49 Tessman’s description of the

21

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AVA I L A B L E L I G H T 22

“politically resistant self ” under systems of oppression is a useful complement. To be a politically resistant self is to pay attention to suffering, Tessman argues, and to accept the consequences of doing so: “Being fully sensitive and responsive to just a small portion of the suffering population requires taking on enormous pain. . . . The background conditions of the world we live in make it impossible to escape both the horror of indifference and the psychic pain . . . of sensitivity and attention.” Tessman contends that in situations of widespread oppression, resistance is both an ethical duty and source of moral damage, since those who resist frequently transform themselves in order to “undo aspects of their own characters that cause them to suffer and cultivate character traits that best enable resistance.”50 Tessman identifies anger as foremost among the “burdened virtues” that are necessary for resistance, but which can both cause psychological harm and “hit the wrong target” if not carefully trained.51 As the preface suggests, completing this project meant navigating a good deal of anger, whether Omar’s, his family’s, former comrades’, or even my own, however repressed.52 I did not always succeed in the task of being “a facilitator,” which Sean Field argues ought to be a historian’s primary focus when faced with painful pasts and surfacing emotions. One of this project’s unique challenges—­and pleasures?—­is that Omar has very clear ideas about who he is and why; he chided me on more than one occasion for failing to recognize “how traumatized [he] was,” while at other times he sought to explain how he had opted to cultivate anger and become “very aggressive,” determined “to hold [his] space.”53 Family, former comrades, and friends have noted this about him. Some of them managed to be as committed to the struggle without falling into the well of such “burdened virtues.” But Omar fell hard and does not apologize for doing so, nor should that be expected. Scholars and memoirists have explored the roots of political commitment and traced how and why some people come “to a political and ethical understanding” and act accordingly, while others do not.54 Sociological analysis can only take you so far, however, and commitment comes down to a choice, in an individual mind, toward a very personal end. For Omar, political commitment was born from anger, from attention, from compulsion, from trauma, from frustration, from the need for an outlet, something to keep him busy, something to provide purpose and comfort. Commitment drove him from the back room on Douglas Lane and it drives him still. Ultimately, I still do not know whether his story is generalizable, like he wanted his art to be. Each consciousness is different, each context unique. History is lived, not programmed. But I do know that the questions Omar has asked himself are still worth asking. What do you see, for as long as there is light available? What do you do in breath and body, for as long as you have both? These are questions we must pose, and answers—­whether in word, act, or image—­from which we can learn.

Chapter 2 DOUGL AS L ANE

1880s–1950s

Grey Street, only your rich go on Haj to Mecca . . . Grey Street, you are not free you don’t look your true self . . . Grey Street, what went wrong with you? —­Mafika Gwala, “Grey Street”

1 WHEN OMAR WAS YOUNG his grandmother, Rassool, called Bibi, told him stories about her village. She was a Nakooda, part of a large family with branches in both Tadkeshwar and surrounding villages, in what was then the British Raj. When she was a girl, her father and her uncles traded and farmed. Decades later, sitting with her grandson in Durban, cleaning mustard greens and taking seeds from chilis, she remembered small herds of cattle moving down the village lanes on their way to graze in fields resting between crops of rice, millet, or beans. She remembered the small market where her family and other traders exchanged goods, with each other and their neighbors, and occasionally with visitors passing through on their way to Surat, once the Mughal emperors’ most prosperous Indian Ocean port, but which in her parents’ lifetime had been succeeded by the British colonialists’ Bombay. She

AVA I L A B L E L I G H T 24

remembered her family’s fruit trees. She remembered the banyan tree that grew in their yard.1 Tadkeshwar lived vividly in her stories. Born in 1888, she related how at fourteen she had been married to Ismail Badsha, another Sunni Vhora from Tadkeshwar. He was a cousin, like most of the residents of the insular community that intermarried strategically and otherwise avoided mingling with the Hindu or Shi’ite families who lived in other villages nearby. Ismail was tall, skinny, with a distinctive nose and neatly trimmed beard. He dressed carefully; when they met, he was selling clothes, and it paid to look the part. In Durban, where he made his home, he had come to dress in the local Gujarati Surti (or Sulthi) Sunni Vhora style: a European-­ style waistcoat, collared shirt, and tie, while carefully covering his head with a topi or fez. Shortly before the first Indian sepoy regiments shipped overseas to fight the Great War for the Raj and Empire in East Africa and Europe, Ismail wore a carefully tailored cotton kamis (shirt) to their wedding in Tadkeshwar. He returned to South Africa shortly thereafter; Rassool gave birth to a son, Essop, in his absence. The Nakudas and Badshas were both plugged into “transnational migratory networks” that had spread across the ocean like a banyan’s roots decades before Ismail and Rassool were born.2 Some of their Shi’ite neighbors had traveled to East Africa during the early nineteenth century; Sunni Vhoras were increasingly heading farther south. Like many men from their community, especially second and third sons, Ismail had begun to travel at a young age. He was not even ten when his parents sent him to help a recently married cousin who was then trying to establish a business on Mauritius. Family lore had it that once there, the cousin had begun to pressure Ismail into marrying another relative. The Mauritius match was not the one his mother had in mind. He went back to Tadkeshwar but did not stay long. Ismail’s older brother had already settled in the Transvaal, while Ismail’s sister had married a cousin, Mohammed Badsha, and they were moving to Natal. The latter secured papers identifying Ismail as their son to placate the British authorities and the local white settlers, who were then clamoring for increasing restrictions on immigration from India. When Ismail arrived in Natal at the turn of the twentieth century, the settlers were distracted somewhat by the ongoing war between the British Empire and the Boer Republics to their north and west; still, so-­called passenger Indians like the Badsha family made whites fearful of the continuing “inrush of ‘free Indians,’” who settlers claimed were monopolizing “all lower branches of trade or farming.’”3 Although they would have denied such devious intent if forced to testify in a settler court, Mohammed and his fictive son were certainly planning to do well in business. Vhora families from Gujarat were well established in Durban by 1900,

primarily in a small district of wood and tin constructed shops, mosques, temples, and shrines set above muddy roadways at the foot of the ridge the settlers called the Berea. The white community built their own businesses and government offices where the land rose slightly between the Berea, the large, sheltered port that had attracted Europeans’ attention in the first place, and the area’s miles-­long beaches astride the Indian Ocean. Small streams and tidal inlets met in malarial swamps where the flatland met the ascending Berea. Gujarati merchants set up shop in what was known as the Western Vlei, for want of a better option. The term vlei, for marshland or swamp, was inherited from the Boer settlers who had once imagined that Port Natal would be their white republic’s outlet to the sea. The British had displaced the Boers back in the 1840s, however, and renamed Port Natal after the Cape governor, Benjamin D’Urban.4 Sensing economic opportunities in the wake of emancipation in the Caribbean, British settlers began to claim vast swathes of Natal’s verdant rolling hills to plant tropical crops, especially sugar. The colonial authorities negotiated a peace treaty with the local isiZulu-­speaking communities; the amaZulu under their king, Mpande, would stay north of the Tugela River and the British and their settlers south. Taxes and creative acts of land alienation forced some Africans to labor for the settlers, but it was not enough.5 In the Caribbean, in Mauritius, and elsewhere in the Empire, British settlers supplemented locally available labor with people they called “coolies,” indentured workers who signed—­or were compelled to sign—­five-­year contracts in return for transit across the kala pani, the dark water, and the promise of either free return to India or the opportunity to work for themselves in situ after their indentures expired. Colonial agents and their local partners recruited most indentured workers from among Tamil-­and Telugu-­speaking Hindu communities in the Madras Presidency, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh. The first indentured workers arrived in Mauritius in the 1830s and in Guyana, Trinidad, Jamaica, and eventually Fiji thereafter. In 1860, the first indentured workers arrived in Natal. Nearly 1.5 million South Asians relocated during indenture, 150,000 of them to that colony.6 Mohammed and his nephew (“son”) Ismail were not indentured workers. In both Mauritius and Natal, branches of the Tadkeshwar community were taking advantage of the expanding Indian diaspora by establishing businesses to service indentured workers’ “distinctive taste in food, clothing and the simplest of luxuries.” In Natal, Gujarati merchants like Mohammed Badsha found an economy that was rapidly expanding beyond its agricultural foundations, as Durban increasingly served as the main port for the gold industry that had emerged in the 1880s and 1890s in the Boers’ Transvaal. Small businesses servicing immigrants became “a foot in the door to other and greater opportunities.” By 1904, more Indians lived in Douglas Lane

25

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AVA I L A B L E L I G H T 26

Durban than did whites. Unlike the settlers, they had no political rights, yet with their shops and trading networks, the four thousand or so passengers were exceptionally visible among the Indian community.7 When Ismail and Mohammed first landed in Durban, the port city was awash with British soldiers in the aftermath of what was once called the Anglo-­Boer war. By the time they set up shop in the Western Vlei, that war was won; the Transvaal and the goldfields that sprawled around Johannesburg had become another British colony in Southern Africa, just like Natal. Many Gujarati merchants made their way inland to seek economic opportunities there. Mohammed and Ismail stayed in Durban. The Vlei’s muddy thoroughfares were improved during the war. A rail line that connected to Johannesburg and beyond ran on dry land parallel to the coast, hard against the Berea. Indian merchants clustered where West Street intersected with Grey Street, the latter named for the former secretary of state for the colonies, who had been instrumental to imperial expansion early in Queen Victoria’s reign.8 Many of the surrounding streets were likewise named for the Queen and her entourage. Mohammed opened a general dealer’s shop. Ismail worked there, and in some other small shops around the neighborhood.9

Figure 2.1. Imperial Ottoman Red Crescent Society, Durban Shop Assistant’s Committee, Ismail Badsha standing, third from right; unknown photographer, with the permission of Goolam Chohan

They slowly built up enough capital to establish roots in Durban and to travel back and forth every few years to Tadkeshwar. Ismail and Rassool Bibi had a second son after one of these visits: Suleiman, whom everyone called Chorta. Finally, just after World War I ended in Europe and the first Indian troops began to return home—­some bringing a new influenza with them—­Ismail arranged for Rassool to travel, along with their sons and several other married women from Tadkeshwar, east to Calcutta, there to board a boat bound for Durban.10 Rassool was pregnant during her transit and gave birth to a daughter, Ayesha, soon after her arrival. The family settled in a one-­story bungalow on a relatively quiet side street on the lowest slopes of the Berea, a few minutes’ walk across the rail line from Grey and West Streets. Their house was built in the local style, with a stoep and a small veranda in the front, and a yard and outbuilding in the back. It had been intended for white soldiers decommissioned after the war, but the neighborhood had become predominantly Indian since then. The merchants and their customers called their neighborhood Grey Street, or simply the District. By 1919, many of the white residents had moved out, seeking more space between them and the area’s brown-­skinned majority.11 2

Once Rassool and the children moved to Durban, Ismail returned to India less frequently. Their family was more modest than some of the bigger clans, both in size and reputation. The Badshas were not the Dadas, the Jhaveris, the Jeevas, the Cassims, the Coovadias, the Patels, Desais, Mohammeds, and Mohammedis.12 There is no entry for “Badsha” in a recent collective biography of merchant families who moved mostly from Gujarat to Natal between the 1870s and the 1920s. Ismail was a clothing outfitter, not a general dealer or a property owner of note. Still, as the family grew more established and stable, he did the things that a respectable Surti merchant was supposed to do. He joined the Orient Club, a gathering place where the grandees of the community interacted with each other and the political and business elite of Natal. Located slightly north of Durban in Isipingo, the Orient Club was modeled after the British gentlemen’s clubs where much of the Empire’s work was said to be done. The better class of Indian businessmen flocked there. Decades later, Omar remembers one picking Ismail up in a gleaming Rolls-­Royce to give him a ride to the club. It was that sort of place.13 Yet it was sometimes—­often—­not enough to socialize with the white political and business elite. Ismail was also a member of the Natal Indian Congress, which was founded in 1894. Organized by a group of Gujarati merchants with legal guidance provided by their advocate, Mohandas Gandhi, the NIC responded to the Douglas Lane

27

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AVA I L A B L E L I G H T 28

British government’s decision to grant Natal settlers “responsible government” in 1893. Almost immediately, the settler legislature began to legislate against the Indian merchant community by doing things such as introducing a literacy test (in European languages) for “free” Indians seeking to settle in Natal, as well as restricting how Indians were able to register businesses, where they could open their establishments, where they could reside, et cetera.14 Like Ismail, most Gujarati Muslims were neither English literate nor conversant in the intricacies of colonial common and commercial law. Gandhi was an upper caste Gujarati Hindu and thus not strictly speaking a member of their community, but by the 1890s he was already known for his ability to excel in both legal work and the work of cultural translation. White settlers opposed both Gandhi’s work and his presence, sometimes vehemently, while merchants hoped that under his leadership, the NIC might “promote concord and harmony among the Indian and Europeans residing in the colony.”15 As many of Gandhi’s more recent critics have noted, one would be hard-­ pressed to describe the NIC’s initial forays into Natal (and South African) politics as in any way “anticolonial.” The NIC was in fact more “intercolonial,” in the sense that its strategy was to make moral appeals to the British Empire by speaking the same language of culture, civilization, and liberal free enterprise that the British liked to think they had invented. The NIC supported Great Britain’s efforts to subdue the Boer Republics during the South African War and otherwise did what it could to portray its members and their families as loyal imperial subjects, deserving the Empire’s support and respect. Gandhi’s critics have noted that he and the NIC accomplished this in part by differentiating the Indian community from the much larger African population in Natal, whom both Gandhi and other NIC leaders often described in frankly racist and denigrating terms.16 Gandhi established his first home—­which he called the Phoenix Settlement—­in 1904, just north of Durban, in the district of Inanda. He chose it because several Indian farmers were already resident there, and he hoped that their agriculturalist pursuits would model the mixture of industry and intentional spiritual purpose that he was then beginning to develop into his own idiosyncratic political philosophy. Phoenix was where Gandhi printed his newspaper, Indian Opinion, as well as began to develop what became satyagraha, or “truth force.” But by establishing Phoenix in Inanda, he was also entering an already tense region, where local isiZulu-­speaking chieftaincies were grumbling that “the free Indian is now gradually ousting the native from private lands.” Throughout the 1900s, while Gandhi denigrated Africans’ capacity for colonial civilization, more and more Africans began to counter that it was the Indian merchant class’s greed that threatened their race’s ability to advance.17

Over the course of the 1900s, Gandhi began more stridently and aggressively to protest on behalf of the Indian community, especially in the Transvaal, where merchants in Johannesburg founded the Transvaal Indian Congress in 1903. Whether Gujarati passengers or formerly indentured, many Indians watched with alarm while the British government negotiated the shape of a future South Africa with the recently vanquished Boers, who constituted most of the white population across the Cape, Natal, Transvaal, and Orange River colonies. Boer racism against both Indians and Africans was well known. The African educationist and publisher John Dube was Gandhi’s neighbor in Inanda. He, too, was alarmed. After 1905, he began to participate in meetings that brought together African political leaders—­chiefs, converts, educationalists, lawyers—­in hopes of appealing to the British authorities. As the decade closed, separate Indian and African deputations went to London to insist that their communities be heard in the ongoing negotiations. The British government was unmoved, and neither Indians nor Africans had a say when the Union of South Africa was established, with Louis Botha, a former Boer combatant, prime minister, in May 1910.18 Gandhi’s organizations continued to protest and advocate using the language of imperial respectability; Dube did as well. In 1912, he was elected the first president of the South African Natives National Congress. Gandhi returned to India shortly thereafter; a decade later, Dube’s organization changed its named to the African National Congress (ANC). Dube and Gandhi’s politics overlapped in still more ways. At the meeting that established the SANNC, representatives insisted that in the new organization, they were “burying the demon of racialism,” by which they meant ethnic, religious, and class distinctions, and opting instead for a new, racial identification—­what they first called “Native,” and which in time became “African.” This was novel and necessary, because they needed a coordinated response to the colonial and Union governments’ insistence that “natives” be treated the same, regardless of their class or other attainments. “Natives” were denied the franchise, with few exceptions; in 1913, “natives” were denied the right to live as they pleased in 92.5 percent of the Union’s territory; “natives” were generally denied the right to be heard in the Union’s courts or represented in its parliament. Under Dube’s leadership, the SANNC organized the elite African community, who had the most to lose, to respond with one voice.19 Yet there was another element to “Native,” which was in keeping with how the NIC had elided its communities’ internal differences when it was founded as such in 1894. There was no precedent for what was happening in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. The war, the ongoing industrial development centered around Johannesburg, the inrush of white immigrants from Europe, Australia, Douglas Lane

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Canada and elsewhere, the continued expansion of the Asian population despite white settlers’ best efforts, the aggressively segregationist regimes that resulted in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Durban itself: the finely wrought regional, linguistic, sumptuary, dietary, and other distinctions by which people had marked their lives made increasingly less sense. As historians have demonstrated, in communities like Alexandra, carved out of former ranchland a dozen miles from Johannesburg, people speaking Sesotho, Sestwana, isiZulu, Sepedi, English, Afrikaans, even some Hindi or Gujarati, lived in each other’s homes or rented space in each other’s yards. They shared the same aspirations for material and social advancement. They came from different places, but they were moving toward similar futures. They were not able to organize deputations to London, but they, too, embraced the idea that being “Native” was a step in a progressive direction.20 The category “Indian” worked similarly. “The ‘Indian’ identity of Gujaratis became paramount in the political sphere as they were denied class-­based entry into the wider society,” Vahed writes.21 It was a political category, useful in part because the state insisted on it, and in part because it reflected what was happening in the densely populated streets around Douglas Lane. To be sure, differences did not go away entirely. Indians spoke many languages and experienced very different Natals. Even categories like “Gujarati” were “highly stratified” and in fact “multiethnic.” Vahed and Bhana note that “Gujaratis” could be from Kathiawad or Kutch; they could be Shi’ites, Sunnis, Parsis, Hindus, or Jains; they could be categorized further still, to be Surtis like the Badshas, or Memons, from nearer to Gandhi’s hometown, Porbander. Both Memons and Surtis were Sunni Muslims; both distinguished themselves from the Hindus, Ismail’i Shi’ites, and Christians among whom they lived; their wealthier men endowed different mosques—­Grey Street for the Memons, West Street for Ismail and the Surtis. When they married off their sons, they sought daughters whose families came from the same cluster of villages back in India.22 Yet as the South African polity consolidated, many of these distinctions were subsumed within the larger category “Indian.” Rassool gave birth to a third son, Ebrahim, in 1921, the couple’s first child born in South Africa. Two more South African–­born Badshas followed: another girl, Fatima, then Moosa, a son born disfigured with a hunched back; his parents worried that he would have a difficult life. They were less concerned about Ebrahim. Family lore has it that Rassool had spent much of her passage to South Africa in the company of Fatima Desai, another Tadkeshwar-­born woman traveling to meet family in South Africa. The story goes that they pledged that their children would marry when the time came. When Ebrahim came of age, the women made good on that plan, marrying Omar’s father to his mother, Miriam, in 1943.23

Figure 2.2. Ebrahim Badsha (standing, center) and siblings, unknown photographer,

undated (1920s?)

AVA I L A B L E L I G H T 32

By then, marriage, child-­rearing, and other domestic arrangements were in many ways the last redoubt for once-­determinative distinctions. The Badshas were Surti Sunnis, whose religious practices had been influenced by teachers who traveled to India from the Arabian Peninsula in the eighteenth century, preaching a return to Islam “cleansed” of saints. Yet white laws forced them into an Indian ghetto, which meant that although the Shi’ite observance of the Prophet’s grandson’s Hussain’s martyrdom had not been part of their ritual calendar in India, in South Africa it was. The planters had granted all Indians three days leave to mark the observance, whether Muslim or not. In Natal, Muharram became a festival celebrated by Muslims and Hindus alike, both those indentured and those who had paid their way to South Africa. Community members built elaborate “miniature mausoleums” called tazia, “constructed in wood and covered in colored paper and gold and silver thread.” They marched through the District, “singing songs to the memory of Hussain, beating on drums, dancing wildly or carrying out stick fights” that re-­created his death in battle.24 Ismail let his children know that such spectacle was not “for them,” but there was only so much he could do: it was outside their door, on Wills Road, down West Street, left on Grey.25

Figure 2.3. “Man with loudspeakers, Badsha Pir celebration,” photograph by Omar

Badsha, 1981

Nor were Surti Sunni children supposed to care much about Indian Durban’s own homegrown “pir,” or saint, a former Hindu indentured worker turned Sufi mystic, who was reputed to have rejected field labor in favor of meditation (some say aided with copious amounts of Natal’s wild-­grown marijuana) and who a visiting Sufi teacher subsequently identified as “Badsha Pir” (a king of saints). Badsha Pir was buried in the small graveyard the municipality had grudgingly granted to the Muslim community, just across the tracks from Douglas Lane, near the markets and mosques. Believers maintained a shrine there, where both Hindus and Muslims prayed for blessings. The Badsha sons could see the shrine when they accompanied their father to mosque or to his tailoring shop on Field Street. They could not help but notice that they shared the Durban saint’s name. When Essop grew older, his friends began to call him “King,” in English, in playful recognition of that fact; Ebrahim’s friends did as well.26 3

Segregation and convention reinforced the fact that they were Indian, living South African Indian lives. They knew little about what it was like to be African, although the two populations increasingly interacted. Trains, horse-­drawn wagons, buses, and privately owned taxis dislodged their African riders nearby Douglas Lane.27 Black workers passed through the neighborhood on their way to the docks, or to domestic work on the Berea Ridge, or seeking somewhere to live on the former sugar farms turned into shack settlements that spread across other ridges, some with Indian neighbors in Cato Manor, others in the municipality-­managed African “location” called Lamontville.28 African men were ubiquitous on the District’s commercial streets, where they pulled carts laden with goods or labored for Indian business owners in other capacities. Few worked inside shops; until the 1950s, most dukawallahs (shopkeepers) employed relatives recruited from India. Most of their customers remained Indians throughout the 1920s and 1930s, but as rural economies contracted and Durban’s expanded to encompass brickworks, textiles, and other labor-­intensive industries, African urbanization increased. The government built hostels for African workers near to where the trunk line south converged with the lines that tracked the North Coast and inland, just beyond the Greyville Racecourse, where white Durbanites paced their horses.29 Africans were denied access to white Durban’s shops, restaurants, and other amenities. They were excluded from the Indian community’s cinemas and theaters, but merchants welcomed their business, and Africans “largely relied on Indian-­owned stores, buses, and [even] land to meet basic needs.”30 The populations were sometimes neighbors, rarely friends, and always interconnected. Douglas Lane

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Over the course of that same period, Syringa Avenue became an unofficial dividing line between the Indian-­dominated district and the de facto, if not yet legally defined, white suburbs. The community’s leaders understood it was still important to cultivate support among that slim minority of South Africans who enjoyed the right to vote and be represented in parliament and municipal government. Successive NIC leaders appealed to the authorities in the provincial capital Pietermaritzburg and in Cape Town on behalf of their community. Both before and especially during the Great Depression, they pressured the Union authorities to build better housing and provide better medical facilities for the poorer elements of the Indian population; the NIC and its Transvaal counterpart sometimes recruited prominent Indian politicians from the subcontinent to make their case in London, citing the Union government’s aggressive efforts to aid the white community when the Depression began really to bite.31 The national government was ambivalent about Indians, however, and the provincial government was downright hostile to their interests. Politicians from across the white political spectrum commonly invoked the specter of Indian commercial dominance to justify segregation and restriction; the threat to deport Indians back across the ocean was a favorite song in the Afrikaner National Party’s repertory. Education was only one of the areas where the government demonstrated little interest in Indian people’s lives. Aside from Christian missionary institutions and madrassas affiliated to overseas networks, most Indian schools were run by the communities themselves, broken down into sectarian components—­Hindu schools and Surti schools and so on. Wealthy merchants competed to donate funds, identify spaces, and recruit teachers. The students who truly excelled in primary school were sent overseas to complete their education, whether back in India, or in the UK.32 Many families did not see the point of education, beyond the rudiments necessary to inherit their fathers’ businesses. Before marrying Ebrahim and moving to Durban, Miriam Desai lived in Wartburg, in the Natal Midlands, where her parents ran a small farm shop on the outskirts of a German-­settler-­dominated small town. Most of their clients were Zulu farmers who lived in the African reserves nearby. She learned a few isiZulu words during her time in the shop, as well as some Arabic for prayers from itinerant imams who occasionally convened classes for Muslim children who were scattered across the Midlands’ dorpies, or small towns. Miriam spoke Gujarati at home and learned a bit of English during the year or two that she spent in school.33 Ebrahim went to school in Durban, where he finished Standard Three at the Carlyle Street Government Indian School. He was a middling, indifferent student, there largely because it was unclear what else he was going to do. Ismail was nearly

fifty when the Depression set in. His hair and beard were turning gray. He was a patriarch, distinguished in appearance, with the right associates and friends. This outward appearance belied the family’s precariousness. When the economy slowed down and costs went up, Ismail did not have resources on which to fall back. The family sublet half the Douglas Lane house as a port of call for immigrants newly arrived from India, or South African–­born Indians coming to town to look for work or to welcome relatives. That income was not enough. For a few years in the 1930s, the family left Durban, seeking security in Port Shepstone, then in Margate, for a time with Badsha cousins who lived on a farm in the interior.34 When Essop was old enough he was dispatched to the Transvaal to move in with one of Ismail’s brothers, who needed an assistant in his shop. There, Essop gravitated to cards and horses and sometimes gambled his wages away. Meanwhile, Ebrahim discovered he had an aptitude for drawing. Citing the best practices of international and local pedagogical principles, all South African government-­aided schools required arts and crafts as part of the school day. The production of graven images was haram in the household; in the schools, however, Ebrahim was rewarded with a prize given by the Natal Indian Teachers’ Society for his watercolors, which he won in 1938.35 He still needed to work, of course, and he left before finishing primary school to join his older brother in the Transvaal.36 While still at home, Ebrahim’s brothers had indulged his interest in art. Chorta was a thickset, confident man whose premature baldness made him seem older than he was. Once established around Grey Street, he met all sorts of people, including at least one white painter who was down on his luck and seeking bargains on the cheaper side of town. The voluble Chorta invited him to Douglas Lane to meet Ebrahim, who he explained was also an artist. The stranger left behind some brushes and basic instructions. Ebrahim carried his interests to the Transvaal. He lived in Fordsburg, then a mixed white and Indian area near the Johannesburg Central Business District. South Africa’s largest and richest city was growing exponentially more so. Ebrahim apprenticed with a sign writer who designed posters and billboards for local cinemas; he learned how to promote businesses by combining words and graphics. He met people who spoke different languages and practiced different arts. He read poetry. By 1940, his brothers were beginning to start families of their own. Badshas tended to cycle through the same few names, a rotation of Essops and Ismails and Suleimans, Fatimas, Ayeshas, Moosas. When Ebrahim had his first son, he named him Omar, after the Persian poet Omar Khayyam. He wanted to be different.37 South African involvement in World War II increased when its forces joined Indian and other colonial divisions in the Allied effort to dislodge the Italians from Douglas Lane

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Figure 2.4. Badsha family portrait, unknown photographer, undated (1940s?)

Ethiopia. By then both Ebrahim and his older brother were back on Douglas Lane, along with Ismail, Rassool, and the younger children. When Ebrahim could, he worked as a sign writer, designing placards and handouts to promote his neighbors’ businesses. When that work dried up, he worked as a shop assistant, selling drapes. Ismail supplemented his tailoring with a small, general dealing shop in the Madressa Arcade. He sold things like shoelaces. Ebrahim turned twenty-­two in March 1943; he and Miriam’s long-­planned wedding took place later that year in July, at the Desai family’s home in Wartburg. They had their first child, Sarah, in 1944. Omar followed a year later, in late June, between the surrenders of Germany and Japan. When he was born, an estimated 70 percent of South African Indians lived in poverty, although most of those descended from the families who had paid their way to Natal did not. Ismail’s line of Badshas hovered precariously somewhere in between.38 4

Theirs was a productive partnership, at least when it came to children. Rashid followed a year after Omar; Rabia, a second daughter, a year after that. The house was full of people, and Miriam, her body slowed by excess weight and her bones exhausted from years of pregnancy and child-­rearing, began to struggle. Having

grown up in a quieter household, she was often at sea in a house of Badshas. There were no new children in 1948, then another son, Iqbal, born in 1949. Ebrahim observed his wife’s worsening condition; he arranged to have this son, his third, adopted by relatives in rural Greytown, where Iqbal died of pneumonia six months later. A fourth son, Ismail, came only in 1953; Miriam seemed distant and unfocused, vague. Miriam birthed another son, Goolam, in February 1955 and broke down shortly thereafter. The family lacked the language to describe her condition medically; it was clear that she was not capable of caring for the baby. Ebrahim arranged for Goolam to be adopted by the same relatives in Greytown. He, too, died of pneumonia before he turned one year old. Ebrahim and Miriam had no more children.39 By then, 7 Douglas Lane was packed, with their five surviving children, Ebrahim’s sister Fatima, and his younger brother Moosa living in the outbuilding in the yard. Ebrahim’s persona betrayed little evidence of domestic stress. Upon becoming the head of his own household, Ebrahim cultivated a very South African type of urbane masculinity. He, his brothers, and their friends owned rifles; they were enthusiastic hunters, tracking small game on farms friends or relatives owned elsewhere in Natal. He fished, casting into the surf at the Blue Lagoon or from the rocks up the North Coast in Umhlanga. He played cricket and enthusiastically supported the neighborhood’s soccer teams when they played others at the Currie’s Fountain sports grounds. He cultivated friendships with entertainment impresarios like their neighbor Benny Singh, a boxing promoter “whose father ran a billiard salon [and] who lived in a world of jazz joints, ballroom dancing and sport.” He designed posters to promote upcoming bouts and angled for ringside seats. Ebrahim and his younger brother Moosa went to Victoria Street on Saturday nights to Pumpy Naidoo’s Goodwill Lounge, where good Muslim boys looked the other way while “the food flowed, the booze flowed, the best musicians played and the women were liberal with their favours,” as a nostalgia-­tinted journalist later put it.40 With his hunchback, Moosa’s prospects were even more uncertain than Ebrahim’s. Like his brother, his real passion was art—­in his case, photography. Moosa got his first camera in the 1940s and began to document his family. He took numerous portraits of his older brother. Ebrahim inherited their father’s tendency for careful self-­presentation. He wore his thick, black hair nearly parted; where Ismail had worn a beard, Ebrahim had a mustache, neatly trimmed. He wore white collared shirts to sell drapes, donning a paint-­and ink-­splattered smock when it was time to write signs or print handbills or posters. He was well known enough that the local NIC sometimes asked him to design banners for their rallies. He was not exactly an activist, but he was keenly interested in politics. Many of Moosa’s portraits Douglas Lane

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found Ebrahim in a characteristic pose: his head resting on his hands, a reading light overhead, studying a newspaper. Some of Ebrahim’s neighbors were more politically attuned than he. While Douglas Lane filled with children, the tenor of politics changed. The NIC was still the main vehicle for organization; its founder’s reputation had blossomed upon his return to India, where the Congress movement embraced anticolonial politics and mass organization on a scale that was then unimaginable in South Africa. Gandhi’s son, Manilal, lived at the Phoenix Settlement, where he covered his father’s exploits in Indian Opinion. Gandhi was not the only Indian nationalist, of course; in Indian Opinion, local readers learned about his comrades, people like Jawaharlal Nehru or Subhas Bose, who flirted with more aggressive—­some would say, revolutionary—­forms of anticolonialism.41 The banyan tree’s roots stretched toward its trunk; during the 1930s, Gujarati immigrant children who showed exceptional promise were dispatched to schools in India, like Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh, where the students were inflamed with nationalist feeling. Others, like Monty Naicker, a well-­known doctor in the District, had already returned from the UK by the mid-­ 1930s. Naicker studied in Edinburgh, where he met Indian diaspora students and others interested in imagining what lay on the other side of empire. Abroad, Naicker and others from the subcontinent added new dimensions to their identities: they came back identifying as nationalists or, given the party’s prominent support for anti-­imperialism (at least where the empire claimed by the Soviet Union was not concerned), as communists.42 Naicker joined the party in the late 1930s. The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) was then over a decade old, having formed when small, disparate socialist groups came together in Cape Town in 1921. Its members were mostly immigrants themselves, frequently Jews from Eastern Europe. Over the course of the 1920s, it attracted a smattering of Coloured supporters, based mostly on the docks in Cape Town and other ports, in addition to several Africans, who joined despite the party’s occasional association with white working-­class populism that could take an explicitly racist form. Following white miner-­initiated pogroms that roiled Johannesburg in 1922, the Afrikaner National Party had begun to vie for the racist populist-­nationalist working-­class constituency and more Africans joined a CPSA that increasingly espoused the Soviet Comintern’s official anti-­imperial line. Indians began to join the party in the thirties, resulting in what historian Jon Soske describes as a “thin layer” of Indian participation in CPSA activities. Many of these members had studied abroad. Some were more recent immigrants: one of Ebrahim’s neighbors and later great friends was A. K. M. Docrat, who had smuggled himself into South Africa in 1930 and was widely known to be a party member.

Yusuf Bhaijee, a learned Sanskrit scholar who emigrated from India later that decade, joined the party as well. He married Ebrahim’s sister, Ayesha; they lived around the corner from Douglas Lane. Other neighbors came to communism via trade unionism, which began to take root in Durban during the Depression, when more and more working-­class Indians found jobs in the growing industrial section. George Ponnen was a few years older than Ebrahim; the son of indentured workers, he had worked in coffee and tea factories during the 1920s and early 1930s, then in several different clothing and textile factories. The conditions were terrible, no matter the industry. Ponnen and other workers organized under the auspices of the previously all-­white Garment Workers Industrial Union. By the time Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Ponnen was the CPSA’s district commissioner in Durban. He, too, lived around the corner from the Badshas.43 World War II changed South Africa politics in multiple ways. The Allies’ Atlantic Charter promised self-­determination and democracy for people suffering under the yoke of fascist German and Japanese imperial domination. The colonized world took notice. South Africa’s preeminent nationalist organization was Dube’s ANC, the politics of which has not evolved much since the 1910s. Under the leadership of its young, charismatic president, a Johannesburg-­based medical doctor named A. B. Xuma, the ANC shifted its rhetoric to match the wartime opportunities. In 1943, Xuma issued a document called African Claims on behalf of the organization, in which he annotated the Atlantic Charter and called for a “Bill of Rights” in South Africa. Xuma imagined a different country, reconfigured along democratic and representative lines. He demanded “the repeal of any and all laws as well as the abandonment of any policy and all practices that discriminate against the African in any way whatsoever on the basis of race, creed or colour in the Union of South Africa.” Xuma echoed calls for full citizenship that Indian politicians had issued during the preceding decades, and in African Claims, the ANC’s leadership tacitly acknowledged the Indian community’s presence. Xuma urged “men and women of all ranks and classes to [struggle] until freedom, right and justice are won for all races and colours to the honour and glory of the Union of South Africa.”44 The government ignored African Claims. The ANC had only a few thousand members by then, although its ranks were increasing under Xuma’s energetic leadership. Collectively, the Natal and Transvaal Indian Congresses boasted significantly greater support. The NIC alone had an estimated thirty thousand registered members during the war. In both the Transvaal and Natal, the popularity of communist anticolonialism, nationalism in South Asia, and wartime conditions prompted radical shifts in Congress politics. Naicker in Natal joined an Aligarh-­ graduate named Yusuf Dadoo in the Transvaal to displace the more conservative Douglas Lane

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old guard. Both Naicker and Dadoo were medical doctors; they were also close followers of Nehru, who, “beginning the late 1920s, [had] consistently argued that overseas Indians must identity their interests with the indigenous majority and abandon their colonial-­derived privileges in favor of African rule.” Nehru’s position was, not coincidentally, the official position of the CPSA, which dictated that the South African revolution needed to begin by establishing what the Comintern termed a “native republic.” With widespread Indian working-­class support, the self-­ styled “radicals” elbowed their way into Congress leadership. When the war ended and Omar was born, Ebrahim and his neighbors were consumed by the NIC’s latest twists and turns.45 After the war, while playing international statesman and helping to draft the UN charter, South Africa’s prime minister, Jan Smuts, simultaneously demonstrated that there was not too much space between his United Party and the Nazi-­ sympathizing National Party. In 1946, his government introduced the Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Act, which offered Indians the “right” to vote for white representatives in exchange for restricting Indian residence and land ownership to certain identified areas. The ANC had hardly mustered the energy to protest when Smuts’s predecessor, the National Party’s Barry Hertzog, had offered a similar “deal” to the African majority back in 1936. A decade later, now led by more radical elements, the Indian congresses were determined to do better. They organized a Gandhian “passive resistance” campaign to protest what they branded the “Ghetto Act.” Ebrahim and his friends attended rallies at Currie’s Fountain; some kept their children home from school or refused to pay their taxes. Representatives from both South Africa and India traveled to New York to plead with the newly established United Nations to intervene on Indian South Africans’ behalf. The UN eventually recorded its concern that the Ghetto Act threatened international peace by “straining the relationship between South Africa and India,” which was then on the verge of independence. Although the act passed, the UN hearing was a symbolic victory, as was the congresses’ demonstrated ability to turn out thousands of supporters to rally and protest. A few months later, in 1947, Xuma, Naicker, and Dadoo met in Johannesburg and signed a joint declaration stipulating that their organizations would coordinate their respective efforts to protest racist laws and to bring about the sorts of reforms envisioned in African Claims.46 Neither the government nor the white electorate cared how far both Indian and African politics had come since Gandhi and Dube’s day. In 1948, white voters booted out Smuts and voted in the National Party, now under the leadership of D.  F. Malan. Called “apartheid,” or “separate development,” Malan’s platform called for further investments to support white South Africans at the expense of

everyone else. The National Party would entrench segregation from park benches and beaches to cities and rural areas; Malan pledged to seek the mass repatriation of the country’s South Asian population to India, and now, Pakistan. Apartheid as proposed by the National Party was certainly against the wartime, anticolonial spirit of decolonization and majority rule; but defined as separate development, its proponents gestured toward the violent displacement then unfolding on the subcontinent to argue that it was in keeping with the best practices of postimperial governance. “The dismantling of imperialism precipitated a global moment of partition,” Soske observes. Mere months later, South Africa’s new government could refer to events in Durban to support its premise that different sorts of people were simply not supposed to live together.47 5

Over the course of 1948, Malan’s government began to consolidate its authority over the state bureaucracy by replacing monolingual English speakers with its Afrikaans-­speaking supporters. The hope was that a more motivated state would enforce already existing regulations. Meanwhile, the government planned an aggressive legislative agenda to build off the Union’s preexisting segregationist regime. Interracial marriage was already illegal; Malan’s administration would outlaw interracial sex. African residents were already confined to urban townships and rural reserves; Group Areas legislation would redefine spaces across the country and disaggregate mixed neighborhoods like Grey Street. With the war’s end, the Communist Party and other potential troublemakers were already being surveilled; Malan’s government would ban them from aboveground existence. Both government and business slowed as usual over the year-­end “festive season,” anticipating a busy year to come. January 1949 was the height of summer in Durban. On Thursday afternoon, January 13, a fight broke out down the road from the Goodwill Lounge, after an Indian cart peddler violently attacked a young African named George Madondo, who later claimed only to have been looking through a restaurant’s window. “Suddenly someone grabbed me from behind and pushed me,” Madondo told a reporter. “It was a big Indian. . . . Then the glass broke, and I fell with my head bleeding.” Victoria Street was packed at the time, full of African and Indian workers on their way home or to the bus rank. By the time Madondo regained his bearings, “other Natives had caught the Indian.” A pitched battle broke out and spread quickly through the neighborhood. Dozens of people ended up in the hospital after large groups of African men careened through the District, smashing windows and breaking into stores, while Indians responded in kind, raining bricks, stones, or glass bottles down onto the crowds from the rooftops. Fires broke out across the area. Douglas Lane

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Thursday’s violence petered out with nightfall, leaving clothes, shoes, and discarded goods scattered on the streets. The next morning it started again, as people who resented their treatment at the hands of Indian bus and storeowners, among other slights, unleashed their anger on Ismail and his neighbors’ homes. The Badsha family patriarch commanded 7 Douglas Lane’s front room, from where he could look out over the veranda and see the block of flats then under construction across the narrow street. That was where he smoked his pipe or welcomed his grandchildren up onto his lap. On Friday morning someone threw a brick through the front room’s window, shattering glass onto the floor. Chorta had joined his brothers to debrief the previous day’s events; he grabbed a hunting rifle, ran out onto the street, and fired a single round skywards. Smoke from the day before still hung in the air. Years later, Omar would claim this event as his earliest memory.48 Ismail’s family was fortunate to only suffer a broken window; some neighbors lost their stock or their shops. As Friday ended and Saturday began, it was apparent that Grey Street’s residents were many times more fortunate than their poorer confederates who lived further afield, in places like Cato Manor, where the African and Indian working class were jumbled together in indistinguishable shacks. Terrible violence broke out there over the weekend. On Booth Road in Cato Manor, “Indian buses were burned and every Indian house or shop . . . was destroyed.” Indian children were trapped in a house and burned alive. When an African man tried to rescue them, he too was trapped and killed. Rumors circulated of a widespread uprising, rape, and looting; in some places the reality was not much better. Ebrahim and his brothers kept their rifles close at hand until the police and South African military finally acted to get the situation under control. The final toll counted nearly two hundred people dead, thousands injured, and almost half of Durban’s Indian population displaced. Community welfare organizations tried to care for the “pitiful clusters of refugees, clutching the little valuables rescued from their homes,” who sought shelter at local police stations or huddled together in open fields. Ismail and Ebrahim’s family remained secure on Douglas Lane, while many of their politically involved neighbors fretted about what the violence meant for African and Indian unity.49 Some people called the events a riot, others a pogrom. Whatever the terminology, in time the three awful days became a literal textbook example of “ethnic riots.”50 In what remained of January and the months that followed, however, the NIC and the ANC’s response was more triage than sociological analysis. Xuma condemned the violence, although other ANC representatives conceded that Africans did have some legitimate grievances. Indian community leaders meanwhile tried to assuage residents’ fears that it could happen again. The argument became that

Figure 2.5. Ebrahim Badsha on Douglas Lane, photograph by Moosa Badsha, undated

(1950s?)

AVA I L A B L E L I G H T 44

the only way to prevent such things was to demonstrate solidarity with the African majority, in word and deed. Together, the ANC and NIC leaders stated that “the fundamental and basic causes of the disturbances are traceable to the political, economic and social structure of this country . . . and the preaching in high places of racial hatred and intolerance.”51 The government disagreed. Eyewitnesses insisted that they had seen white South Africans urging the rioters on, and for its part, the National Party could barely conceal its glee. The government convened a commission to study the violence and rejected any conclusions that ran contrary to its own conviction that it had happened because different people and different communities were not in their proper places. The state promised that the Group Areas Act would build a wall between Africans and Indians. It passed parliament in July 1950. Soon notices appeared around Grey Street, warning residents that parts of the neighborhood would be declared a white area and that they would have to move. Fifteen months later, Ismail Badsha died suddenly after a heart attack. He died far from Tadkeshwar, where Nehru’s Congress Party now governed. He was buried in apartheid South Africa, in the same Durban cemetery where supplicants prayed at the grave of Badsha Pir. Rassool Bibi mourned her husband from Douglas Lane. She was older and slower now. Thankfully, her daughters were around to help care for the children.52 6

Ebrahim inherited the front room and hung pictures on its walls. Some were clipped from magazines, some were his. He was a sign writer and a sale assistant. He had a difficult time keeping his children in new clothes and relied on his brothers for help, although it was apparent that only Chorta had inherited Ismail’s sense of financial responsibility. Ebrahim found his sign writing work tolerable, but he wanted to be an artist. In 1951 he began to attend evening classes that the Bantu Indian Coloured Artists group ran at the Bantu YMCA on Beatrice Street. Organized in 1950, BICA was founded by a small number of trained white artists who had noted that there was nowhere in Durban for what the government called “non-­European” artists to study. The artists included immigrants from postwar Europe and white South Africans raised in Natal. They applied for seed money from the government, promising that “our aim is to encourage students to develop along their own Racial lines.” Once classes began, a visiting inspector noted with satisfaction that “the principles of apartheid naturally found their expression in” how African (then commonly referred to as Bantu), Indian, and Coloured students practiced their art. He recommended that the government continue to support the project. BICA eventually added piano, violin, and singing to its offerings. For his part, Ebrahim was only interested in painting.53

Figure 2.6. Nils Solberg with unidentified student, unknown photographer, undated

(1950s)

He was one of what a contemporary visitor described as a multiracial group of “signwriters, window display artists [and] workers in the printing industry” who attended BICA’s weekly classes. There were easels there, and oil paints and live models. His instructors introduced Ebrahim to ways of using paint that he had never considered before. He loved it. He developed a rich, realistic style, favoring bold black lines and vivid colors laid thick on wood panels. He did some portraits of models and classmates, and at least one nude, with a white model (the government would have had fits, had its representatives found out). His teacher Nils Solberg used Ebrahim as a model for a portrait painting class and gave the final product to his student. Omar still has it. Solberg was skilled: he used color to carefully highlight Ebrahim’s white shirt, to make it both stand out from and blend in with the subtly patterned green background. Ebrahim looks tired; Solberg managed to capture what it felt like to sit still and silent after a long day standing up at work.54 For his part, Ebrahim mostly painted from scenes he sketched around Douglas Lane. A few paintings survive in his children’s collection: a domestic worker holding a child, viewed from behind, their shapes intermingling. The hallway that ran from 7 Douglas Lane’s front door back to the room where his children slept. Hats and overcoats hung against the wall; a somewhat incomplete rendering of a small satchel perched awkwardly on a stool. The latter composition was not entirely Douglas Lane

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Figure 2.7. Students at BICA, unknown photographer, undated (1950s)

successful—­Ebrahim seems to have gotten lost between the perspective necessary to convey the hall’s depth and the more irregular shapes and textures the coats and hats presented. Yet the painting did capture a quiet moment, a calm that Ebrahim’s family only occasionally enjoyed. In 1954, Solberg invited Ebrahim to show some of his paintings at an exhibition at the Natal Society of Arts. The same year, BICA painters proudly exhibited their work in the Durban Art Gallery in the City Hall.55 There was obviously nothing necessarily “Indian” about Ebrahim’s work, save how the government classified him pursuant to the 1950 Population Registration Act. These were paintings done in rather conventional style that was then falling further out of fashion in New York and Paris, but still popular with South African painters and collectors. This familiarity troubled the government education inspectors. By the time of the NSA exhibition, Pretoria had withdrawn its support, citing that “BICA has developed into a Society or organization for equality for all groups,” rather than the apartheid-­friendly institution that it had once promised to be. It was, an inspector concluded, a nonracial organization, unworthy of government patronage. The government washed its hands of the classes, which managed to continue for a few more years until interest petered out.56 In how it refused apartheid’s logic, BICA was radical. The National Party’s system was quite simple in essence: everything that could be segregated needed to be segregated, whether to ensure white minority rule and white prosperity (true),

Figure 2.8. Douglas Lane interior, painting by Ebrahim Badsha

cultural integrity (untrue), or the peace (sometimes true, but for reasons that begged further exploration). Over the course of the National Party government’s first decade, political leaders from the majority community employed a variety of strategies to resist its edicts, nearly all of which countered segregation by insisting instead on unity. The inspector found BICA guilty of being what activists referred to as a “nonracial organization,” because its membership was open to all South Africans, regardless of race, albeit hardly on the scale of the best-­known nonracial Douglas Lane

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organizations in the country: the banned but still active Communist Party, or the short-­lived Federation of South African Women, which in 1956 brought twenty thousand women of all backgrounds to Pretoria to protest the extension of identification laws to African women. BICA was more modest: never more than two dozen artists, sweating it out in the Y off Grey Street. Ebrahim was not a woman, or a factory worker. He did not attend the Congress of the People. Neither Miriam nor their daughters attended the march on Pretoria. Ebrahim wanted only to be an artist, surrounded by other artists. And in that modest sense, on those weeknight evenings, for a few short years, he was part of something revolutionary. Durban’s small circle of art aficionados took note. Wolfgang Bodenstein was an eager collector, mostly of carvings, who served as a medical adviser to the Zulu royal family. In 1953, Bodenstein met a young African painter named Selby Mvusi,

Figure 2.9. Ebrahim Badsha painting, unknown photographer, undated (1950s)

who had just moved to Durban to teach art and English at the Loram Secondary School, the city’s premier African high school. Bodenstein arranged for Mvusi to visit Princess Magogo, the king’s sister, to paint her portrait. The painter already knew her son, Mangosuthu, known as Gatsha, with whom he had crossed paths while a student at the South African Native College at Fort Hare. Either Bodenstein or someone else recommended BICA to Mvusi. He joined the classes and there met Ebrahim.57 Theirs was precisely the sort of connection apartheid was intended to preempt. The son and grandson of prominent Methodist ministers, Mvusi was well over six feet tall, lanky, commanding, and enormously talented. Whereas Ebrahim had barely completed Standard Three, Mvusi had graduated from the prestigious Adams College and gone on to earn a degree from Fort Hare, in addition to an art teacher’s certification from the recently established Indaleni Art School, on an old Methodist mission not too far from Pietermaritzburg. Gatsha Buthelezi had been expelled from Fort Hare for his ANC activities before he finished his degree. Mvusi was more inclined to studies than politics (although his widow would later reflect that he never missed a protest action when his presence was called). His parents lived in Durban, in a manse owned by the Methodist church near the racetrack. Seeking a bit of independence—­ his future wife was then teaching in Inanda and it was nice to have his own place for when she took the bus to town—­Mvusi rented a room in Grey Street.58 Mvusi and Ebrahim had art in common and little else. Ebrahim’s wife rarely left the house; Mvusi’s fiancée, Nisa, was from a distinguished line of ministers and had graduated from both high school in the Eastern Cape and from college at Fort Hare. She and her friends rode the bus into Durban for the weekend, throwing old overcoats over their fashionable dresses to protect them from Inanda’s dust. They flirted shamelessly with rural Zulu men coming to town to go to the market; once there, they flirted with the Indian shopkeepers’ sons as well. Nisa and Selby went dancing at the Goodwill Lounge. They loved Durban, even when Selby got into a fight with a white bus driver who insisted that he bow upon entering the bus, or when he was caught up in a pass inspection and his Indian neighbors had to run to his parents’ house to retrieve Selby’s forgotten pass.59 Mvusi took his Loram students to the Durban Art Gallery and lectured there about art history and art appreciation. “He was [way] ahead in terms of thinking,” the artist Bill Ainslie later remembered. Ebrahim had grown up in what he thought was a cosmopolitan district, surrounded by learned, modern people. Compared to them, Mvusi was a cosmonaut.60 They compared techniques. Ebrahim worked from sketches, applied color evenly; Mvusi was moving toward abstraction, blending his figures into their surroundings, experimenting with layering paint and pushing his palate knife onto the Douglas Lane

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board, creating textures and depth. They talked about politics—­Mvusi was a Christian and skeptical of communism’s influence on the ANC, an organization he had joined at Fort Hare. Omar remembers that Mvusi visited Douglas Lane sometime before 1957, when Mvusi left Durban to study art education in the United States. He came to town again only in 1960, to visit his parents before leaving again this time for permanent exile. He visited Ebrahim on that visit as well.61 While in the United States, Mvusi had switched his loyalties to the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), an organization that broke away from the ANC in 1958, citing that same concern about communist influence and suspected direction from Moscow. Some Pan Africanists were overtly racist and skeptical that Indians or whites belonged in a future South Africa. The organization’s president, Robert Sobukwe, felt otherwise. Another Fort Hare graduate, Sobukwe had consistently explained that his position was “anti-­nobody. We are pro-­Africa. We breathe, we dream, we live Africa; because Africa and humanity are inseparable. It is only doing the same that the minorities in this land, the European, Coloured and Indian, can secure mental and spiritual freedom.”62 Upon assuming the presidency of the PAC, Sobukwe made this even more explicit, pleading with Indian South Africans to let go of their group pride and reject multiracialism, a concept that “implies that there are such basic insuperable differences between the various national groups here that the best course is to keep them permanently distinctive in a kind of democratic apartheid. That to us is racialism multiplied.” Instead, the PAC imagined a “government of the Africans by the Africans, for the Africans, with everybody who owes his only loyalty to Africa and who is prepared to accept the democratic rule of an African majority being regarded as an African.”63 Ebrahim had read about the PAC in his newspapers. Some of his neighbors were anxious about how the organization had rejected the Congress Alliance. They remembered 1949. Ebrahim was already South African; there could be no question about that. Perhaps he was intrigued by his friend Selby’s invitation to think about himself as an African. It is difficult to say what the two artists talked about, before Mvusi left Durban and never returned. In his presidential address, Sobukwe had noted that the PAC’s revolution was more aligned with the Chinese than the Soviet. A few months later, the Chinese Communist Party’s Peking Review was delivered with the rest of Ebrahim’s mail.64 7

Omar was not yet ten when his father met Selby Mvusi. When the Congress of the People took place, he had only just learned to read. It had not come easily—­many decades later, he finally understood that he was severely dyslexic, which helped to explain why he had struggled in school and been made to repeat so many grades.

When he thought about his early schooling, he mostly remembered his teachers’ anger and the whip of the religious instructor’s cane. He still does not like to write.65 Memory is a funny thing. People make sense of their own selves through hindsight, drawing out connections between disparate events and developing a story about how the child they were became the person they are (or want to be). Narrative develops late, however. For most people, childhood often eludes memory; and memory, therefore, relies on other people’s stories and mnemonic devices—­like photographs—­to make sense. Oral historians remind us that memory is always a performance, and that performance always has a purpose.66 From the perspective of his adulthood, Omar narrates his childhood in a certain way, to a certain end. His story begins in January 1949, when the brick came through the window. He was three and a half. “It left a lasting impression on me and influenced my later political thinking about the need to build better relationship between Zulus and Indians and propagating the idea of non-­racialism,” he reflects, decades later.67 But that is a story. Other than the narrative, he retains flashes, sensations: the sound of the glass, his uncles’ startled yells, his grandfather on his feet. The smell of the smoke that was spreading across his neighborhood, the way it made his nose itch.68

Figure 2.10. “Grey Street,” photograph by Omar Badsha, 1978

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He remembers the sound of his own small voice, hawking shoelaces in the Madressa Arcade. Years later he would take pictures of another generation of children doing the same for their grandfathers. They helped him to remember. He remembers driving in a car to Greytown. It was winter; he remembers being covered with a blanket. They were either visiting his brother Goolam, or maybe that was the trip when they left the baby there, never to return. Memories grow clearer the older we get. He remembers going to work as a shop assistant at Mahomedy’s, twelve years old, conscripted to do his part to help the Badshas get by. He remembers his mother’s brokenness. He remembers finding her hysterical, naked on the floor of the kitchen; he remembers stooping low to pick her up, lifting with his skinny arms against her clammy flesh, her sobbing and gasping for air. He remembers laying her down on her bed and covering her shaking body with a thin blanket.

Figure 2.11. Miriam Badsha, unknown photographer (Moosa Badsha?), undated (1950s?)

Figure 2.12. Omar Badsha and siblings on Douglas Lane, photograph by Moosa Badsha

(1957 or 1958?)

He remembers the aunties who talked about djinns and told him to pray so that the evil would leave his mother. He remembers the children who laughed and pointed and mocked him for his mother’s illness. He remembers clenching his fists and swinging them, curses erupting from his lips. And he remembers that at other times the house on Douglas Lane was full of joy and laughter, Ebrahim and his jovial group of South African friends, having dinner before the boxing, or back home with an ice chest full of fish.69 Photographs make it easier to remember. Once Moosa succeeded in getting four of Ebrahim and Miriam’s five surviving children to look at him when he closed the shutter and captured the light. But not Omar. He was in his father’s chair, in his father’s characteristic position, lost in a newspaper. It was 1957 or 1958. He wore loose trousers, a white shirt, and a necktie. He still struggled to make all the words make sense. But when words failed, there was life and action in the sitting room, and in the streets.

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Chapter 3 DURBAN 1960s

you have lingered on ever ready for a fruitful chat as you pushed books to the concerned student, to the lecturer the doctor, the trader, the housewife the welder, to the well-­off lawyer the poor and the idealist each one a vital part of a whole —­Mafika Gwala, “A Stalwart—­August 1977 (for ‘Oldman’ Docrat)”

1 THE APARTHEID GOVERNMENT was preoccupied with the question of how to govern

and reproduce the African majority. Over the course of Omar’s childhood, racist state bureaucrats developed the notorious system of “Bantu Education” to institutionalize and reproduce apartheid. For a while, at least, the bureaucrats in charge paid the Indian community little mind, just as the apartheid government’s predecessors had neglected Indian schools during Ebrahim’s childhood. Many poorer Indian children received only a rudimentary education. Seeking better outcomes, many Tamil and Telugu speakers had gravitated toward the diverse array of mission schools over

which the apartheid government was then attempting to exert its control; many converted to Christianity in the process, replicating in South Africa the strategies of their confederates in the Raj who had sought a similar outlet from the limitations of caste.1 Since the early twentieth century, the Gujarati Muslim community in Natal had pushed back against the accusations that their madressas grounded “children in antique customs while failing to transmit modern knowledge” by supporting independent, “integrated” schools that combined twentieth-­century educational techniques with Islamic principles.2 It took some time to develop a program of primary and secondary education, and until the postwar period most high-­achieving Muslim children were sent either to India or, rarely, to the UK. But by the time Omar was finishing his primary education at the Anjuman Islam State-­Aided Muslim School, merchants, clerics, and others within the Gujarati Muslim community had managed to establish their own high school, the Orient Islamic School, on land leased from the city near the Natal Botanic Garden and the Greyville Racetrack, at the foot of the Berea.3 The community fundraised to erect a purpose-­built, midcentury modernist structure of glass, concrete, and steel, albeit one that incorporated “various forms of calligraphy, . . . arabesque tiles . . . Kufic script,” and other gestures toward the community’s cultural and religious heritage. Observers credited Cassim Lakhi, a Natal-­born, UK-­trained architect for “the Eastern beauty in the design and detail adorning its edifices.” By the time Omar came to Orient in January 1960, Lakhi had already been tapped to teach fine arts at the Indians-­only University College the government intended to open on Salisbury Island in Durban Harbor.4 Only a small percentage of Indian children attended secondary school in 1960, whether Muslim, Hindu, or Christian. The Gujarati elite was quite eager to grow that number, to bring it closer to the nearly 25 percent of white children who advanced past primary school.5 The Badshas were not nearly as successful or influential as many of their neighbors; both Ebrahim and Chorta had sons who had managed to complete primary school, however, and although neither Omar nor his cousin Cassim were particularly enthusiastic about continuing their education, their fathers pressed them to attend.6 They were easily distracted students who preferred the company of the university students along whom they worked afternoons and weekends at Mohamedy’s general dealers, some of whom freely shared their Communist Party affiliations and engaged the younger Badshas to distribute copies of the radical Johannesburg-­based New Age newspaper around town.7 There was political freedom and adolescent rebellion in traversing Wills Road and the Victoria Street Bridge, hawking a radical rag to housewives in their saris, nurses in their uniforms, housemaids in their doeks (headwraps), smart young men in skinny Durban

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ties and flared pants, dockworkers hurrying from the bus rank to the port. School could hardly compete, and Islamic education barely stood a chance. Chorta hired a religious studies tutor to come to Douglas Lane. When a verse came out wrong, so did the instructor’s switch. On one occasion, Omar’s youngest sister, Rabia, watched in wonder when the adolescent Omar declared that he had had “enough” of the tutor’s “nonsense” before storming out of the house.8 Decades later Omar can still remember what it felt like to fail English lessons at the Anjuman School around 1958.9 It took some time for him to learn the word—­dyslexia—­to describe his struggles to make the letters make sense. His teachers certainly were not sensitive to his plight; he was not particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of continuing into an Islamic-­oriented secondary school. But when he and Cassim were admitted to Orient, they acceded to the expectations of creed and class and enrolled.10

Figure 3.1. Omar Badsha in father’s room on Douglas Lane, photograph by Moosa Badsha (late 1950s?)

Not surprisingly, Omar did not excel. At Orient, the curriculum was in many ways like that of many of South Africa’s whites-­only high schools: an Orient graduate would be socially minded, focused on the community’s progress within the context of South African “separate development.” As Vahed and Waetjen put it, Orient aspired to equip “younger people to qualify for opportunities that would come in racial packages” while allowing “for the upward mobility of many.”11 Students learned literature, mathematics, science, all underpinned with a Muslim theological and ethical foundation. Vahed and Waetjen suggest that Orient was a “Muslim school, but not an ‘Islamic’ school,” meaning that it wore its theology lightly.12 To many Orient students, Islamic education was the price of admission. Omar’s friend Ebrahim Seedat—­called “Baba”—­also began at Orient in 1960. He did not mind the religious instruction. “It was about value systems. . . . It’s going to teach you not to steal and things like that,” he remembers, a recollection shared by numerous contemporaries.13 Whether because of his dyslexia or his general attitude toward education and authority (and likely because of how these dovetailed), Omar struggled with the subjects and hated the religion. And when Omar did not like something, it was known. He started hanging out in the hallways during Islamic classes, not disrupting classes but making his feelings clear. “I was causing so much trouble,” he remembers, “they would kick me out.” The administration was forced to figure out something else to do with him.14 Thankfully, for Omar’s sake, there was precedent. Under apartheid, South Africans grew adept at fudging their religious or cultural backgrounds to access superior schools.15 In 1960, of 257 Indian boys enrolled at Orient, slightly more than 100 were Hindus and Christians who were accommodated in art classes in lieu of Islamic instruction.16 Orient’s art teacher had attended some Bantu Indian Coloured Artists (BICA) classes back in the fifties and knew Ebrahim and his apparently reckless son. BICA’s instruction tended toward conventional European practice, including portraits, which did not fly at Orient. Whereas in primary school Omar’s art instruction had focused on the decorative arts—­floral patterns, some handicrafts—­“we made chains,” Omar remembers—­Orient’s art teachers were intrigued by Islamic artistic traditions and favored work in ink with strong, assertive, swooping black lines learned from Qur’anic calligraphy. Ebrahim’s own art practice was moving in that direction as well. He urged Omar to take the opportunity that art classes presented seriously and supported him with pens and ink to continue the practice at home.17 Substituting art for Islam, Omar muddled through. He never mastered the required English and Latin courses; he failed Standard Eight in 1962 and had to repeat it the following year. Yet Orient did have some merits. There were some good teachers, including ones connected to histories of rebellion and protest. Everyone knew that the music teacher’s brother was a prominent communist who had fled Durban

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Figure 3.2. Omar Badsha at the Orient Islamic School (second row from top, fourth from left), photographer unknown, (early 1960s?)

the country for Eastern Europe, for example. Even in the dreaded English class, “politically sussed” teachers promoted “subtle discussions” about subjects like the execution of the Italian American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti; the students read John Dos Passos’s “They Are Dead Now” as part of their poetry unit; and, as the 1960s progressed, those with even a minimal awareness of the world around them noted that after the Congress of the People, the Treason Trial, and related bannings, numerous members of their own community had also being forced to don “grey prison clothes” and dream “the dreams of the men in jail.”18 Three months into Omar’s first year at Orient, the political realities became even more inescapable. The year 1960 opened with the government tightening the noose around Cato Manor, where a mixed population of Indians and Africans lived tightly together, often in extreme poverty, in defiance of Group Areas zoning that declared the area to be a white residential district. Across 1959 the police repeatedly raided and deconstructed residences, citing health dangers, illegal beer brewing, and at a host of other social ills. Residents fought back. A few weeks into Omar’s Orient career, one such police raid resulted in a violent clash between residents and officers in which nine of the latter were killed, including four Africans and five whites. The violent resistance increased the tensions, locally and nationally, including in the Transvaal, where participants in the PAC-­organized national pass protests were reported to chant “Cato Manor, Cato Manor” at the nervous officers called to subdue the crowd that gathered in Sharpeville on March 21.19 The tension built, and then broke, murderously.

When the police stopped firing, sixty-­nine protesters were dead. Over the next two weeks, rebellions flared across the country, primarily in African townships, but occasionally reaching into the commercial districts where the Indian population was concentrated. In Cape Town, Phillip Kgosana from the PAC led more than thirty thousand people from Langa to march on police headquarters. That same day, the government declared a state of emergency and banned all public meetings, but in Durban, a crowd estimated at six thousand strong marched down the Berea from Cato Manor through Omar’s neighborhood to the city center.20 For older Indian residents, the phalanx of Black protesters provoked discomfiting memories of 1949. It was a weekday, which meant that Omar was in class when the march approached Grey Street. Air Force planes flew overhead to intimidate the marchers. When this failed, the police sent in armored cars and police on foot. Orient’s students were released from class and instructed to go home.

Figure 3.3a. Cato Manor march, photograph by S. B. Bourquin, March 1960, with the

permission of the Durban Local History Museums

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Omar’s journey to Douglas Lane was hectic. A crowd of women had gathered at an intersection and were taunting and jeering the police, while a group of marchers had evaded the police lines and were marching briskly away from the Grey Street Mosque toward the white business district, City Hall, and the beach. The police followed at a sprint, some shooting into the air, some aiming a bit lower. Three people were killed on Wills Road. Omar picked his way through the crowds; looking down, he saw gutters cluttered with abandoned hats and shoes. There were doctors down the street working on a protester who had been shot, whether by the police or someone else who had taken advantage of the chaos. His “stomach was torn up and they were trying to patch him up. He was making a noise trying to breathe. Next thing was silence, and he was dead.” The tinny smell of blood and peaty funk of organs mixed uneasily with those of the neighborhood’s midday meals.21 The memory of that body stayed with him. Decades later, he could recall it clearly: it was an ordinary school day, until it was not. This was the central tension of his life at the turn of the 1960s. He was a teenager, the eldest son in a family that aspired for the upward mobility that Ebrahim’s own artistic predilections had made more difficult in the prior generation. He was supposed to go to school, then to university, then to assume his place in society, apartheid or not. His struggles in school put that future in doubt, however, and besides, there were always alternative paths to living a meaningful life. The violence of late March 1960 only reinforced that fact. During the decade that followed, Omar would continue to live a life in layers: he was a disinterested student, and simultaneously eager to be mentored in politics, whether by teachers who assigned Dos Passos, or by Jeevan Desai and the Durban Students’ Union, or by the Communist Party and Natal Indian Congress activists who were his neighbors and Ebrahim’s friends, sometimes all at once. As he grew older, he added layers, which also blended. Following Ebrahim’s lead, he, too, became an artist, while also cutting his teeth as an activist by carrying messages on behalf of the “underground”—­a vague and capacious term given to the remnants of the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies that endured in Sharpeville’s wake. He moved into the back room separated from the main house on Douglas Lane and in time began to hold gatherings there—­inviting fellow artists, aspiring poets and playwrights, friends looking for cigarettes or a drink, others for the revolution, most for both. They wrote poetry and plotted modest acts of rebellion; he drew and was tormented with anxiety that his art was not capturing the many facets of his young adult life as he experienced it. Only by the decade’s end did he become convinced that he had figured out how to merge drawing and politics, art and activism—­or at least convinced and certain enough to abandon the former, for a time, to pursue the latter as a vocation.22

Figure 3.3b. Cato Manor march, photograph by S. B. Bourquin, March 1960, with the permission of the Durban Local History Museums

That last term—­vocation—­was key. More than anything, Omar during the 1960s was a young person looking for that which young people tend to seek: meaning, purpose, a sense of belonging, faith in some sort of future. For Omar, Sharpeville and the rise and fall of the armed struggle that followed was ample incentive to do so. But that political consciousness could not be separated from his own personal experiences, as a fifteen-­, sixteen-­and seventeen-­year-­old who was trying to make sense of the bloody bodies in the streets, the political crisis in the newspapers, and the domestic crisis on Douglas Lane. 2

Their mothers’ dreams notwithstanding, Miriam Desai and Ebrahim Badsha were not well suited. Ebrahim took up a lot of space. “He liked to talk a lot,” to anyone, and freely shared his sometimes “unique take on the world,” a neighbor’s child recalled.23 He was “a mover and a shaker, the way he dressed, he was very sharp,” “modern,” comfortable in his body, at ease in the hazy darkness of the Goodwill Lounge and surfcasting into the Blue Lagoon.24 Saleem Badat was about ten years Durban

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younger than Omar; he did not know Ebrahim well, but to this day can still picture him, distinguished, mustachioed, bent over his sign writing at Mohamedy’s.25 People’s impressions of Miriam were more mixed. She had grown progressively more withdrawn since losing her infant children. Rumors spread that she was ill. Although some neighbors remembered a quiet, modest woman, those within the house knew that her reticence was occasionally punctuated with fits of hysterical emotion.26 Rabia Badsha has only one picture of her parents together; revealingly, six other people are also in the picture. All of them were related by blood to Ebrahim, who is the unquestioned center of the image, seated at the head of a table piled with food. He addresses his nephew Haroon, whose mother smiles widely at both her son and her brother. Miriam is a head shorter than Haroon’s mother, her sister-­in-­law. She, too, smiles down at her husband, albeit less convincingly, her gaze drawn slightly to the right, back to the kitchen, away from the banter we might imagine is shortly to ensue. If pressed, it would be difficult to identify to whom Ebrahim belonged. Short where he was commandingly tall, meek where he was bold, “conservative” where he was “modern,” home while he was out, sad where he performed a masculine sort of public ebullience: she looks more like an upcountry visitor, uneasy in the big city, than the woman of the house. Which is not to say that there was not occasional tenderness between them. Omar’s uncle Moosa took this image exactly one month before Sharpeville, when the older kids were away at school. A few months later, in the massacre’s aftermath, Ebrahim sketched a pencil portrait of his wife. He smoothed out her cheek bones, softened her jaw, and filled out her lips. Via his hand, she looks more confident and takes more attention than she does in the photograph. Her eyes are still heavy, but also softer; you can imagine her sitting, the tilted sun coming through the window. Remembering his lessons from BICA, him reminding her to raise her chin, keep it out of the shadows that creep up the wall behind. She holds his gaze, for the moment at least, although one can imagine the effort it takes to keep her eyes from escaping to rest somewhere other than her husband. The drawing is quiet. One can hear the hairs on his arm brushing across the paper and the soft scratch of the pencil marks. This single moment’s captured quiet belied a home that could tilt occasionally into terrific clamor. Ebrahim worried about money, “all the time, battling from month to month.”27 He was ashamed that he needed Chorta’s help to secure both books and shoes for his own children. The shame burned deeper still when Chorta acted out his own frustrations about being the only reliable earner among the painter, the photographer, and the gambler. He targeted Omar, whose struggles in school made him an easy mark. “Omar and Chorta did not get on,” a cousin

Figure 3.4. Untitled portrait of Miriam Badsha, by Ebrahim Badsha, 1961

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remembers. Omar would talk back, and out would come Chorta’s belt, or his fists. Sometimes Omar would flee to his aunt’s place until her brother calmed down.28 Ebrahim had a sharp temper as well. Rabia had some Christian friends and occasionally tagged along with them when they went to church. Once, amused, she casually mentioned that a priest had blessed her during one such visit. Before she knew it, “I saw stars”—­her father had hit her, not, she thinks, because of religious fealty, but instead because she had been unsupervised with a man.29 “This temper of his always [makes] trouble,” Omar confided to his diary in the aftermath of one of their occasional rows.30 As he grew older, he was more capable than when he had had to carry Miriam from the kitchen floor to her bed. When neighborhood kids made fun of her, or of him, he scrapped and defended himself. But he still struggled to bear that intimate pain. Thinking back over his childhood, he reflected on the “the cry of my mother the anger of my father this terror is always there. To grow up in this atmosphere where hatred burst out into violence.”31 It was evident that Miriam’s life had taken its toll. On the back foot from the outset, she was lost the moment she set foot on Douglas Lane to find her fate enmeshed with the brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins who proliferated there and in the surrounding streets. And then the children chewed Miriam Desai to her marrow. She spent most of the 1940s and 1950s either pregnant, nursing, or in mourning. Losing Goolam broke her. Things would come to a head “once or twice a year,” Omar remembers, “then be better for some time” before Miriam was down again. Her suffering “dominated our lives.” Shortly after South Africa became a republic in May 1961, his father decided that it was time for his children’s mother to go. Ebrahim sent for her brothers and said, essentially, “Take your sister back.” Either her distress or their compassion preempted any protest.32 Ebrahim explained to the children that the decision was best for them, and for their mother.33 His sister, Fatima, already lived with the family; she and Rassool had run the household through Miriam’s struggles and would continue to do so. Miriam lived with a succession of relatives, first nearby in Durban and eventually up the coast in Stanger. Her children saw her only occasionally. When he left school, Omar stopped by every now and then; once she gave him enough money to “buy cigarettes without me asking for it. I feel so guilty.” His mercurial father remained much more a part of his life than his mother.34 He was ashamed that he sometimes wished her dead and himself freed of having to care about her. He felt terrible about that. Miriam Desai had been bound, weighed down and broken; when he began seriously to draw, he turned again and again to mothers and their children, the women wearing head coverings, as Miriam always did, their eyes vacant and lost. Omar’s family had never truly been a vessel safe from apartheid’s seas; in the early 1960s, it was breached.35

Figure 3.5. Untitled (mother and child), by Omar Badsha, undated (1960s)

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3

It was in this context that Omar first met Jeevan (sometimes spelled Jivan) Desai, a student at the Natal University who had emerged as a leading figure in the Durban Students Union (DSU).36 Desai was a few years older than Omar: quiet, studious, cultured in a different way than the jazz-­and boxing-­loving Badshas. Desai was among a small number of Indian student activists from the Natal University and the M. L. Sultan Technikon who claimed a loose affiliation with the Cape Town–­based Non-­European Unity Movement. The Unity Movement had emerged from study groups, which had brought together teachers, lawyers, artists, and other intellectuals to debate how global concepts and debates articulated with local circumstances.37 Many Unity Movement activists propounded Trotskyism against the Communist Party’s orthodox Stalinism. During the 1950s, the NEUM kept its distance from the ANC-­led Charterist movement, preferring to focus on what Mohamed Adhikari describes as the “core objective” of building a “united” African, Indian, and Coloured “political front,” while preaching a “policy of non-­collaboration with ruling authorities, using the tactic of boycotting all racial institutions.”38 For Indian students like Desai, the appeal was clear: a multiracial united front helped them to imagine a constituency that transcended apartheid’s divisions and the neighborhood’s residential segregation. In 1959, the government announced its intention to segregate the country’s institutions of higher education, including the University of Natal, which had a small number of African, Indian, and Coloured students, and who would be forced to attend what activists disparagingly called “bush colleges” instead.39 For Indians, this meant being forced to leave Howard College, high up on the Berea, to attend classes in a decommissioned Royal Navy base called Salisbury Island in Durban Harbor. Protests against university segregation broke out across the country; in Durban, a group of largely Indian students responded by boycotting graduation, as well as the Natal University’s “golden jubilee,” in 1960.40 The government took little note of this, nor did it seem to have paid much attention when the students eventually formed the DSU and began to publish a newsletter, The Student’s Voice, which printed original material focusing on the student struggle in Durban, along with the speeches and propaganda from the Cape-­based African People’s Democratic Union of South Africa (APDUSA), a Unity Movement offshoot that formed in the wake of Sharpeville and sought to fill the void left by the banned ANC and PAC. “In a time of social ferment many organizations spring up; society becomes prolific in producing its political offspring,” the veteran activist I. B. Tabata reflected in his first presidential address to the new organization, but “only those organizations which arm themselves with correct theory are able to live on and assist in

guiding the struggles of the people towards a higher plain.”41 As secretary of the DSU, Jeevan Desai was tasked with recruiting high school students to join their university-­ educated peers to discuss current events and develop that “correct theory.” Chorta was close to Desai’s family and had helped to look after them after Jeevan’s father passed away. Jeevan reciprocated by taking a special interest in Chorta’s rebellious, ambitious, frustrated nephew. They went to the cinema together and discussed serious films; Desai introduced Omar to classical music and invited him to take in the Durban Symphony’s occasional “nonracial” Sunday evening performances.42 More importantly, the DSU helped to teach Omar how to think systematically about the South African and global situation. The organization aspired to use theory “with the deft skill of a surgeon” so as “to make a neat incision into the body politics [sic] of South Africa and remove the cancerous growth that threatens to poison and destroy everything.”43 DSU propagandists named the cancer herrenvolkism—­a term adapted from German into Afrikaans political rhetoric—­but Afrikaners were not the only ones infected. Herrenvolkism held that politics and ethnicity ought to be overlain, so that a particular community’s political practice would be indistinguishable from the self-­interest of its ethnically defined constituents. Herrenvolkism undergirded the National Party’s theory of separate development, which under Malan’s successors—­ especially his former minister of Native Affairs, Hendrik Verwoerd—­meant that what was until 1961 the unequal and segregated Union of South Africa was thereafter to be divided into separate and distinct ethnic states, known as Bantustans. Painting with a broad brush, Indian students in the DSU wrote themselves and their local struggle into the collective history of those who had suffered the most at the hands of the colonizers. “For over 300 years . . . we have felt . . . whips and scorns,” wrote an anonymous writer whose ancestors were likely to have arrived in South Africa no more than seventy years before—­“like the serpent [the rulers] have fattened on our milk and honey.” All ethnic identification was collapsed into herrenvolkism; thus, all people of conscience ought “now to rally to the call of the liberatory movement by joining the Durban Students’ Union,” by scorning any participation in what Verwoerd—­now prime minister—­called “Grand Apartheid.”44 Collaborators and race nationalists were both junior partners in the white supremacist project, “slaves-­in-­chief,” the “boss boys of the Verwoerd government.” University administrators, students, and professors who acceded to the edict to segregate their campuses were racialists who needed to be resisted; the local struggle was but a piece of the national drama.45 To Omar, Desai and the DSU were a lifeline. The appeal was not necessarily ideological. Many of the more politically inclined members of Ebrahim’s social circle were Communist Party loyalists, who eschewed Trotsky and his South African supporters. Following arguments with Chorta or Ebrahim, Omar sometimes Durban

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sheltered around the corner with their sister, Ayesha, and her husband, a Natal Indian Congress (NIC) and Communist Party activist named Yusuf Bhaijee. Omar’s cousin Jamila recalls frequently finding him in her flat, “chatting with [her father] for hours [about] books and politics.” Bhaijee maintained a carefully curated library, including encyclopedias ordered from Britain, newspapers from South Africa and beyond, and magazines sourced from as far away as the United States.46 Omar was not doctrinaire; the DSU’s primary appeal was that it offered a new discipline, countering those of race, class, and creed that he had inherited. Under Desai’s tutelage, it did not matter that he was a middling student (or worse) who was not destined to study at “Indianstan’s” finest institutions. What mattered was that he was not “content to carry on his little life as [a] ‘respectable’ little doctor or lawyer or teacher,” as DSU propaganda put it.47 Via the DSU, he could claim that he would have turned down admission to Salisbury Island out of principle. At the same time, most of DSU’s leadership were college students whose intellectual credentials were well established. It took him time to gain the confidence to publish his words, so Omar tried to make himself useful in other ways, by finding a printer to produce hundreds of copies of Tabata’s 1962 APDUSA presidential address, for example.48 He carried messages from activist to activist across the Durban metropolitan area, venturing further by bus and taxi than his feet could carry him. School friends noticed. Baba began to call him “Mole” (frequently written as Mol’), comparing his evident talent for circulating underground and popping up in unexpected places to the elusive, subterranean mammal.49 The nickname stuck; decades later, friends from Durban and beyond still knew Omar as Mol’, even if many could not remember why.50 He had other mentors, some of whom were older and even more impressive than the cultured Desai. Abdul Khaled Mohammed Docrat—­“Doc” or “Old Man Doc” to those who knew him—­was a local legend who had thrown himself into Congress and communist politics almost immediately upon his 1930 arrival in South Africa.51 Detained during the post-­Sharpeville state of emergency, he spent most of the 1960s banned to his small flat, smoking “little rolled up cigarettes,” accompanied by endless cups of “heavy, dark tea.”52 Not that there were many open surfaces on which to put down your cup: decades later, friends recalled a home “packed to the rafters with books.” “Few can claim to be as well read,” an appreciation subsequently recounted. “He devoured everything from newspapers to poetry to the classics of revolutionary literature.”53 Docrat represented an older generation of community activists who were doing what they could to maintain their networks and involvement in the face of government repression and banning. The Old Man’s network included people like

the lawyer Phyllis Naidoo, a NEUM veteran turned underground party member, who spent much of the 1960s organizing to help support banned people and the families of those detained; the Natal University sociologist Fatima Meer; and Ela Gandhi and her husband Mewa Ramgobin, NIC activists who maintained Ela’s grandfather Mohandas’s Phoenix Settlement.54 “The reconstruction of the ANC and [communist] underground was designed in small-­scale units,” the historian and activist Raymond Suttner explains.55 In Grey Street, Old Man Doc’s flat was a hub for one such resilient, if precarious network. Docrat frequently “bent” his banning order to come to visit Ebrahim, whose eldest son became a fixture at Docrat’s flat in turn, reading pamphlets from past campaigns and being exposed to theories about revolutionary strategy that complimented those he was considering in the DSU.56 Docrat and his comrades were eager to connect with young people like Omar who expressed interest in their ideas and experiences. They needed them, even if the relationships were not always seamless. Once Omar found his voice, he and Doc debated incessantly; Baba recalls Doc throwing Omar out the flat “many times.” But Omar always came back. The Old Man was a tap root, a “knowledgeable, . . . very incisive mind that encompassed the history of the struggle.” Younger men, finding their way, “could get continuation from him. Institutional memory.”57 His flat was a refuge from Omar’s house and remained that way for the rest of the decade. “Last night we heralded in the New Year arguing about our politics Doc and I,” Omar reported on January  1, 1968.58 The Old Man guided protégés to ideas he thought would interest or challenge them. For Omar’s friend and fellow DSU activist Enver Motala, it was readings about law and history; for Omar, it was Trotsky’s history of the Russian Revolution and, once Omar began to express his interest in creating, the dissident communist’s essays on art.59 Omar, Baba, and Enver offered services in return: Omar carried messages between banned activists on Doc’s behalf, helping to sustain their modest network’s continuity. These were sometimes paper, sometimes verbal. Oftentimes he did not know what the folded-­up pieces of paper said. “An intrinsic feature of underground work was that some people knew more than others,” Suttner reminds us.60 Omar was occasionally trusted to relay the words himself—­that so and so had fled the country or returned illegally; that such and such comrade was coming through Durban and wanted to meet. Docrat’s network was modest. It was not going to make a revolution. But while passing from Desai’s tutelage to Docrat’s, Omar glimpsed how he wanted to live.61 In 1962, while he was adjusting to life without Miriam, Omar penned an autobiographical poem that can be read as a seventeen-­year-­old’s prophecy of his envisioned self. The poem’s Omar “saw deeper than some of his own age.” He discerned a “world bustling in Revolutionary Times / new ideas filled his mind. Every minute Durban

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he learned / something. He every hour was put into work.” On behalf of his movement, on behalf of the “cause of the poor oppressed,” he undertook “a journey to a contact’s home. / A journey to the printers / a journey to give his speech,” opening his “lungs, his heart filled the room with the / voice of freedom.” The poem was a flight of fancy. The boy Omar was from a broken home, failing out of school, frustrated and battered, a person raced Indian in a country determined to maintain the authority of whiteness. But the poem’s Omar, in 1962 a scarce “17 summers old” was at the “helm of destiny,” “with a mission / determined to conquer evil.” This was not subtle; but it was a salve. These words came easily, unlike in his lessons.62 Yet it was also not enough. The state’s repressive machinery soon came for APDUSA and the DSU. Tabata was hounded into exile, where he would die in 1990. Desai was banned.63 He “had no job, nothing. He had to depend on his brothers.”64 The organization faded from the scene. Omar spent more time at Old Man Doc’s and Desai sank into a profound depression. Within four years, he was dead, drowned in the Blue Lagoon. “What drives a man to that act?” Omar wondered. He went to the funeral and reconnected with some former comrades; it was a subdued event. A week later, Desai’s brothers burned his papers and books, which compounded the tragedy. “We have no articles by him,” and without the archive, Desai risked being forgotten. Writing in his diary, Omar was determined to keep “his memory . . . deeply inscribed in our minds.” By then the Mol’ was surfacing more regularly to exhibit the drawings that were his primary occupation. Maybe he could draw something in Jeevan’s honor.65 He had started to take art more seriously shortly after Desai was banned. His last year at Orient he won a school competition with a graphic depiction of a dense city scape, seen at night across a body of water. He layered blue, yellow, orange, pink, and other crayons onto paper, which he then covered with black shoe polish. Using a sharpened stick, he scratched off the polish to reveal the color underneath, scratching a broad skyline of skyscrapers, more Manhattan than Durban.66 That same year he failed his matriculation exams. He would not have the opportunity to boycott the Indians-­only university. Ebrahim drew on neighborhood connections and set his son up with a series of short-­term jobs—­as a construction laborer, a department store clerk, for a few months at a printing press. No job lasted very long, whether because Omar was ill suited to the work, or because the state security branch was visiting each workplace and inquiring about their new employee (or so the rumors went).67 Whatever the reason, the result was that Omar had more time on his hands. He was aimless and too often idle. Ebrahim knew it. Omar’s father was then experimenting with Arabic calligraphy. He gave Omar some paper, pencils, pens, and inks, and urged his son to get more serious about his art.68

4

The timing was good. The country quieted down in the aftermath of the Rivonia Trial and associated repression. Although the ANC and PAC had quickly reestablished themselves in exile with support both from newly independent countries on the continent and from further abroad, internal resistance to apartheid was limited mostly to small cells like Docrat’s, which kept the flame lit but achieved little else. Internal calm opened room for less strident forms of political and cultural participation, especially in the art world, where African artists and their white patrons began to play an increasingly assertive role. Most of the action was in Johannesburg, but in 1963, the Natal Society of Arts (NSA) and the provincial office of the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) felt confident enough about the local scene to stage what they called the Art South Africa Today exhibition at the Durban Art Gallery in City Hall. Initially intended to raise funds for the SAIRR, the contest was advertised as the first “nonracial” national art exhibition in South Africa’s history; organizers received submissions from across South Africa’s racial spectrum and exhibited them together—­a modest, yet still significant move in a country so thoroughly segregated. Durbanites voted with their feet; an estimated twenty thousand attended.69 The city was “not exactly the cultural nerve centre of the country,” as the critic Neville Dubow later put it, but it was evidently hungry for art.70 Two years later, the NSA and SAIRR held a follow-­up competition. They sought judges among South Africa’s multiracial arts community, all of whom were engaging apartheid in their art practice, whether intentionally or not. The first iteration had featured a recently hired lecturer in the government-­run bush college for Zulu speakers, members of a multiracial artists group dedicated to developing “African” forms of expression, and the head of the whites-­only Michaelis School of Fine Arts in Cape Town. In 1965, judges included the director of the South African National Gallery—­an institution renowned for cultivating the white government’s preferred self-­perception as a bastion of Western civilization in Africa. But apartheid meant separate development, so organizers invited Cassim Lakhi, who had designed the Orient Institute’s “Muslim Modernist” aesthetic, to join the judging. When the exhibition closed, Lakhi took home the piece that won the Sir Basil Schonland Prize for the best work by a South African artist born since 1935: The Three Penny Game, by the previously unknown Omar Badsha.71 The Three Penny Game was a black-­and-­white woodcut print, based on a photograph Moosa had taken of a younger Omar and his friends playing a dice game outside on Douglas Lane. It showed five figures clustered together, intent on the dice one was preparing to roll. The image was more suggestive than realistic; Durban

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Figure 3.6. The Three Penny Game, by Omar Badsha, 1965

the figures were recognizably people, but Omar had gouged geometric patterns and shapes into their bodies so that the overall effect was more abstract. The work was akin to the burgeoning “township art” scene that typically featured slight bodily distortion set among colorful urban scenes (penny whistles and shacks for township art, boys playing dice for the Douglas Lane iteration).72 It was perhaps not surprising that Lakhi favored it—­he was then spearheading the development of the fine arts program at the Indians-­only Salisbury Island, along with Jack Grossert, a specialist in South African Indian art, who had recently spent more than a decade helping to develop the apartheid government’s specialized art training program for Africans.73 The piece was modest, and the prize—­R50—­more so. But the Badshas were excited, and the recognition convinced Omar that it made sense to focus on his art.

Family members still treasure the photographs from the opening.74 In one, a group of eight is gathered around the framed print, female cousins and sisters to the right, friends from the neighborhood and the artist himself on the left. The men are wearing sharp suits, the women’s dresses befitting a formal occasion. Ebrahim’s glossy suit hangs loosely from Omar’s skinny frame; the artist has a thin goatee and smiles wryly, clutching a rolled-­up exhibition program. The pride is palpable. Docrat was also enthusiastic about Omar’s success. When in its wake the white women who ran the NSA offered Omar a semi-­regular job hanging exhibitions, Docrat urged his young protégé to take it, the theory being that change needed to infiltrate every available space, no matter how modest or seemingly insignificant. Boycotting had its place, but in the mid-­1960s, it was more important to establish connections and see what small improvements might be possible.75 Still, as a DSU veteran who was deeply suspicious of anything that stunk of herrenvolkism, Omar had his limits. He went to work for the NSA and accepted invitations to socialize with the white director of the Durban Art Gallery and her circle.76 But when Lakhi’s colleague Grossert invited Omar to join the art classes on Salisbury Island—­apparently because he was an Indian artist who had been recognized in a national exhibition and in spite of his lack of academic credentials—­ Omar declined the invitation.77 Via his expanding network, he met leading figures like Walter Battiss, from Pretoria, who was fascinated to meet an artist who was both Indian and Muslim. Omar reacted skeptically enough that Battiss was compelled to assure Omar that “I cannot recall the color and nationality of the people I count [as] my friends” in the art world.78 In South Africa, to be a non-­white artist was to be interpolated as a conduit for ethnicity and little else.79 Battiss and Grossert were confirmed racialists. To his dismay, Omar’s neighbors and intimates demonstrated no greater understanding about what art might be. He replayed interactions in his head: “What do you do?” “I am an artist.” A beat. “Oh. What do you paint? Landscapes? Portraits?” Repeat. “The poverty in the question” was infuriating. “Art is either design making or the above two for our people,” he fretted.80 A few months later, the “ladies of the Muslim women’s cultural club” invited him to talk about art in the community; he tried to stretch the definition a bit, to explain that he wanted his work to relate to South Africa as a whole, not the Grey Street ghetto. They were not receptive. “The bitches gave me the sayings from the Koran as a token of appreciation,” he fumed.81 His father’s reaction was even tougher to bear. Ebrahim was proud of his eldest son and eager that Omar find a way to keep creating without being reduced to the sorts of commercial work through which he made his living. His own art practice had moved on since his days in BICA; he did fewer portraits or Durban

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domestic scenes and was increasingly fixated on the lines and loops of classical Arabic-­script calligraphy. When the opportunity presented itself, he did ornate woodcuts of Qur’anic verses, which he printed and shared with neighbors and relatives.82 The fine arts department on Salisbury Island announced its intention to hold an exhibition of South African Islamic Art, and Ebrahim urged Omar to submit. Tough conversations ensued. “I oppose this move since it helped the government[’s] separate development policies,” Omar reflected afterward. Ebrahim was enraged by his son’s intransigence: “We had a row over this it became violent and he hit me,” Omar reported to his diary. “This temper of his always get in trouble [sic].” Ebrahim kicked him out of the house. He wandered down to the Natal University city buildings to listen to a talk, coming home only after he was sure that his father was asleep.83 In 1965 and 1966, Omar leaned into the idea that he was an artist. He cultivated his goatee, then bored of it; he wore a beret on and off. In a pencil self-­portrait completed in 1965, he depicted himself with a serious, severe look, eyes shadowed in a way that evoked exhaustion, but wide open and gazing into the middle ground. At night he sometimes shot awake, confused by a distant sound that he mistook for his parents arguing and Miriam screaming. It took a few moments to remember that she was gone; the “cry of my mother, the anger of my father” lingered nonetheless.84 Discussions with Docrat and readings gave him an idea about what art could be. It was how “man finds his bearings in the world,” Trotsky wrote in 1926. “It is a way of inspiring feelings and moods.”85 Artists “generalize experience” and thus “widen the horizon” for their communities.86 Islamic art or art that was ethnically or culturally delimited was about the world that was. Omar yearned to find a way for his art to push toward the world that could be. He used the word terror to describe his household growing up; but was not terror a common experience under apartheid? As a “searching artist,” the task was to demonstrate that “my experiences [are] not only my experiences, they are universal.”87 He struggled, however, to manifest the idea that his experiences were representative of a larger predicament. Although he was loath to produce “ethnic” scenes, he could not escape the world he knew best, which was that of mothers and their children, families who were instantly recognizable as Muslim (and thus in the Durban context, raced as Indian). Given his politics, such compositions were not intended to be cultural exotica, of course; rather, they came almost unbidden, compelled, reflecting his preoccupation with the rupture that his family had endured—­indeed, with the very notion of “family” itself—­and where his left him. Much of Omar’s oeuvre from the second half of the 1960s reflected the uneasiness he felt about his mother. There were closely observed character studies on brown paper: a mother and her infant

child, rendered in pencil, thick lines demarcating the mother’s tightly drawn, lightly colored shawl, her face an inverted triangle, the features more suggested than detailed, the contrast between the shawl and her dark, shadowed eyes achieved by turning the pencil tip on its side and sketching with the horizontal. There was a cubist effect, the features out of alignment, the mouth not quite matching the nose, the eyes slightly askew from each other. The child is more aligned, its face less shadowed; it gazes expectantly at its mother, but she is looking somewhere else.

Figure 3.7. Untitled (mother and child), by Omar Badsha, undated (1960s)

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The details changed with repetition; in some, the mother is obviously inside, holding a child in her lap, while another looks on yearningly from its bed, the sheet that shrouds its body an echo of the loose-­fitting dress and headscarf that covers hers. Here her eyes are on the same plane, her facial features rendered with a greater clarity (unlike the child in her lap, who is more formless); the eyes are still vacant, though, and her gaze is focused on something only she can see. Sometimes she is in a chair; sometimes she is the one in the bed. She is always haunted, yet usually approached empathetically. Omar had watched Miriam struggle; he knew what her life had cost her. When he depicted the mother (who was / was not Miriam) in bed, the vertical slats of the headboard could allude to a cage, or a prison cell—­an analogy he made more explicit on at least one occasion, depicting a female figure who was chained by a literal chain, attached to her headscarf, and by the scarf itself, which wrapped around her arm and the bars of her cell, the vertical slats having migrated from background to foreground to make the allusion even more apparent. He completed the latter drawing in 1970, by which point Omar managed more regularly to tie his art to political processes; he titled it Detainee.88 But to read the politics of that particular drawing without reference to its predecessors, the subject’s sisters and their children, imprisoned within the family, is to miss the deeply personal content with which the artist had been obsessed for nearly a half decade by that point.89 From time to time, Omar took his imagination outside and placed his families into the landscape. Some of these graphics are more colorful, almost as if having access to inks gave him license to depart from the dominant grays and blacks to flirt with sweetness and optimism.90 One print appears to depict a nuclear family—­ something quite foreign from his experience—­two children, a father and mother—­ holding hands as they walked together. True, the children are pulling away from their parents, but that was youth and fun and, thinking about Omar’s life experiences, fantasy. In others, however, the outside world was more threatening, prompting the children to cling to their mothers for protection; sometimes, they were even hugged back, as in a mixed-­media print that showed a vaguely animalistic mother and child huddled together for protection, while a tightly gridded orb and other celestial bodies loomed threateningly overhead. The theme came easily to his hand. But by the mid-­1960s, his world had grown bigger, and he was more aware of the politics that conditioned his life on Douglas Lane and those of the people with whom he came into contact. He tried to train his hand to translate the other dramas that he took in while carrying messages, or visiting friends, or attending events at the Natal University City Buildings or the NSA. His preoccupations being what they were, he was frequently drawn to the children whom he encountered. One day he saw “a small boy no bigger than eight so drugged

Figure 3.8. Untitled (family outside), by Omar Badsha, undated (1960s)

he went for a peaceful sleep across the busy pavement” and tried to sketch him. But the sketch eluded him and his paper supply was low. He abandoned it. A few weeks later, as people hustled to outrace a storm, another scene presented itself: a young boy, “nine-­ten years [old] screaming ‘I did not steal,’” chased “by a large white policeman” who seized him when a group of hawkers blocked his escape. Omar stood at the end of the Victoria Street Bridge, watching, considering what it was like to be that young, “so lonely, friendless.” He contemplated yelling at the hawkers to let him pass. Maybe he should have. But that Black boy and the white policeman were not his business; rather, his business was the “trudge” home, “sad and sober, . . . mind reeling in thought. Started a sketch. Going to call it ‘I did not steal.’” To create was to digest: eyes took in a brutal world for a mind to break down; hands formed the brokenness, providing relief and release. The satisfaction then faded, replaced with nagging questions: Had he said it well enough? And did it matter if he had?91 He sought out others who might share his interests. Foszia Fisher met Omar after his initial success at Art South Africa Today. She was a student at Salisbury Island, studying political philosophy. She briefly dated a friend of his, Anoo Motala, who had also studied at Orient—­with more success—­before turning down Salisbury Island to focus on his own art practice. Anoo had a bit more of a financial cushion than Omar; he sometimes decamped to La Mercy, a segregated seaside community for Indians north of Durban, where he painted in a garage owned by a wealthier family. He was quiet and studious. Recalling Omar, by contrast, Fisher Durban

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remembered “a hunger”; one could feel that he was “unsettled.”92 Despite their different circumstances and personalities, Omar was glad to have Motala to work with. “I hope he carries on [maybe] we can have a joint exhibition at the end of the year,” Omar reflected in August 1966.93 They shared Ebrahim’s wood carving tools. “Anoo’s woodcut came out great, now he is working . . . in the right directions,” Omar reported a few months later.94 This collaboration led to others: over the course of 1966 and 1967, Anoo, Omar, and a small group of writers, teachers, and artists from the neighborhood began to meet, often crowded together in Omar’s room. They called themselves the Arts Society (TAS), which was a rather grandiose name for what was a rotating cast of young men, some of whom were just looking for a jol, a good time, and whom Omar was determined to fashion into a modest network of his own.95 Anoo participated for only so long. He had a passport and means, and in mid-­ 1967, he broke up with both Foszia and Omar and left for Europe. He sent a postcard. “The bastard talks about exhibitions and plays he saw I feel lousy sitting here and missing all these things,” Omar stewed.96 It could have been him: Old Man Doc had encouraged Omar to consider going overseas to study and offered to connect him with party-­affiliated gallerists and artists abroad. Ebrahim was also enthusiastic. But when Omar applied for a passport, he was turned down.97 If he left South Africa, he would not be coming back, at least until the political situation changed. He considered going into exile, but ultimately decided against it. He felt guilty enough about Miriam. The thought of more distance from her, and from the world that he knew in general, was too much to contemplate. Besides, flowing between places and people, connecting to Doc’s network, building his own, he felt useful.98 He knew Durban. So he stayed behind, bitter that Anoo had escaped to the wider world, sometimes regretful that he had not, determined to find his way in his more familiar context.99 His connections to the local art world expanded Omar’s sense of what being a South African artist—­or simply a South African—­could be. Most of TAS regulars were from the neighborhood. But some were not. Omar’s forays to lectures and galleries brought him into contact with African writers, poets, and artists—­in other words, with people who represented most of metropolitan Durban’s population, yet with whom apartheid made it difficult to maintain intimate relationships. He met a young lawyer named Mafika Mbuli at the NSA. Mafika’s real passion was poetry. “I asked him to bring it to me to read. It was just great,” Omar reported.100 Mafika began to drop by Douglas Lane regularly, walking the few short blocks up from the bus station. The poet was often an ebullient foil to Omar’s often dour and self-­serious “artist.” He laughed easily and shared humorous lessons “about women particularly,” something Omar appreciated during a period when his romantic life was in flux. Mafika is “dynamite—­he seems to blow up the atmosphere with

well-­chosen witty remarks.”101 He left verses on Omar’s door when he passed by. In one he equated the images visible through the barred window to inmates in a cage; in another, he was the prisoner, kept from his friend, “scraping / with my heart / the wall of your house / . . . / until the blood / dripping down the wall / should congeal / and leave a picture / of one imprisoned from without.”102 Mafika rarely missed the opportunity to create, even when a simple request to call would have sufficed. (And to be doubly certain, he appended the number where he could be reached as well.) Mbuli’s jests belied a darker current that ran just beneath the surface. His area suffered from an acute lack of medical resources; he pitched up at Douglas Lane late one evening, drunk, bereft because his baby had died during a frantic sprint to a too-­distant clinic. Omar was used to his joking, yet here he was adrift “and he just sat and sat.”103 Omar admired how Mbuli was able to capture and relate Mbuli’s experiences. His poems revealed a mind attuned to how Black bodies suffered in South Africa; Mbuli’s subjects were cut, thrashed, brutalized; he wrote about miners, migrants, “their armpits mouldy with sweat of pushing a cocopan / down the rails into the ore crushing mill,” human souls made to do the work of machines, “hands manacled / with weariness / . . . all our lives / till the mind is numb / and ceases to ask.”104 Omar struggled. Mbuli’s poems revealed the ways in which “the life of the average Black in South Africa is hell,” as the literary critic Mbulelo Mzamane later put it.105 Mbuli was so much fun and in so much pain. Poetry was his therapy; through his verses, Mbuli externalized his own experiences to make social comments. Omar tried to learn from his example.106 He met others who had a way with words. Another frequent TAS participant was “Mike”—­a pseudonym for another Mafika, Mafika Gwala. A few months younger than Omar, Gwala had been born in a mixed Indian and African area outside of Verulam, up the coast from Durban, before racial zoning removed him to Mpumalanga, a desperately poor African township off the highway between Durban and Pietermaritzburg. He matriculated at the University of Zululand bush college, only to be expelled almost immediately. He scraped by, picking up work as a clerk and trying to organize fellow poets, musicians, artists, and others in Mpumalanga.107 Gwala thought hard, drank hard, wrote hard, and read hard, devouring whole volumes on Marxist theory and political economy, and producing painstakingly detailed handwritten essays, which Omar was thrilled to read and critique.108 Soon Gwala was another regular visitor to Omar’s back room, sharing cigarettes and cheap booze, trying to capture what he had seen that day in verse. Omar introduced him to Docrat; years later, Gwala would remember the “Oldman’s” “undaunted voice enveloped in / the quest for bare facts,” “unsaddled and unbereaved” by banning orders, “crawly pieces / signed by Pretoria.”109 Durban

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Figure 3.9. Mafika Gwala (1946–­2014), photograph by Omar Badsha, undated (early 1980s)

Booze was Gwala’s therapy, for better or worse; his work rarely trended toward the inwardness that marked Omar’s own.110 He was at his most lyrical when observing Omar’s Durban through his own eyes. Gwala captured the Victoria Street Bridge, “four thirty / crowds / sifting / their tired heads” past the “pagoda laden / graveyards” where Ismail Badsha was buried. Another poem observed the racial politics of the art galleries that he and Omar frequented together. Two friends stood examining a painting when a “frail, bespectacled / not bohemian” white man entered unbidden into their conversation. The old man was “talkative / knowledgeable / about art and those things,” and unafraid to take up more space than he was due. He “reminisened [sic] / about Pre-­Raphaelite / St. Paul’s of London” while Gwala’s narrator pulled the apartheid-­era Black man’s necessary trick: “I smiled,” outwardly, while inwardly “contemptuous.” The two friends excused themselves and exited to “sadder times / storm clouds / hurrying feet” on their way back to their segregated homes. The poem set a perfect 1960s cultural scene: white people forcing their ideas onto Black people, who just wanted to look at pictures in peace.111 Yet art could also convey a humanity that people too often lacked. In his last three lines, Gwala took the scene somewhere else. The narrator turned to his friend: “You know . . . / that old guy / was lonely.” It is hard to imagine a more humane sentiment.112 Omar and I discovered this unpublished poem buried at the bottom of a disorganized box; we read it together, relishing that final twist. “Mafika was a genius,” Omar sighed.113 His own poetry rarely reached such heights. But friends like the two Mafikas were important models: as Dorothea Lange once said about the camera, their poems trained him how to look.114 He kept working—­he had to. Art was how he “kept abreast of the times”; he was determined to break through to a new form of expression that reflected this fact. That was the “only solution.”115 5

For all his studies and cosmopolitan sensibilities, Omar was a somewhat parochial product of the Grey Street area. His known world was mostly limited to a few dozen blocks around the house in which he had been raised. But in 1960s South Africa, any serious artist could avoid the country’s largest and richest city for only so long. His work compelled him to Johannesburg: that city was where the galleries were, and the money. Other than Art South Africa Today, one of the country’s few nonracial art exhibitions was run out of the Adler Fielding Gallery in the Johannesburg CBD (central business district). In 1966, Omar decided to submit three pieces for consideration, bought a third-­class overnight train ticket, and went, like so many others, eGoli.116 South Africa’s cultural and industrial capital felt further away than a few hours. Durban sometimes slumbered under its thick blanket of subtropical air. In Durban

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Johannesburg, even the storms were electric: they blew in out of the clear blue sky, great gray thunderheads crackling with energy to make your hair stand on end. The city was greedy; its millions lived in the world’s single largest city not situated on a navigable body of water, disaggregated in near-­perfect segregation since Gandhi and the Transvaal Indian Congress had first locked horns with Jan Smuts and the Union government at the turn of the twentieth century. Africans mostly lived in newly built sprawling townships south of the main rail line from Durban, which itself skirted the lower slopes of the enormous man-­made mountains of gold waste that were essentially all that remained of the city’s reason for being. During the 1950s and early sixties the government constructed a new township for Indians even further away from the city center. Skyscrapers were rising in the CBD, among the tallest anywhere, casting enormous shadows on the elegant old Edwardian buildings and the tiny people of all races who hustled to make their living. “Jo’burg City, you are dry like death,” another young African poet named Wally Serote put it.117 Omar agreed. Johannesburg was too big, too inhumane, “a town of terror.”118 Yet he was an artist and it was the center of art, so he went, in 1966, again in early 1967, once again in early 1968, again and again, impelled like a moth by the opportunities there. And with each visit, it became more tolerable, more interesting, more anticipated even, because of the people he met and what there was to see. Omar took in shows at the Johannesburg Art Gallery adjacent to Joubert Park. The surrounding area was the epicenter of bohemian Johannesburg, where artists of all sorts displayed their works while buskers competed for the fashionable crowd’s attention.119 Joburgers and visitors lingered, taking in the scene. It was a useful cover. During his trips to Johannesburg, Omar sometimes carried messages from Old Man Doc to contacts in the Transvaal. On one occasion he was given a package to hand off to a connection named Ismail Coovadia, who was leaving that evening for London. Doc wanted to get some newspapers and a message to him. A Johannesburg-­born Gujarati, Coovadia’s family had relocated to the UK to wait out apartheid. Coovadia returned home frequently to check on the family properties in Johannesburg; he was a useful courier. Omar read the newspapers on the train up from Durban—­a group of MK fighters had been arrested after entering the country from Swaziland. Doc needed London to know what had happened. Omar and Coovadia met in the park before the latter left for the airport.120 Art was usually his main business in town. In 1966, Omar’s first call was at the Adler Fielding Gallery on Commissioner Street. Run by a stentorian former Royal Navy officer, the gallery’s Artists of Fame and Promise exhibition was modeled on a London antecedent. Fielding considered himself a liberal and happily invited non-­ Europeans to participate. Omar brought five small sculptures for consideration,

three of his own and two of Ebrahim’s. Fielding received them without enthusiasm: by 1966, graphic work by Black “township” artists was all the rage, not sculpture.121 A Swiss émigré named Fernande Haenggi had recently opened Gallery 101 nearby; in January 1966, she showed work by a young African draftsman named Dumile Feni. It was an immediate sensation. Fielding was much more excited that Feni was going to submit pieces to his exhibition than he was that an unknown Indian artist had brought some sculptures up from Durban.122 Like many Black artists in the mid-­1960s, Feni was known to frequent the Jubilee Centre, on the outskirts of the Johannesburg CBD.123 At Jubilee, all the students were Black and some of the instructors were as well. Omar visited early in the morning, arriving in time to find the “impressively” “well-­equipped” studio slowly coming to life. More than a dozen artists filed in, rolls of parchment under their arms. Some were seeking only a bit of a diversion from their working lives; others, an occupation, a place in the small but growing cohort of Africans who made their living doing art. At any given moment, around fifty students were registered with the program. “African artists are not exactly cropping up like mushrooms,” a reporter conceded, “but the few professionals who are patiently wielding expert brushes . . . are doing the profession rightly proud.”124 The sculptor Ezrom Legae was Jubilee’s primary instructor. Omar sat and watched the students work until Legae introduced him around, offering some paper and space to sketch.125 Omar stayed at for a while. When someone new came in, Omar felt the energy in the room change, slightly, but perceptibly. Some artists angled their bodies in front of their canvases; others picked up their easels and flipped them around to stand facing the walls.126 Zwelidumile Geelbooi Mgaxaji Mslaba Feni—­known as Dumile—­looked younger than his twenty-­six years. He was short and round faced, partial to corduroy sports coats even in summer and always wore fashionable shoes. Clothes were one thing he respected. Music was another. The sanctity of other artists’ ideas was not. “Dumile was like a sponge,” Omar later recalled.127 He borrowed others’ techniques, shamelessly, then improved on them to make them his own. It was relatively easy to do so; after all, most Black artists at Jubilee were working from the same material—­namely, life in the townships. Yet Dumile’s subjects looked quite different than did his contemporaries’. In his drawings, there was precious little color and even less sentiment. His figures lived roughly in space, their skin drawn thin, their bodies exposed to the elements; all knees were knobby, all joints jutting, all shoulders bulging and bent under invisible weight. Dumile constructed bodies from the outside in, using cross-­hatching and other shading techniques to define people and their surroundings. Distorted bodies were characteristic of both sculptural and graphic “township art,” but there was nothing pleasingly exotic or Durban

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“warm” about Dumile’s vision, which some observers judged disturbing, a “sickly kind of art.”128 According to Dumile’s ever-­evolving autobiography, the term sickly was appropriate: his life had been a nearly unbroken string of bad luck and suffering, from tuberculosis severe enough to be hospitalized in a sanatorium (where he drew on the walls) to time spent in a criminal gang (where he learned how to dress), until he was stabbed, declared dead, then miraculously resurrected in a Johannesburg morgue. Or so he said. No one was sure if any of the stories were true.129 Dumile sidled over to Omar and Legae and listened in on their conversation. Omar was gathering his belongings when Dumile intervened, saying that there was more Johannesburg to show him. They left together, Dumile spinning stories of his life as he expertly wound his way through the afternoon crowds. They stopped by Dorkay House, the original Bantu Men’s Social Club on Eloff Street; it was early yet and not much was happening. They walked on, north through the university precinct Braamfontein, ascending a high ridge with expansive views northward over the white suburbs, Dumile casually sharing that out of principle he never carried his pass. They descended the ridge and began to climb the next, moving through generously shaded streets, past intimidating hedges and impressive gates. The walk reminded Omar of childhood jaunts on the Berea, pilfering fruit from unpicked trees. Dumile chattered away. They came to a mansion in Parktown owned by Bill Ainslie, a white artist who had known Ebrahim’s friend Selby Mvusi back in the 1950s. Dumile entered with practiced nonchalance. He stayed there sometimes, apartheid be damned.130 Omar needed to catch a train, so that initial visit lasted only a few hours. Dumile had been invited to stage a one-­man show at the Durban Art Gallery (DAG) in August; they made plans to reconnect when he came to town. Omar’s work was accepted for exhibition in Johannesburg. A few weeks later, he saw one of his pieces in a newspaper, being considered by the eminent critic Neville Dubow. It was “funny to see your work in print,” he reflected. He attended a neighbor’s wedding and watched a group of three women chanting, accompanied by the rhythmic drumming of sticks. He contemplated depicting it, even though doing so would flirt with the sort of ethnographic work he abhorred. He convinced Rabia to sit for him to do a preliminary sketch.131 Dumile was scheduled to stay with Wolfgang Bodenstein, who had facilitated Mvusi’s introduction to the local arts scene a decade prior, but when he came to town it was immediately apparent that it was not a good fit. He phoned Douglas Lane and asked to be rescued.132 He ended up staying for three months—­the first of many visits. Ebrahim took to the young man. Dumile was brash, but respectful; he had lost his parents and apparently relished being among a family. He charmed

Rabia with stories about his mother. She spiced his food exactly as he liked it; he reciprocated with a sculpture.133 Omar kept a regular diary for only a few years in the mid-­1960s, a period in which he was trying to find his bearings in that liminal space between youth and adulthood. At no time were his most intimate reflections more romantic than during those early days with Dumile. “What an experience I am going through,” he wrote, “that can never be wiped out or taken away.”134 Dumile shared stories with Omar—­ about losing his parents early on in life; about his wife leaving him because he wanted to draw, not work; about being “taught to lie dead after thugs had stabbed him.” True or not, the stories had a dramatic effect: Omar was convinced that it was because of his experiences that Dumile so successfully “wrestled with man’s soul” in his work, while displaying none of the “bitterness” and angst that Omar experienced. They sat together on Omar’s bed. Watching Dumile work, the stretched-­thin figures taking shape from his pencil, Omar was overwhelmed. “He says all he wants to say,” he marveled, and South African society “is what he says.” Omar’s theological training was entirely Islamic; nevertheless, he reached for the biblical analogy that seemed most apt. Dumile has “taken upon his shoulders to bare men’s sins,” to render Black suffering meaningful. So doing, he “reminds me of Christ.” It was an apostle’s love, searing and intense. In Dumile, Omar saw reflected “what I want in myself.”135 Dumile’s compositions foregrounded people’s bodies, their labors, their contortions, while insisting on his subjects’ humanity, like Mafika Gwala’s poetry. Although Dumile occasionally produced images that responded to notable events, or took place in recognizable locations, the clarity of his vision often obviated the need for overt referents.136 His often-­dark vision was evident at the DAG: in one drawing, he depicted nearly a dozen bodies, strewn around a rough shelter, a single window indicating only darkness within. Most of the bodies lay prone, twisted, distressed. They are naked, unaware, maybe blindingly inebriated, perhaps felled by some invisible, toxic agent. We cannot say for sure whether Dumile intended the composition to comment on apartheid, on South Africa as a whole, or perhaps the dangers of alcohol consumption; regardless, the community he depicted was certainly sick. Yet what Omar sensed in their early days together—­what drew him and so many others to Dumile—­was what many observers have failed to note: Dumile’s sweetness—­what another artist called his “extraordinary gentleness”—­was also evident in his art.137 Dumile’s work focused on intimate units that clung to each other. At DAG, he showed a drawing of a doek-­wearing mother hanging laundry on a line, her black arms standing out in stark contrast to her white apron, the soles of her feet on parched ground (a plain described sparingly, with only five faint lines), bleached sky beyond. Her daughter clutches clothes waiting to be hung, to catch the breeze that blows from Durban

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Figure 3.10. Omar Badsha and Dumile Feni sculpting on Douglas Lane, photograph by

Moosa Badsha, 1966

left to right. Mother and daughter were connected, no matter the wind or the work.138 It was not his only depiction of familial closeness: another captured a woman sitting in the shelter of a man, clutching his knee for support, while he in turn seeks comfort by holding her breast. Their heads are upturned, their eyes peeled, their mouths pursed: they are long, but small, dwarfed by something immense that they can see, but we cannot.139 While at the Badshas, Dumile won an award from the South African Breweries for another family portrait, a mother whose head is so askew that it looks in danger of tumbling off, her bony shoulder protruding at an unnatural angle. She is obviously in agony, yet her arms remained clasped protectively around her child. Both figures are wide eyed, the mother terror stricken as she looks past the viewer.140 There is something happening beyond the borders of all three compositions, indicated by the direction of the gaze, or the wind that caught the clothes on the line. The world is out there, menacing, but the figures have each other.141 The resonance with Omar’s own preoccupations was apparent, although of course, not all mother-­and-­child portraits are the same.142 Dumile’s vision of buffeted community resonated in other ways as well. After the exhibition, DAG produced a catalog, with photographs—­taken by Omar’s uncle Moosa—­on the back cover. There are twelve of the latter; the first shows the photographer’s nephew, from behind, wearing a checked sports coat. We recognize him by his shock of

Figure 3.11. Omar Badsha and Dumile Feni with Stricken Household, at the Durban Art Gallery, photograph by Moosa Badsha, 1966

nape-­length black hair, his hands thrust into his pockets, his head tilted as he examines a large composition hanging on the wall. Dumile enters in the next image, along with the tall, bearded Bodenstein; the artist is now the show, commanding both Bodenstein’s and Omar’s attention. In the images that follow, Moosa captured Dumile in mid-­thought, gesturing with his arms. In some images, Omar hovers on the outside of the group, while in two of the others, he and Dumile are engaged in conversation.143 These images live on, accessible to anyone who googles the history of Dumile’s exhibition in Durban or his association with Gallery 101.144 These were not the only images that Moosa took that day: there were at least two others, which Moosa printed and gave to his nephew. The first showed the friends posed on opposite sides of the exhibition’s most brutal composition, that of the group succumbing to the toxin. Omar looks thoroughly discomfited, smiling awkwardly, Dumile nonplussed. Moosa took the second in an adjoining gallery, where the Durban municipality’s modest collection of European paintings was on permanent display. Like many white South African cultural spaces, the Durban Art Gallery was overdetermined by colonial racism: it was a municipal space, in which white visitors would find their supposed cultural superiority validated, and Black visitors learn how far they had to go. The old masters on the wall in their uncomfortably ornate frames, the Edwardian City Hall’s self-­serious architecture, the enforced, stilted comportment: visitors could not help but feel its weight and its purpose. Moosa captured Omar and Durban

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Dumile together on a bench before a wall of paintings. Omar sits at the edge, legs crossed, quietly, looking to the left. Dumile takes up more than three-­quarters of the bench; he is laying down, jacket open, arms behind his head, ankles crossed. He might have been exhausted from the hubbub of the show and found the bench’s cushioned surface an enticing invitation; Omar’s back room was not exactly spacious and good sleep hard to come by. His posture, however, suggests that he is not asleep, but thinking, looking up at the inlaid ceiling, at ease in a space that he was never intended to occupy, while his friend, another artist, from another excluded community, sits a protective vigil. Moosa might have ushered them into this pose. Or he found them like this, walking quietly over the shining floors to make the image; maybe they lingered there for a while after the shutter closed. They were a sort of family, bound by interest, not blood, buffeted by a wind, safe in an unlikely shelter, for that moment at least.145 Dumile was not supposed to stay in Durban, and especially not with an Indian family on Douglas Lane. As Christine Eyene has noted, “Art did not qualify as a legitimate form of employment for a black person” in any case, so his pass was always a problem, whether in Durban or elsewhere.146 On September 6, the friends

Figure 3.12. Omar Badsha and Dumile Feni at the Durban Art Gallery, photograph by Moosa Badsha, 1966

were walking over the Victoria Street Bridge when word reached the neighborhood that Prime Minister Verwoerd had been assassinated in parliament. Omar remembers shopkeepers and their customers bursting onto the street in celebration—­a gathering that quickly attracted police attention. Rather than join in, they beat a hasty retreat to Douglas Lane to toast the news in private.147 And when Dumile’s relative fame helped Omar to get another exhibition, together with Bill Ainslie, Anoo Motala, and Sherene Timol, Baba’s wife, who was then studying art with Grossert at the bush college, the Special Branch took note.148 The artists called themselves the “Trans-­Natal Group,” a name which did not last longer than the week-­long exhibition, but which Timol thinks sounded suspicious enough to prompt the police to visit her father at work. “He laughed,” she remembers, amused at their paranoia that a “seventeen-­year-­old girl was going to overthrow the government . . . with her prints.”149 That Omar had already been denied a passport by that time indicated that he was on the police’s radar; Eyene and other art historians argue that the authorities were wary of Dumile’s stark critiques.150 The show went on. “Each artist is saying something,” Omar observed, which was exceedingly “rare in this country.” He was proud and uncharacteristically pleased.151 In Dumile’s calculus, the comfort of being with Omar, in Durban, in the neighborhood, was worth the risk. Friends recalled that he was entranced by the area’s dense community of intellectuals and creators. It was one of the few places in South Africa where “people dovetailed across different disciplines and different classes,” recalled Paul Stopforth, a Johannesburg-­born artist who was then teaching art at the Durban Technikon. Stopforth first met Dumile at Bill Ainslie’s, then reconnected with him in Durban, where he found the artist in the company of a “rather fabulous Marxist” who Dumile called “Mole.” “Grey Street was a sort of paradise,” Stopforth explained, and although Dumile eventually returned to Johannesburg, he kept it close.152 He phoned Douglas Lane often, talking at length with Ebrahim if Omar was not in. He typed letters devoid of grammar, to ask after Ebrahim, Rabia, Anoo, and Sherene, imploring Omar to say “hello for me to old man dock tell him I will remember him and he must remember.” He was hard at work in Johannesburg, hustling to find money to bronze a set of small terra-­cotta sculptures based on models that he and Omar had fashioned together in red clay Ebrahim had accessed from a brickwork. (The ever-­present Moosa captured the friends working on this project as well.) He had work that needed to get done, but when it was finished, he planned to come back to Durban, “if only to clean my brain.”153 It was not necessarily easy to be his friend. Before that next trip materialized, Dumile begged Omar to come to Johannesburg to meet his current girlfriend and their child, and to give him advice. But upon arriving in the city, there was no sign of Durban

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Dumile. Omar made the rounds—­to Gallery 101, to Jubilee, to Bill Ainslie’s place. He took in a film at the Bioscope, he sketched, he stretched his money to cover meals. He “went back to 101. Dumile still out. No one seems to know his address in the townships.” He felt bad for himself, “very, very tired,” homesick. “Must meet Dumile tomorrow somehow,” he resolved during a break from his aimless wanderings. Two days passed. Omar was “hopping mad.” He went back to 101 and demanded that they give him information they did not have. The Badsha temper was well practiced; the gallerists were shaken. Thankfully for them, Dumile made a sudden appearance, incongruously clad in a “green corduroy suit and a bus conductor’s hat.” He did not offer any explanation. They left together and caught a train to Soweto.154 It was Omar’s first foray into South Africa’s largest township. He had never ridden the trains that took Black workers from segregated ghetto to work in town. It was “one of the most horrible journeys I have ever undertaken,” he reflected. “One had to push like mad to get on. . . . I had to hang on for dear life with my head down so that I don’t attract attention.” Surrounded by masses of African commuters, Omar was acutely aware of being Indian. There was no room to stare at his own feet; he looked down instead at a shriveled old couple, a man and woman, who swayed together with the train’s insistent rhythm, past the looming mine tailings, the Coloured and Indian townships, deeper into urban banishment. He winced at the sharp jolts from the train’s brakes, its whistle, and those of the always suspicious police. He closed his eyes and let the cries of babies clutching their mothers and train-­car preachers proclaiming the word wash over him.155 He imagined burning eyes on his face, his height, his hair: “I must have been the only Indian in the Township and I stood out like a topless dressed woman in 45th Avenue New York.”156 They alighted and a taxi took them to Dumile’s place. The small room Dumile shared with his girlfriend and child had “no lights,” unlike Douglas Lane, but it was otherwise familiar: “a typical artist home, with paintings, sculptures, drawings, books all over the place.” Omar spent a fitful night on the floor beneath Dumile and his girlfriend, listening to the baby congested with a cold. Dumile was hoping to sell enough work to send the woman to her family in Kroonstad, where she would be more comfortable and they would baptize the baby.157 The next day brought pouring rain and a trip back to the CBD, where the friends parted. Omar returned by train to Durban.158 Soon Dumile wrote from Johannesburg to invite Omar to attend the baptism, although he conceded that it was not going to be anything special, “unless of course they got a new morden way of watering babys.”159 The event did not turn out as planned: Dumile’s claim of parentage was preempted by a locally powerful gang leader, who claimed both the baby and Dumile’s putative betrothed for himself. Unlike Omar, Dumile was not a fighter. He slunk

back to Johannesburg and eventually found his way to Durban, surprising the Badshas one morning, hollow eyed and mournful. During his stay he produced an uncharacteristically self-­involved composition he titled An Artist Contemplating Suicide; a solitary figure, alone in a void, his head blending into what looked like the long barrel of shotgun. Thankfully, on Douglas Lane, Dumile was not as alone as he projected. He stayed there for a few weeks, creating, recovering, then talking, making plans, before returning to Johannesburg.160 And then, midway through 1968, he was gone. South Africa had always been hard on its Black artists. Ebrahim’s old friend Selby Mvusi had gone into exile in 1957, before the floodgates opened after Sharpeville: writers, journalists, poets, singers,

Figure 3.13. An Artist Contemplating Suicide by Dumile Feni, 1967

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trumpeters, pianists all fled, for London, for New York, Dar es Salaam, Moscow, elsewhere. Omar had contemplated leaving and Dumile frequently did the same. A few months after the 1967 visit, he wrote to propose that they “start something in Swaziland.” Omar was intrigued: the country’s proximity was such that “in a few years we could shift the centre of art [from South Africa] to Swaziland.” It would be a “fascinating experiment.”161 The government gave Dumile additional incentive to find a way out. Both critics and the state read political content into Dumile’s work, even though his friends thought him politically “naïve,” in Stopforth’s assessment.162 That same year his work was included in the country’s official pavilion in the Sao Paolo Biennale; Omar was apoplectic and Dumile totally befuddled by his response. The state propaganda machine was happy to use Dumile’s evident talent to broadcast how apartheid was incubating Black creativity, while at the same time Special Branch began to move against him, citing his lack of official employment in Johannesburg. Late in 1967 Dumile was notified that he was going to be “endorsed” to his registered home, in the culturally barren Cape. He had six months.163 He was frantic, convinced that banishment to the Cape would spell the end of his career. “For an artist, [the work] is [the] only thing,” he had written to Omar.164 Endorsement would be a form of death. Bill Ainslie used connections in the UK to get Dumile invited to show his work at the Grosvenor Gallery in London.165 Dumile was granted a passport and a visa for the UK. There was one final round of parties in both Durban and Joburg. “Dumile is sad,” Omar recorded on June 12, 1968. They chased the sadness with drink; the next morning Christ and his apostle visited Docrat “and the old man gave Dumile instructions for London.”166 He flew first to Johannesburg, then northward still. For a time, there was only silence. South African newspapers reported that he was missing. Omar fretted that something had happened, although he suspected “a publicity stunt.”167 Eventually Dumile phoned, resuming the old practice of speaking to Ebrahim if Omar was not in. When Omar got his own place, he no longer had a phone and they lost touch. It would be more than two decades before they saw each other again. 6

It had been pouring rain when Dumile and Omar traveled back to the Johannesburg CBD from Soweto in February 1967. After they parted, Omar sought shelter in a small café, where he nursed a cup of tea, sketched, and wrote in the pocket-­sized notebook that he was then using as a diary. When the rain stopped, he moved outside to a park, still sketching and mulling over what he had learned, from Dumile, from TAS, from Old Man Doc, his mother, his father, Jeevan Desai, about what he wanted and about what it all meant. What an artist “takes from life is . . . what he

goes through,” he reflected. He was twenty-­one—­still young, and he had already gone through a lot. But Trotsky’s interpretation of the artist’s role in a revolutionary situation gave him pause. In times of great historical flux, an individual’s experiences were insufficient if they did not speak to the social predicament. The artist’s task was to transcend individuality, to “give life a coherent whole [by] putting all the fragments”—­society’s multitudinous perspectives, experiences, observations, traumas, comforts—­“into a unity.” “In other words,” Omar concluded, “the artist must make his individuality universal.”168 This was what the best artists did—­what Mafika Gwala did, what Mafika Mbuli did, what Dumile did. Omar recognized it and struggled to achieve it himself. The months that followed this revelation were difficult ones. “[I] just seem not to get anywhere. My mind has just refused to work,” he related after another in a string of frustrating days. He needed something to “shatter the stillness.”169 Dumile was showing new work at Gallery 101 and Omar decided to make a quick trip to Johannesburg. It did the trick. Dumile’s “exhibition was fantastic. The word genius I can only use. His drawings have improved[,] they have a soft and refined quality. So much said, with so much life.” He returned to Durban refreshed, bought some paper, some pastels, some brushes and paints. “Did some work yesterday,” he related; it was late June and cold, but he felt happy.170 He was still working around their shared themes, working through his own life, attempting to turn his private monologue into something more meaningful. He admitted to his diary that he sometimes borrowed from Dumile’s work. “Some of his sketches and my sketches are alike in line and feeling,” he noted. “I have been influenced by him.”171 Within a year, Dumile was gone; Omar stayed behind and pressed on. Omar’s drawings were similar to Dumile’s in that they focused on characters at the expense of landscape or location. Yet whereas Dumile’s figures were typically exposed, whether to wind, drink, or danger, the beds and chairs among which Omar placed his preoccupied mothers and children suggested interiors, an internality akin to his own troubled psyche. The more he worked, however, the more he began to experiment with bringing his figures outside. “Outside” was apartheid; it was the townships and the Bantustans and the throngs of workers who made their way through his neighborhood; it was the galleries and the segregated spaces and the shadow world of comrades, messages, and networks. Despite segregation, outside was a commonweal—­people shared their experiences of it, if not equally, equitably, or comfortably. At some point during this period, he did an experimental drawing; it depicted a figure lying in field, reposed, but not relaxed, head raised to look at the viewer, with the sun’s thick round mass smoldering to his left, five thick scribbles representing clouds above a thin, undulating horizon line. Durban

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Dumile’s success had made it clear that human characters did not need to be realistic or even recognizably human to communicate their humanity. Beginning in 1968, Omar began to experiment with this as well, de-­emphasizing his subjects’ unique historicity by taking away cultural referents like head coverings and exaggerating, rather than obscuring features like noses, mouths, and eyes. In time, some of his humans began to resemble—­and in some cases, became—­birds. He combined these innovations in rough pen sketches—­beds, chairs, birdlike humans placed outside, under the same smoldering sun, horizontal lines indicating a landscape. The year ended; 1969 began. There would be an Art South Africa Today in a few months. He wanted to enter something new, to demonstrate what he had learned.

Figure 3.14. Untitled (figure in landscape), by Omar Badsha, undated (1967 or 1968?)

He continued to pick up work hanging exhibitions at the NSA; in return, he was able to invite his friends to attend openings, and to take advantage of the food and drink available there. He occasionally overdid it. After one opening, he stumbled, in his words, “from gutter to gutter” not home, but instead to Docrat’s, where he knew there was a spare couch. There he tossed and turned for a few hours, his mouth pasty and dry, his clothes reeking of cigarettes, his and other people’s sweat. Cracking his eyes open with the morning’s sun and building heat, he saw only what was at the foot of the couch—­a wall: white, unblemished. On this hungover morning, the wall offered recovery. He remembered later how a deep, inrushing urge to draw had seized him. He stepped into his shoes and ran out of the flat, rushing to his own, there seizing India inks and paper, a frenzied man among the work-­week morning frenzy, not on his way to the port, or to market, to school or town, but up the stairs to that wall, that beautiful wall, onto which he poured his self.172 Within a few hours he had completed a sketch of a large composition that he called Black Mother, after the historian Basil Davidson’s book of the same name, to which he had been introduced while in the DSU. Later, he would explain that the piece was inspired by an incident he had observed: friends from the neighborhood were having an affair, when folk birth control remedies failed them, necessitating an abortion to head off the community’s opprobrium. As elsewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, abortions in Durban were illegal, relatively easily procured, and typically brutal interventions.173 The practitioner worked out of a car, the darkness barely obscuring what was going on within. Omar happened to walk by soon after the operation took place and witnessed the aftermath. He chewed the scene over, the woman’s plight blending in his mind with that of his own mother, and with that of families in general. Apartheid had not caused her situation—­not entirely—­ but for someone who had been obsessed with these questions for years, the historical context was inescapable: his drawing captured what South Africa had made.174 He brought the piece of paper back home and continued to work with it, adding elements, more ink and color. This “mother” in question is scarcely human, her head is uncovered, rounded, prone on a bed the frame of which Omar rendered definitively in thick, saturated black ink. The frame is the composition’s most realistic element, yet even that transparent depiction is undermined by a horizontal line indicating a plane that exceeds the bed frame, extending under her shoulders to indeterminate points on her right and left. The mattress is impossibly vast, as if indicating the difficulty of maintaining a neatly demarcated domestic life amidst widespread social depression. A familiar rounded mass hangs low over her left shoulder, now colored orange. The bed is also a stretcher, elevated above a surface rendered in roughly applied crayon; the smudges carry over onto her body; Durban

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they are random, inchoate, dirty, polluted; they are multicolored, filthy feathers, some intact, some scattered. Only her minimally rendered, avian head is free from blemishes. Strong swoops in black ink bind her to the bed/stretcher. They weigh her down, entrap her, restrain her, smother her with bandages or cloth. Her face is clear; she can respirate. But she cannot breathe. In other work completed around the same time, Omar dispensed with human referents altogether, opting instead to depict only birds. Humans were bound to the

Figure 3.15. Black Mother / Birth by Omar Badsha, 1969

earth, like the mother. Birds could fly and flight meant transformation and escape. The metaphor was obvious, even when he tempered it by encasing some birds’ feet in concrete blocks. That possibility of flight was what his work to that point—­and, not incidentally, Dumile’s—­had missed. Humans either succeeded or failed to shelter each other from the world that was. To be a bird, on the other hand, was to retain the possibility of what might be. He was still writing poetry at the time, and incorporated a verse into the composition, placing it into the sky opposite the smoldering sun. The poem moved from reality to possibility. It began darkly, observing the “Black Mother / gravely in your / bedpost silenc[ed] . . . / heralding . . . doom.” Then it pivoted, to imagine the future: “But leave this / landscape untouched / for only marching school children / . . . will never create landscapes / of doom.” The mother was bound to give birth in fetters. Miriam had and she was still bound. In verse, Omar asked whether her offspring—­people like him—­could create a different world. Black Mother was not just art; it was therapy.175 Omar entered the piece into the 1969 competition. The judges liked what they saw. Returning to Cape Town afterward, Neville Dubow reflected that “the most interesting of [the artists] is the young Indian artist, Omar Badsha. He has figured in a minor way in previous [Art South Africa Today exhibitions],” but Black Mother / Birth “is his first real breakthrough.”176 The judges awarded Omar the exhibition’s first prize: the Ernest Oppenheimer Memorial Award, and R500. It was a substantial sum; he could buy his own pens and inks, paints and paper, and continue his efforts to understand and master color. After a long decade of reading, acting, learning, observing, and creating, he had said something, and said it well. The prize led to the invitation to stage his first one-­person show, in Cape Town. The birds and mothers alighted for a different province; Dubow visited them there too. Perhaps thinking about Dumile, whose reception in London was avidly covered in the South African press, Dubow noted that “there is an . . . important art tradition peculiarly of our time,” which “offers no balm,” while yielding insights “into the human condition [and] Badsha’s vision is a part of it.”177 Soon, Dubow and other critics would recognize this new vision as a form of aesthetic and creative protest. In 1970, it was new and bracing and portended more statements to come.178 It was also not enough. By then Omar was well into his twenties. He had friends, comrades, fellow creators, a network, a “hunger” that sometimes alienated both intimates and strangers, yet which had become the manifestation of the internal discipline, the restlessness he was convinced he needed to survive. Looking back to the decade’s beginning, to Sharpeville, to school, to the dissolution of his family, there had been significant achievements: prizes, connections, an occupation of sorts. This was tempered by significant losses. The family was broken. Dumile Durban

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Figure 3.16. Untitled (birds with concrete blocks), by Omar Badsha, 1973

was gone. Others were dead. Jeevan Desai was drowned, his body bashed up against the rocks. A few weeks before Desai died, Ebrahim was notified that the family would soon have to vacate Douglas Lane. The Badshas knew it was coming: the authorities had long been determined to remove Indian residents away from the city center. They could keep their businesses, cemeteries, and mosques, but they would have to leave their homes. The prospect of losing Douglas Lane stung. “There is a heavy lump in our hearts,” Omar mourned. “I am the third generation living here it is about 50 years that we are here.” He struggled to find the words. “It really heart breaking to leave. . . . It is like being killed or something like that.” The highway was coming through. The Badshas and their neighbors would soon be out.179 He oscillated between despair and hope. Oblivion threatened his neighborhood; there were mothers there who were bound and trussed. But things could change. He was now old enough to have friends with children of their own. A new generation, a new possibility. “It was like it was happening to me,” he related after meeting a friend’s baby. “I smiled, happy like I was never so for a long time.” He liked how babies captured time not yet lived. Here was one more chance for people to live “in a new way.” Maybe this child’s generation would be the one to disarm the snare of race. Maybe this child would live “not [as] an Indian, but [as] a South African.”180 Another friend was expecting a child, her third. He presented her with a drawing: a mother, arms raised high, out of the reach of the human children who grasped and clawed. In her hands she holds a precious, tiny baby bird. (See figure 1.8.) Omar continued to draw. But that had never been enough, and still was not. People from his network were getting increasingly involved in the Indian trade unions—­they reported that the workers were having difficulties with both management and their union, which seemed hopelessly co-­opted. There were meetings being held in halls nearby. Dumile left South Africa. Omar attended a couple of meetings, sitting in the back. After one, he reached out to the workers, to see what he could do to help.181

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Chapter 4 N ATAL 1970s

today Victoria Street was rainy on Maydon Wharf the dockworkers were soaking they hurried past the freight agents mingled with the cartage workers waiting for a tornado or something to snap some did swallow the rain that fell on their silent lips —­Mafika Gwala, “A Stalwart”

1 EBRAHIM LOVED CARS, but he could not afford his own. Omar himself learned to

drive outside of Pietermaritzburg, where he moved in the winter of 1973 to organize textile workers. That year saw a dramatic upsurge in labor disputes across Natal’s industries, most famously in Durban, where hundreds of thousands of workers downed their tools in January and February.1 African workers organizations had no recognition rights, but those comprising Indian workers could bargain collectively. In the area around Pietermaritzburg there were numerous organized textile mills, some of which both employed and were owned by Indians. The strike wave was an

opportunity to consolidate and expand labor’s influence in South African politics. So, when a dispute at a small factory named Prilla Mills spilled over into retributive firings and lawsuits, Omar joined a white Natal University student named Halton Cheadle to organize for the union.2 Cheadle used his wife’s car to travel from the union’s office in central Pietermaritzburg to factories scattered across the area and the townships from which workers—­whether Indian or African—­were transported on company buses. As the dispute simmered across August and September 1973, Prilla Mills company officials repeatedly denied organizers access to the factory; this presented a logistical challenge, since the busing meant that workers were almost entirely inaccessible. Factory foremen were pressuring workers to resign from the union or risk their jobs. Retrenchment was less of a threat to Indian South Africans than to Africans, given that Indians did not carry passes and therefore did not risk being endorsed out of their home areas without a job. Still, many of the workers at Prilla Mills were young women—­some as young as fourteen or fifteen years old—­who labored to support their families, and who were acutely vulnerable to pressure. Many signed away their union membership; the union tried to push back, producing literature and aggressively organizing.3 With a car, organizers could track buses to and from the townships and the factories. Cheadle was a tall, broad white man from Johannesburg who had come to Natal to swim competitively at the university’s Howard College campus. He was fearless and a little reckless. He and Omar teamed up to track the company buses as they plied their routes through the region’s hilly townships. On one occasion, the bus doors opened to receive workers, and Cheadle saw an opportunity.4 They had printed material detailing the rights of union members and advising workers how to respond to company intimidation. He grabbed a stack, leapt from the car, and vanished into the bus, leaving Omar behind to follow and pick him up. Omar had never operated a motor vehicle. They were in a poor township where few people owned cars and thankfully there were not too many pedestrians around. He carefully eased the car back onto the road, trying to manage both the mechanics and his adrenaline. The bus was far ahead, but he could track it as it passed over the hills like a boat over a set of waves. Finding a way to express one’s politics artistically was one thing. Driving a car in pursuit of workers’ transport was something else entirely.5 Cheadle’s seeming lack of regard for his own security—­as well as for his wife’s property—­is indicative of a certain type of white, left-­wing masculinity, and in the retelling, the ostensible objects of his intervention—­the workers themselves—­are almost extraneous. Yet it is Omar, not Cheadle, who shared these stories, when, prompted by a somewhat harrowing Natal

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trip to dinner, I asked him how he learned to drive. He downshifted and reached for memories from a half century before.6 His ability to handle a car yielded access to union transport, along with autonomy and increased range: beyond Grey Street into the rest of Durban, to the townships and the informal settlements, to the lives of the working people who made their homes there. The work brought him closer to the heart of apartheid than his art ever could. It brought him closer to people who shared the same traumatic experiences as a Gwala, a Feni, an Mbuli, and people who sought solace not in producing work, but in work itself, in activism and the pursuit of change—­small, inconsistent, fragile, and incremental—­but change nonetheless. Chasing that bus, he tasted something more addictive than drawing. 2

Even while enjoying the success of Black Mother, Omar had never stopped trying to build his network, or to contribute to Docrat’s, Phyllis Naidoo’s, and others’. He remained the Mole, who was also intrigued by more overt forms of activism. In the late 1960s, Omar drafted a play about an activist and his family. He imagined two sisters responding to the news that their brother, Pascal (which happened to be Mafika Gwala’s “Christian” name, as well as his sometimes pen name), had led a protest that was met with police violence. Stage notes explained that one sister represented “reactionary elements,” who blamed her failure to go to university on her brother’s choice to become a “full time revolutionary.” She thought little of his choice, spitting that Pascal “has nothing to do with this house and we have nothing to do with his like.” While the other sister trembles at the thought that Pascal might have fallen, the first mocks his “beautiful death . . . on the barricades, with the red flag flying.” By putting these sarcastic words in the “reactionary’s” mouth, Omar’s script was bolder than he himself tended to be. He hatched a plan to stage it, co-­opting some other members of The Arts Society (TAS) to act. The plan was to approach the Institute for Race Relations and propose that it sponsor an evening of one-­act plays, and a talk by Omar on Berthold Brecht, who was his current intellectual obsession. He hoped it would generate a stir.7 Others in Omar’s community were then engaged in similar efforts to merge art with activism. Much of this was happening in the country’s segregated universities. At Salisbury Island, Foszia Fisher fell in with a group of like-­minded creators who called themselves the “Café Clan,” after their usual stomping grounds.8 Omar’s neighbor Strini Moodley was among the group’s most outstanding members; a year younger than Omar, Moodley had grown up in Wills Road in a block of flats studded with Omar’s relatives and friends. His father had been active in the Natal Indian

Congress in the fifties; he was as a well-­known and popular teacher and offered his services as a tutor for neighborhood kids. For a time, Ebrahim hired him to help his sons Rashid and Omar with their studies.9 Both still struggled in school, while Strini matriculated to the bush college.10 Salisbury Island was a placeholder while the government built a larger, more modern campus farther away from town, on an inland ridge in Westville. Until then, Salisbury Island’s modest and ill-­suited buildings hosted faculty hired and, if they were not careful, fired by the apartheid government. Campus authorities and security police carefully surveilled the student body, mandating ties for the boys and suitably modest dress for the girls; they scrutinized sign-­in sheets against class lists to make sure that everyone was where they were supposed to be. Moodley and Fisher arrived on campus at the beginning of 1966; May that year marked five years of the republic and students were instructed to gather in the largest hall to sing “Die Stem” and wave little flags. Moodley, Fisher, and a few others—­numbering no more than ten, the former remembered later—­gathered instead by the café. “We got a broomstick, we tied a look-­like South African flag, we marched around, we made our own speeches and then we burnt the [mock] flag.”11 They loved this sort of modest theater—­one member remembered another performance that involved a student walking around campus with a tree branch on which he had painted the word SPECIAL in bold print—­a pun on the government’s Special Branch.12 While Omar and Dumile sought comfort in drawing, Moodley, Fisher, and the Café Clan were drawn to the possibility of theater. Together, students read off the syllabus, gravitating toward practitioners like Brecht, whose work collapsed audience and performers and entered the fraught terrain of the political. By early 1967, the Café Clan had developed an unscripted play called Black on White, a “political satire, how Black people saw white people and vice versa . . . just ridiculing the whole notion of race.” Actors improvised based on their own experiences, usually in impromptu performances on campus open spaces, with passersby turned into an unwitting audience.13 In time, the Café Club adopted a new name: the Theatre Council of Natal (TECON); by the end of the sixties, they were staging performances far from campus, outside of the market in town, for example, or in restaurants or parks. Haroon Aziz was an activist from Omar’s network who sometimes came to TAS meetings.14 Old Man Doc instructed him to contact the Café Clan. TECON performed in townships like KwaMashu, where the Indian cast was challenged to connect their experiences of apartheid to wary African onlookers (and government surveillance).15 Some TECON performances ended with the police chasing the cast away; others resolved into what Aziz described as “Brechtian” discussions between performers and audiences, during which he took note of who demonstrated “high levels of Natal

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consciousness.” Aziz later testified that his work with TECON was part and parcel of ongoing efforts to “keep the movement alive.” In 1969, Moodley was expelled from Salisbury Island, ostensibly for violating the campus’s strict behavioral codes. He kept at it, seeking out like-­minded others, like Omar, by now a locally well-­ known artist, as well as the small group of African medical students and activists who lived in the Alan Taylor residence, behind the oil refineries near the airport.16 That dormitory was the de facto headquarters of the South African Students’ Organization (SASO), founded in 1968 to organize “non-­white” university students to withdraw from the multiracial National Union of South African Students and to protest white liberal dominance over that organization, among other issues. Led by Steve Biko, SASO was developing a new approach to South African politics that came to be known as “Black Consciousness.” A student at the University of Natal Non-­European Medical School—­where he studied alongside Indian and Coloured, as well as African, students—­Biko defined “Blacks” as all those denied full legal rights under apartheid. When qualified with “consciousness,” “Black” described both a racial and political identity: Omar was not a student, but his activism and attitude vis-­à-­vis the apartheid state meant that he was Black, while those upwardly mobile, middle-­class Indians who obediently waved their republican flags and voted in government-­sanctioned South African Indian Council elections were not. Black Consciousness was “an attitude of mind and a way of life,” as SASO defined it in 1971.17 After being expelled from the University College, TECON members opened a small record shop and café near Grey Street. They called it “Revolution” and invited Omar to display some works. He did a cover for one of their programs, Afrika Hoorah, a revue that incorporated spoken-­word performances, poetry, and a play entitled Into the Heart of Negritude. His cover incorporated the same bird motif with which he had been working, adjusted slightly to meet the Black Consciousness cultural activists’ instructions that they wanted an “African” theme. Around this time, Omar began to describe himself as “Black,” finding in Blackness a historically coherent South Africanity that both encompassed and superseded his own experiences growing up in the Grey Street Indian ghetto.18 Black Consciousness demanded bold acts of political creativity—­its theater, music, art confronted the audience. Omar was attracted to the idea that art could matter and was happy to display his works. But at the same time, he was losing confidence that art itself would promote substantive change.19 The year 1971 marked a decade since the republic. The state was holding elections for the South African Indian Council, and former ANC (African National Congress) Youth League members like Gatsha Buthelezi were entering government via the Bantustan system, preferring to resist apartheid from within (they claimed)

or seeking to tap into what power was available (as their critics rebutted). The decade opened with Omar’s solo show in Cape Town, which exposed him to new critics and new markets, and gave him an excuse to carry messages to comrades in the Western Cape. But the work was leaving him rather cold. “I was getting pissed off because I was feeling that I needed to go to the next step, [but] I was repeating myself.” Apartheid was ascendant and he “didn’t know how to move forward.” He was disenchanted with creating, tired of drawing birds, when people were so obviously stuck on the ground.20 That same year, the state finally came for the Badshas on Douglas Lane. Omar no longer lived there, but he wanted to help load the lorry. When he saw the workers and his brothers carrying the table out, to be placed carefully amidst Ebrahim’s wrapped paintings, he froze, until the truck drove off. “It was too too sore.”21 Ebrahim was offered a house in the newly built Phoenix Township, named for Gandhi’s nearby ashram at Inanda. He was too proud an urbanite to accept that, however, so he opted instead to rent a cottage in Clare Estate, a smaller middle-­class Indian neighborhood in the dank inland valley below the Berea Ridge. A wealthier Grey Street family owned the property. Omar stayed behind in the room he had rented since moving out in 1969, a Badsha near Douglas Lane, for a few more years at least. 3

Omar interacted with the Black Consciousness crowd while keeping them at arm’s length. He worried that they were too committed to racial thinking; they risked alienating potentially useful whites—­precisely the sort of mistake Docrat had counseled his protégés not to make—­and besides, race was the snare to be disarmed, not reset. They were also too bold for his tastes—­“reckless” was the word he used. Increasingly, he was spending time helping Phyllis Naidoo care for the families of banned and imprisoned activists. He remembered Jeevan. To be an activist was not something to be taken lightly. The Special Branch could be mocked, but it remained a threat. Better to be a mole.22 This reluctance did not mean that he missed out on politics. Somehow, “he managed to be everywhere,” SASO activists remembered.23 In 1972 the University College moved from Salisbury Island to Westville. The move coincided with a crescendo in Black Consciousness politics, when the bush colleges erupted to protest after SASO leader Ongkoptse Abram Tiro was expelled from the University of the North.24 The protests took place while student leaders at Westville were negotiating with the authorities over student governance. Following Tiro’s expulsion, Black Consciousness-­affiliates organized a boycott—­three hundred of the university’s more than one thousand students decided to commit what one former activist Natal

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called “hari-­kari” and quit, sacrificing their hard-­won university admission. Omar was not a student at Westville, nor did he have any relationship with the institution, but he still showed up at student meetings and advised them not to take what he considered a pointless stand.25 Most did not listen. Many of the bush college’s more senior students had recently become involved in the revival of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC), a course that Omar judged more strategic.26 The organization had gone dormant after Sharpeville; some of its leaders had been banned, while the organization itself was never made illegal. Omar knew the NIC activist Mewa Ramgobin well; the older man had an insurance practice in Grey Street, to which he commuted from his home at the Phoenix Settlement, where he and his wife, Ela Gandhi, raised their family. The NIC was still a legendary organization in the minds of many of Omar’s relatives and neighbors, some of whose family lore went back to the beginning of the South African Indian community’s engagement with South African politics in the early twentieth century. After leaving for India, Gandhi had sent his son Manilal back to South Africa to look after the Phoenix Settlement; although Manilal passed away in 1956, his widow, Shushila, remained at Phoenix, along with their daughter Ela, who was a long-­standing community activist in her own right.27 Omar began to visit the Gandhi family at Phoenix Settlement in the late 1960s; he frequented Mewa’s office as well, where former trade union activists worked as translators and messengers. It was a useful place to share information.28 Just as SASO launched a new organization called the Black People’s Convention to help Black Consciousness transcend its university origins, Ela, Mewa, Pravin Gordhan from the bush college, and others relaunched the NIC. Strini Moodley joined the first post-­relaunch NIC executive committee, before souring on the organization as an example of ethnic division rather than political progress. Moodley had a point: although the rebooted NIC’s first public meeting was opened by Nokukhanya Luthuli, she was not able to join an organization reserved for people of Indian descent. They had considered alternatives, treasurer Farouk Meer reported in 1972, before concluding that “non-­racial organizations do not enjoy mass support.” NIC activists opted instead to recycle the thinking of the 1950s: organize within a community first, then push for a “common society.”29 This was what scholars call “strategic ethnicity.”30 NIC leaders were adamant that their goal was to keep the Indian community focused on the ultimate end of a “non-­racial, democratic South Africa”; to that end, they organized Indians to do things like not vote in South African Indian Council elections.31 Although he typically rejected anything that scented of herrenvolkism, Omar attended the NIC’s initial meetings, both in town and at the Phoenix Settlement; he was among the group of activists who transited Natal

Figure 4.1. “Mewa Ramgobin,” by Omar Badsha, 1970

over the course of 1971 to organize branches in various communities. From Omar’s perspective, this is what Black Consciousness advocates failed to recognize when they rejected collaborating with both the NIC and white sympathizers: the struggle depended on building the broadest possible base. Meet the people where they were, then open their minds. It was true in art; it was true in organizing.32 Natal

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The Gandhi family was heavily involved in local community work and invited NIC activists to join in. The area around the Phoenix Settlement needed help. The Gandhi homestead was at the heart of a hundred acres of farmland in Inanda, a largely rural area, then shared by Indian and African peasants alike. From Inanda, migrants could access Durban’s labor markets without residential permits. Freedom from state oversight meant that Inanda lacked even a modicum of infrastructure, however, which led to unplanned shack settlements that frequently transgressed onto land locals claimed as their own.33 Housing was subpar, even by apartheid’s standards. The Phoenix Settlement was one of the few homesteads with adequate sanitation and safe drinking water; the settlement’s clinic was the only medical care available. The undulating dirt road off the motorway to Ela and Mewa Ramgobin’s doorstep was the only improved road for miles. Many of the NIC’s members were medical school lecturers and students who volunteered in the small medical clinic that the Phoenix Settlement ran for the local community.34 People associated with the medical school were not the only visitors. Uma Dhupelia was in high school in Grey Street at the turn of the 1970s. She knew Phoenix well—­her mother, Sita Dhupelia (née Gandhi), was Ela Gandhi’s older sister. Around 1971 she began to spend time at Phoenix with her classmates, at weekend and holiday camps organized by community activists. They would bed down on the floor of the settlement’s school and help with the farming, cooking, or construction; in the afternoons and evenings there were lectures and occasionally films. Omar was always around. He lectured to the students at Phoenix, introducing them to concepts he had gleaned from his reading and discussions back in the sixties. She was in high school; he was in his mid-­twenties and seemed so much more experienced.35 Lesley Lawson met Omar at Phoenix too, in January 1971, during a week-­long work camp following her first year at Natal University. Her “respectable, right-­wing” United Party–­voting mother allowed her to attend because she mistakenly thought that it “was some sort of Christian thing,” when it was, in fact, “a youth camp, with political content.” Lawson recalls that Omar was among those who delivered the latter. She can still picture him in a striped shirt and beret. While she and the other white students slept on the floor alongside Black students from Inanda and the medical school, she remembers that Omar slept outside, bedding down with one of her university’s most compelling personalities, a politics lecturer named Rick Turner.36 4

Turner was one of those useful whites that Omar was convinced SASO risked turning away. A political philosopher who had grown up on a farm outside of Cape

Town, he earned his PhD at the Sorbonne, where he studied the work of Jean-­Paul Sartre and “embrac[ed] the great philosopher’s emerging synthesis of existentialism and Marxist humanism.”37 He was worldly, learned, and boyish, with an unruly shock of red hair and thick-­framed glasses. He joined the faculty at the Natal University for the 1970 academic year and immediately stood out, not least because he moved into a community of artists and student radicals who flopped near campus in homes that the state had forced a local Coloured community to abandon. In the conservative world of South African academia, Turner was an alien; under his influence, for some white students and fellow travelers, Durban was transformed into “a different country,” if not a different planet.38 He advised the local NUSAS (National Union of South African Students) branch, while writing a tract of political philosophy called The Eye of the Needle: Towards Participatory Democracy in South Africa, which scholars then and today regard as one of the most important statements on nonracial, utopian humanism in South African history.39 Turner was many things: a Christian, a Marxist, a nonracialist, a humanist, in his student Peter Hudson’s view, a bit of a Maoist, in his biographer Billy Keniston’s estimation, an anarchist, in the estimation of Black Consciousness advocates, a liberal.40 He engaged in frequent and frank debate with Biko and the others at the Alan Taylor residence while offering white students the tantalizing prospect that, since political processes were the outcomes of human choices, their decisions and actions still mattered.41 Lesley Lawson had witnessed Turner’s organizing firsthand. Most protest politics repulsed her—­just boys building up their social capital by shouting slogans. But Turner was different and so were the small group of students whom he tutored and with whom he lived. They held “incredible debates with conservative first year students and completely unraveled them.” Watching Turner explain how South African society fit into the history of global capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism shook her. “It prompted an existential crisis,” she reflects. “It was very scary.” It was also exciting. When she caught wind of the workshop Turner was running at Phoenix, she signed up, and met Omar there.42 Turner was not the only progressive lecturer on campus. Michael Nupen lectured on the Russian Revolution and clarified the post-­Stalinist positions of the New Left; Turner and Nupen shared students like Halton Cheadle, Omar’s future colleague, whose stereotypical white South Africa masculinity made it more striking that Lesley Lawson identified him as a leading radical on campus. Cheadle lived for a time in Rick’s flop. Laurie Schlemmer from the sociology department was not as free-­spirited as Turner, but his work was also politically potent. At the turn of the seventies, he and his research assistants were surveying economic conditions of African workers in both townships and informal settlements like Inanda, research Natal

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which was by definition political.43 Former Robben Islanders Judson Kuzwayo and Shadrack Maphumulo were among those who facilitated it; he also had the ear of Barney Dladla, the minister of community development in the KwaZulu Bantustan. The research of Schlemmer’s PhD student David Hemson focused on dockworkers. Like Schlemmer, Hemson was devoted to the method of the sociological survey, the results of which demonstrated that even Durban’s gainfully employed working class was in a much more precarious position than government propaganda suggested.44 And then there was Fatima Meer, also in sociology. Meer was a struggle stalwart, going back to the 1950s. An accomplished researcher, she had been banned, detained, and then emerged as one of Natal University’s minuscule number of “non-­ white” academic staff—­although by 1970 she, too, had begun to employ the term Black. Fatima Meer frequented Phoenix, as well as the galleries, and knew Omar as someone who often popped up in both. Omar thinks he met Rick Turner via Meer a few months after the Capetonian came to Durban, when Turner showed up at his room one day, at Meer’s suggestion.45 If not at his flat, they would have met at the Alan Taylor residences, where the circle around Turner, including Hemson and Cheadle, overlapped with the circle around Biko, including Moodley and Fisher. Political, artistic, and cultural Durban was small—­and Omar was the Mole. “He knew everyone,” Hemson remembers, and the connections proliferated.46 Foszia Fisher and Rick Turner met at a TECON event. The attraction was as powerful as it was controversial—­for the obvious reasons, as well as because Turner was not yet divorced from the wife he had left behind in Cape Town. When that relationship ended, Turner converted to Islam so that an Imam could solemnize the union with Fisher, since the state would not. They were married at the Meers’; Omar’s practiced caution did not allow him to attend. Relationships were one thing, but in his estimation, marriage “was a red rag to a bull and these people”—­the Special Branch—­“are vicious, so don’t provoke.”47 Whatever hurt his absence from their wedding caused was lessened by the work he and Rick did together. The January 1971 work camp that Lesley Lawson attended was a case in point. Turner and Schlemmer were the official sponsors; one of the students’ tasks was to conduct quality of life surveys among Inanda’s residents, while Omar facilitated the connection to the Gandhi family. Both Ela and Mewa were banned at the time and participated only from a distance. Students spent a week in the Phoenix Settlement’s gardens, or learned to cook daal in the open-­air kitchen, or participated in seminars about the commodity supply chain and about how South African society might be deconstructed so that small-­d democracy might emerge in place of racial hierarchy.48 The work camps at Phoenix were an example of what Turner’s friend and colleague Tony Morphet subsequently named

the “Durban Moment”: flashes of political fellowship, islands of political possibility, poking above the surface of apartheid’s ocean.49 Everyone met at Phoenix. TECON performed at the work camp. Paul Stopforth was dating a TECON member and was recruited to perform with the troupe whenever they needed a white cast member; he played Creon in TECON’s Antigone ’71 at Phoenix. He does not remember much about the production, but clearly recalls running into Dumile’s old friend Omar on the lawn there, wearing a beret and discoursing on Trotskyism. Phoenix felt safe, protected by its one road and its isolation. You could experiment there.50 Not that it was all that safe. The historian Billy Keniston has unearthed evidence that the Special Branch had people inside the work camps, reporting on what happened there. “It was a multiracial meeting where no color divide was applied,” an informant stated.51 And the police seemed happy to let participants know that they were watching. Well inland, Phoenix sweltered in the January heat. One night, Omar and Turner opted to lay their sleeping bags out on the lawn between the school and Gandhi’s house, to catch the slight breeze that the settlement’s rise afforded. Chatting together, they tracked a pair of headlights as they wound their way slowly up toward the settlement. The unknown driver passed through the gate, then suddenly accelerated, careening toward where they had sat up, alarmed. Omar and Turner threw themselves off the lawn into the adjacent ravine. Catching their breath in a tangle of brambles and fabric, they heard the car reverse and saw it tear off back down the road, its taillights receding toward the national highway. Maybe the driver had merely been lost. Maybe not. Regardless, they agreed not to share what had happened, rather than risk a panic. Today, Omar reckons that each white student who attended became some sort of activist (excepting the police informers, of course).52 It was a collective experience of consciousness raising, a focused application of his theories about political change.53 It was exhilarating; it was terrifying. It was addictive. Over the course of 1971, Omar and Turner brought their collaboration from Phoenix into the heart of Durban via a series of programs called Platform. David Hemson first met Omar at an exhibition, then reconnected with him at a Phoenix work camp, then again at an NIC event. Hemson was an outsider to Grey Street; he did not know to call Omar “Mol,” but he was learning what sort of person Omar was. “He was very good at . . . opening all networks.” He introduced Hemson to artists, to former trade unionists, to people connected to the local underground. Omar “was always full of buzz.”54 Platform was one such buzzy enterprise. There, in September 1971, a police informer reported “Omar Badsha [was] responsible for the showing of the film ‘Summerhill,’” about the progressive English school of the same name.55 By 1972, Turner, Omar, and many others in their circle had begun to move in a direction indicated by the research being done at the university and at the work Natal

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Figure 4.2. “Street performance, Victoria Street,” photograph by Omar Badsha, 1981

camps. Omar himself conducted surveys in Inanda, where he visited homesteads and collected information about people’s families, trajectories, and livelihoods. What he found “changed my entire perspective.”56 He had been in townships before, in Durban with the Durban Students’ Union and in Johannesburg with Dumile. But those had been government townships, where acute poverty was somewhat tempered by mass (if substandard) housing and a population checked by pass regulations and state oversight. Inanda was different; there, he saw people pushed toward destitution.57 In part due to frustration about how Black Consciousness had cornered the market on discourse about race, in 1971 and 1972 the circle of activists and students around Turner began to focus instead on poverty and the potentially critical role of the Black working class in motivating change. Workers were the tectonic plates that undergirded the South African political economy, David Hemson related, and what the country “needed was an earthquake.” For many young activists—­including Omar—­stimulating such tremors began their primary focus.58 5

With Turner’s guidance, NUSAS-­affiliated students organized on campus to intervene on behalf of workers, via submissions to both the university administration and the provincial authorities that set the regional wage standards. Students tried to access existing networks in extant unions and among ex-­SACTU (South African

Congress of Trade Unions) activists to publicize wage board meetings.59 During the 1960s most of the population had enjoyed unprecedented buying power, which helped to secure a measure of political quiet for the white minority government.60 The boom times ebbed at the turn of the 1970s, and the economy turned sharply downwards thereafter. As Hemson’s research would later demonstrate, although it took more than a decade for prices of household basics to rise 40 percent during the 1960s, in the early 1970s a comparable jump occurred in a matter of months.61 Students began appearing at bus and train stations with pamphlets campus workers had translated into isiZulu detailing how much the average South African worker needed to be paid in order not to be impoverished.62 If Omar approached visibility warily, these activists decided that it was the point. Workers needed to know they had allies. Critically, there was nothing illegal about African workers’ organizations—­it was just that employers were under no obligation to recognize and negotiate with them, unlike white, Indian, or Coloured workers’ organizations. People could be organized. Omar first met Halton Cheadle at Alan Taylor in 1971. In 1972, he saw him again, standing out in a crowd of commuters near Grey Street, distributing pamphlets about the wage board.63 Durban was stirring. By 1972, the NIC was revived; Black Consciousness had organized the campuses. The region’s first major work stoppage occurred in October 1972, when stevedores laid down their tools and marched through the city. The docks were Durban’s flagship industry; anything that happened there sent ripples far beyond the port. The students in Turner’s circle had nothing to do with this first work stoppage, although they were then trying to formalize the relationship between the local intellectual left and the regional working class. The weekend before the strikes, Omar and Turner had attended a workshop for workers from the university at an ecumenical retreat center. They were on their way back to town when one of the attendees offhandedly mentioned that dockworkers were going to strike. This proved correct. There were evidently networks that the students could not see.64 Around the time of the stevedore strike, Cheadle and others were also distributing copies of a mimeographed newsletter called Isisibenzi—­an ungrammatical gloss on the isiZulu term for the worker. One of Omar’s drawings appeared on the cover of the first issue.65 Meanwhile, a General Workers’ Benefit Fund had begun to focus on raising money for medical aid and funerals. By mid-­1973, the Benefit Fund had an estimated twenty-­two thousand members, a significant, if fractional, percentage of the local laboring population.66 The Benefit Fund was run with significant financial support from the Trade Union Council of South Africa–­affiliated Garment Workers International Union’s Natal Provincial branch, and Omar began to pick up work conveying workers to meetings, doing publicity, and helping to build the organization.67 Natal

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The GWIU was a registered trade union, meaning that its primarily Indian and Coloured membership paid dues to have representatives bargain contracts and advocate on their behalf. Most members worked in large textile and garment factories west of Durban in Pinetown and further inland around Pietermaritzburg. The union was based in Bolton Hall on Gale Street, on the outskirts of the Grey Street area. Upon assuming the leadership of the union after the death of her husband, Jimmy, Harriet Bolton pushed the once-­conservative union in new directions. Omar still holds onto clippings detailing her career in the Natal unions. In 1970 she was able to convene more than forty thousand Indian, Coloured, and a small minority of African workers for a rally at Currie’s Fountain: an impressive and telling event, remembers David Hemson, who had just moved to Durban to research the docks.68 Bolton encouraged the organization of African workers. This was an unpopular opinion with the state, as well as the white-­dominated Trade Union Council of South Africa, the leadership of which repeatedly cited the country’s prevailing migrant labor system as proof positive that African workers were not ready for

Figure 4.3. Labor organizers (L to R) Desmond Matabela, David Hemson, Junerose

Nala, and Harriet Bolton attend a strike meeting, unknown photographer, 1973, with the permission of the University of Cape Town Libraries and David Hemson.

industrial organizations. Radicals had managed to push back somewhat via SACTU and the Charter Alliance, only to see both crushed by the state.69 At the turn of the 1970s, as the internal opposition to apartheid began slowly to pick up steam and the national economy began to slow down, Bolton condemned white workers for not wanting “to associate with anyone but themselves,” while they were increasingly few and “well on in years, [so] it’s like a closed club, a dying concern.”70 If South Africa’s labor movement was to have a future, it depended on Black workers, and the Benefit Fund was the GWIU’s first attempt to reach South Africa’s vast underclass. For Bolton, students’ activism was the opportunity to build a constituency and to maintain her organization, by demonstrating that collective action could achieve things that workers would be unable to achieve on their own. The waves of strikes that broke out in January 1973 and passed like a torch’s light across the region invigorated them all. While the stoppages continued, Bolton Hall was abuzz with the energy of what all hoped was the breaking of a new dawn in the history of the country’s working people.71 Workers by the thousands marched in unison through central Durban, their marshals waving red flags to warn motorists, chanting usuthu, a term associated with loyalty to the Zulu crown. Omar was enthused. “Usuthu / Shouted our stand[ard] bearers,” he wrote in a poem dated February 8, 1973, “Chatter of the proletarian / Army / Forward, join up / Ten thousand strong / We bellowed the big wigs down.”72 It was his play come to life, only Pascal spoke isiZulu. The importance of this cannot be overstated. Many of the strikers identified as Zulu, whether they were migrants from rural areas, township residents, or somewhere in between, like the people moving to Inanda. “Zuluness” provided a unity to the working population, which was not replicated in the more cosmopolitan locales of the Cape or Transvaal. Representatives of the KwaZulu Bantustan negotiated the wage rises that saw the strike tide ebb by March. Although by 1973 the Bantustan project and its proponents, such as KwaZulu’s Chief Minister Gatsha Buthelezi, were anathema to both Black Consciousness supporters and the exiled Congress movement, being associated with KwaZulu did not necessarily mean being conservative on labor issues.73 As the NIC had calculated, ethnicity could be a vehicle toward broader change. During the strikes, KwaZulu’s Minister of Labour Barney Dladla emerged as a powerful advocate for Natal’s working people. As a Bantustan official, he was able to travel abroad; he used that relative freedom to meet with SACTU exiles, in both Geneva and Lusaka. The ANC archives indicate that he might even have transported money and messages between the internal and external labor movements.74 Working with established and sanctioned authorities was strategic at a time when the state was beginning to respond to the changing political climate. As the strikes Natal

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Figure 4.4. A group of striking textile workers demand an extra R5 per day at the

Consolidated Textile Mills, unknown photographer, 1973, with the permission of the University of Cape Town Libraries and David Hemson

waned in February, the government banned Biko, Moodley, and other former Café Club performers-­turned-­political-­activists. Turner was banned as well. As numerous scholars have shown, most of the banned managed to remain politically active and relevant despite their limitations.75 For the activist community in Durban, Turner’s banning hastened the establishment of structures to replicate and expand on the labor theory workshops that he, Omar, and others had run over the previous months. One result was a Benefit Fund offshoot called the Institute for Industrial Education (IIE). The IIE was the brainchild of Turner, Foszia Fisher, the ex-­SACTU and Benefit Fund activist Harold Nxasana, and others. Its ostensible goal was to facilitate the development of a new class of worker intellectuals who would assume the leadership of labor organizations.76 The model was Oxford’s Ruskin College, founded in the early twentieth century to offer educational opportunities for working-­class students without the networks and resources to attend more established institutions of higher education. Over time, Ruskin evolved into a training college for shop stewards in Britain’s expanding labor union sector.77 The activists who organized the IIE in May 1973 aspired to do the same. They produced materials on local labor history and theory; their first book was published in 1974 and covered the history of the Durban Strikes, the first comprehensive study of what had taken place. They reached out to Ruskin and were promised that officials from the UK would visit Durban to cement closer ties.78

There was a striking disconnect at the core of IIE materials, however. Isisibenzi was written with the local audience of isiZulu-­speaking working people in mind. Most articles were written in that language and the issues it considered were relevant to ongoing events. IIE materials, on the other hand, were more clearly influenced—­ and often written—­by Turner, which meant that they reflected the perspective of a PhD holder from the Sorbonne. The Durban Strikes volume married narrative, chronology, and sociological survey data with searching claims about the politics and consciousness of the province’s working people. There had been no recognized leadership in the strikes, but no matter: “Sartre’s concept of groupe en fusion describes this kind of spontaneity well.”79 The IIE’s pedagogical project was of a piece with the pedagogy premiered at Phoenix; the intent was to increase workers’ and students’ capacity for self-­identification and critical self-­insertion into contemporary South Africa. The IIE read the strikes as clear indication of subaltern political consciousness: “We believe that [the strikes] must be interpreted as a statement of rejection, an affirmation of the desire for a quite different society.”80 But its program was abstract. The exact form that society would take—­beyond the creation of African trade unions—­was left undefined.

Figure 4.5. Worker addressing assembly of Coronation Brick workers, unknown photographer, 1973, with the permission of the University of Cape Town Libraries and David Hemson

Natal

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In pursuit of “a quite different society,” the IIE stepped very carefully. To register as a certificate-­granting educational institution, the IIE needed to find a prominent, established figure to serve as chancellor; they invited Mangosuthu Buthelezi to serve in that capacity. They were “honored by the fact that Chief Gatsha Buthelezi has accepted,” the first issue of the IIE’s South African Labour Bulletin reported.81 Buthelezi was a pragmatic choice. He provided a measure of political cover during a moment of acute pressure. Besides, many students were proud when earning an IIE certificate because “my chief gave this to me,” Foszia Fisher recalls.82 Buthelezi’s role did come with a significant political cost, however, since it gave exiled SACTU and ANC critics grist to criticize Durban’s activists for deluding themselves that that there could be truly progressive labor education and organization while apartheid and its Bantustan project continued.83 Activists disagreed: the strikes had proven the need for better communication between the various segments of South African society and Buthelezi seemed a willing ally in that cause. “Trade unions are a means of communication . . . that has stood the test of time,” he argued in 1973.84 Put in terms of Omar’s own experiences, the theory was that Buthelezi could be a wedge with which to crack apartheid, just as Docrat had hoped the art world might be. The struggle demanded an omnibus approach. Many of the white students within the movement were self-­described Marxists, but by opting for trade unionism, they conceded that there were smaller steps to be taken before the revolution.85 Fire continued to come from both the left and the state—­the minister of labour insisted that “the Bantu worker, with his different nature [struggles] to make use of the foreign bargaining machinery,” while the IIE and the GWIU plotted how to transform the Benefit Fund into viable, African-­majority trade unions. Workers went back into their factories and 1973 progressed.86 6

Omar worked with Fatima and Shamim Meer, among others, to gauge the Indian population’s response to the strikes. He was present at the founding of the IIE and was a member of the working committee set up to operate the young organization in August 1973.87 The other members of the working committee were either academics—­like Eddie Webster, with a PhD in sociology from the UK, who came to Durban following Turner’s ban, and David Hemson—­or already accomplished trade unionists like Bolton and Nxasana. Omar was in the third category, those associated with Turner, like Halton Cheadle and Foszia Fisher. He popped up everywhere. “He was able to be the water between the stones and get around quite easily,” Hemson recalled.88 Bolton Hall was a short walk from Douglas Lane; the Garment Workers’ offices were only a few minutes further by foot, near the SASO offices in Beatrice Street. TECON had

held its “Revolution” nearby; so, too, had Omar and Turner run Platform. Like most everything else interesting in Durban at that time, the trade union brain trust was focused in the small area between the Berea and the Docks, centered on the Grey Street neighborhood, where Omar already had a lifetime of experience.89 Omar’s first foray into aboveground politics was as an organizer for the GWIU. The strikes meant both new interest and anxiety about the status of Natal’s extant labor unions, which brought him to Prilla Mills, on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg. Textiles—­especially blankets woven from locally produced wool—­were one of the largest industries in the region. Unlike in Pinetown, where white-­owned manufacturers predominated, in Pietermaritzburg, Indian—­and often, Gujarati Muslim—­firms were common, most of which employed young female Indian workers. Connections between employer and employee were layered; so, too, were the relationships between organizer and management; one mill owner had grown up with Ebrahim; another knew the Transvaal Badshas.90 Bolton’s organization had been registered in Prilla Mills for only a month before the Durban Strikes began. Most of the members there were female, while both management and the local union leadership was male. Almost immediately after the strikes, management tried to undermine the union in ugly and cynical ways—­by tempting male stewards with access to sexual favors from teenage female workers, for example—­while also insinuating that conditions would only improve if workers withdrew from the union.91 The Prilla Mills episode is easily overlooked within the broader history of the textile and garment industry in Natal. A few months later, strikes involving African workers, as well as Indians and Coloureds, broke out in Pinetown. Those strikes generated massive media coverage and eventually a victory in the form of a recognition agreement signed between a majority African union and white management, which was a major step toward reforming the country’s labor regime. The Pinetown strikes also generated a dramatic political response, which included a new round of banning of white activists and Buthelezi’s decision to finally curtail Barney Dladla.92 But for Omar, Prilla Mills was formative. He had never worked in a factory. The stories he heard were harrowing. Female workers as young as sixteen reported violence at the hands of their foremen. Work stoppages spread in August and September of 1973; in response, Prilla’s management dialed up the pressure even further, citing that the company’s entire stock had been presold through 1975 and that any slowdown made it impossible to take on new orders. They curtailed organizers’ access to the factory and instructed bus drivers to keep the windows closed as they transported workers to and from the townships, no matter how hot it got as spring turned to summer. Rumors spread that bus drivers were empowered to fire workers suspected of accepting union literature.93 Natal

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Organizers revealed a concerted campaign to decertify the union, often with the explicit threat of violence if workers did not cooperate. A worker named Princess Osman helped collect affidavits to bring a suit against the mill, citing intimidation. One woman named Zeenith colluded with management to have workers sign the verso of typed sheets without being able to read what was on the other side, then taunted the workers that they had signed away their right to representation.94 The foremen and their supervisor, a Mr. Botha, put concerted pressure on the workers. Two Indian foremen named Aboo and “Beetlejohn” were particularly malicious. They told workers that once they left the union, Botha would ensure that they received a pay raise and medical insurance, but “that if I did not resign, I would not get an increase. I signed a piece of paper with the resignation already written on it.”95 There was menace behind such promises. Aboo brought one hesitant worker to Botha, who threatened her that “the workers [were making] it worse for themselves.”96 In October 1973, Aboo confronted a group of young members who had congregated outside of the factory gates. “The Union can do fuck all. I am going to fuck the Union,” he threatened them. A worker named Joyce pushed back and he “pulled her hair very hard.” She cried, and her sister, another employee named Sintha, tried to intervene. He brandished his fist. “All your fucking teeth will fall off.” He stalked off, cursing that the union members were “fucking rogues.”97 At some point, unknown assailants attacked the outspoken Princess Osman with acid.98 The union sued. Omar drafted circular letters to the “workers of Prilla Mills” to be included among the materials that Cheadle smuggled onto company buses. “You have been told a great deal of lies about the union,” Omar wrote. “Some supervisors even have the cheek of swearing the union. . . . We do not mind—­the more these supervisors swear the union—­the more they make a song and dance in the factory—­the more it shows that they are scared.” This was bravado in the face of the stark realities of workers’ victimization. From the relative power of an established union, Omar tried to fight back. “The driver does not realize that he can be brought up in court for threatening workers,” he reminded his readers, because “no worker can be victimized for belong to or taking part in union activities,” at least where registered unions were concerned.99 Union organizing was about doing something and being seen to do it. In a letter to the managing director of another mill, Omar made a telling edit. Management was refusing to resolve a disciplinary issue involving a union member and Omar wrote that “I wish to now inform you formally” that the union was pursuing legal action—­only he crossed out “I wish to now” and replaced it with “my union,” a construction that recurred three more times in a short letter.100 Scholars have been

Figure 4.6. Self-­portrait, by Omar Badsha, 1972

critical of young union organizers who “learned to steer events in their favor, to acquire and utilize power.”101 Many union organizers did turn their activism ostensibly on behalf of working people into long and occasionally lucrative careers.102 Yet such conclusions do a disservice to organizers like Omar, who, in his late twenties, discovered that a measure of power was possible if “I” became a collective. Natal

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That said, Prilla was not the best place for Omar to organize: with family connections to the factory, he was too conspicuous. People pressured Ebrahim to get Omar to cease and desist; at one point a business partner from Johannesburg meaningfully mentioned that he knew Omar’s family there, which Omar interpreted as a threat. Organizers grew accustomed to being trailed by members of the Special Branch.103 Cheadle laughingly remembered one organizing trip when he, Nxasana, Bolton, and another organizer rendezvoused and then proceeded together in one car—­meaning that that one car was tailed by all four security police vehicles that had followed their respective targets to the initial meet-­up.104 In February 1974 the state struck again and banned Cheadle, Hemson, and other unionists. Omar helped to keep the Pietermaritzburg office open in their absence, before moving back to Durban midyear. Following the founding of the IIE, Bolton and her allies had begun small, unregistered African-­majority trade unions under the umbrella of a new organization called the Trade Union Advisory Coordinating Committee (TUACC). Along with garments, textiles, furniture manufacturing, and transport, metalworking was one of the region’s major industries; so, too, was the Durban area home to a critical concentration of the country’s chemical production (primarily of paints and other domestic and personal care products). A Benefit Fund employee named Alpheus Mthethwa became the secretary of the newly formed Metal and Allied Workers Union. Hemson drafted the Benefit Fund’s “office photostat machine operator” to serve as secretary when the Chemical Workers Industrial Union was first organized early in 1974.105 Omar designed the logos for each of TUACC’s affiliated unions. Then, in July, he replaced the photostat operator as secretary. CWIU’s logo was somewhat like the cover Omar had designed for TECON’s Afrika Hoorah only two years prior: in this drawing, the bird was gone, replaced with a human hand and wrist, now clenched powerfully around an industrial beaker, a bold cuff bearing the initials CWIU. Like his predecessor, he had no experience in the industry.106 7

That the union at Prilla Mills had survived long enough to protest was a testament to the perseverance of people like Princess Osman, who paid dearly for her leadership. Many workers’ organizations had learned not to identify their leaders, who tended to get banned or worse. Yet trade unionism was only viable if there was factory-­floor leadership, and the IIE’s course was intended above all to identify and train shop stewards. Fisher and Nxasana were consistent on this point. In their presentation to the national Black Renaissance Convention late in 1974, they asserted that since most Black South Africans were workers, it was only “through the Trade Union that [they]

Figure 4.7. Group portrait of labor organizers and activists at a seminar. Omar is seated

in the second row from the bottom, second from the left, unknown photographer, 1974, with the permission of David Hemson

can immediately begin to assert some control over their lives.”107 The perilous conditions at places like Prilla Mills revealed what happened when workers were denied authority over their lives; shop stewards were critical to reassert workers’ dignity. Omar’s job was to cultivate this pipeline. He assumed his position in July 1974; during the preceding months, membership had held steady at around 500, scattered in factories in Pinetown and in Durban’s south, near the oil refineries and the townships. The membership grew steadily across 1974, averaging about 130 new members signed up per month, then growing at a slower rate during the first half of 1975. By mid-­1975, the CWIU could claim almost 2,500 members, spread across eighty-­one factories. Those were impressive numbers for a young organization during the first year of its existence. Union density was somewhat less impressive; the bulk of the membership was in eighteen factories, of which seven boasted over 50 members. (There were sixty-­three factories with a membership between 1 and 19.)108 Those factories with engaged union activities tended to be those where conditions were particularly demeaning and where workers were willing to risk exposure by speaking out. Quality Products and Natal Oil and Soap Industries produced cleaning products. A small group of workers there joined the Benefit Fund immediately after the 1973 strikes and continued to pay their dues thereafter; in November 1974 the workers joined the CWIU. By January 1975 there were 186 workers in the union, all but ten African. Credit for this fell almost entirely to that initial core, many of whom had become shop stewards who institutionalized the union through weekly organizing meetings with other workers. Omar credited one worker in particular—­a man named Mbutho—­for the union’s success.109 Most workers were Natal

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quite afraid of identifying themselves with the union. “Membership is seen by the majority of the workers as . . . a thing to keep secret,” Omar reported to the TUACC executive. Reports from within the factory indicated that indunas—­African employees who earned extra wages mediating between workers and management—­ frequently recorded the names and passbook numbers of suspected union supporters. The KwaZulu government paid attention as well; after Dladla’s dismissal, in factories like Quality Products, Buthelezi’s government cultivated relationships with both indunas and factory owners. To be associated with the union thus risked multiple relationships. The small handful of people like Mbutho who were not cowed kept the union alive.110 At Quality Products, management’s methods were subtler than at Prilla Mills. So-­called liaison committees were among the limited reforms that the apartheid government adopted after the Durban Strikes.111 In the absence of collective bargaining, liaison committees were where employers and employees were supposed to resolve disputes, consider disciplinary cases, and so on. The CWIU tried to join the liaison committees and was repeatedly rebuffed in favor of those indunas with whom management had already cultivated relationships. Led by Mbutho, union members argued that the union, not the liaison committee, was the workers’ legitimate voice. By July 1975, lines were drawn. “Support your true leaders!” a CWIU circular urged. “Reject those who are acting against you.”112 Over the months that followed, the CWIU pursued two objectives at Quality Products and across the region: within the factory, union-­affiliated workers pressured management for recognition, while Omar demanded that he be allowed into the factory to hear workers’ concerns. The union represented a plurality of workers, he explained, “and it is the practice in most democratic countries [that] a union [with] more than 1/3 membership in a factory is given at least the right of access to its members.”113 The managing director, P. Buchwald, repeated denied his request. South Africa was not a democratic country. The second objective was to support Mbutho by identifying other likely shop stewards. By mid-­1975 the CWIU ran its own shop steward education program as a more informal complement to the IIE. Most workers had been denied basic facts about the noxious chemicals that they handled every day. Safety protocols were lax, working conditions deplorable. Omar knew next to nothing about the industry either, so he collected circulars and pamphlets from the Transport and General Workers Union in the UK (formerly Britain’s Chemical Workers Union) to educate himself and to prepare lessons for those workers. In addition to safety concerns, courses focused on basics: what a union was, how it worked, and what rights workers did and did not have to negotiate wages and other benefits.114 Mbutho joined Omar at these sessions. On evenings and weekends, they commandeered a TUACC

combi to transport workers from the factories to the union offices on Gale Street, and then home to Lamontville, Umlazi, or further afield. Mbutho proved a keen student of union practice. While Omar and Buchwald continued to squabble about access, he attended TUACC secretariat meetings, which brought together organizers from across the region’s unions. Harriet Bolton tired of Special Branch repression and left South Africa for the UK at the end of 1974. Hemson escaped into exile shortly thereafter. By 1975, Omar was the only activist present at the founding of the Benefit Fund who remained active in one of the unions. Black organizers filled the void; some had come from the shop floor themselves, like Junerose Nala, the National Union of Textile Workers’ (NUTW) secretary. Mbutho’s presence gave Omar reason to boast that the CWIU was also developing a workers’ leadership.115 Momentum was difficult to maintain, however. Quality Products offered small concessions in exchange for labor peace, including an R2 per week “attendance bonus” to those who reported to work. Police—­both uniformed and Special Branch officers in plain clothes—­congregated around the gates to the factory. Omar urged workers to protest their presence. Buchwald responded, sternly, demanding that the union consult management before calling a public meeting.116 As letters between Omar and Buchwald flew back and forth, a foreman threatened Mbutho that since the latter apparently “had a lot of time to do the union work,” he was being reassigned to the Engineering Department and “put to work shoveling coal.” Needing his job, Mbutho began to withdraw from his active role in from the union.117 The story of Quality Products and Natal Oil and Soap was of a piece with the broader history of the TUACC unions during 1975 and 1976, when the initial optimism was increasingly tempered by structural powerlessness. Many of the unions lost membership during the mid-­1970s and most factories remained unorganized. With support from the government and the Special Branch, management obfuscated and stonewalled. Only Nala’s NUTW managed to build a strong foundation, based on their support from a registered trade union (GWIU), and the recognition agreement and ability to bargain collectively with factories in Pinetown.118 For the other TUACC unions, it was a slog. Both proponents and critics of TUACC unionism have noted that in the mid-­1970s the unions increasingly focused on what became known as “workerism”—­defined as a concern with shop floor issues and the maintenance of the union organization itself—­over and against broader political concerns. Many union officials, like the NUTW organizer Johnny Copelyn, were unapologetic about this, while exiled organizations loudly castigated TUACC’s as “yellow unions” for their lack of revolutionary commitment.119 Omar straddled these positions. As Sakhela Buhlungu has documented, many former SACTU activists had connected TUACC workers back to workers’ networks Natal

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from the 1950s, occasionally giving the government even more of an excuse to repress than it already had.120 The state recognized that workers’ organizations were dangerous. But at the same time, Omar clearly saw that workers’ conditions were too desperate to wait for the revolution. Aside from meeting minutes, passionate circulars, and frustrating correspondence, the bulk of the CWIU archive that survives from this period comprises the diary that Omar maintained occasionally. As one organizer ostensibly responsible for more than fifty factories, he did a lot of driving. There were frequent and rarely returned calls to managers who were under no obligation to listen to anything Omar had to say. There were primers on a union’s basic functions and how the CWIU fit into the web of TUACC, the IIE, and other organizations. There were petitions to protest changes to payment schedules. There were visits to factories and dismay at what he saw there. Just before daybreak on July 16, 1975, he visited Chrome Chemicals in Pinetown, where workers produced paint and liquid metals. “It rained last night. Puddles all over the yard. Yellowish with Chrome. Rambling buildings. Large number of them without windows. African workers cloak room has two long tables with benches. No lights. No door. Windows cannot be opened.” A worker toured him around the factory. “No doors to toilets. No toilet paper. Only 8 showers, some not working”; workers endured long waits to rinse the company’s noxious wares from their bodies. Chrome was one of the CWIU’s largest and best organized shops; out of a total of 180 workers, 140 were signed up to the union. They demanded “more showers, benches, chairs”; they wanted the workers’ locker room repainted. They wanted towels; they wanted the company to clean the bathrooms. They wanted toilet paper.121 Workers suffered from chronic bronchitis from inhaling fumes, and many were not given even the most basic protections, such as rubber gloves and aprons. They showed Omar where their arms were bleached white from repeated submersion into chemical vats. They demonstrated how their skin peeled off. These were the harsh apparitions of South African life. But this was not the Durban Art Gallery; these were real people who appealed to their union to help them maintain their bodies, and their dignity.122 Omar negotiated with Chrome Chemicals to buy rubber gloves and aprons. The factory was jointly owned by a British company and the German company Bayer. Most of its products were exported to West Germany. The union did not have standing to negotiate on behalf of its members in Durban, but Bayer’s German workers had influence. The South Africa labor movement occupied an uncertain place in global labor politics in the mid-­1970s. Even as unions like the CWIU were growing in fits and starts, SACTU’s exiled leadership condemned them for their gullibility. Anti-­apartheid activists in the UK prevailed on Ruskin College to reject the IIE’s bid for affiliation, citing its relationship with Buthelezi and the KwaZulu

Bantustan. But unionized workers in the Global North were sometimes open to solidarity, especially when they thought that corporations were cutting labor costs by shipping jobs overseas. In an early iteration of what became an increasingly common anti-­apartheid practice, Omar wrote to the West German unions and asked for support.123 The factory’s racial caste system helped the union’s case. Omar noted that both white and Indian facilities were superior to that of the African workers (with the former being more decisively so, of course). The West German government’s support for the apartheid state was a hot-­button domestic issue, the government typically citing the Cold War for doing business with South Africa.124 But dire and racially differentiated conditions in a partially German-­owned factory cut too close to the bone. Bayer’s German management urged the Durban factory to reform, although they did not go so far as to pressure the South Africans to recognize the CWIU.125 The pressure paid dividends. On January 20, 1976, a shop steward reported that conditions were improving. There were doors on the toilets, more reliable showers, soap, and hot water. There were lights in the locker room and new lockers. There was less particulate matter in the air now; new filters had been installed and new breathing apparatuses distributed. The company began to pay out both grocery and cash bonuses to workers with more than ten years’ service. To work at Chrome Chemicals was no longer as humiliating nor as deadly. It was progress. This shop steward—­a Mr. Gumede—­was significantly older than many of the other workers. In February 1976 he took a modest company pension and retired. He had been the CWIU’s “most reliable and fearless fighter” at Chrome Chemicals, Omar noted, and “a major force in bringing about changes in his factory.” For his efforts, the CWIU executive committee voted to make him an honorary member, who would receive the union’s health and funeral benefits for the rest of his lifetime, or that of the union.126 It was unclear whether he or the union would be the first to expire, however. In early 1976, the combined membership of the TUACC unions was about fourteen thousand, of which half was in the National Union of Textile Workers; the rest of the TUACC unions were on extremely precarious footing.127 A lot of the uncertainty was because of politics. In 1975, Buthelezi spearheaded the establishment of Inkatha, a Zulu nationalist cultural organization, which in time became the Bantustan’s dominant political force.128 As chancellor, Buthelezi viewed the IIE as a resource to develop Inkatha’s capacity, and although the IIE tried to remain independent, it was difficult. A bureaucrat named Kanye had assumed Dladla’s role as Minister for Community Development; he ignored TUACC’s outreach and instead made sure that only Inkatha’s most loyal indunas were given bursaries to study at the IIE. Organizers grumbled, blaming Fisher and the IIE for failing to stand up to Inkatha.129 Natal

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The situation grew ugly and personal, as Fisher (and through her, Turner) were increasingly at odds with activists like Copelyn, who had recently arrived from Johannesburg and who was especially insistent that IIE serve the unions alone. According to Turner’s biographer Billy Keniston, Turner and Fisher were very critical and suspicious of Copelyn, whom they thought interested in building his institutional authority (and that of the union, via its shop stewards) at the expense of the critical self-­consciousness of the IIE’s students.130 As CWIU secretary, Omar shared Copelyn’s concerns. He chaired TUACC’s IIE subcommittee and griped that “the IIE has done virtually nothing that was useful for the shop steward group. . . . It was high time that the IIE . . . wake up to the unions’ needs.”131 He wanted the IIE to become a subsidiary of the union council, responsible for “education and research.”132 By the end of 1975, the pressure had reached a point that Fisher was forced to step down from the IIE; without her, it eventually collapsed. The Bantustan issue was a knotty one. Omar appreciated the principle of eschewing cooperation with state structures and recognized that shop floor issues needed to be addressed. His impatience with herrenvolkism was well established. And yet, it was social issues that had brought him into the labor movement in the first place. With the shop stewards, he traversed the distance between township and factory, from oppression to repression, poverty to negligence. Workers could not be separated from their communities; unions thus needed to consider issues beyond the shop floor, which sometimes meant dealing directly with Bantustan officials to seek better outcomes. “Omar said the squatters in the area around Umlazi had been given notice to move and that a meeting of the people concerned had been called,” the TUACC executive meeting reported in 1975. He wanted TUACC to get involved. He suggested that the unions “work out what form of action we could take in support of these people.” He wanted the unions to be their advocate, as they had been for those people who worked at Chrome Chemical.133 Omar drove a union combi out to Umlazi to investigate, which raised hackles—­ the use of union transport for nonexplicitly union purposes was a frequent flash point. Officials struggled to make sure that the vehicles were being used “correctly.” “Foszia enquired of staff members whether any of them has asked Omar or Alpheus to drive them anywhere on either 14th of February or 18th of February,” 1975 the IIE minutes report. Both had used vehicles on those dates and charged it to the IIE. No one remembered being driven, at least not on official IIE business.134 Union combis were often checked out by unauthorized drivers, who failed to record the purpose and mileage and often returned the vehicles in sorry shape.135 Omar was one of the worst offenders. He used combis to do the same work that he had previously done on foot: visiting comrades, carrying messages, and looking in

Figure 4.8. “Irene Dlamini and baby, Secretary of Chemical Workers International

Union, Gale Street,” photograph by Omar Badsha, 1978

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on the families of banned and imprisoned. He and Alpheus Mthethwa drove activists’ families to and from jails where their loved ones were imprisoned; they delivered food and clothing to families of banned people. The political context made these trips a problem. While Omar was working in Pietermaritzburg, he connected with Harry Gwala, a famed SACTU and ANC activist in the Midlands, who was banned there upon his release from Robben Island in 1972. Once out of prison, Gwala began a township laundry service, which gave him an excuse to maintain his networks across the Pietermaritzburg area. He openly solicited volunteers to join the underground.136 Omar’s and Gwala’s networks overlapped, carried by the need to support victims of apartheid repression and Omar’s ability to access transport. Doris Skosana met Omar around this time. She was from Edendale township, Gwala’s home base; she frequently joined Harry’s wife on her rounds through the township, checking in on the families of the banned and the imprisoned. Through Mrs. Gwala, she met Phyllis, who did the same in Durban. She went to work at Phyllis’s office in Grey Street, where she met Omar, who recruited her to TUACC. Soon she was an organizer for the Metal Workers, taking over for David Hemson after his banning early in 1974.137 Skosana maintained her connections to Gwala’s network, supporting the banned, recruiting, helping to smuggle activists out of Natal for Swaziland and the MK. She was not the only one involved. Union organizers like Alpheus Mthethwa, IIE employees like Harold Nxasana, and ex–­Robben Islanders like Judson Kuzwayo, Shadrack Maphumulo, and Jacob Zuma were all connected to Gwala’s network, and used union resources and vehicles to arrange meetings and to transport people from place to place. The state was watching, which meant that whether TUACC was officially on board with Gwala’s agenda or not, the unions were exposed when he was arrested in late 1975.138 The trial that ensued was one of apartheid South Africa’s major show trials, lasting for more than a year before Gwala was found guilty and sent back to Robben Island. It was ugly on multiple levels: the ANC in exile raised money to support a legal defense, but the lawyers could not agree on who ought to try the case and who was supposed to look after the families. Phyllis Naidoo ended up taking on the latter task.139 The state turned the screws on the detained, including Omar’s colleague Harold Nxasana. Following months of isolation and torture, he turned state witness and testified against the accused.140 Nxasana had been one of Omar’s closest colleagues. It was a terrible time.141 Naidoo made sure that those arrested received care packages and that their families were looked after. When they were sentenced to Robben Island, she helped to facilitate their families’ travel to and accommodation in Cape Town. Omar used TUACC transport to bring clothes and food to people in detention, and to transport their families to court. Union combis were recognizable, however, and in TUACC

meetings, Omar came under sustained pressure for putting the unions in a perilous situation. For Copelyn, it was a question of maintaining the focus on the workers and their working conditions; for others, the issue was that the combis should not be associated with the armed struggle and banned organizations. TUACC secretariat meetings turned “hot,” Omar remembers, “it became quite nasty. Really nasty.”142 All the while, he was negotiating with Quality Products. Then, during the summer holidays in 1975 and 1976, Omar took the Hi­Ace on a nearly two-­thousand-­mile round trip to Cape Town—­“without authorization.” No records exist to explain why he made the trip; he remembers only that Phyllis Naidoo or Docrat had instructed him to do so, to connect with comrades there and to ensure that the network to host families visiting loved ones on Robben Island was still intact. He “apologized for the irregularity in the use of the Hi-­ACE and asked the secretariat to condone his actions.” The TUACC executive rejected Omar’s plea, docking his wages to cover the maintenance costs. Executive committee meetings were frequently acrimonious. His colleagues were annoyed, cautious, and anxious. He began to contemplate moving on from the CWIU, and TUACC from him.143 His balance sheet showed small credits in building and maintaining a workers’ organization; the losses were of friendships and relationships, as well as uncountable losses that the unions were helpless to resist. Omar’s work often brought him to the old neighborhood. In early May 1976, a visit to a block in the process of being deconstructed left him mournful. Wills Road was awaiting “the mechanical claw” that would “tear [the] entrails from our homes,” he wrote, yet “this district has no (poet) one to fill its (gallery of) memory,” no one to “sing the praise of our Friday evening revelry.” He was thirty now; most of his childhood friends were married, with careers and children. He was tired. “(Wearily) the words trail along, now falling, now cutting the corner of shop windows . . . (wearily) the words trail along listening to the whispered laments of the women,” watching while the state destroyed their homes. The seventies had opened new vistas, connections to new sorts of people, relationships to places—­townships, factories, jails—­that had not previously been part of his experience. He had found solace and meaning in the work and won small victories. But apartheid remained and it was clawing the heart out of his neighborhood. That part had not changed.144 8

While the Gwala trial got underway, student protests against Bantu Education were growing, both in size and militancy, inspired by Black Consciousness’s calls for ceaseless confrontation. When police fired on unarmed students in Orlando on June 16, 1976, many observers’ minds went to Sharpeville. That proved an imperfect Natal

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Figure 4.9. “Demolished building, Grey Street,” photograph by Omar Badsha, 1984

comparison. State violence had stunned that township into a sort of quiescence after March 21, 1960, as it had in Langa, Cato Manor, and elsewhere. But on June 17, 1976, the students were back in the streets, battling—­and the next day, and the next day. Rebellion spread across the Transvaal, then to Umlazi, KwaMashu, Lamontville, and elsewhere. Schools were on fire, students were killed, government beerhalls targeted, lines between collaborator and comrade redrawn. At the decade’s outset, there had been a stirring; midway through 1976, there was a movement. The unions were only part of it.145 Around the time that he witnessed the “mechanical claw” taking his neighborhood apart, Omar resigned as the general secretary of the CWIU. It was not clear what he would do next. A year prior, he had read that slide shows were frequently employed to organize and educate workers in the UK. He reasoned that it might be useful to have a visual record of the conditions at factories like Chrome Chemical. On August 25, 1975, he borrowed a camera from a friend and set out to document the factory yard, the toilets, the laundry, the chrome bins, the contrast between the white employees’ spaces and those of their Black co-­workers. He entered the factory around 6:30 a.m. and shot a roll of film.146 He did not really know what he was doing. “Fuck all came out,” he remembers. “Not enough light.” For the next year or so, he continued to work and organize, without any images. He kept the camera.147

Chapter 5 SOUTH AFRIC A

1980s

Remember mixed and united Verulam? —­Mafika Gwala, “Letter to a Friend in Exile”

1 NASIMA COOVADIA was born in Johannesburg in 1951. The family lived in a small

block of flats in Fordsburg, a site of white urban labor agitation and racial violence after World War I, which had become Johannesburg’s Grey Street complex by the conclusion of World War  II. As around Douglas Lane, families originating from across the Indian subcontinent lived together there, Muslims, Hindus, Christians, communists, businessmen, their devout wives and their upwardly mobile children. Racial bars trapped wealthy Indian families to live alongside their poorer cousins. Where Fordsburg spilled over into Fietas and eventually the working-­and middle-­ class white suburbs that climbed the Brixton ridge, Coloureds, whites, and Africans lived close by, to the apartheid government’s great displeasure.1 If Nasima’s parents took her up on the ridge during her first few years, they would have witnessed the state making the Johannesburg of its imagination: to the north, the ample lots of the wealthy white suburbs spread under the canopy of what boosters celebrated as the world’s largest man-­made forest; squinting, Nasima’s parents might have been able to see the clouds of dust produced by the bulldozers that were by the mid-­fifties demolishing Sophiatown, a mixed-­race suburb that interrupted the whites-­only expanse. Turning 180 degrees to the south, the family

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would have seen the suburbs ending before the rail line that stretched south and west to Cape Town. Johannesburg’s “mountains” towered over the electrical pylons and catenary that demarcated both the right of way and the factories that paralleled the tracks. Glinting in the Highveld sun and leeching poison following the region’s thunderous storms, massive piles of mine waste obscured the Soweto townships to which Sophiatown’s African residents were condemned.2 By the time Nasima turned ten, those bulldozers had crossed the valley from Sophiatown and were beginning to deconstruct Fietas; Fordsburg was in their crosshairs as well.3 As in Durban, Johannesburg’s white urban planners envisioned a city center emptied of its non-­white residents. They would preserve part of Nasima’s neighborhood as an Indian Central Business District, while also calming the community’s protests in defense their mosques and temples. Nasima’s family was informed that they would be removed to Lenasia, the Indians-­only township on the far side of the much vaster Soweto.4 Moving would not be all bad—­Ebrahim Coovadia operated a small shop nearby in Kliptown, one of the African communities that predated these latest removals. Kliptown had its own, sometimes proud history; it was there that the Congress Alliance had officially adopted the Freedom Charter in 1955. Yet as far as Nasima’s father was concerned, Fordsburg, not Lenasia, was home. More vertical than Omar’s Grey Street, it was in many other ways similar: dense with personality, local history, community, family. It was a hard place to leave.5 Like many other Gujarati Muslim women of her generation, Amina Coovadia did not work outside of the home. She covered her hair and communicated mostly in Gujarati, unlike her children and some of their neighbors. But the times were changing. Coovadia cousins in Johannesburg and elsewhere were beginning to experiment with new ways of living, filling the space apartheid left open for relatively well-­positioned people of Indian descent. Nasima was an excellent student, adept, confident, and, in time, willing to push back against the gendered traditions that had curtailed Amina’s ability to define her own being in the world. Coovadias, both men and women, were matriculating, some overseas, some at Salisbury Island, others at the Natal medical school; Jerry Coovadia, a doctor and founding member of the relaunched Natal Indian Congress (NIC), was Nasima’s father’s first cousin. Jerry’s wife, Zubeida, was herself a widely respected doctor, a fact that Nasima recognized as progress.6 The Coovadias were generally better off than the less widely dispersed and numerous Badshas.7 Otherwise the families had a great deal in common: Sunni, Surti, Gujarati, now South African. Chorta married a Coovadia in 1935; Omar’s first cousin with whom he got into trouble in school was thus distantly related to Nasima and the Fordsburg Coovadias.8 Separated by geography, Omar and Nasima

did not know each other in childhood, however, and around the time that the latter turned twelve, the distance between them grew vaster still. Ebrahim Coovadia balanced his work life with donations to and support of the Transvaal Indian Congress, although he was hardly an activist (unlike the family’s doctor and friend, Yusuf Dadoo, the party leader who was secreted out of South Africa after Sharpeville, never to return). Sharpeville, increased repression, and the advent of the armed struggle focused attention on Johannesburg’s activist community. The shopkeeper and his peers worried about their children’s futures, and especially about those children who were particularly attuned to politics—­like Nasima’s cousin Ismail, who had all the promise in the world and who was increasingly channeling his energies into the struggle.9 Faced with the twinned threats of political repression and apartheid urban planning, Nasima’s uncle Essop decided to emigrate to London, for his son Ismail’s safety and his own sanity. By then his bright and willful niece Nasima was running up against the limits of what Fordsburg could afford her. Her uncle offered to bring her along to continue her education in London, hopefully freed from the unique perils of being an intelligent and conscious Indian South African girl. Nasima’s father assented. She doubts that her mother had much of a say in the matter; years later, the guilt of leaving Amina behind became one of the many reasons that she returned. At the time, however, her mother’s feelings mattered less than the fact that she was twelve, it was 1963, and she was on a jet to London. It was a grand adventure.10 It was also the fast track to autonomy, in ways that would have been hard to anticipate. In the UK, her uncle engaged in a diverse array of businesses, trying to keep the family afloat and re-­create Fordsburg’s dense networks. Nasima’s aunt struggled with the climate; she was frequently ill and unable to surveil either her niece or her son. School was only Ismail’s secondary interest; he threw himself into ANC-­exile politics with abandon. Possessing a passport, for a time in the late 1960s he was a useful conduit between exile and South Africa. On one visit home he collected a message from an artist, distantly related by marriage, up to the Transvaal from Durban. Ismail kept Nasima updated both on goings-­on in South Africa and locally. He was her “connection into the other world,” the high stakes one beyond the crowded, increasingly diverse central London neighborhoods in which the family lived. Ismail introduced Nasima to Ruth First—­communist, Jewish, a veteran of the apartheid prison system, who had become a stalwart of the UK’s Anti-­Apartheid Movement since going into exile. First was a powerful, inspirational woman. Nasima invited her to come speak about apartheid to the other girls at her grammar school.11 Most of her classmates were British, save one other young South Asian student recently arrived from East Africa. Their differing origins aside, they had much in South Africa

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common. They were female teenagers amidst the excitement and opportunities of the 1960s. They were an “amazing feisty group, adventurous, into whatever fads were going on”—­interested in music, in fashion and, as they grew older, in politics too. For Nasima, South Africa was obviously a central concern—­but so was Vietnam and immigration and decolonization and what they as young women wanted to make out of their lives. In many ways, she inverted her cousin Ismail’s priorities. She cared deeply about politics, for sure, but school was paramount. Education was how one maximized one’s ability to do and to be something in the world. Nasima shared with her classmates a generation of women’s confidence in their own capacity; many of their British mothers had worked as secretaries, or clerks, or bureaucrats in postwar Britain’s booming governmental sector. Nasima and her friends—­ these working women’s daughters—­were going to be the first generation of British women to take the world on their own terms.12 For her, education meant science above all. Not medicine—­although family and community pressure to become a doctor transcended gender—­but its building blocks: biology, physiology, chemistry. She excelled in secondary school and earned admission to the University of London’s Royal Holloway College, in what was then a sleepy part of the wider metropolis. What it lacked in excitement Royal Holloway made up for in classes and possibility. Nasima turned twenty far from Fordsburg and apartheid. She took a degree at Royal Holloway and went on to earn a teaching qualification at the University of Leeds, in the north of England. For all she knew, she was the only South African among the many thousands of students enrolled there, but it scarcely mattered: the north of England was alight with trade union socialism and working-­class and student agitation in the first years of the 1970s. The campus buzzed. A picture from the period shows Nasima Coovadia and two other women in their early twenties, posed amidst the arboreal riot of an English summer, her dark hair parted and down, arms crossed beneath a barely concealed grin. One of her two companions is significantly taller; both are significantly paler and show more skin. But the same smile plays on their lips, as they try and will shortly fail to keep the spasms of laughter at bay. This was Nasima’s world.13 Until, rather abruptly, it no longer was. After Leeds, Nasima moved back to London, finding a small flat in a tidy Edwardian building near Paddington Station. The surrounding neighborhoods were increasingly—­and sometimes contentiously—­ brown, which agitated the white nationalist right, but provided her with some measure of comfort after the north, where people with her skin were “an oddity. You were stared at.”14 She applied for jobs and reconnected with the South African exile community. But the discomfort she had felt in the north stayed with her. She had grown up in the UK at a moment when many people of South Asian descent were

beginning to call the country home. But she was not “Indian” or “Pakistani” or “British.” She was South African. She was offered a job as a lecturer in human anatomy and physiology at the Tottenham College of Technology, out in northeast London. She would be a high-­achieving professional, a Londoner, a professor launched on her career. She accepted the position at the end of June 1975. But she had doubts.15 She missed her parents. She keenly felt that she needed to get to know them, especially Amina. The local ANC office shared reports that things were happening, with Black Consciousness symbols and language widespread and the slow spread of trade unionism in Durban and beyond. She was convinced that South Africa was the place “that I would feel was home.”16 She contacted connections there. There was an opening for a lecturer at the M. L. Sultan Technikon, the scientific and engineering training college for Indians in Durban, next door to the Orient Institute. Unbeknownst to her friends in the UK, she made plans to return. By Christmas she could smell the Indian Ocean, having traded the winter solstice for the summer, the dark and cold for Durban’s humid embrace. She shared a flat with her cousin Farida. Her friends in the UK “were shocked.” Her cousin Ismail was excited. He stocked her with messages, including one for the artist who he had once met in Joubert Park.17 The shock her friends experienced at her departure was nothing compared to how they reacted to the news that shortly filtered back up north from Durban. Nasima and her British friends had talked often about marriage: about when and why it ought to happen, about how to balance financial independence and security with the antiquated—­but still enticing—­prospects of romantic love. Within two months of arriving in Durban, Nasima seemed to have found a sudden resolution to these contradictions. “I don’t think I have yet recovered from the news of your last letter,” a friend wrote from London in late February 1976. To meet someone, fall in love, move into together and marry so quickly—­“it . . . seems like a fairy story. . . . I’m really happy for you—­but it is still almost unbelievable.” Her circle of friends was eager to hear more. They were getting together in the coming week and “your news” was sure to be conversation topic number one.18 Love is difficult evidence. Omar had had various girlfriends. His late-­1960s diary was equally as obsessed with Fatima, a medical student from the neighborhood, as it was with his own role as an artist in apartheid society. Nasima came into his life nearly two years into his work with the Chemical Workers Industrial Union (CWIU). They married amidst his own growing sense that the trade union space was no longer where his own political self was best articulated. They had had such different trajectories. She was a highly decorated student qualified to teach in the sorts of institutions from which he had been barred. His stint in the CWIU had represented his longest stretch of continuous employment since leaving Orient. She South Africa

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was a professional on the rise: the more prestigious Durban-­Westville poached her from the Technikon within a few months of her arrival in Natal; a few months after that, the even more prestigious Natal University Black Medical School hired her to teach human biology and anatomy to the country’s best and brightest Black students. Staking his life to hers promised a measure of economic security and stability that had eluded his line of Badshas.19 They were so different: her time away had meant that her teenage years were spared some of the petty humiliations and more profound traumas that marked his growing up. She was less insecure, more level headed. Yes, the trauma of leaving first her parents and then her life in England was significant. But she had also been insulated, to a degree. Such differences aside, Omar was also quite familiar. He was in his own way as worldly and cosmopolitan as she was—­albeit without ever having lived anywhere but around Wills Road, save for his brief stint in Pietermaritzburg. They were both radicals of a particular kind who found in each other, as 1975 became 1976, someone who was safe and comfortable: Muslims from Surat who knew that they were first and foremost Black South Africans, with everything that implied. In January they signed the paperwork to be married at the Department of Indian Affairs marriage and registration offices, her in a flowing, flowered shirt over a pair of slacks, him with his beard neatly trimmed, shirt tucked in. Her parents initially balked at the news that their UK-­educated daughter was going to marry a trade union organizer with only two Art South Africa Today awards to his name.20 But they reconciled themselves to her choice and came down to Durban to celebrate. On Valentine’s Day 1976, various Badshas and Coovadias gathered at a Coovadia family flat. Resplendent in a bright magenta dress that matched her husband’s tie (it was the seventies, after all), Nasima beams while he slips on the ring. He is thirty, she twenty-­four. Their first few months of marriage coincided with Omar’s resignation from the CWIU. Nasima’s father gave the couple a used Volkswagen and they took an epic road trip, tracing the borders of their South African home, first to Johannesburg, then north and west, to Augrabie’s Falls and Upington, south and west farther still to Cape Town. The Special Branch in Johannesburg brought Ebrahim Coovadia in for questioning, curious why a car registered in his name was being driven all over the country by a known troublemaker. He assured them that it was nothing more nefarious than a honeymoon. In a picture from that trip, Nasima and Omar stand on a high point, overlooking a valley, tangled hills, dotted with trees and grasses. They lean into each other, wearing ornate embroidered tops. It is unclear who took the picture and with which camera, because in it the bridegroom clutches his own, tightly, in his left hand.

2

Omar’s uncle Moosa was the first Badsha to carry a camera everywhere. Moosa was a man-­about-­town, who loved boxing, soccer, and jazz; along with his brother Ebrahim, he was among those seen and seeing at places like the Goodwill Lounge, which he occasionally identified as his “business address.” For most of the 1950s and 1960s, he worked as freelancer, covering sporting and social events for local newspapers and supplementing this with steadier work for hire, making images at marriages, births, and other occasions. “He would just be photographing people in the streets, all the time,” Omar remembers. Many local families had Moosa’s works in their albums, stamped “A Moosa Badsha Picture,” with both the family’s address on Douglas Lane and that of the Goodwill Lounge, on the verso.21 “He had a knack for turning up any place there was a happening,” a friend recalled, to “report the event in pictures.”22

Figure 5.1. Moosa Badsha, unknown photographer, undated (1980s?)

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Moosa never married; photography was his one true love. In November 1958 the Museum of Modern Art–­organized Family of Man photographic exhibition came to Durban, setting up in an empty warehouse. Moosa brought his nephew along and they spent hours slowly considering the photographs that crowded the walls.23 He learned his trade from established professionals like Ranjith Kally, who had become one of the stable of photographers working for the Johannesburg-­based Drum magazine in the 1950s.24 Moosa also picked up tips from others who met at the International Club, on Plowright Lane, a club for the community’s leading men, where the local activist Cassim Amra occasionally lectured about photographic history and methods.25 Amra maintained a darkroom, although he was using it less frequently by the mid-­1970s. Shortly after Nasima and Omar were married, he gave both his darkroom equipment and his cameras to Omar, who was then looking for a new direction.26 Omar set up the equipment in the small bathroom of the flat into which he and Nasima had settled, on Chapel Street in Overport, a middle-­class Indian neighborhood just over the crest of the Berea. She helped him learn how to mix the chemicals used to process film. He taught himself how to take better pictures than he had at Chrome Chemical. In 1977, he took over Kally’s old darkroom on Queen Street. There was a theater downstairs, run by Kessie Govender, a local playwright. Omar practiced there, using the spotlights and the darkness; he published his first image that year, of two actors in Govender’s latest production.27 As with his uncle, his camera became his constant companion. Omar visited friends like Phyllis Naidoo and took their portraits; he drove out to the Phoenix Settlement, where Fatima Meer had organized weaving and basketmaking workshops to help some of the local women earn extra money. Many of the interior shots are underexposed; he did better outside, where a group of women demonstrated their craft. He took portraits of Mewa Ramgobin, who was then banned. Some trade unionists were restricted to Inanda after the Gwala trial; Omar visited Shadrack Maphumulo there, taking his photograph in a half-­built shack. He caught Doris Skosana carrying her infant son at the TUACC (Trade Union Advisory Coordinating Committee) offices. He visited Alpheus Mthethwa, who was banned to St. Wendolin’s, near Pinetown. He visited Docrat and Mafika Gwala; on a trip to visit Nasima’s parents in Johannesburg, Omar carried messages from Durban to Indres Naidoo, an MK activist who had been released from Robben Island in 1973. Naidoo had a young son. The two Naidoos kept their space from the photographer, engaging the camera from their small front yard. It was Christmas Eve, 1977; taking advantage of the holiday lull, Naidoo fled to Swaziland soon thereafter.28 While in Cape Town with Nasima, Omar visited John Gomas, born in 1901, who had been an

Figure 5.2. “Alpheus Mthetwa and children, St. Wendolin’s,” photograph by Omar

Badsha, 1978

early member of the Communist Party.29 Omar found Gomas debilitated by a series of strokes, reading a newspaper by the light that streamed through his window in District Six. His halo of white hair backlit and aglow, he looked like a figure out of time. Within a few months he was dead; shortly thereafter the government demolished his small house and those of his neighbors.30 Most of Omar’s earliest photographs were of his known world: the system, its politics, and those personalities who contested it. Other images were studies of partially deconstructed buildings on Wills Road or depictions of graffiti scrawled on walls—­“Cops Free Mandela,” “ANC Lives”—­images taken in haste, lest onlookers begin to wonder. Other photographs tended toward what one would expect from a family member who always had a camera—­his mother walking down the street on one of her visits to Durban—­his grandmothers sitting together around Rassool Bibi’s bed, the old friends from the ship now nearly ninety years old, their husbands long passed. In February 1978 he and Nasima welcomed a daughter, Farzanah, another generation of Badshas in Durban, the third since Rassool Bibi retraced Ismail’s journey across the Indian Ocean. Omar took his daughter to his grandmother; he shot a series of images of the two of them, separated by more than nine decades, together on the old woman’s bed, Rassool struggling to sit upright while Farzanah squalled. South Africa

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Figure 5.3. John Gomas, photograph by Omar Badsha, 1978

Figure 5.4. Farzanah Badsha and Rassool Badsha, photograph by Omar Badsha, 1978

He was a few months shy of his thirty-­third birthday when he became a father. Farzanah—­dark haired, dark eyed, round faced, and bright—­came at both a personal and national pivot point. Nasima was slightly more than four months pregnant when Steve Biko was killed by the police in September 1977; the former South African Students’ Organization (SASO) president was at least the twentieth activist to die in police custody since June 1976; many dozens died in never fully explained extrajudicial killings during the same period. Shortly thereafter, the Ministry of Justice banned all the Black Consciousness organizations, including TECON (Theatre Council of Natal). Thousands of activists fled into exile.31 Phyllis Naidoo left in 1977 after more than two decades of caring for families in desperate need of comfort and support. She and Omar had been close since the sixties. She sought asylum in Lesotho and endured a painful exile. She wrote long, passionate letters, updating Omar about her and her sons’ contributions to the struggle. In 1979, a parcel bomb exploded near her, killing a comrade and wounding her eye. She found medical care and a replacement cornea in Eastern Europe. She hoped her donor “was a he and that when he smiled, his eyes dimpled in delight,” she wrote in 1980, back in Lesotho. “I don’t suppose I have an idiot’s cornea, or a racist’s.” She was glad to be back in Southern Africa. From Maseru, she had “a daily view of my beloved country,” just a river and a fence away.32 South Africa

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What it meant to be an activist within South Africa was once again being reconfigured, just as it had been after Sharpeville. Mere weeks before Farzanah was born, someone knocked on the window of the house that Rick Turner and Foszia Fisher shared in the Durban suburb Bellair. Fisher was not home. Turner came to investigate and was shot, twice, through the sitting room window. He bled out on the carpet, in his thirteen-­year-­old daughter’s arms. Biko was thirty when he was murdered; Turner was thirty-­six. Islamic law called for Muslim men to prepare the deceased’s body for burial. Omar washed the blood from his friend’s body. The next day he stood vigil next to the prayer rug–­draped coffin, wearing dark glasses and a heavy beard. Moosa stood next to him, a head shorter than the other men, head bowed, mourning in a black suit. Turner’s ban was set to expire the next month.33 The weeks that followed reprised those after Biko’s murder: there were official inquests and calls for justice, both locally and internationally, and inconclusive investigations. Fisher shortly left Durban and South Africa; she remarried and settled in England, where she still lives. Turner was buried in the Muslim cemetery near Ismail Badsha. Omar visited them both from time to time, Turner’s black marble gravestone, his name transcribed in Arabic, along with the memory that “he sought justice for all.” Hemmed in by the city, in the 1980s the cemetery ran out of space and began to bury multiple bodies in its graves; both Ismail’s and Rick’s bones now intermingle with those of other believers. Back in 1978, a few weeks after Turner’s funeral, Omar and Nasima welcomed Farzanah. The thirtieth anniversary of National Party rule passed three months after her birth.34 3

While the summer of 1978 toggled from horror to joy, the Badsha family settled into their new lives. Making images became Omar’s primary preoccupation. Photography’s capacity to do something in the world was well established. Ernest Cole (born Kole) from outside of Pretoria worked briefly for Drum at the turn of the 1960s. He left South Africa in 1966, along with the negatives he had taken during a decade of documenting apartheid. He published his first monograph from exile in 1967. House of Bondage was immediately banned, but still circulated. Omar recalls seeing a few reproductions, whether at Docrat’s, Cassim Amra’s, or elsewhere.35 More recently, the photographers Peter Magubane and Sam Nzima had covered the student protests in Soweto. Magubane had been active since the 1960s; he had been both banned and detained while plying his trade. Nzima was less well known before June 16, 1976, when he captured what became that day’s signature image, of the dying Hector Pieterson.36 It remains one of the iconic images of South Africa’s long

struggle with white supremacist violence, in time earning Nzima deserved fame. More immediately, the Special Branch chased the photographer from Johannesburg into a precarious existence in the Gazankulu Bantustan.37 Of course, there were plenty of South African photographers who managed not to be beaten, banned, or detained. And from Kally to Magubane, these photographers had technically been photojournalists, dedicated to the circulation of noteworthy happenings, not “artists,” their aesthetic and technical proficiency notwithstanding. Yet if we adopt the perspective generated by Omar’s own definition of art—­that which helps people to see—­then these professional distinctions were irrelevant. These forerunners were artists who paid dearly for their art. Even though he seldom printed and had rarely shared his photographs, by the time Farzanah was born Omar was convinced of the camera’s capacity to convey politically necessary truths. The question was how to use photographs to say something, while minimizing the state’s indelible critique. By 1978, the Johannesburg-­based photographer David Goldblatt had published two widely circulated books of photographs: On the Mines (1973) and Some Afrikaners Photographed (1975). Omar picked up a copy of the latter in Johannesburg. The work spoke to him—­he saw how images and a few well-­chosen words could illuminate an entire segment of South African society. Back at the Coovadias’, he found the photographer’s entry in the Johannesburg phone book and rang him, introducing himself as someone beginning to think seriously about the vocation. Goldblatt invited him over and they began an occasional correspondence, during which Omar began cautiously to share his work with the more established practitioner.38 Their relationship was both productive and tense. Photography aside, Omar was committed to the struggle and its imperatives, as he understood them. Goldblatt—­soft-­spoken and calm, where Omar was hotheaded and aggressive—­ was more flexible in his opposition to apartheid. Goldblatt counted on many within the white business community to support his photographic practice. Omar was repulsed to learn how the photographer had entered a contract with the Anglo-­ American Corporation to gain access to the Black subjects he shot in On the Mines.39 Like many on the left, Omar’s analysis of South African history held that Anglo was the superstructure on which apartheid’s racial capitalism was predicated. To collaborate with the corporation was comparable to collaborating with the South African Indian Congress (SAIC) or the Bantustans; it was anathema. Still, Omar recognized that Goldblatt’s pictures were good, while for his part, Goldblatt recognized Omar’s as “well-­seen, . . . open-­ended” and welcoming to interpretation, notwithstanding their creator being a dogmatic “Marxist sort of Communist.”40 South Africa

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In Goldblatt’s work, Omar saw images that reminded him of Moosa’s photography magazines. Back in the 1950s, critics had condemned The Family of Man for being too saccharine and convinced of its own good intentions to do anything productive in the world.41 The irony was that many of its best-­known photographers had come to prominence precisely because of their own political interventions, especially those like Walker Evans who had covered the misery of the American Great Depression, or W. Eugene Smith, another American, whose World War II photographs earned him membership in the Magnum Photographic Agency. Durban’s International Club followed Magnum with fanboyish intensity—­those who could afford them copied many of the Magnum photographers’ fanatical dedication to Leica cameras.42 In the late seventies, Omar inherited his much-­fetishized (and coveted) Leica from Cassim Amra.43 The more he learned, the more Omar came to admire photographers whose seriousness of purpose matched their aesthetic achievement. Goldblatt counseled that the first rule was to “be in a situation,” to take the time to research and observe what was happening, and only them “to move into [it] and come back with something that’s quintessential.”44 Omar wanted to take things further, to leverage a photograph’s unique capacity to promote action. Sometime in the late 1970s, Moosa shared W. Eugene Smith’s latest work, Minamata: A Warning to the World, with the newly minted photographer. Smith’s final essay (in collaboration with his wife, Aileen) chronicled the devastating effects of a chemical company’s negligence on one small Japanese fishing community. Moosa thought that Omar would be interested because of the chemical company connection; Omar was struck by how Smith’s compositions were so quiet and calm, yet provoked outrage. Reflecting on Minamata, Smith explained that photography “can lure our senses into awareness” and that via photographs, people might find “a greater sense of understanding and compassion [and] to find a way to right what is wrong.”45 This was what the critic Ariella Azoulay calls the “civil contract of photography,” the possibility that images could mediate across disparate communities to promote solidarity and action. Omar became convinced that the camera could do something similar in South Africa.46 The Badshas hired a domestic worker to help care for Farzanah. Nasima worked, the baby grew. Omar wrote the occasional poem and imagined a screenplay about an artist who had become a trade union activist. He went to his darkroom on Queen Street. He picked up some freelance work for Diakonia, a Durban ecumenical association, which frequently devoted its newsletter to covering the provincial housing crisis. Omar became one of their go-­to photographers.47 With the Leica comfortable in his pocket, he documented old friends and comrades who were then living in shacks in Inanda or St. Wendolin’s. After meetings at the Diakonia offices, Omar sometimes

wandered over to the nearby Roman Catholic Emmanuel Cathedral. It had large windows through which sunlight streamed, creating an effect not dissimilar from the spotlights in Kessie Govender’s theater. He captured a series of people kneeling, heads bowed before illuminated altars and shrines. They are suffused with light and gorgeous stillness, interrupted only by whispered prayers and his finger on the shutter, and the traffic when he opened the door to slip back outside, which was where his real interest lay. By the end of 1978, he had found his footing. 4

That year was challenging for Fatima Meer. She was very close to Rick Turner; her family mourned him, even as they tried to manage their own exposure. In and out of detention since June 1976, she continued to work, organizing women’s organizations and managing the Durban-­based Institute for Black Research (IBR), which she had founded in 1972. Through the institute, Meer sought to institutionalize a Black perspective in South African sociology. “The interpreter” of data “is of crucial importance,” she explained to an audience of academics in 1973, since researchers are themselves “products of socialization.” Rather than support “the ‘taking’ of knowledge from Blacks to progress white scholarship and develop white research institutes,” the institute aspired to be a Black enterprise, building from researchers’ intimate knowledge of their communities to study and generate solutions to Black people’s problems.48 Working with local university students on a shoestring budget, Meer and her collaborators studied subjects ranging from socioeconomic diversity within the Indian community to Durbanites’ responses to the Soweto uprising. She was an indefatigable researcher and editor and first-­rate sociologist, even under conditions that would have made others wilt. The United Nations declared that 1979 was going to be the International Year of the Child. Meer knew that Omar had begun to focus more seriously on photography; she invited him to collaborate on a publication to commemorate the UN’s declaration. It would be focused on South African children; any proceeds it generated would be split between the institute that funded it and organizations that addressed child poverty. They put together a little pamphlet and presold copies to help pay for film and chemicals. “Nobody was going to say no to her,” Omar laughs. Funds in hand, Omar got to work.49 The IBR published Letter to Farzanah in September 1979. At first glance, Omar’s return to art reprised the themes that had consumed him during the 1960s: family, his in particular. Indeed, both the title and the cover image—­of the eponymous Farzanah with her great-­grandmother, Rassool Bibi, who died while the book was in production—­suggested a poignant and personal study. He dedicated the book to his South Africa

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daughter and addressed her directly, in a one-­page “letter” that prefaced the photographs. Omar had been writing for decades—­a fact that most likely would have surprised his schoolteachers—­if mostly for private consumption. Yet other than a book review he published in an early issue of the South African Labour Bulletin, it was the first time his words appeared in print.50 The “letter” made it clear that this project was not so personal as it appeared. There was a gesture toward the reality that his life had changed since becoming a father, but that was brief; the bulk of it was focused on the historical, not the familial. “I somehow fear that there isn’t enough time in which to teach you all that I know about our society,” Omar wrote, admitting his anxiety that she might not grow up to share his political principles. “Either we follow the dictates of our conscience and remain free, or see ourselves being continuously stripped of our self-­respect and dignity,” he warned her—­and, by extension, the audience who could actually read his words. “Not a day goes by when we are not called upon to make decisions which tax our commitment and our principles.  .  .  . There is no escape from our situation.” Farzanah

Figure 5.5. Letter to Farzanah, by Omar Badsha, published 1979

was eighteen months old; Rassool Bibi had lived a long, rich life; those details were dissolved into the stew of South African reality. In both the letter and the images, Omar pulled a neat trick, which indicated how his photography was going to extend the moves he had made with his drawing. In Black Mother, he had looked away from subjective experience and personal trauma by forcing himself outside, placing his subjects into the landscape, thus making the personal universal. The pursuit of the quintessential via photography extended this practice. The images (and captions) collected in Letter to Farzanah revealed families whose lives were inextricably shaped by apartheid. The details of their lives mattered, yes, just like it mattered that it was Farzanah’s name on the cover, and his grandmother cradling his infant daughter. But those personal details mattered more because of how they were inseparable from the national drama. Omar dedicated the book to Farzanah by naming her as one among the multitude of South African “children who march through the broken landscape.” The dynamics that conditioned individual selfhood mattered less than the basic, fundamental fact that they were all apartheid’s children—­and so was he. Omar overwhelmed and overcame the personal, in other words, by insisting on the political.51

Figure 5.6. “Recent arrivals Inanda,” photograph by Omar Badsha, 1979

South Africa

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Letter to Farzanah presented a sociology of urban South African family life from rich to poor, Black to white, workers’ hostels to private swimming pools, shanty towns to bank branches. Two images contain another camera: in one, a bikini-­clad youth photographs her friends in Reservoir Hills; in the other, a husband snaps a picture of a crawling child. The difference between what their cameras memorialized and what Omar’s saw was the point: this was Durban’s delicate foam of wealth. To see the sea, we follow Omar’s lens. Poverty is far vaster and almost exclusively Black: children waiting to be seen at Phoenix Settlement’s clinic, or playing in the shack settlements nearby, which had grown exponentially since Omar began visiting Inanda in the late 1960s. Omar captured children on the move, alongside hastily or partially constructed homes, carried on backs, led by their “banned trade unionist” father along a deeply rutted path, or visiting their migrant laborer father on a “72-­hour pass.” He juxtaposed all this movement with two girls in Overport, sitting still on a swing, while in the background, corrugated iron indicated that other migrants had sought shelter in adjacent yards.52

Figure 5.7. “Thandeka and Mulelani Maphumulo, children of ex–­Robben Island

detainee,” photograph by Omar Badsha, 1979

Figure 5.8. “Park, Chapel Street, Overport,” photograph by Omar Badsha, 1979

Omar lived in Overport. He found the girl on the swing close by. His vivisection of South Africa succeeded because it revealed a world with which he was so intimately familiar. Cassim Amra lived in Reservoir Hills; Shadrack Maphumulo lived in one of those quickly growing Inanda settlements—­because he was banned, only his back appeared in Letter to Farzanah—­although during that visit Omar also captured a necessarily unpublished but nevertheless striking image of the ex–­Robben Islander, standing with another man in an open window. Alpheus’s three children lived in a similar house. Omar pseudonymized Shadrack in the “letter,” relaying that “it is easy to dismantel [sic] but to build a new world requires much more than courage.”53 Letter to Farzanah succeeded as sociology because of what Meer called “the identity of the investigator”: it was only because Omar knew these people and places that he could claim to understand and relate his world’s dense complexity.54 Yet this was not sociology (or at least, not only): it was art. In Letter to Farzanah, he moved toward the concept he had first approached a decade earlier. All children are the synthesis of a dialectical relationship. He was constituted of Miriam and Ebrahim, for better or worse. But these children—­and their families—­were the children to whom Black Mother had given birth. The hope of the new generation was that instead South Africa

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of stopping at trauma, these children would reflect what the workers at Chrome Chemicals and Prilla Mills had taught him about maintaining dignity and composure amidst hardships, and how endurance could become raw material for change. To transcend trauma was to make politics; to make politics was to find therapy. In Omar’s conception, documentary photography was art about reality. It embraced a confessional realism—­closely observed works, which suggested that their intimate, quotidian content captured, indicted, and, ideally, superseded apartheid. John Berger writes that the photographer Paul Strand’s best “photographs convey a unique sense of duration”; Strand captured people in the wholeness of their lives, revealed at a single, present moment. “The present tense of the verb to be refers only to the present,” Berger advises, “but nevertheless, with the first person singular in front of it, it absorbs the past which is inseparable from the pronoun. I am includes all that has made me so.”55 Omar was after something similar, with a twist. All of this is real, he told his audience, none of it is new—­and all of it can be changed. The IBR printed off one thousand copies, many of which had already been presold; the rest were available for R5.50. On September 12, 1979, Omar’s second one-­man show went on display at the Hermit Gallery in central Durban. “Technically, [the images] are near perfect,” a critic for the Natal Mercury observed.56 A prominent Johannesburg art critic sent Omar a long, handwritten assessment. “It is immensely difficult to photograph children. . . . One is so easily waylaid by their beauty[,] and charm and cuteness lies but a hairs breadth away.” “Cuteness” was the enemy of serious art. It needed to be avoided. She congratulated him for remaining “tough,” noting “how demanding you had been towards yourself in the way you perceived your subject matter.”57 A critic for the Sunday Tribune concurred. Omar showed how normalcy was “warped by the abnormality of South African society.” But he left the exhibition depressed. “The sad fact is that the child is father to the man,” and, class and race operating as they did in South African society, “the squatter child helping to build a home will, in all probability, become a squatter himself. . . . The children playing in the streets will probably see their children playing in the streets.”58 Omar would have added a Seussian “unless,” but at least the critic got part of it.59 The state certainly knew what it was looking at.60 The Special Branch visited the gallery and noted who was in attendance. The Directorate of Publications followed suit, declaring the book “undesirable.” The banning attracted national media notice. The Rand Daily Mail asked Mothobi Mutloatse, the chair of the beleaguered South African office of PEN International, for comment. “The banning of Letter to Farzanah is inexcusable, unjustifiable and unacceptable,” Mutloatse declared. The photographs were “poetic, sensitive portrayals of black children,” and the state’s response was yet more evidence this censorious regime needed to go “immediately.”61

The Sunday Times interviewed Omar—­now, “the South African photographer,” full stop—­about his decision not to appeal the censor board’s decision. Doing so would be “pointless,” Omar suggested; the directorate was not likely to change its mind and besides, having had his work banned, he was “in the same position as other Black writers” whose work had run afoul of the censors.62 He was in good company: a week after banning Letter to Farzanah, the government banned Call Me Not a Man, a collection of short stories by the Soweto-­based writer Mtutuzeli Matshoba. The bans “created a storm of anger in the Black community,” reported Mike Kirkwood, representing Matshoba’s publisher, Ravan Press. Call Me Not a Man was only the latest Ravan publication to be banned, a list that included Miriam Tlali’s Muriel at Metropolitan, the first novel published by a Black South African woman. Matshoba and Tlali were both Soweto-­based writers whose prose carefully discerned insights into everyday apartheid, with a bit of knowing satire and ironic release. Like Omar’s photography, their stories were more about the “normal” than the spectacular, more about perseverance and determination than the overt radical action.63 When the government thrust his work into their company, Omar became a national figure for the first time—­now both a photographer and a dissident. Omar knew Kirkwood from the latter’s stint spent lecturing English at the University of Natal. On at least one occasion Omar took him to Mpumalanga Township to connect with Mafika Gwala and talk about how to sustain the cultural struggle against the state. Shortly thereafter Kirkwood moved to Johannesburg to steward Ravan.64 The publisher itself was a byproduct of the early 1970s South African Council of Churches–­led Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society, which had provided a platform for many future Black Consciousness activists, as well as published writers like James Matthews, a Cape Town poet, and Rick Turner, who had published his Eye of the Needle with SPRO-­CAS. After Turner’s ban, Ravan—­an acronym for the names of its three founding editors (Peter Randall, Danie Van Zyl, and Beyers Naude, all of whom were associated with the outspokenly anti-­apartheid Christian Institute)—­began publishing more experimental and politically bold fiction.65 In 1978, Ravan introduced a literary magazine, Staffrider—­named for the township train riders who daringly “rode staff ” by hanging onto the sides and perching atop the trains that linked Johannesburg’s townships to the city center. The first issue featured poetry from a member of Gwala’s arts group, alongside a J. M. Coetzee poem and Tlali’s saga of a group who was detained while traveling to Steve Biko’s funeral in King Williams Town. Staffrider published photographs as well, including Omar’s portrait of an Indian shop owner and his African assistant, and John Gomas, cragged and ancient, tripping the eye of a new generation of South Africans from his room in Cape Town.66 South Africa

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Staffrider, Tlali, Matshoba, Kirkwood, Gwala, Badsha: all confirmed not a shift in South African culture, but its consolidation. Since the fifties, activists had called for a cultural boycott of South Africa so long as apartheid persisted, claiming that there could be no such thing as “normal” culture in such an abnormal society.67 Exiles and their allies had struggled to maintain that line during the following decades. Now, in South Africa itself, activists insisted that cultural producers confess the inseparability of politics and culture. Culture was politics; politics was culture. Or so the photographer Omar Badsha reminded Tina Turner when he and his camera got close enough to upbraid her for violating the cultural boycott by playing Durban’s Playhouse Theatre, a few weeks after Letter to Farzanah was banned. Although he had to concede that she had put on a hell of a show.68 The seventies ended. Omar was now well into his thirties, a married father, a professional photographer. He shot for Staffrider and Diakonia News. Many days he dropped Nasima in Westville and carried on for St. Wendolin’s or steered north to Inanda. Others he took the family VW over the Berea, down toward the sea, parking close to Douglas Lane or Wills Road. Buildings were being deconstructed by the mechanical claw. He traversed the Victoria Street Bridge for the umpteenth time, perhaps remembering the same walk with Dumile—­now apparently in California—­ taking the crowds in with his eye or his lens, pausing if something got his attention. Occasionally he snapped pictures of the cemetery, of the Badsha Pir memorial or Ismail Badsha and Rick Turner’s more modest graves. He walked over Queen Street amidst the workers carting building materials. Hawkers, some too old to stand, plied their wares. Others were children. Supplicants asked for a few coins, or for prayers. He hurried to the darkroom, where there were prints to develop and other photographers who might want to talk.69 5

After Letter to Farzanah, Omar had a modest platform; ever in motion, he had other projects in mind. He needed funds to help cover film, chemicals, and travel. One project was a “systematic look at the contemporary situation of the South African Indian community,” he related to Mike Kirkwood. He envisioned a book of photos taken in Grey Street and surrounding areas.70 He also proposed a study about Inanda, which he described as “a massive squatter camp outside Durban,” then being “rapidly transformed” by explosive population growth. “My aim is to document the lives of the people and to let the people themselves talk about their predicament,” he explained.71 He tried to generate the support necessary to get the projects going. In January 1981 he exhibited a selection from both Inanda and Grey Street at the recently established Market Photo Gallery in the Johannesburg CBD, where

David Goldblatt was beginning to train others to make documentary photographs.72 The older man was a helpful patron. “For a time Badsha was a painter,” Goldblatt joked (somewhat inaccurately) at the opening. “He seems to have suffered no lasting damage.” Kidding aside, Goldblatt hailed how Omar took to the camera “with the sense of the photographer rather than that of the painter”; painters worked with their imaginations, while photographers were “tied to reality.” Goldblatt gestured to the images and invited the audience to see how they were quintessential of what reality was, not propaganda dictating what Omar or anyone else might want them to be. “Things and people and their qualities are not distorted by wishful emphasis,” despite the “intimacies” of his political “concern,” “what he”—­Omar—­“propagates is quite simply and no less than reverence for life itself.”73 Omar would have qualified Goldblatt’s analysis, and did so, often, over the next many years. But it was clear that the camera freed him to speak to South African reality in a way that drawing never had. In Johannesburg, he spoke to Joyce Ozynski, who reviewed the show for the Rand Daily Mail. Photography is “the democratic art,” he explained; it enabled “oppressed people [to look] at who we are and where we are going.” In their conversation, Ozynski confessed her own aesthetic preferences made it challenging for her to appreciate Omar’s “anti-­romantic” images; yet she accepted that his was the ascendant aesthetic, concerned above all with “conveying the dignity with which people meet oppression.”74 Many people circulated in Goldblatt’s orbit. Omar already knew Lesley Lawson from the 1971 work camp. She had moved to the UK after university, then returned to South Africa, where she settled in Crown Mines, an illegal squat in an abandoned mining compound. The community there was a broad cross section of the counterculture: it was defiantly and openly multiracial; there were people in same-­sex relationships, young men trying to evade conscription, activists less securely “underground” than the omnipresent security police presence demanded.75 She was entranced with photography and eagerly sought lessons with Goldblatt, who reintroduced her to Omar. Goldblatt also facilitated Omar’s introduction to Paul Weinberg, who had just served his required stint in the South African Defence Force (SADF). Weinberg was radicalized by the Soweto uprising. He came to Johannesburg and drifted around in the small community of conscientious objects, draft dodgers, and other dissidents. Weinberg also picked up work as a freelancer, making images and short documentary films, and proclaiming that artists could not be neutral in the face of oppression. He and Omar became fast friends.76 There were others. Peter McKenzie had grown up and gone to primary school near Grey Street, before being shipped off to Cape Town’s famed Harold Cressy Coloured School. He moved to Johannesburg and worked at a television factory. South Africa

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A colleague on the assembly line was an amateur photographer who was emigrating and low on cash; he sold McKenzie his cameras and lenses. McKenzie moved back to Durban to study photography at the Natal Technikon.77 While there, he immersed himself in bohemian society, playing bass for Staple Diet, a jazz/funk group led by Steve Dyer, later one of South Africa’s best-­known saxophonists. Staple Diet was a local fixture; Durban’s multiracial cool kids flocked to ramshackle clubs and backyard braais to dance together to their repertoire of covers and original songs.78 Ebrahim’s friend Ike’s son Rafiq—­known as Rafs—­had known McKenzie since childhood. He was a big Staple Diet fan. They reconnected in the late 1970s, brought together by their common love for music, dagga, and, increasingly, photography.79 The Mayets and Badshas were practically family. Rafs’s parents lived in Omar and Nasima’s building in Overport. Rafs had grown up thinking Omar was a cool cat in a goatee, who hung out with charismatic freaks like Dumile. (Rafs tagged along with Ike when he drove Dumile to the airport on his way out of the country. Dumile thanked them for the lift with a small drawing of a bird in flight, which the family still has.)80 McKenzie lived in a small cottage in Sydenham, a Coloured suburb. They would hang out and listen to records. Omar invited McKenzie to use his darkroom; they talked about how they might combine their efforts. McKenzie eventually finished his studies and moved back to Johannesburg to reunite with his family; Omar suggested that he contact Weinberg and see what sort of collaboration might be possible.81 Omar met Cedric Nunn at McKenzie’s place. Nunn’s family traced their line back to John Dunn, a British settler to whom the Zulu king Cestwayo granted a large piece of land on the border between then-­independent Zululand and the Natal Colony. Dunn married several Zulu women; together, they left behind a large family that the apartheid government classified as Coloured, a broad category that in no way captured the complexities of the Nunn and Dunn family history. Like McKenzie, Nunn went to boarding school, before getting expelled for misbehavior. He unhappily assumed a semi-­skilled position in a sugar factory near the family’s small shop on the Natal north coast. It did not hold his interest. He traveled to Durban regularly to visit a cousin who was studying drama at Natal University. They went to parties; they saw Staple Diet. Nunn thought McKenzie a serviceable bassist. He had gotten a camera at some point and usually had it with him. They talked about photography and McKenzie introduced him to Rafs and Omar. He began to go to Queen Street to hang around the darkroom.82 There were more: Jeeva Rajgopaul was a teacher from Chatsworth whose home abutted that of the BC-­activists Bobby Marie and Shamim Meer. He liked machines and was teaching himself to use a camera. Marie told him about Omar.

There were photographers in Cape Town, more in Johannesburg, others scattered at various points in between. Some—­especially the whites—­were trained; others were self-­taught. Some were just looking for like-­minded people to talk to, a way to contribute, a community, a chosen family. Some were interested in exploring the relationship between media and politics. A core group carried on a dialogue between Durban and Johannesburg. Early in 1982 they announced the formation of a new, collectively run photographic agency called Afrapix, with offices at the South African Council of Church’s Khotso House in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, and at Omar’s darkroom on Queen Street, Durban.83 Those who joined agreed that photography was a field of both aesthetic and political struggle, and that neither photographers nor photographs were “objective instruments.” Rather, they were artists who wanted “to play a part.”84 Later that year, the ANC’s Department of Arts and Culture invited those they called “cultural workers” at home and abroad to contribute to and attend a Culture and Resistance Festival, just across the border in Gaborone, Botswana. Representatives from Afrapix were among the nearly nine hundred activists and creators who attended. Omar’s work was displayed at the conference; since the government still refused to grant him a passport, he was unable to attend. McKenzie did, taking his turn in the spotlight on the conference’s second afternoon. Photographers welcomed the “responsibility to participate in the struggle,” McKenzie explained, using the word responsibility carefully: unlike theater or writing, photography transcended language; unlike painting or sculpture, photographs could travel and replicate without losing their essential characteristics. Photographs mattered. More people encountered them than any other medium, in more places, which meant that more people could be “morally affected” if image makers did their jobs right. And yes, there was a right way and a wrong way to be a photographer. Sitting on a panel with David Goldblatt, who was well known for opting for aesthetics over political commitment,85 McKenzie was blunt: “We’ve got to take sides in the struggle [so that] our commitment becomes very evident in our photographs.” Photographers needed to be with the people as they endured, persevered, organized; photographers “must share the day-­to-­day experiences of the people. . . . We must be involved in the strikes, riots, boycotts, festivities, church activities and [other] occurrences.” Photographers needed to march with Farzanah and the other children across the broken landscape, lenses focused on the present, in service of the future.86 As the decade unfolded, there was no shortage of content. Labor unions grew stronger, civil society organizations denser and more confident, resistance more strident, strategic, and durable.87 In Durban, the NIC organized resistance to the 1982 elections for the South African Indian Council. When the government South Africa

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subsequently announced that it would reform parliament to give Indians and Coloureds representation in Cape Town, “anti-­SAIC” groups coordinated with similarly noncollaborationist Coloured and African allies (the latter of whom were still denied any representation under the plan). In 1983, a national organization called the United Democratic Front launched in Mitchell’s Plain, outside of Cape Town, with a rally attended by some ten thousand people. Omar, Weinberg, and other Afrapix members drove down together. The future was nigh.88 The UDF comprised hundreds of affiliated organizations that identified with the national movement without ceding their local autonomy. So broad and diverse, the UDF meant “different things to different people,” the sociologist Ineke Van Kessel suggests. Internal consistency mattered less than capacious solidarity. It spread like a veld fire; tamped down in one township, it sparked instantly somewhere else, to connect local struggles—­about housing, rent, forced removals and a lack of services, police brutality, compromised schools—­to the national crusade. The UDF had its eloquent spokespeople and its symbolic leadership. But its foundation was the thousands upon thousands of regular people who were already engaged in thousands upon thousands of struggles, both before and after the “united democratic

Figure 5.9. “Dr. Essop Jassat, Mrs. Nokukhanya Luthuli, and Mrs. Albertina Sisulu at a

political conference, Durban, 1983,” photograph by Omar Badsha, 1983

front” was inaugurated. The UDF provided “a sense of direction and ideological cohesion” for these animated masses, who were thick across the country, organizing from the Cape Flats to union meetings in the Transvaal to Inanda’s shacklands, which were also spreading inexorably as the decade beat on.89 6

The area commonly referred to as Inanda was jointly occupied by Africans and Indians since the late nineteenth century. The former tended to live on mission stations, while Indians rented or purchased small plots of land from the white authorities. It was the prominence of Indian smallholders in Inanda that first attracted Gandhi to the area; his Phoenix Settlement was carved out of a large, formerly white-­owned farm, then inhabited largely by Indians.90 John Dube (who had been raised on an American Board mission station nearby) and Isaiah Shembe, the founder of the AmaNazaretha independent church, eventually purchased portions of the same farm, before the 1913 Natives Land Act curtailed any expansion in African land ownership. Indians were not so encumbered and continued to purchase land and to maintain both small farms and shops, selling to each other and to their African neighbors.91 Inanda occupied a rather nebulous status in segregation-­era South Africa. It was neither a native reserve as defined by the Natives Land Act nor a part of the Durban municipality; relatively infertile and never commercially viable, it was “released” in 1936, when Prime Minister Barry Hertzog’s government granted a bit more unproductive land to the reserves and took away the limited African franchise in exchange. “Released Areas” were to be purchased by the government and granted to the native authorities; in time, many similarly identified areas were integrated into Bantustans. The government never bought the plot on which Phoenix sat, however, and most of the area remained owned by Indian smallholders and inhabited by a mixed population of Indians and Africans. Inanda was one of the few areas “where some measure of Indian and African co-­residence” remained well into the 1980s.92 In this, Inanda was the exception. In the acceleration and amplification of the unchecked urbanization that took place there in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Inanda was quite normal. Cities sprawled under apartheid. Proliferating segregation spawned white suburbs and Indian, Coloured, and African townships. Dense areas like Grey Street were hollowed out, forced to send unwitting shoots north and west, to newly constructed state-­managed initiatives like the Phoenix Township. Economic migrants seeking opportunities and better outcomes filled in the spaces in between. At the turn of the 1980s, the population around the Phoenix Settlement—­for which the South Africa

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township was named—­was growing exponentially. The historian Heather Hughes was then living nearby at the Inanda Seminary. Her research suggested that twenty thousand people arrived in Inanda between 1977 and 1979; four years later, five times as many had settled around the Gandhi Settlement. An average of fifty thousand new migrants were coming annually.93 By the early 1980s, most of the population were Africans living in shacks, imijondolo—­what housing theorists called “auto-­ constructed housing,” built from scavenged bits of tin, mud, wood, and waddle.94 Inanda was a difficult place to live, as Omar’s work back in the early 1970s had revealed. The Gandhi Settlement alone had electricity; there was only one tarred road; and, critically, residents relied on unreliable wells and small streams for drinking, cleaning, and bathing, at a time when the region was experiencing a severe drought (a Southern African iteration of a continent-­wide drying event that presaged climactic changes to come).95 Typhoid broke out at the end of the 1970s; cholera soon followed. Dozens of Inanda residents succumbed and the state slowly began to act, distributing water and developing plans to connect informal settlements to the municipal water system.96 The politics were complicated. The government demanded that Indian landlords provide services for their African tenants or evict them in the name of public health. Many landlords were themselves poor and could not afford to dig deeper wells or provide plumbed water; some sold their land, generally to the few better-­off African neighbors, many of whom were connected to the KwaZulu government and not subject to the same pressure to ameliorate living conditions.97 Omar visited often, finding plenty of quotidian dramas to occupy his mind (and his lens). His trips to Johannesburg and Cape Town happened sporadically; trips up the coast to park at the Gandhi Settlement and walk through the area’s tangled network of footpaths, dusty roads, and yards took place three or more days in a typical week.98 By the early 1980s, many Indians had moved to the Phoenix Township, although many thousands remained. Civic groups formed to demand services and to protest evictions. Amouti was an especially dense and poor community north of the Gandhi Settlement; shackdwellers there formed a residents association, which was one of the hundreds of similarly scaled social formations that constituted the broad-­based, multifocal democratic movement. Residents protested officials “who refused to give their name [yet] informed us that all structures in the area built in the last three months had to be demolished” and described brutal acts of dispossession, like on July 21, 1982, when a group of unknown assailants “broke down houses without giving us enough time to do it ourselves.” Thirty armed policemen watched and did nothing, while the men absconded with residents’ precious building materials. Amouti’s residents were under enormous pressure. Omar served as the residents association’s secretary for a

Figure 5.10. “A prayer to open a meeting of the Amouti Residents Association,”

photograph by Omar Badsha, undated (early 1980s)

time; he kept meeting minutes and collected funds, letters, and affidavits protesting the threat of removals. He also used his camera to document residents’ efforts to survive their local iteration of apartheid.99 In 1985, he published many of these images in his second monograph, Imijondolo: A Photographic Essay on Forced Removals in South Africa, which both continued work he had done in Letter to Farzanah (the emphasis on families, the unerring focus on human dignity in situations of tremendous want) and extended it, aesthetically, editorially, and politically. Imijondolo was a bolder book: the images were higher quality, as was the editing and the captioning. Where Letter to Farzanah was somewhat vague or allusive about the particulars, here the captions worked with the images to create a more effective sociology (a practice he learned from Goldblatt, who was an acknowledged master).100 Inanda’s unfolding history is inescapable. Many of the photographs were taken in Amouti: the book’s first image shows children clustered together on the floor following an “all-­night vigil”; residents bow their heads in prayer before a meeting; a group of women sit on a hilltop, turned toward another who stands, speaking. Children are still part of the story, but they are older, more mature, wiser, warier, more responsible. On the cover, a girl builds her house; her arms are caked in mud; she carries more of it on her head. The wall behind her is still wet. Her life is dense with her community’s history.101 South Africa

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Omar printed only a small selection of his Inanda photographs for Imijondolo. Friends remember prints laid out on the floor in Overport, Omar pacing above them, trying to identify resonance and narrative.102 He denoted images destined for printing and publication with an orange pen, sometimes marking an X, sometimes a bold box around a likely negative. His contact sheets conveyed what it took to live in Inanda. The same tasks recur—­women waiting for pension payments or for water or for a meeting to begin, their children or grandchildren flitting about, helping, sometimes resting, pausing when they encounter a lanky photographer on a path between two shacks, indulging him when he bids them to pause for a moment, a cask of water half their height perched on their head, so he can find the light. Some new arrivals erected canvas tents or flimsy plywood shacks or corrugated iron lean-­tos to provide temporary shelter. Others built more permanent structures, framing their houses with poles stripped from the shrinking supply of local trees, bound with rope. Residents filled “empty beer cartons with mud,” Omar remembers, and stacked them between the wood frames.103 Change was evident and ongoing. People hacked at the dry earth with hoes and shovels, children passed by with small herds of cattle. Inanda’s rural past died hard, but it did die. A resident recalled that “people were still trying to hang on to the idea of growing plots, where they could have some mealies and some vegetables and stuff. And then you could literally over months, see that disappearing because another shack, the space was needed.”104 Omar’s visits tracked agriculture’s death. Neighborhoods looked different on consecutive days. “Every night, [shacks were] just springing!” Homes crested hills and filled valleys; busy families carted building materials and swept yards. A spigot had been turned on in the Bantustan and people were now pooling in Inanda, trying to find a stable, sustainable level.105 With practice, Omar got better at shooting interiors, using a light meter and his gut to capture people in their homes, schools, clinics, and churches. He honed his ability to tell stories. The ability to shoot inside reinforced the argument he had begun in Letter to Farzanah: apartheid structured the possibilities of life inside just like it determined what was public and visible. He revealed modest homes that were meticulously furnished, evidence that residents yearned for the stability that conditions denied them. A stevedore and his wife pull back the drapes that lend their marital bed a bit more privacy; the drapes are evenly tied, beaten free of dust. The bed sags a bit under his weight; it is neatly made, befitting a tidy room. The stevedore smiles with no small amount of pride—­that is his wife, shoulders back, erect. This is their tea set, their flatware, their dishes displayed just so. This is their cross, in the protection of which they lie together. The stevedore and his wife were older than many of their young neighbors. In Inanda were migrant workers, “unemployed youths,” brickyard workers, people

Figure 5.11. “Stevedore and his wife, Amouti,” photograph by Omar Badsha, undated

(early 1980s)

who have turned their homes into workplaces—­fixing shoes, selling snacks, raising their children in a shebeen. Omar captured a young mother before she had cleaned up from the previous night’s good business. Bottles—­gin, brandy, beer, Coke—­are scattered on the floor and elsewhere. She has a long day ahead of her. There are the small comforts, however: the hook on which she hangs her handbag, a man’s tie partially obscured behind it—­Her husband’s? Her lover’s? A delicate lace curtain demarcates where mother and child sleep. Their neighbor has a big battery-­powered boombox and lies in bed to smoke and listen to music. The interiors Omar captured at Inanda became some of his most celebrated and oft-­reprinted images—­especially one he took at the Amouti school of a teacher, her crinkled eyes simultaneously smiling and sagging beneath her doek, her eighty students arrayed behind her, all perfectly still, meeting Omar’s eye perfectly, professionally even—­save one who sneers, playfully, and another, younger than the rest, who has seen something more interesting off to the photographer’s right.106 Like most Afrapix photographers, Omar thought photography was most effective when it made both political and aesthetic statements. Residents ought not to be reduced either to the state’s racial abstractions, or to patronizing condescension.107 With his camera, he took Inanda’s residents on their own terms. He spoke to people South Africa

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like Caiphias Ndimande, fifty-­six years old when Omar met him in Amouti, who had been forced out of Cato Manor in 1961 and was still on the move two decades later. Ndimande rented from an Indian landlord and was not sure where he was going to go if evicted. His family opted to focus on the present, filled beer cartons with mud and erected thick walls.108 The South African historian and cultural theorist Patricia Hayes argues that by exposing the “structures of the inside, its textures and objects,” Omar found a way to “speak for the life of a person.”109 To capture individual stories within epochal, massive social transformation was no mean achievement; it is what the best of Ravan’s writers were then trying to do; it was what a new generation of South African social historians were then trying to do, girded with overseas PhDs, training, theory, historiography.110 Omar was a self-­taught photographer from the Durban ghetto who studied nowhere other than the galaxy that spun within thirty miles from Douglas Lane. Like his subjects, he was a nobody who was also a somebody—­in his case, a photographer, an artist. He knew what was happening, and when he did not know, he knew enough to listen. He would soon be forty. He had tried and failed to write plays, screenplays, and poems. Words were not his forte. But he could tell a life story with a click. Yet this was apartheid, this was the struggle. As narrator, Omar needed these lives to go somewhere, to reveal something essential to the moment. Not all homes were poor, which demanded investigation. Mr. Rattan was of South Asian descent, a “storekeeper and landlord” in Amouti. Omar framed him comfortable and powerful, inside a room flooded with natural light, photographs of his ancestors are arrayed behind him. Yet down the road, or over the hills to the coast, there were mansions large enough to render Mr. Rattan’s comfortable sitting room tiny and insignificant. And across the country, there were other interiors more extravagant still, up to and including the boardrooms, the Union Buildings and Parliament, where the decisions that shaped all these people’s lives were then being made. Omar wanted to take the story there. Outside in the light, he attended closely to the performance of power across Inanda. Rattan’s house was big. Headman Nkonyane’s house would be even bigger. Omar captured him in an undershirt and short pants amidst the wages of his relative power and authority: a large yard, a house under construction, no roof yet, but three windows already framed and awaiting their

Figure 5.12. (facing page top) “Shebeen owner and child, Amouti,” photograph by Omar

Badsha, undated (early 1980s)

Figure 5.13. (facing page bottom) “Teacher with her class of eighty children, Amouti,” photograph by Omar Badsha, undated (early 1980s)

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Figure 5.14. “Mr. Rattan, storekeeper and landlord, Amouti,” photograph by Omar

Badsha, undated (early 1980s)

glass. He is connected to Inkatha, and he is powerful. Inkatha’s leader and KwaZulu’s chief minister, Gatsha Buthelezi is striking in Imijondolo, whether clad in a black suit amidst the white-­robed Shembe followers in one image, or more militaristically styled in another, as he leads pallbearers on their way to bury the same Nkonyane—­ who did not live to see his house finished, alas.111 Between the disease and the poverty, the need and the aspiration, the state and the residents, between renters and landlords, Indians and Africans, the residents’ associations, the NIC and the UDF, Inkatha and KwaZulu: Inanda was balanced on the razor’s edge. Somehow, it remained relatively peaceful during the early 1980s, while elsewhere in the region and across the country, communities began to slip.112 In 1983 Omar and Weinberg were the first photographers to document the aftermath of a battle between Inkatha and UDF-­aligned students at the University of Zululand in Ngoye, sixty miles up the coast. The latter group had organized to Figure 5.15. (facing page top) “Induna Nkonyane, Amouti,” photograph by Omar

Badsha, undated (early 1980s)

Figure 5.16. (facing page bottom) “Inkatha pallbearers at funeral of Induna Nkonyane,

Amouti,” photograph by Omar Badsha, undated (early 1980s)

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Figure 5.17. “Disabled shoemaker whose shop was demolished a few weeks later,

Amouti,” photograph by Omar Badsha, undated (early 1980s)

protest Buthelezi’s desire to use the campus to celebrate the Zulu royal house; five were killed in the aftermath. Omar’s images were atypical of his oeuvre: bloodied sheets, a trashed room.113 In Imijondolo, Omar pled for solidarity in the face of sectarianism. An Indian lawyer, identified as representing residents, listens to a civic association leader speak; Ela Gandhi is identified by name as she, too, listens to a conversation about the removals. Landlords were landlords, and tenants, tenants, but Omar also carefully depicted Indians and Africans as collaborators, and in one image as lovers.114 He gestured to the region’s collectively shared history. The book’s final picture shows a group of young people gathered to commemorate the killings of students in Soweto on June 16, 1976; the woman in the foreground wears a T-shirt with the face (and notable mustache) of Msizi Dube, a Congress leader from nearby Lamontville, who was assassinated, also in 1983.115 Dube’s death was attributed to collusion between Inkatha and the police, which a Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigation confirmed.116 There were days of pitched battles in its aftermath. Here Dube was being commemorated along with the Black children murdered in 1976, at a location Omar carefully identified as the Gandhi Settlement. The trauma at Ngoye told one story; the daily therapy and fragile thread of solidarity at Inanda told another.

Figure 5.18. “Ela Ramgobin and residents talk to pressmen after the demolition of

shacks at Phoenix Store,” photograph by Omar Badsha, undated (early 1980s)

Figure 5.19. “June 16th commemoration meeting, Gandhi Settlement,” photograph by

Omar Badsha, undated (early 1980s)

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Heather Hughes was close friends with both Omar and Nasima by this point; Omar would occasionally bring Farzanah along to visit with Hughes and David Brown, her husband, at their Inanda Seminary home, before taking his camera and walking back toward the Phoenix Settlement. Hughes wrote the introductory text for Imijondolo, detailing Inanda’s history, from John Dube (whose biography she would later write) to the shack explosion. The Bishop of Johannesburg wrote the forward. Desmond Tutu had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the previous year; he was a fixture at UDF rallies, political funerals, and other gatherings. Omar was a “truly committed person concerned with justice and equality,” Tutu reported. His images ought to “sear our consciences so that we will work to put an end to policies that can produce such human tragedy.”117 Afrapix published Imijondolo in March 1985. The Durban area was somewhat atypical that winter and remained relatively calm, while unrest swelled across the country. 7

Omar and Nasima’s flat in Overport became a hub and haven. Writers visiting from Cape Town, Afrapix colleagues Weinberg and Nunn down from Johannesburg, friends turned collaborators like Rafs Mayet sat on the floor and squeezed together onto couches. Activists from across the country spent the night and shared toast, eggs, and tea with Farzanah the following morning. Her “uncle” David—­Heather Hughes’s husband—­came to the flat after standing vigil at Durban City Hall with a placard condemning “Another death in Detention.” She took ballet lessons; Nasima read to her and then she herself learned to read. She liked Heidi, although the Alps were far away. Her bedroom had dinosaur posters and stickers taped to its walls: “I reject apartheid celebrations,” “free all detainees.” She was four, five, then six, then seven. People gathered in her flat to debate strategy, to plan events or rallies; Omar was “full of advice about how other people should do” whatever it was they were planning to do.118 For a time Farzanah wondered how to find the entrance to the “underground.” The way people talked, it had to be nearby.119 The police raided occasionally.120 It was part of the cycle of things. When they left, the music came back on, and when the flat grew too crowded or loud, Farzanah went upstairs to the Mayets’, where it was calmer and there was a TV.121 The responsibility for feeding all these animated mouths was usually Nasima’s. “My poor mom was literally feeding people constantly,” Farzanah remembers.122 This was common in activist circles: everyone was engaged in discussion, but when it came time to eat, women were still expected to provide.123 The Badshas were somewhat different, however, because everyone knew that the family’s relative financial security was because of Nasima. Her salary paid for their flat, their food

Figure 5.20. Farzanah Badsha, photograph by Omar Badsha, undated (early 1980s)

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and Farzanah’s nappies; her work subsidized the petrol that Omar used to drive to and from Inanda, the film he exposed while there, and the chemicals he used in his darkroom. She went back to work soon after having giving birth. Omar was the primary caregiver for a time, until Nasima’s salary allowed them to hire a proper nanny, Celestine Ngcobo.124 In our conversations, Omar gave credit where it was due: Nasima’s work gave him the freedom he needed to study Inanda, to think about the people who lived there and how best to represent what he had learned. He did not need to chase the news. Her success facilitated his.125 By the early eighties, Nasima was well established at the University of Natal Black Medical School, which remained one of the country’s most dynamic political spaces.126 There, she became interested in how students from severely underprivileged backgrounds adjusted to the rigors of a tertiary education—­an especially acute challenge in South Africa, three decades into Bantu Education.127 She mentored and befriended students and introduced them to her family. Omar told a young medical student named Zweli Mkhize that the martyred Steve Biko had lived next door to his room in the Alan Taylor residences.128 Cycles repeated. Omar introduced Mkhize and other medical students to Ela Gandhi, who recruited them to volunteer at the Phoenix clinic.129 Nasima had a demanding job; the struggle was not as central to her identity as it was for Omar. Yet she was an activist in her own right, and people sought her advice. Albertina Sisulu came to town in October 1981, for example, to attend a meeting of organizations that were boycotting the elections to the South African Indian Council, which were set for the following month. Walter was still in prison; Albertina had been in and out of detention and banning for decades. She spent the night in Overport, talking to Nasima well after Omar went to bed.130 Over the next two days, hundreds gathered to hear Sisulu, Nokukhanya Luthuli, and other activists condemn any participation in apartheid’s sham elections.131 Only 10 percent of eligible voters participated in the November 1981 SAIC elections, anticipating the boycotts to come.132 Women like Albertina Sisulu and Nokukhanya Luthuli had been and continued to be committed activists, yet women’s issues had not really penetrated to the core of oppositional politics.133 This began to change around the same time as the 1981 Anti-­SAIC campaign. While continuing to teach, mentor, and earn, Nasima was involved in the meetings that established the Natal Organization of Women, a nonracial feminist organization. August 9, 1981, was the twenty-­fifth anniversary of the Federation of South African Women’s march on the Union Buildings in Pretoria and NOW (not to be confused with its American contemporary with a similar name) organized to mark this event. Once she was old enough to attend school, Nasima kept Farzanah home each August 9 to commemorate.134 Back in 1956, the

police had turned Florence Mkhize back from Pretoria; in 1981, she worked as a seamstress in Grey Street while organizing around housing and education in Lamontville. She joined NOW; so did Dorothy Nyembe upon being released from prison and banned to Inanda in 1984. Omar photographed all of them as they met in community halls across the Durban metroplex. Sometimes Afrapix comrades kept him company while Nasima was at a meeting and Farzanah asleep at home, beers and passionate debate for entertainment.135 Afrapix, NOW, and Anti-­SAIC were all part of the expanding universe of the struggle.136 In 1983 and 1984, more photographers joined Afrapix—­like Chris Ledochowski, the son of Polish immigrants to Johannesburg, who had gotten “sidetracked” in the townships while completing his fine arts degree at the Michaelis School at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Ledochowski met Omar at McKenzie’s flat in Johannesburg. Omar was older, “a straight dude,” where he and Peter were a bit more twisted, but Omar had had interesting ideas and he made beautiful images, “up close and personal . . . in depth, in people’s homes, in the middle of everything.”137 Paul Grendon helped to open the Afrapix office in one of Cape Town’s few remaining mixed areas.138 Gille de Vlieg was older, closer to Omar’s age. Born Hemson, she was the younger

Figure 5.21. Farzanah Badsha and Omar Badsha, photograph by Tim Beserer, undated (early 1980s)

South Africa

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sister of David, Omar’s old comrade; she was a homemaker who volunteered with the Black Sash, a white women’s protest organization. Through the Sash she met young people associated with the Congress of South African Students, who encouraged her to use her position to the student movement’s advantage. She took photographs to document their conditions and their activism and discovered her passion for it.139 In Durban, Jeeva Rajgopaul administered Afrapix’s community education project, which taught shop stewards, students, and once a group of ministers to use cameras and print images. He ran classes over the weekend. On Saturday morning people had never used a camera; by sunset Sunday they were taking two prints of their own back to KwaMashu, or Umlazi, or Lamontville.140 Phakade Magwaza—­ known as “Pax”—­had grown up in the latter, which was both Durban’s oldest township and one of its most politicized. Florence Mkhize and Msizi Dube were Pax’s Jeevan Desai. They mentored him to resist state rent rises and local government elections. He loved theater and was entranced by the concept of the cultural struggle. Dube organized a boycott to pressure both the apartheid state and its Inkatha allies. Activists printed their slogan—­“asinamali”—­we have no money—­onto posters and T-shirts; Magwaza helped to produce a theatrical production of the same name that barnstormed the township, playing at community centers and churches.141 Dube was assassinated a year into the campaign; actors from Magwaza’s theater troupe died in the violence that followed, and Pax was mixed up in a group that sought retribution. He was arrested, charged with murder, and imprisoned. To his supporters, he was a hero; to others, one among too many South Africans responsible for the ongoing cycles of violence. He appealed his conviction and was released in 1986, pending its outcome; a year later it was denied, and he went back to prison. During his brief time outside, someone shared Omar’s work with him. He saw Msizi Dube’s familiar mustache emblazoned on protesters’ T-shirts and sought out the photographer. They met in the darkroom and talked about art. Omar gave him a camera and Pax started taking pictures of local performances and the people in his community. He too joined Afrapix.142 To join Afrapix was to commit to producing what the photo historian Darren Newbury deemed “powerful human documents,” images to be dispatched first to the Afrapix office in Johannesburg, then distributed to publications like Staffrider, political pamphlets, or, frequently, outlets overseas.143 As the decade progressed and South Africa consumed increasing international attention, their photographs were in high demand.144 The London based International Defense and Aid Fund frequently received Afrapix images, as did the ANC. As Patricia Hayes has documented, packages from the Johannesburg office went out weekly to the US, the UK, Scandinavia, elsewhere in Europe, and beyond: “At its peak, there were about

Figure 5.22. Omar Badsha running a film processing workshop for the Metal Workers

Union, Durban, photograph by Jeeva Rajgopaul, undated (mid-­1980s)

10 regular destinations for such weekly packages and a considerable flow of photographs into the Afrapix office to serve demand.”145 Some international outlets did not get what the photographers were trying to do. Aladdin Books in London requested color photographs, for example, of “villages . . . looking filthy to show the poor conditions . . . general shots of Soweto, again to show poor conditions, Black schools with no or poor equipment . . . white suburbs looking rich.”146 To a person, the collective resisted such entreaties and avoided reiterating “the stereotype of the black body in a state of abjection.”147 Theirs were not voyeuristic photographs. Using black-­and-­white film and favoring character studies, Afrapix cultivated a distinct aesthetic. Omar had witnessed how chemicals ate away at workers’ flesh and smelled how intestines reeked when breached and exposed to the light. There was no progress in trauma. His rules for photography were simple—­no starving children, no prone bodies, only people, erect, eyes forward. 8

He rarely hesitated to share his perspective. In 1981 Carnegie Corporation of New York announced that a UCT professor named Francis Wilson was going to lead a South Africa

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“Second Carnegie Commission on Poverty and Development in South Africa.” The director of the university’s Southern African Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU), Wilson was a development economist whose parents, Godfrey and Monica Wilson, had been among the very first social scientists to argue that urbanization, land scarcity, and migrant labor were fundamental to understanding South African society. Francis’s own work focused on the economics of migrant labor from the Eastern Cape to South Africa’s industrial centers. The grandson of missionaries, Wilson was a quintessential social-­gospel-­espousing, liberal academic who cared deeply about the plight of Black South Africans, while making his career at a famously segregated university.148 The first Carnegie Commission (1929–­32) had emphasized “poor whites”—­and the Afrikaner poor in particular—­to the exclusion of the African majority, thus providing a “blueprint” for apartheid (as Wilson) put it. In 1981, the country was still enduring the first Carnegie Commission’s effects.149 Wilson intended the second Carnegie Commission to be different; on the radio, he encouraged potential collaborators to contact SALDRU. Omar knew a bit about the history of the first commission. He knew more about the photographers who had gone to work for Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression and who had produced such seminal images in the process.150 He heard the interview and took up Wilson’s invitation, calling his SALDRU office, saying, “Hey man, you can’t have this bloody thing without photographers.” (Which is, word for word, exactly what Wilson remembers.)151 Wilson did not know Omar personally, although he had heard of him. The idea of producing something not only representative, but maybe even beautiful, was attractive enough to justify a meeting in a time and place when media—­photography, television, films, and documentaries—­was an ever-­more essential form of political communication.152 They came to an arrangement, the result of which was that from 1981 to 1984, Omar coordinated the Carnegie photography project while also shooting what became Imijondolo and collaborating with Afrapix (many of whose members participated). For his part, Omar ran with the opportunities that Carnegie presented, which included money (initially, a windfall of R20,000 to be shared among the photographers he recruited), connections to international institutions, and entirely new political and artistic vistas.153 One result was a massive conference held at UCT in April 1984, where researchers presented more than three hundred papers and twenty photographers exhibited their essays. It took intense editorial work—­photographers submitted around a thousand images, from which Omar selected 130.154 Omar initiated the project; he recruited the participants from the networks he himself had built by force of will and effort.155 To ensure its success, he prioritized aesthetic interest over

his own personal politics—­inviting David Goldblatt to participate, for example, because he was a great photographer, even though they did not see eye to eye about politics. Lesley Lawson submitted her work as well. Her participation was a coup; her essay on service workers carried a force of message that demanded viewers’ attention, dogma be damned.156 UCT was the belly of a certain beast—­the epitome of the white, liberal academy, the sort of institution Rick had tried to change and from which people of Omar’s background were excluded. It was satisfying to see his work acknowledged there, without having had to sacrifice his artistic principles. Reflecting on the project from the vantage of the later 1980s, Wilson and the former SASO activist and academic Mamphela Ramphele wrote that poverty in South Africa was unique because it was “a consequence of deliberate [social] policy, . . . reinforced by racist policies that are a direct assault on people’s humanity.”157 Wilson and Ramphele credited their collaborator Omar for most clearly asserting this. In the catalog that accompanied the exhibition, Omar explained that the images on display represented photographers’ contribution to and participation in “working class and popular resistance to apartheid.” “Many of the photographers in this exhibition are directly involved in . . . [the] popular upsurge” against the state, he wrote.158 Omar pushed to call the collection “the cordoned heart,” after a verse in Ingrid Jonker’s 1960 poem “The Child Who Was Shot Dead by Soldiers in Nyanga”: The child is not dead the child lifts his fists against his mother who shouts Africa! shouts the breath of freedom and the veld in the locations of the cordoned heart.159 Omar insisted on the poet, the verse, and the title. Before settling on Imijondolo, he had played with the idea of calling his study of Inanda “The Cordoned Heart: Inanda People’s Struggle.”160 Omar and Mafika Gwala shared a passion for both Jonker’s writing and her example. “She was our hero,” Omar remembered, “a true revolutionary.”161 In 1986, Carnegie published South Africa: The Cordoned Heart simultaneously in South Africa, the United States, and the UK, with Omar as editor. Jonker’s poem is about persistence in the face of multiple forms of violence. In the book, Omar placed it opposite Afrapix member Wendy Schwegmann’s photograph of students and their teacher in the shack that was their school. They were poor; they were also determined to learn and working hard at it. Theirs was the heart of South Africa’s humanity, its persistent beating center, a fragile heart sheltered by muscles that can tear, bones that break, vessels that can rupture or fail; canvas that can South Africa

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rip, wood that can rot, paper that can burn, metal that erodes and bleeds and drips. The door behind Schwegmann let in some light; the rest came from holes punched randomly in the structure’s battered metal walls. It looked like someone had fired a shotgun at their classroom. The state, its agents, its policies, and the poverty that resulted were the cordon, squeezing, threatening to choke out this precarious life. When Cordoned Heart came out, South Africa was two more years into a cycle of uprising, violence, and repression. The book revealed “the heavy burden of history.”162 Omar worked closely with Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor, two American photographers, curators, and designers associated with Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, to produce it. Introduced to Omar by a former student, the two spent much of 1985 with him, driving across South Africa, collecting negatives from photographers, making editorial decisions, printing. Harris did most of the latter alongside Omar, with whom he spent hours together in the darkroom. Sartor laid the volume out, with an eye on how text and image could be combined. Her intent was to produce a book that was almost “musical,” one that carried a tune from quiet intimacy—­a woman on the veld, carrying a chair over

Figure 5.23. “Classroom, Rooigrond,” photograph by Wendy Schwegmann, 1984, with

permission of the University of Cape Town Libraries and Wendy Schwegmann

her head, newly built outhouses in the middle ground, a shack to her right, otherwise nothing—­to the crescendo of political protest visible on both the book’s cover and in its essays.163 The Americans had not known very much about South Africa before they arrived in Cape Town. They found it terrifying, familiar, and farcical. Repeated difficulties finding hotels and restaurants that would accommodate both Omar and their (white) selves during drives across the country were familiar from their upbringing in the US South. Yet the country was also thrillingly hopeful. They thought that Omar and Weinberg “clearly loved each other” and that Afrapix was a family. Omar was among the older members; they remember him fretting about the younger ones, worrying that they were too reckless—­the same sort of care and anxious concern he had once felt for Rick. Most of all, Sartor and Harris were thrilled to be somewhere photography mattered. From their perspective, photographers “woke up every morning resolved to change their country” and were doing so.164 Omar wanted the book’s cover to bear what he called “a political image.”165 The group chose one of Omar’s: an iteration of what was becoming a classic trope in South African photography—­a political funeral, young people singing while bearing the coffins of fallen comrades on their shoulders. One wore a UDF T-shirt; the caption stated explicitly that this had been the funeral of ANC “soldiers” killed by the police in Natal. Omar took the photograph in KwaMashu, weeks after the original Carnegie Conference had concluded at UCT. Cordoned Heart was about the historical present, on its quest for the future; these were confrontational images, intended to force viewers to confess the sin of neutrality in the face of oppression, to see their own responsibility or complicity in that carried by the unbowed mourners. Cordoned Heart’s subjects were “photographed persons . . . looking out of the photographs and demanding something else,” as Ariella Azoulay might have put it.166 Cordoned Heart was the commission’s first and by far most widely circulated publication. Prints were hung in Johannesburg in March 1986, then toured across the country. But the primary audience was international. Fearing censorship, Harris and Sartor took a complete set of prints with them out of South Africa in late 1985. Omar eventually printed six copies of the entire exhibition, destined to tour overseas—­in the UK, in continental Europe, and in North America.167 The images toured American universities, civic centers, libraries, and local government offices for three years, a period during which the bulk of the American population and the US government finally succumbed to intense civil society pressure and began to act against apartheid.168 In June 1986, Goldblatt, Weinberg, Rajgopaul, and other photographers joined Wilson at the International Center for Photography (ICP) in New York to kick off the American tour. Curators hung bright red banners on the gallery’s four walls, South Africa

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Figure 5.24. “Funeral in KwaMashu of two ANC soldiers killed in clashes with the

police outside Stanger,” photograph by Omar Badsha, 1984

printed with text from the book. Farzanah and Nasima were there too. Omar was not, having been denied a passport for the fifth time since 1965.169 The fact that Farzanah was able to be there was significant. Eight in 1986, she had been denied her first passport when only eight months old. The Sunday Times Indian section reported on the family’s bureaucratic struggles in 1984. “She May Be the Youngest,” the headline read, above a picture of a braided Farzanah.170 Things had gotten so stuck that Ebrahim had commissioned new identity documents that read “Bassa,” not Badsha, so that he could attend printers trade shows abroad.171 In anticipation of The Cordoned Heart tour, Omar applied again early in 1986, with the UCT vice chancellor Dr. Stuart Saunders’s endorsement.172 He was denied, nevertheless. Weinberg and Rajgopaul kept him in the loop from New York, the latter assuring him that they had arranged the slide show to his specifications and that the script for the narration was coming along.173 His images were going to be exhibited in New York and elsewhere. His name was on the book’s cover; in his remarks, Alex Harris credited him for conceiving and facilitating the project and read a telegram to the crowd, relaying Omar’s sentiments.174 Farzanah bought a Walkman in New York—­the cutting-­edge symbol of cosmopolitan cool.175 It was amazing to be out in the world with her mom. Omar was happy about that. Friends and family assured him that his work, displayed in one of his discipline’s most revered temples,

was recognized and acknowledged. While the launch took place, Omar was busy, including making sure that exhibition opened successfully in Soweto.176 But being denied the opportunity to be there in person burned.177 Reviewers encountered the show as it left Ninety-­Fourth Street to wheel around North America. Their responses provided some comfort. The Christian Science Monitor saw it on the UCLA campus in Los Angeles. The captions—­mostly written by Wilson, with Omar and others’ input—­worked. “Many of the photos, in fact, appear benign—­until you find out the story behind them,” the reviewer reflected; the overall effect was “gut-­wrenching.” Viewers considered a photograph of women carrying firewood differently, upon learning that “people living in the Gopane district must walk an average of 14 miles a day to obtain fuel—­in a country that produces 60  percent of the entire continent’s electricity.” Other commentators were similarly struck both by Goldblatt’s Night Riders of KwaNdebele series, or Lawson’s Service Workers, both of which showed how apartheid turned quotidian activities—­commuting, working—­into spaces of extraordinary exploitation.178 The Washington Post brought the Amouti schoolteacher and her students face to face with newspaper readers half a world away.179 The exhibition was especially poignant for South Africans who experienced it. Cordoned Heart came to Philadelphia toward the end of its tour; it was installed at Haverford College, a mostly white Quaker college ensconced in wealthy Montgomery County. The Philadelphia Inquirer found Senti Thobejane, a student from Johannesburg, at the show. He had not been home since 1980. Seeing the photographs struck “a deep responsive chord.” He paused on Omar’s photograph from the cover. “It shows the burden of oppression,” Thobejane reflected, “as if they are carrying the whole struggle on their shoulders.” By 1988, the American press regularly highlighted South African violence and suffering. Thobejane was relieved—­he had expected something more sensationalistic. “The pictures are really striking,” he concluded. “They tell the whole story.”180 “Whole stories” do not really exist, of course. Every story is edited, and not every viewer agreed with Thobejane. Art critics were the most skeptical. Good photographs communicated on their own, a reviewer for the Los Angeles Times explained, while these images “depend[ed] upon words; catalogue text, labels, and photographers’ quotes enlarged on red banners.” She could not reconcile the photographs on display with what she had seen broadcast on TV. This was not the South Africa she knew, in other words; “a woman cleaning a huge table by crawling on it, in a photo by Lesley Lawson, could be working in a Manhattan board room . . . people sleeping during long commutes . . . could be traveling in an international array of cities.” Only the text made it clear that this was happening in South Africa. South Africa

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Absent words’ intervention, “we might imagine [these people] to be citizens of any of a dozen other countries—­including our own.” The reviewer left the exhibition confused—­although she did recommend picking up the book, the text of which was “clearly written [and] moving.”181 Although different, the critic’s and Thobejane’s responses clarified how Omar and Afrapix’s artistic and political inclinations articulated in the mid-­1980s. It was a matter of genre. Many critics accepted that good art could be “political”; they had studied Picasso, even if they had never heard of Dumile, or Badsha. But some critics insisted that “art” meant nuance, whereas text was didactic and sometimes worse. “The photographs, by themselves fairly conventional, are reduced to mere pawns in a larger game,” grumbled Andy Grundberg from the New York Times. He did not like the banners. One has the “impression that one has walked into a Soviet propaganda pavilion circa the 1920’s.”182 Grundberg thought that the images failed as art, while from the Afrapix photographers’ perspective—­and Omar’s—­it was the critics who failed to be human beings. Carefully chosen images and precisely worked captions established solidarity and prompted action. That was South Africa’s art. Genre conditioned what the Los Angeles Times critic expected to see from South Africa, and about which Thobejane was apprehensive. The demand for spectacle up to and including bloodshed was real. As Thobejane reflected, by the time Cordoned Heart went global, television broadcasts had a well-­established visual grammar for

Figure 5.25. “Office cleaner, Johannesburg,” photograph by Lesley Lawson, 1978, with

permission of the University of Cape Town Libraries and Lesley Lawson

presenting South Africa: helmeted police with batons; shock cannons; teargas; protesters with sticks, knobkerries; and tires, dripping petrol, hung around an unfortunate’s neck. South Africa bled and it led. Afrapix resisted this with a genre of its own invention, one born from the sort of research that Omar had conducted in Inanda, and rooted further back still, in the unions, where he had become convinced that resilience was a more compelling narrative than suffering. Spectacle was inimical to humanity. Trauma was met and overcome, replicating what he had achieved when he drew the sun smoldering over the Black Mother’s left shoulder and wrote a poem above her right. The critic could not recognize how, together, text and image were saying something that had a purpose beyond “art.”183 By the mid-­1980s, South Africans lived in a world so saturated with the political that intellectuals like the Black Consciousness veteran Njabulo Ndebele were already beginning to wonder whether it would ever be possible for art to be about anything else.184 Omar did not trouble himself with such concerns: he was apartheid’s child, as were they all, and an artful politics—­and a political art—­was still necessary to transcend that birthright. It mattered that Afrapix cultivated this genre; it mattered, too, that it was a nonracial organization, structured around photographers’ shared identification with the struggle, not any other social “fact.” A South Africa united in its diversity populated Cordoned Heart. All social categories were there, in struggle, from Indian lawyers to Coloured shack dwellers to Afrikaner poets to African mourners. All shared the same goal. The book’s index made this even more explicit. “Asians. See South African,” “Venda. See South African,” “Zulu. See South African,” up to and including “White. See South African.”185 These were Omar’s own politics, rooted in the party, the DSU, the unions. His project was collective, national, now international, and very, very personal. 9

Although he denied it in our conversations, saying that he was too busy to care, I think that Omar’s inability to travel freely stung more than he admits. How could it not? He had poured himself into the project and was denied the opportunity to bask in well-­deserved praise. The tone of the letters that reached him from New York suggested his friends worried that he was angry about it, and in the months that followed, colleagues worried that his displeasure seemed not to dissipate. “I have been worried for sometime about you,” Weinberg wrote after witnessing an Afrapix meeting that devolved into bitter argument. “I have felt that your anger and the fights you’ve gotten yourself into have been unnecessary.”186 Weinberg’s response depended on his own definition of “necessary,” of course, and Omar was bound to disagree. By 1986, Omar had reached the zenith of his influence within Afrapix and South Africa

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beyond—­he was a well-­established photographer, with a network that now encompassed supporters and fellow travelers around the world. He featured regularly in the press—­especially the Indian press, where the clarity of his refusal to collaborate with state structures cut through ongoing debates about Indians’ participation in apartheid. It had taken significant effort to get to this point, since first he imagined himself “at the helm of destiny” back in high school. Foszia Fisher (who became a psychoanalyst after leaving South Africa and was thus sensitive to such things) claims that she had seen a sometimes alienating “hunger” in Omar back in the mid-­ 1960s; meeting minutes from TUACC (Trade Union Advisory Coordinating Committee) to Afrapix certainly suggested he had carried that with him as he moved through the multifarious movement, and two decades later, colleagues in Afrapix were experiencing that as well.187 For his part, Omar willingly admits that he “never learned diplomacy.” When faced with threats, sometimes he hit back, and sometimes he hit first. In a crowded house, in a crowded neighborhood, where neighbors mocked him for Miriam’s mental illness, where teachers beat him without understanding how being dyslexic impacted his ability to learn by their rote example, when Chorta brought out his belt, or Ebrahim his fist, he learned to “become very aggressive” when it was necessary to “hold [his] space.”188 Writing in his diary back in the sixties, Omar could be scathingly self-­critical; there are relatively few instances of pride or self-­celebration. Yet when Ebrahim and he had a fight that culminated in violence in May 1967, Omar later reflected being both upset and proud that, as he put it, “I stood my house.”189 Now, an adult on the rise in art and struggle, he still prided himself on doing that. The ways in which he did so took some people—­and especially white people—­by surprise. Via photography and Afrapix, he entered self-­consciously deliberative (and liberal) spaces like universities and corporate offices, where a temper like his was judged disturbing. Decades later, David Goldblatt was still shaken by an incident in the mid-­1980s when Omar’s dispute with the editor of Leadership magazine devolved into a fistfight.190 Another publisher complained that Omar used “language of the most abusive kind [and] threats to assault and kill me,” recalling how Omar “lifted the heavy glass ashtray on my desk and threatened to hit me with it.”191 Omar shrugged at Goldblatt’s reaction.192 In South Africa, Goldblatts no longer lived in the ghetto. Badshas did. For all the talk of nonracialism and organizations that were like families, there was no alchemy to remove race from these interactions. Since first he had entered the art world, Omar had had to deal with whites with their own agendas, in which people like himself were bit players at best, or objects to be manipulated at worst. This was true with Adler Fielding and Walter Battiss; it was true with Johnny Copelyn; it took quite a leap of faith to think that it was not true with those whites

who professed total commitment, while holding onto their passports and access to the comforts that white skins could sometimes afford. Omar’s assessments were not always correct; he was hotheaded and could make mistakes. But he stood his house nevertheless. All the foregoing suggests that his temper was a conscious, logical response to his experiences. But anger is rarely logical. The twenty-­something Omar’s fixation on mothers and children suggested that he was working through emotions that he had a hard time expressing in words. Often the mere thought of his mother was enough to bring “tears to my eyes,” he admitted to his diary.193 There was a deep pool of sadness, loss, and longing that welled inside him, the pressure of which he released by generalizing his experiences, de-­emphasizing the particular by turning his mother and her children into birds. By the mid-­1980s, having mastered photography, he had also mastered the therapeutic practice of linking his own self so tightly to the national struggle that they were sometimes indistinguishable, in his own mind at least. Omar disassociated by associating. Which meant that when things did not go the way he wanted, when comrades chose what he thought was the wrong path, when groups split over ideology and strategy, he frequently took it personally.194 The irony is that, like Ebrahim, Omar was also capable of enormous acts of support and love, and adept at defusing and avoiding conflict. As Dumile had learned, the door to 7 Douglas Lane was always open; indeed, back during the interwar period and before their own financial situation worsened, the family had offered the house next door as a safe landing spot for immigrants newly arrived in Durban, offering food, a bed, and help to find work.195 Omar had inherited Ebrahim’s temper, and also his generosity. “That’s my big brother,” the trade unionist and poet Nisa Malenge enthused when remembering Omar’s during the 1980s. “He helped us in so many ways.” He welcomed Nunn, McKenzie, Magwaza, and so many others “to come to his home, to his darkroom anytime.” Nunn knew Omar’s bad side and he recognized and appreciated his good. “If I had come to him at some point and said, I’m desperate, I need 1000 rands, he would have just given it to me, and he would have figured out—­he didn’t really have it, but he would have given it to me,” generously and with no conditions attached.196 He could fight if pushed but he was also increasingly tired of outrunning violence. In 2019, when I asked whether he wished he had learned diplomacy, he answered yes without hesitation.197 And when the struggle grew increasingly brutal, at the height of his artistic powers, Omar did not print any images that condoned or celebrated violence. His archive abounds with them. There is the striking series of images that he captured at a Natal girls’ school, for example, in close with a group South Africa

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of protesting teens. There was graffiti on a wall behind them: white writing on dark brick, most likely with chalk taken from the classrooms. Umkhoto [sic] is the solution. Reactionary violence with revolutionary violence. Eye for an eye. Tooth for tooth. Umkhonto you are not alone. Viva [unclear].198 It is a beautiful image, which he opted not to share. He knew that violence was a fact in South African political life. He did not reject it; his work supported organizations committed to armed struggle. Yet the story he chose to tell did not include it. Perhaps this was a political choice, a conclusion come to after hard thinking, a pragmatic resolution to an issue that had bedeviled opposition to apartheid both within and outside of South Africa. Or perhaps, given that Omar had turned to photography at precisely the moment when violence most dramatically violated the circle of friends with whom he had worked and whom he had loved, he wanted to believe that with the camera, he could promote a different path. It was difficult to keep violence out of the frame in 1980s Natal, however. Inanda remained the center of his working life, where tensions built as 1984 turned to 1985. Inkatha-­allied shacklords commanded small armed groups to enforce their authority; they did not like Indians and they not like the press. On two occasions armed youths waylaid Omar and took him to a local potentate named Thomas Tshabalala. Omar was terrified. “Jesus, now I think to myself. This is it, man.” He managed to talk his way out and sped as quickly as he could back to Overport, nerves frayed.199 Fighting elsewhere reached a fever pitch during the first half of 1985, prompting the government to declare a state of emergency in the Eastern Cape and Pretoria-­ Johannesburg metroplex. Durban burst in early August, following yet another assassination, that of Victoria Mxenge, NOW activist, lawyer, social worker, and ANC stalwart, whose husband Griffiths had been killed four years earlier. Students affiliated with the UDF announced a school boycott to protest the killing; authorities in townships governed by Inkatha resisted. This time the clashes spread to Inanda.200 On August 5, the civil war came to the Laljeeth Rattan’s home in Amouti. He and his family escaped to Phoenix Township, along with hundreds of other fleeing families. Indian landowners were not the only targets. Dorothy Nyembe was restricted to Inanda in 1984. She, too, was targeted. By August 9—­­the twenty-­ninth anniversary of the march in Pretoria—­her home was destroyed, and she was sheltering alongside an estimated two thousand Indian residents in Phoenix Township’s community hall.201 Imijondolo was not Omar’s last word on Inanda. Shackdwellers from a nearby settlement took refuge in the same buildings where more than a decade before Omar and Rick Turner had run their work camps, where Shadrack Maphumulo

Figure 5.26. Untitled (1986 is the year of Umkhonto we Sizwe . . .), photograph by Omar Badsha, 1986

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Figure 5.27. “Victoria Mxenge, UDF leader, YMCA, Beatrice Street,” photograph by Omar Badsha, 1984

had talked about cooperative economic development, where Nasima had helped to facilitate medical clinics, where Omar had taken so many photographs.202 Early on the morning of August 10, Fatima Meer called Omar and bid him come to Phoenix. He arrived in time to witness heavily armed Indian youths marching from Phoenix Township. They threatened the shackdwellers, who responded in kind. Stones were thrown, fires lit. Within a few hours the Phoenix Settlement was burned and looted. The Gandhi family escaped with help from the South African Defence Force (SADF): a humiliating, bitter irony. That day marked the end of nearly a century of Indian and African cohabitation on the old sugar farms at Inanda. Three of Omar’s photographs illustrated the Sunday Times’ story about the events: Indian youth marching behind a menacing SADF troop transport; a civic association leader who had tried in vain to preempt the clash; and white soldiers, guns out, walking across the grass where Omar and Turner had camped, the buildings obscured by smoke and sunlight.203 By the time the situation calmed down, at least seventy people were dead, thousands displaced, and thousands more wounded.204 Afterward, Inkatha organized a so-­called peace rally to assert their side’s control; supporters spilled onto the dirt road, singing and banging knobkerries against cars, buildings, and fences. Omar was taking photographs when they turned on him.205 “I just mowed them down. I drove right through them, through this veld, got

Figure 5.28. Phoenix Settlement, Inanda, photograph by Omar Badsha, 1985

onto the bloody highway, came back into town and went into my darkroom.” Tshabalala had terrified him. This broke him. He sat in the dark, crying “fucking wits out” for more than an hour. It was not enough—­the anger, fear, and sorrow stayed with him; it was prone to surface, no matter how much space he put between himself and the violence.206 Years later he would conflate this day with another confrontation—­this time with the police, in a melee following Botha’s so-­called Rubicon speech at Durban City Hall. The latter took place on August 15; this rally was two days earlier. The effects of experience accumulated. He would never photograph in Inanda again.207 10

Omar tried to file the smoke deep into his memory with that which had blown over Grey Street in 1949. It was difficult to do. He was still a working photographer, which meant that covering events like the May Day rally a few months later, at which tens of thousands of Inkatha supporters celebrated the founding of their own Zulu nationalist trade union federation.208 Attendees carried a coffin on their shoulder, declaring that the recently formed Congress of South African Trade Unions “is dead.” Inanda shacklord Tshabalala paraded across the pitch, knobkerrie in hand; he looked Omar dead in the eye and shook him to his core. The next month, Cordoned Heart opened without him in New York and he turned forty-­one in Durban. In October, Omar, Nasima, and Farzanah welcomed a new Badsha, Leila, at the tail end of another violent month. She was lovely, and he was tired. South Africa

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When the chance came to put some distance between himself and Inanda, he took it. Carnegie had been talking with UCT about institutionalizing what had become an influential South African cultural medium. The plan was to establish a repository for photographic archives, to provide training for photographers, and to extend the discipline’s influence with publications, exhibitions, and symposia. Carnegie offered an initial three years of funding for a Centre for Documentary Photography (CDP) at UCT; the expectation was that it would become “a more permanent feature of the University,” Francis Wilson reported to his colleagues.209 Opening with the 1987 academic year, the CDP was run through SALDRU, with space and administrative support from the Centre for African Studies—­a poorly funded backwater in a very slowly transforming and still very Anglocentric institution. Omar was appointed director. A few archival sheets after Leila’s birth, Durban was a memory, replaced with Cape Town, bright sun illuminating the stoep of their first owned home, Farzanah posed on one side of the door, Nasima on the other, tiny Leila in a pram in between, a broom forgotten (or left on purpose, for symbolism’s sake?) on the steps. Durban had been hot and thick; Cape Town was windy, scouring. A change would clear the air. The Badshas lived in Wynberg, near the university, whites closer to the mountain, Coloureds and now others farther away. It was a significant transition. Omar had spent nearly every night of his life within a few miles of the Indian Ocean. So had his line of Badshas, for nearly a century. For the first time since working for the unions, he had a salary. Nasima had had many jobs, of course, and lived in places that were much farther from Durban than Cape Town. Yet the transition was in many ways harder for her. She had sunk roots deep into Durban. She loved her work and the network of families and activists who helped to share her load. They were all devastated. “I thought my world would fall apart,” Heather Hughes remembers.210 Nasima and Farzanah wept bitterly as they drove away.211 Cape Town was an adjustment. Farzanah lasted only briefly in Coloured schools in Wynberg before transferring to a formerly all-­white girls’ school called Michelfield. In Indian Durban, Farzanah had been middle class; a scholarship student at Michelfield, now she was poor. Most of her classmates came from conservative families and holidayed on the Garden Route. Her family was different.212 Farzanah spent most of her free time on the UCT campus where, soon enough, her mother began to thrive. Apartheid was cracking. Neighborhoods became gray zones, with people openly living together in ways that would have been unimaginable only a decade before. Under pressure to recant its racist history, UCT began to admit a small number of Black students. Nasima was hired in the Academic Support Program; she became one of the first administrators in South Africa tasked with serving Black students at historically white institutions.213 At the Medical

School she had learned that access was not enough; together with a skeleton staff, she developed new ways to assess and support students whose education has been so dramatically retarded by apartheid ideology, including new ways to assess working competency in the Anglocentric institution’s required English.214 It was a totally “analog” process, she remembers, her driving from school to school across greater Cape Town, carrying assessments in her bag. She still loved science, but at UCT she discovered a talent for making the bureaucracy move, and a new passion for transforming higher education.215 Omar had a harder time transitioning to campus life. The CDP was intended to be the institutional home for a dynamic and chaotic discipline. He had an ambitious agenda: a triennial magazine; a series of regional workshops to encourage photography outside of the major centers; an eight-­week course to train both UCT

Figure 5.29. Untitled (Cape Town), by Ebrahim Badsha, 1972, inscribed “To my darling

princesses Farzanah and Leila,” 1987

South Africa

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students “and advanced students from the various community arts / cultural projects” in the basics.216 He set up a darkroom on campus and invited Afrapix affiliates and photographers he met around town to come and re-­create the environment he had fostered in Durban. He called the country’s first national documentary photography conference and exhibition, set for July 1988. But bureaucracy was not his strong suit, and his mental state was fragile. He sought renewal elsewhere, in community organizations in Wynberg and the politics of the Western Cape UDF.217 Cultural politics was reaching its zenith. That year the ANC organized the Culture in Another South Africa conference in Amsterdam, seeking to capitalize and focus the disparate energies that had saturated South African political culture in the 1980s. Held over the course of two weeks in December, the meeting was crowned with a documentary photography exhibition featuring the work of nearly forty South African photographers, including Omar. Home Affairs turned down his application for a passport to attend. Regardless, the conference confirmed that “culture was a weapon of struggle,” as a widely circulated UDF slogan had it. The state thought so too. The Amsterdam meeting was a callback to Gaborone, where the Johannesburg artist-­in-­exile Thami Mnyele had been among its organizers. By 1987, he was two years dead, murdered by an SADF hit squad in his home in Botswana.218 Omar photographed Mzwakhe Mbuli numerous times over the course of the 1980s; the so-­called people’s poet administered the UDF’s “Interim Cultural Desk” in Johannesburg, where he sometimes controversially defined the terms of boycotts and anti-­apartheid culture, in between stints in prison.219 Culture was political and politics had consequences.220 Pax Magwaza wrote to Cape Town from prison in mid-­1987. His only comfort was that Omar and their colleagues were supporting his family. He pleaded with Omar to “keep the spirit moving.”221 Seeking to capitalize on the Amsterdam conference’s energies, Omar was one of a small core group of activists who organized a new organization called the Cultural Workers’ Congress (CWC) in early 1988. A club DJ named Mario Pissarra was then writing a thesis on political cartooning at UCT; he was named general secretary of a nonracial, nonsexist organization committed to the belief that “every act of struggle is an act of culture.” Defying a preemptive government ban, CWC activists reoccupied the rubble-­strewn, overgrown wasteland that had only recently been District Six—­where Omar had photographed Gomas not so many years ago—­ and constructed symbolic shelters from the detritus. The CWC “was a platform for artists to speak with one voice and stand together,” Omar—­the CWC chairperson—­ told a reporter.222 The irony was that despite registering at the founding meeting as “Omar Badsha, Photographer,” he was no longer making many pictures. Afrapix bookkeepers

knew this. The organization relied on annual tithing from its members in exchange for their affiliation—­typically 30 percent of their overall earnings. In 1988, the year of the CWC, Weinberg was the top earner, contributing R8,700 of a total near R40,000. Omar appeared not to contribute a single rand.223 Reputation was one thing; within the organization, he was a bit player, increasingly “on stage only once or twice a year” at annual general meetings, as Cedric Nunn put it.224 He remained intent on making sure that the organization remained consistent with his vision of an artists’ collective, committed to relating stories of national upheaval, resistance, and rebellion, which prompted conflict when Weinberg or any of the others disagreed. Cedric Nunn handled the books, answered the phones, dispatched the packages, and endured AGMs that became “very contentious occasions,” Omar and Weinberg locked into combat over a single point, Omar “persistent in getting the consensus that he wanted,” even if it took hours to get there.225 Nunn’s phrasing is instructive. No one doubted Omar’s commitment to the cause of big-­D Democracy in South Africa. He had a decades-­long resume. But things could get heated when he “stood his house” in more intimate settings.226 Afrapix had played its part in moving South Africa toward some sort of change. That a multiracial group of artists managed to work collectively in the collective tension of the 1980s was remarkable; their work helped make South African photography matter. But it was also a distressed organization, with inconsistent production and little money. The AGM that year was held in March in Durban. Several members—­ mostly white and Johannesburg based—­urged their comrades to consider how the organization could remain viable once the political situation had changed. “Paul felt that Afrapix can survive only because of the financial input of the agency,” a participant recorded; some members wanted Afrapix to become a more market-­ driven organization, envisioning an imminent future when it no longer made sense for “photographers, who do not fit in with our ideology [to] be excluded.” They proposed Afrapix’s transition away from the McKenzie model to become an organization that used “image value,” not politics, “as a criteria.”227 Omar was not alone in thinking that a mistake. Nunn agreed with his position that it was too soon to call the cultural struggle complete. But Omar was busy in Cape Town and only irregularly involved in conversations. The organization began to get away from him. “It seems your head is elsewhere,” Weinberg wrote in the wake of a dispute. He worried that Omar had “gone beyond organization,” beyond the collective commitment to produce images and tell stories and instead “pushed yourself into the national political arena” at the cost of the work that had made his reputation. “Afrapix has not seen a photograph of yours in two years,” he wrote in April 1988. Worried Omar might interpret that observation as an “attack,” Weinberg South Africa

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tried to be sensitive: “I feel like you’re under a lot of political pressure,” he suggested, and urged Omar to shift his focus back to “what people know you best for—­being a photographer.” And photographers needed to get a jump on the future—­the Cold War was ending; the ANC had embraced the multistage National Democratic Revolution, not an immediate socialist one.228 Photographers would need something other than the struggle on which to live.229 Weinberg was right: Omar’s head was elsewhere. The winter of 1988 was especially busy. He was one of a group of activists who were organizing to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s seventieth birthday on July 18, 1988, with a series of events: a road race, church services, a bell ringing. At the same time, the CDP was hosting its inaugural national documentary conference, with both exhibitions and papers on “people’s culture, the history of documentary photography in South Africa, the alternative press, repression and censorship.”230 Afrapix photographers descended on Cape Town for the conference. Omar was not able to join them. The police raided the Wynberg home early in the morning of July 8, seizing letters and documents

Figure 5.30. Omar Badsha and protesters at the University of Cape Town, unknown photographer (Eric Miller?), undated (late 1980s)

related to both the CWC and “Nelson’s Birthday.” Omar was taken to Victor Verster, sixty kilometers away in Paarl. Mandela was not yet associated with that prison—­ his last, to which he would be moved later that year—­but inside its walls, Omar found his comrades from the birthday committee, including the UDF’s Western Cape president, amidst a throng of lesser-­known activists.231 Mandela was outraged that people were detained merely for marking his birthday.232 Omar had been arrested on numerous occasions and occasionally held overnight; this time he was inside two weeks before the government relented.233 He found some ballpoint pens, a few sheets of paper, and a roll of grainy thin prison toilet tissue, and kept a diary, noting that the food was “cold” and that his back was bothering him. He sketched one of his fellow inmates, a wizened, bearded man. He planned out sessions for an upcoming CWC meeting. “The emergence of slogans and the concept of people’s education—­people’s courts—­people’s power” indicates that “we are experiencing the emergence of . . . people’s culture,” he wrote. But “people’s culture” needed further refinement in order not to produce “empty slogans, but . . . the embodyment [sic] of the desire of our people to intervene and to change their personal and the conditions of the oppressed people as a whole.” The people were “calling for a major shift in the thinking in our society.” Some people’s desire to turn the page on the struggle was irrelevant by comparison.234 The move to Cape Town had not been easy on Omar and Nasima’s marriage. The tension he carried with him burst with regularity; he was angry and irritable; they both sank themselves into work and spent less and less time together. Omar’s imprisonment provided an opportunity to recommit themselves, via their shared political commitment.235 Nasima was the defiant partner, telling a reporter from the Associated Press that the CDP conference would go on in his absence.236 His arrest reaffirmed that they were part of something bigger than their relationship; “the phone and the door-­bell have not stopped ringing,” she wrote to him.237 Cedric Nunn was staying over; that was comforting. Their community was outraged. Dullah Omar, the UDF lawyer who was widely considered to be Mandela’s spokesman, offered his support. “Be proud of him,” the other Omar urged; “we are also proud of you.”238 The conference “went off very well,” she assured him, although the attendees were “indignant” that he had been arrested.239 All gave Omar the same reassurance that he had offered to people like Pax: keep the faith. The future will be worth it. In prison, Omar was often alone with thoughts. At one point he began to draft a sequel to the “letter” he had written to Farzanah almost exactly a decade before, this time addressing “Dear Leila.” Somewhat unexpectedly, he found himself thinking about growing up on Douglas Lane and began to write about it, suddenly desiring that his children “understand me better.” But he quickly abandoned the idea and South Africa

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drew a thick line through the words. Introspection was aborted; instead, he used his toilet paper to address an audience that went far beyond his daughters, pivoting to the more comfortable polemical mode.240 The government is bent on “terrorizing and exploiting [all of] our people,” he advised his infant daughter, yet “there are millions of people who have opposed the regime and will continue to do so.” These were his fellow prisoners—­other fathers who missed their children, “young comrades” who had sacrificed the chance to have families for the struggle. He believed “that by the time you grow up the horror of apartheid will be swept away.” Douglas Lane mattered much less than that.241 Omar was released a few days later; he brought his toilet paper archive with him back to Wynberg. His imprisonment seems to have confirmed the faith of his decades, that his own self and the struggle were linked. Rivals were less sanguine. Being arrested “was Omar’s ticket to martyrdom,” an Afrapix colleague bitingly commented. He became even more strident and insistent than before, even quicker to name-­drop his connections.242 The CDP conference had served as an unofficial midyear AGM. Although Nasima reported that members supported Omar and his family, between his outside commitments and his failure to contribute to Afrapix’s coffers, more colleagues were coming around to the position that they might be better off without him.243 Time passed; the work continued. Soviet and American negotiators engaged South Africa, Cuba, and Angola in talks about Namibia. In January 1989, Botha had a stroke and was forced to cede power. After a brief struggle between reformers and hard liners, the pragmatic and reform-­minded (and well-­established racist) F. W. de Klerk assumed the state presidency. The next AGM was in Cape Town in April 1989. It was immediately acrimonious. Many members wanted to consolidate the move toward professionalization with a new constitution that redefined the terms of membership, participation, and output. Omar was opposed and berated his antagonists for thinking about themselves, not a society in revolt. “We need to look at [how to] make ourselves more accountable to the mass democratic movement,” he insisted, not plan how to make money. People had grown tired of this routine, however, and pivoted the conversation away from the constitution and toward the question of Omar’s future in Afrapix. He stormed out of the meeting in protest. In his absence, his colleagues—­many of whom had once been his close friends—­voted to expel him. The vote was unanimous.244 Omar was enraged. He hired a well-­connected law firm and threatened to sue.245 He appealed to the UDF cultural desk and Mbuli offered to facilitate a rapprochement. No one from Afrapix responded.246 Dullah Omar registered his unhappiness as well; this slight against a well-­known comrade would be remembered. Rumors

reached Weinberg that Omar had shared his side of the story with Dumile’s old friend, the poet Wally Serote, who was highly placed in the exiled-­ANC’s Department of Arts and Culture. Weinberg had known Serote for a long time; he considered himself part of the poet’s network. But he found himself frozen out in certain struggle circles and he was sure he knew why.247 Nasima had befriended many of Omar’s colleagues over the years, hosting and serving as a surrogate sister for people like Nunn, with whom she immediately cut off contact. In time, Nunn and Omar reconciled; he reckons that Nasima never forgave him, her own issues with Omar aside.248 The positions that led to Omar’s expulsion were consistent with the political faith that had motivated his behavior and determined his choices since the 1960s. His behavior—­his temper and his stubbornness—­was consistent as well, and this time he paid for it with being cast out from a once-­beloved community. Yet it is worth noting that, in 2018, Omar introduced me to Chris Ledochowski, who today lives nearby in Cape Town, where he shared his memory of events with me.249 Despite the rift, they remain friends. Omar never sued. In his archive are jotted-­down notes imagining what he wanted from the organization, including an apology and a reinstatement, a board of trustees that would make Afrapix accountable to broader South African society, the ability to define and limit membership by politics, not profit. But he was also busy doing so many other things, and nothing came of it.250 The pending transition did open new possibilities for expression. Led by Weinberg, Afrapix published a documentary photography magazine that was explicit about covering South Africa beyond the struggle; Patricia Hayes argues that its title—­Full Frame—­was “quite deliberate.”251 Full Frame published well-­curated images carefully displayed and professionally printed. Some of the work was familiar in its oeuvre, such as the recently released Pax Magwaza’s intimate portraits of his neighbors in Lamontville. Full Frame also included what could have been considered war photography from the subcontinent’s conflict zones, work that was bloodier than anything Afrapix had shown before.252 But the magazine also fulfilled its creators’ stated desire to tell different South African stories, including David Goldblatt’s elegant architectural studies and a series of images that a Cape Town leather shop owner and ex-­fighter named Billy Monk had taken of mostly white revelers at a fairly sketchy club called Catacombs back in the seventies.253 The pictures were as rich in character and personality (if a bit skankier) as anything the more sober Omar Badsha produced. It was unimaginable that he would have let them go out under the Afrapix imprint, but he no longer had a say. He did still have his eye, which even his former comrades admitted. Full Frame only lasted for three issues before it was absorbed into the alternative weekly Vrye Weekblad. Its final issue included Billy Monk’s portraits and, a few pages later—­after South Africa

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an advertisement or two—­selections from Omar’s Imperial Ghetto project, reproduced for the first time. “Badsha explored from his Muslim Indian background the different culture, religions and rituals that made up life in Grey Street,” the editors explained.254 Such language was a long way from “Asian. See South African.” The images Omar published in Full Frame were familiar, personal, closely observed, yet fit uncomfortably in the space that “cultural work” left open. They were more Goldblattesque than they were explicitly political; when they came out in 1991, it suggested that even Omar was willing to concede that different stories could finally be told.255 Predictably, some photographers profited from the transition more than others. Some white Afrapix veterans founded a commercial agency called Southlight, which lasted for a few years.256 Cedric Nunn was not invited to join. Nunn had been Afrapix’s member administrator. When the music that defined the struggle stopped playing, Nunn—­the poor kid from the rural area—­was left without a chair. It fell to him to close shop, deal with the office and the furniture, and literally to turn out the lights. He took it hard. It was “like a divorce for me”; he had spent “ten years of my life building this organization, and [now, in 1992] I was . . . out.” Tired and embittered, he yearned to go back to rural Natal, to “plant vegetables with my dad, . . . to dig furrows, . . . and just rest until I healed.” It was not to be. The family’s shop was in economic trouble and while the country haltingly found its way toward democracy, he found himself back at the till, keeping the books, watching the numbers rise, and more often fall.257 11

Afrapix died in a different South Africa. Back in 1989, Omar was still embroiled in the old one, demanding reinstatement, organizing events with the CWC, attending to his responsibilities on campus, a task made that much more difficult by the chasm that had grown between himself and his former comrades. Apartheid was weaker, wounded, dangerous. The new president demanded credit for very limited reforms. The Berlin Wall fell, and the supposed Soviet threat receded further. In December, Mandela and de Klerk met at the president’s offices in Cape Town, although it was not widely publicized. That same month brought a personal portent of reform: Omar’s application for a passport was approved. He had been trying for nearly a quarter century, during which time he had flown only a handful of times—­from Durban to Johannesburg, to Cape Town on assignment, back to Johannesburg, down to the coast. As the eighties grasped for their end, Omar presented his freshly minted documents at D. F. Malan International Airport and boarded a plane to London. He slept fitfully as the jet beat north. The dawn broke over North Africa. In a few months he would be forty-­five. It was the first night he had ever spent outside of the country.258

Chapter 6 MILLENNIUM

1990s–­2 020s

It is seedtime in Soweto What went round has come around This time the plants will grow and bear fruit to raise up more seed There’ll be a refreshing persistence of the wits Because this time There’ll be no more lullabies —­Mafika Gwala, “No More Lullabies”

1 ARRIVING IN LONDON IN 1968, Dumile fell in with the community of artists and

others who were reliant on support from the African National Congress (ANC) and its local allies. It is unclear whether he ever crossed paths with Nasima or with her cousin Ismail. He was focused on his exhibitions at the Grosvenor Gallery, which he hoped would lead to bigger things. He lived with Louis Maqhubela, another exiled South African who had won Adler Fielding’s Artists of Fame and Promise prize; they shared Denis Goldberg’s flat while the Rivonia trialist served a life sentence in Pretoria. Dumile would occasionally call Douglas Lane and wake up Ebrahim, sometimes at one or two in the morning. “He would be at somebody’s party and he would use their phone,” Omar recalls. Ebrahim and Dumile would chat; Dumile

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was often drunk and never left a number. He and Omar spoke only a handful of times in the decades after midyear 1968.1 Abroad, Dumile continued to weave stories about his past, experimenting with new backstories, new birthdates, new explanations for who he was and where he had gotten his ideas. “Dumile was always drawing,” Maqhubela remembered. “At times he asked for cigarette boxes from passersby, on which he would sketch.” He sold work and spent the money. When he had nowhere else to go, “he went to live at the ANC offices”; within a year after his arrival, Bill Ainslie visited and found Dumile “badly disoriented.” By the early 1970s, old friends had joined him in exile, including Wally Serote, with whom Dumile had come up on the 1960s Johannesburg arts scene. Dumile’s attention wandered. At the end of the 1970s, while Omar settled into family life in Overport and turned to photography, Dumile decided to re-­create himself as a filmmaker. He relocated to Los Angeles. Shortly thereafter he moved again, this time to New York.2 There he resumed his London patterns, moving from place to place, sometimes homeless, drinking too much, always drawing, planning. He relied on support from the local ANC. Moeletsi Mbeki, Govan’s second son, was based in New York; Barbara Masekela from Alexandra Township was teaching literature nearby at Rutgers University. Her father had been one of the first Black South Africans to build a reputation in the visual arts, a decade before Dumile had arrived on the scene. She met Dumile at Moeletsi’s place and was thrilled to learn that he “loved my father’s work.” They spoke Afrikaans together. She worried about him. He “was often drunk.” Barbara’s older brother Hugh met Dumile around the same time, when he visited his doctor, a Swazi emigrant named Cyril Khanyile. Dumile was living at Khanyile’s apartment overlooking Central Park, where he shared a room with the photographer Ernest Cole, another South African artist far from home, struggling both to create and to live.3 Hugh Masekela had had his own struggles with alcohol and other drugs; he was aware of how creativity, when combined with exile and trauma, could yield both inspiration and desperation.4 He sought Dumile out whenever he passed through New York, a period in which Masekela was increasingly in demand as a performer on the global anti-­apartheid circuit. “When I had a financial windfall, I asked Dumile whether he would mind living across the bridge, in New Jersey. I found a place in Union City.” There were big windows that looked out over the Hudson; there was good light.5 Dumile soon found his way back to the city, however, where he struggled with sickness and homelessness, beating a peripatetic path through artists’ colonies in the East Village, SOHO, and farther afield. Friends who knew him then treasure photographs that show that he retained his characteristic

charisma—­on occasion, Dumile glowed at the center of a boisterous group, bodies tumbled all over each other, just like back in Parktown or on Douglas Lane.6 At some point he lived in an unheated apartment that he sublet to three other people to make the rent. He contributed to a mural celebrating “revolutionary leaders,” commissioned by the leftist Pathfinder Press. Dumile painted Mandela. Right-­wing anti-­communist zealots defaced the mural only a week later, spurred on by the conservative New York Post’s calls for its removal. Dumile was overweight. He had diabetes; his eyes were bad.7 Omar flew from London to New York in the middle of January 1990. The British capital had been a whirlwind. He met up with cousins he had not seen in decades and rang in the new decade at an ANC party. Everyone was there: Mac Maharaj, from Newcastle, who knew Omar’s older sister and had urged Omar to recruit union members for the underground, shortly before leaving the country back in 1977; Moeletsi’s older brother, Thabo, who was in conversation with National Party leaders about where South Africa went from here; Wally Serote, with whom Omar would spend much of the next week discussing the ANC’s cultural policy. Those talks were not easy. “He is very manipulative,” Omar worried. “He does not understand issues at home.” The ANC was preparing to come back to South Africa, but the exiles seemed uninterested in coordinating with activists and organizations who had sustained the democratic movement in their absence. Omar was distressed that Cape Town and the Cultural Workers’ Congress (CWC) were an afterthought, if that. The meetings were “very tense.”8 He misplaced his passport the morning he was supposed to fly to the US. He panicked, frantically tearing through his hosts’ flat. Omar’s American connections had been pressuring the authorities to issue him a passport for years. He had met Nan Wells, the director of Princeton University’s Office of Governmental Affairs, when she came to South Africa with a group of Carnegie officials. Wells invited Omar to visit Princeton and Washington, where she lived and lobbied.9 The minister of home affairs had relented; it would be a terrible irony if he lost his hard-­won documents on the eve of his visit to the United States. Thankfully, the passport turned up in that random way that lost things reappear in the nick of time. On January 15, 1990, he flew into JFK. Arriving at night, seeing the lights loom up after hours of inky Atlantic darkness was “the most spectacular sight.” His disembarked and entered the confusion of voices, taxis, steam, exhaust, and the slog onward to Manhattan. New York was the coldest place he had ever been.10 Within days, he had reconnected with Dumile for the first time in two decades. He made a series of images in the room that served as both Dumile’s kitchen and his studio, cleaning supplies and food piled on the counters, drawings Millennium

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tacked to the walls and the door. By 1990, Omar looked his age. His hair was turning gray, he wore glasses, sometimes just a mustache instead of the goatee or the activist’s thick beard. Dumile wore his hair and his small, thin beard in locks. The exile squatted on a stool while they talked, occasionally walking to a window to look over the building’s fire escape. They were a few stories up. Dumile wore a loose, long-­sleeve shirt, which did little to hide his weight, and black dress shoes. He was wearing shorts, even though it was January. It was the outfit of someone who had not been getting out much. He greeted Omar at the apartment’s door: “Hey Mol’,” he said. “Mol’, we survived, we survived. We’re alive.” Here they were, breathing the same air again.11 For all the stress that his life in South Africa had entailed, it was clear that Omar was in many ways better preserved than his old friend, although Dumile was in high spirits, talking of exhibitions and projects. He had converted to Islam in the past couple of years and insisted that they go out to a local halal restaurant. Omar was amused that his obviously sodden friend was so passionate about Islam’s

Figure 6.1. Dumile Feni in New York, photograph by Omar Badsha, 1990

dietary restrictions, while also producing work that verged on pornography. They talked about art and South Africa and New York; Dumile told Omar about Ernest Cole, who was dying from cancer and hospitalized in Manhattan. They made plans to visit him when Omar came back through town on his way home. They parted. Dumile went back to his apartment to draw and Omar resumed his life at the intersection of art and politics, meeting with Cornell Capa from the ICP and with locals involved in anti-­apartheid politics, then jetting off for North Carolina to see Alex Harris, to California to meet with students and artists in Los Angeles and San Francisco, eventually to Washington to brief Congress. In South Africa, Omar “holds a position in ways comparable to Roy Stryker’s with the Farm Security Association in 1930’s America,” Nan Wells wrote to her congressional contacts, analogizing Omar’s role to a time when documentary photography had been similarly important in the United States. “He has helped black South Africans to document their own history, a history that might be lost without his efforts.” She invited congresspeople and their aides to join Omar for a breakfast in the Rayburn congressional office building.12 That event took place on February 13, 1990, by which point a good deal had changed. Omar was in San Francisco on February 2, when de Klerk announced that the liberation movements would be unbanned. Cape Town was ten hours ahead of the American West Coast. By the time the small gathering to welcome Omar to the Bay Area kicked off, “it had become a media event—­two TV units came and recorded scenes of us singing.” South African students from nearby universities joined the festivities; “black and white South Africans and some American anti-­apartheid activists” celebrating together.13 A week later he was preparing for his meetings in Washington when the Mandelas walked out of Viktor Verster. He sat vigil in front of the TV, alone, “tears in my eyes in this darkened room,” curtains drawn against North America’s midwinter light. He called Nasima. She and the girls had been part of the crowd who had waited all day for Mandela to be driven from Paarl to Cape Town’s Grand Parade.14 Things had turned unruly—­people were hungry and some helped themselves to food from kiosks, prompting the police to push back against what they perceived as looting. Nasima took the girls back home and they, too, watched Mandela’s first public speech since 1964 on TV. “It was quite dramatic,” Omar reminisced. “I was so happy, the thought of not being there did not [even] matter to me.” He laughed—­“even as a photographer I didn’t think about it.”15 Thankfully, his former colleagues did. Chris Ledochowski and Omar were still on the outs on February 11, 1990, when Ledochowski found a spot just below Cape Town City Hall’s imposing facade. Amidst the crowds and the joy, he captured an iconic moment: Mandela in a portico opening, forceful and commanding, chopping the air with his right hand while he spoke, trade unionist Cyril Ramaphosa Millennium

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holding the wired microphone just beyond his parted lips, the great, gray-­haired husband Walter Sisulu among a throng that hung to every surface and every word. The assembled crowd, perfectly balanced with tension and energy; in that moment, Ledochowski was a Da Vinci, a Carravagio, a Botticelli—­only this was not myth, but History. Even now it gives me chills, when I look up from the monitor on which these words appear, to take in the print above my desk. It was morning in Washington when the future finally arrived back at home. Exile would soon be over. Omar spent one more week in the United States. Back in New York, he and Dumile talked about staging an exhibition to welcome the latter back. Cornell Capa introduced Omar to a wealthy American who was interested in South African art; Omar introduced him to Dumile. He was pleased to facilitate a sale—­$1,000—­not much, but not nothing—­although he suspected Dumile would fritter it away rather quickly. Omar and Dumile visited Ernest Cole in the hospital. He looked like one of Dumile’s drawings. “He was in his bed covered with a sheet and we could see every bloody bone in his body.” Dumile introduced them—­“Here is that photographer I told you about.” Cole’s body was dying, but his “face . . . was absolutely alert.” His eyes crinkled in recognition. “Oh yes, yes, yes, Dumile talks about you all the time.”16 Ernest Cole would not make it home. He died on February  18, 1990. Omar and Dumile called Cole’s mother in Mamelodi to extend their condolences; months later, Omar contacted her again to ask for permission to name a documentary photography bursary after her pioneering son. She granted it and wrote hopefully, asking whether Omar might help Ernest’s niece, twenty-­two, who was “interested in doing journalism with photography  .  .  . [to] follow her uncle’s steps.”17 Omar was back in South Africa by that point, catching up with the future that had started without him. He kept in touch with Dumile. The exhibition they had planned opened at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in July 1991; in October, it moved to Wits, where Dumile was to come and speak. But like Ernest Cole, Dumile Feni never made it home. That same month, he suffered a massive heart attack and died while shopping for records in Manhattan, only days before he was supposed to travel. He was fifty-­one, or maybe forty-­eight, or maybe neither.18 2

In 1990 Omar joined the ANC. He was appointed to the provincial executive committee. His primary focus was on the fate of the cultural struggle that he and many others thought had been so instrumental in getting the regime to blink. By February 1990, debates about the shape of post-­apartheid South African art were heated and complex. There were many parties and interests: the Cultural Desk, in Johannesburg

(whose critics thus referred to it derisively as the Transvaal Cultural Desk), which rivaled Omar’s CWC (derisively, the Cape Cultural Workers Congress). Representing the desk, Mzwakhe Mbuli had come to Omar’s defense after his expulsion from Afrapix, while at other times Omar resented how Mbuli claimed the right to dictate the terms of cultural affairs. The desk comprised numerous organizations, such as the Congress of South African Writers and the South African Musicians’ Alliance, but from the CWC’s perspective, it was too Johannesburg-­focused to be truly national. A “single, centralized, non-­democratically constituted organization” was not what many cultural workers wanted, Kenneth Grundy explains, and the CWC instead advocated for a regional structure, linking communities by locale, not practice.19 The unbanned ANC’s Department of Arts and Culture wielded enormous clout and was expected to provide guidance. Yet it, too, was divided. In February 1990, it was led by Barbara Masekela, who returned to South Africa from New York. Serote was her deputy. The ANC presented itself as the government in waiting, which meant that it needed to both keep the masses on its side while also assuaging the white business and cultural elite’s anxieties. This was not easily done. The first cracks in what might have been a united front came in 1989, about the cultural boycott. Before returning to South Africa, the DAC suggested that the cultural boycott evolve to allow certain “cultural workers, artists, sportspersons or academics [to] be permitted to travel to South Africa to perform . . . in those instances where such travel is clearly in furtherance of the national democratic struggle or any of its objectives.”20 Both Omar and Mbuli strenuously disagreed, insisting that South Africa remained an abnormal society and that any revision was premature.21 This position had only begun to be digested within South Africa when another paper created an even bigger splash—­Preparing Ourselves for Freedom, ANC executive committee member Albie Sachs’s plea for South African culture to turn the page on the cultural struggle. Sachs’s essay circulated widely in exile circles in 1989; the Weekly Mail published an excerpt on February 2, 1990, the same day de  Klerk announced the unbannings. Sachs appreciated what “cultural workers” had achieved in the last decade but contended that it was time to move on from the concept, arguing that it was censorious to use political standards to determine the value of art. Any insistence on correct thinking, correct behavior, and correct creating was dangerous and fundamentally antidemocratic, Sachs argued. The time for censorship had passed: “What are we fighting for,” he asked, “if not the right to express our humanity in all its forms,” not only the righteousness of the struggle, but “our sense of fun and our capacity for love and tenderness and our appreciation of the beauty of the world.” Somewhat cheekily, he proposed that artists ought to Millennium

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ban themselves “from saying that culture is a weapon of struggle” for at least “five years.”22 For some cultural workers, Sachs’s paper came as a relief; this was the sort of evolution that people like Weinberg had anticipated. Others were wary, including Omar, who insisted that Sachs was moving too hastily to abandon what the cultural struggle had achieved. “As far as I am concerned, nothing has changed,” Omar told an interviewer while still in New York.23 Yet as 1990 progressed, momentum was with the thaw.24 Soon after returning to the country, Barbara Masekela visited with the (white) organizers of the (white) National Arts Festival in Grahamstown—­an institution the author Nadine Gordimer once described as the “English equivalent of the [Afrikaner nationalist] Voortrekker Monument.” Indeed, in the name of being “apolitical,” the festival’s organizers had forbidden the Black Sash from protesting on its grounds as recently as 1989. Many activists were apoplectic that the ANC was talking with unreconstructed, formerly white-­dominated institutions—­whether in Grahamstown, the National Gallery in Cape Town, or the government-­run Performing Arts Councils, which continued to dictate what appeared in state-­financed venues across the country. What kind of liberation was this? Yet with the ANC’s ascendance, other points of view were crowded out. Even Omar made his peace with Grahamstown, liaising with representatives there to facilitate Dumile’s 1991 exhibition.25 However opposed he was to “exchanging radical hopes for a process of normalization,” as the literary scholar Anthony O’Brien later put it, Omar also recognized that the ANC was a new, powerful force, and he signaled his loyalty.26 He proposed a new project covering “the reestablishment of the ANC within the country,” and pledged all royalties “to the movement.”27 He never completed that project, but he did get access: his archive abounds with images of Omar meeting with ANC leaders and photos he took at the organization’s meetings. In Durban in 1991, Omar had a clear view of the wide table at which sat three future South African presidents—­ Mbeki, Zuma, and Ramaphosa, along with Chris Hani, Joe Slovo, and others. None are looking in the same direction, or seem particularly happy to be there. The access was nice, but he still worried that the ANC saw culture only as a means “to stimulate excitement amongst the people,” rather than a precious, precarious space that needed “to be open to all,” as the Freedom Charter had promised.28 Barbara Masekela was increasingly drawn into Mandela’s orbit, leaving Serote in charge of the DAC, which called a national convention to coordinate cultural workers. The inelegantly named National Interim Cultural Coordinating Committee (NICCC) resulted. Omar served as treasurer and, at first blush, the NICCC’s politics reflected his own. The organization celebrated “art as an instrument of struggle” and argued that it was not enough to advocate for Black participation and representation in institutions

Figure 6.2. ANC national conference, Durban, photograph by Omar Badsha, 1991

like the National Arts Festival; rather, practitioners ought “to systematically question the value system that we have inherited from centuries of racism.”29 Although the DAC had endorsed the NICCC, under Omar’s leadership the new structure did not endorse the party’s reformist vision. We need to maintain our own networks and contacts, Omar mused in late 1990, our own “democratic structures,” to reach beyond the movement and state elite to embrace other, smaller political organizations and cultural formations.30 Still, he invited Mandela to give the keynote lecture when the NICCC launched a new national cultural federation in December 1990. That address never happened, nor did the NICCC survive the year, its initial momentum petering out after a few months. Omar met with the Grahamstown organizing committee and the curators of the South African National Gallery; he met with the banks that underwrote artistic productions and even with representatives from the white municipality-­administered Performing Arts Councils.31 NICCC representatives were stubborn and insistent on farther-­reaching change; the white representatives on the other side were noncommittal. Brooks Spector was an American Foreign Service officer, assigned to information services and cultural affairs in Pretoria; he and Omar met when the latter came to town on NICCC business. Spector was an eager proponent of reform and normalization. He remembers a dinner after which he and Omar debated late into the night, the latter refusing to countenance a transition away from revolution and into liberal norms. When the DAC subsequently withdrew its endorsement of the NICCC, Spector was not surprised: Millennium

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Figure 6.3. ANC national conference, Durban, photograph by Omar Badsha, 1991

stridency was giving way to compromise. By January 1991, the NICCC had faded away. Spector next encountered Omar at the helm of a totally new organization, the Federation of South African Cultural Organisations (FOSACO), which purported to pick up where the NICCC had left off.32 Spector did not know who had asked Omar to organize FOSACO, nor which “cultural organization” he represented. When he joined the CWC in the late eighties, Omar had registered as a representative of the Centre for Documentary Photography (CDP) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), not of Afrapix or any other organization. When he assumed the leadership of a federation of “organizations” in 1991, Omar was no longer a member of any cultural organization and his position at UCT was precarious.33 The unraveling there started with a seemingly minor incident: in early November 1990, he was invited to a reception to celebrate the retirement of a white African Studies administrator. He knew that a Black staff member was retiring as well, and he protested that they were not being celebrated at the same time. “I just lost it,” Omar recalls. “I walked right into the middle of the circle and I stopped the show.” Perhaps it was not really about the retirements; perhaps it was the frustration of many months spent knocking on the doors of white institutions that had supported apartheid—­whether tacitly or explicitly—­and that did not seem to be in any hurry to recant. Only a few months into the supposedly “new” South Africa, he had tired of what he perceived to be white South Africans’ intransigence. Perhaps all his

frustration about what had happened with Afrapix surfaced at the wrong moment. For whatever reason, Omar broke. He raised his voice and made a scene, in a place not used to such bald politics.34 The mostly white attendees were appalled. They complained to the university authorities, explaining that there had been a separate event to celebrate the Black staff member the previous week. Omar’s concerns were not assuaged. “For the record I have and will continue to register my protest at the insensitivity” of the faculty for having “a separate function for a black member of staff,” he wrote to Nigel Worden, a historian who chaired African Studies. Separate events smacked of apartheid, in the supposedly “new” South Africa. He recognized that liberal whites were sensitive to being accused of racism. But the mistake was theirs. “In the situation that we black people live, . . . this type of situation can easily lead to the charge of racism being leveled against people.” The whites called Omar’s language slanderous; he retorted that it was appropriate and proportional.35 Witnesses demanded an official inquiry, “as we find it very difficult to continue to have Mr. Badsha working in the same building as us.” University vice-­chancellor Saunders acceded and convened a commission on which sat Omar’s ostensible supervisor, Francis Wilson, among others. The timing was notable: this was in December 1990, the same month that the NICCC disbanded and FOSACO was born. The commission concluded that “Mr  Badsha is not justified in alleging that the functions . . . typified racist attitudinal practice.” Saunders demanded that Omar apologize, publicly and in writing, or risk his position at the university. Omar refused.36 (Or, as he put it to me years later, “Fuck you. Take your disciplinary procedure and fucking shove it up your ass.”37) In early 1991 he was placed on a six-­month unpaid leave. This dispute coincided with Carnegie and SALDRU’s regular reassessment of their institutional relationship and signaled the death knell for the CDP. Carnegie opted to cut bait. Omar—­still on unpaid leave—­took his fury out on Francis Wilson. “Your action does underline the arbitrariness with which people like you who are in positions of authority at this University view community-­based projects,” he fumed, putting his struggles within the context of the dead-­end conversations he was having with the National Gallery and other institutions. Omar and Wilson eventually reconciled. The latter continued to work at UCT. By mid-­1991, Omar was FOSACO’s general secretary; he was otherwise unaffiliated and unemployed.38 He was still committed. Headquartered at Omar’s home in Wynberg, FOSACO envisioned forming a trade union for cultural workers. Omar and his collaborators drafted a Cultural Charter—­essentially, a cultural workers’ bill of rights, which demanded the total transformation of state-­funding to guarantee each creator the Millennium

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“opportunity and support to practice his or her art” by provisioning a living wage, health care, pensions, et cetera. Artists had fought to liberate the nation; FOSACO demanded that the state demonstrate its commitment to and care for such veterans.39 Omar was still influential enough that the DAC’s Wally Serote came down from Johannesburg to witness the Cultural Charter’s launch, although he cautioned FOSACO not to get ahead of itself. Cultural workers ought to recognize that “the oppressed and the oppressor . . . will share the destiny of this country” and to moderate their demands, including the Cultural Charter, which Serote was careful not to endorse.40 No one doubted that Omar believed fervently in these issues; FOSACO’s charter would amount to a fundamental transformation, befitting the dreams that had kept the struggle viable, from the nonracial studios of BICA (Bantu Indian Coloured Artists) to Omar’s back room, the Phoenix Settlement, Afrapix, New York, London, beyond. FOSACO believed that a revolutionary culture ought to resolve in a revolutionary society, a new, more equitable and just way of making art and politics.41 But as the months went by, it was apparent that whatever was happening in South Africa, it was not the revolution that Omar had spent most of his life envisioning.42 By the end of 1991, even Omar’s allies worried that he was no longer an effective representative. He was too combative, Mario Pissarra told me: “There was always this fear that he was going to alienate a lot of people.”43 In meetings with the state-­funded Performing Arts Councils, negotiations bogged down over FOSACO’s insistence that money be set aside to maintain community arts organizations in the townships and rural areas. In Cape Town, curators were confused whether FOSACO’s demands were the same as the ANC’s. Soon there were rumors that Marilyn Martin, the Gallery’s director, was going to the opera with Albie Sachs or socializing with Wally Serote and that was where the real negotiations were happening.44 The same was true in Grahamstown, where Omar accused the ANC of going behind its back by negotiating with the still-­unreconstructed Festival Committee. “The DAC seems to place a great deal of credence on the opinions of the ruling class establishment as opposed to a fraternal organization,” FOSACO fumed. In April 1992, Omar traveled to Johannesburg to present a seventy-­four-­point memo to the DAC. The ANC bristled at the fact that the memo had been prepared by ANC members “without due regard given to established consultative procedures.” “FOSACO is viewed by the ANC as one of its formations,” Serote retorted; it was speaking out of turn.45 Procedurally appropriate or not, the FOSACO memo was a remarkable document. It recapitulated the entire history of the cultural struggle and demanded the formation of a cultural workers’ trade union in a transformed, revolutionary state. The DAC ignored it. Instead, Serote turned Omar’s charge of antidemocratic behaviors against FOSACO, demanding that it produce a constitution,

a list of office bearers, meeting minutes, and a list of affiliates. Short of that, as Omar would have put it, FOSACO could shove the memo up its ass.46 Kenneth Grundy’s assessment is only slightly less forthright. “Despite a widespread recognition of the need for a national organization, FOSACO [failed to] fill the bill. It became embroiled in the politics of culture as opposed to the practice and dissemination of culture.”47 And the practice and dissemination of culture was evolving, quickly. While FOSACO foundered, in September 1992 the Black-­led Dance Theatre of Harlem spent two weeks in Johannesburg with support from the American government and a white-­dominated South African bank. Brooks Spector made sure that the dancers would be welcomed: he secured Mandela’s endorsement, as well as that of other movements—­even Inkatha, just to be on the safe side. He did not ask FOSACO.48 Part of the visit involved dance workshops attended by hundreds of Black township dwellers. But the main event was “the opening act” for Johannesburg’s city-­run Civic Theatre. “We’ve been so starved here,” a local (white) ballet teacher exulted. Reporting for the New York Times, Bill Keller noted that the audience remained mostly white. “The audience last night seemed to include fewer blacks than the cast of 49 [Black] performers,” he wrote. Still, the performances were “a sign that South Africa is now passing beyond the rancor of its peculiar cultural politics.”49 Those who had cut their teeth in those “peculiar cultural politics” were not asked for their opinion. By then, it was clear that the ANC was done with FOSACO. Omar continued to attend meetings, accompanied by Pissarra and others who shared his sense of alienation with the coalescing consensus. He made his points, publicly and vehemently. In December 1992 nearly one thousand practitioners from a range of disciplines and representing a wide array of viewpoints met in Johannesburg to constitute a new National Arts Policy Plenary. Conservatives sat next to radicals and collectively decided on a path forward—­including deciding to accept money for arts programing from the Department of National Education, still led by the National Party. Omar protested that “the masses . . . should not be asked to rubber-­stamp an organization that included” unreconstructed Afrikaner nationalist groups and others “unfamiliar with the process of popular mandates and accountability.” Only thirty attendees voted to support this position.50 The politics of culture as played out in 1990s South Africa became a classic case of an “elite transition”—­“the pacting of centrists on both sides . . . based on the willing exclusion of their own radicals.” The obviously racist Performing Arts Councils were left out on the right “and the . . . structure led by photographer Omar Badsha” was frozen out on the left.51 Meanwhile, formerly white institutions—­whether museums or universities—­weathered the transition intact and unchanged, with white-­dominated banks and other nongovernmental Millennium

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funders committing themselves to diversity and little else. FOSACO had posed questions that challenged the status quo. They received no replies, whether because they had asked them intemperately or because no one was listening. Omar’s rise had been nothing short of remarkable: a boy from the Grey Street ghetto without a matriculation certification had worked himself to the center of the struggle. But that was then, and this was governance. He could climb no higher. Instead, he was relegated to the radical fringe, with only the most explicit racists for company. And in the end, culture really did not matter all that much. The DAC itself was sidelined in the final deliberations that birthed the new South African artistic status quo. Following liberal best practices, the consensus became that art should no longer be mixed up in politics. When elections came in April 1994, the DAC’s chair, Wally Serote, was so far down the candidates’ list that he only made it to parliament after dozens of more highly ranked party members had been seconded to other positions. Compounding the slight, Mandela’s Government of National Unity “combined arts and culture and science and technology into a single cabinet official”—­ Ben Ngubane, a medical doctor and Inkatha member, who had previously served as minister of health in the KwaZulu Bantustan.52 By then, Omar was back in Cape Town, a loyal party member working to ensure that the ANC won the Western Cape. The last meeting he attended around these issues was organized by the DAC in late April and early May 1993. FOSACO was basically dead, which did not stop Omar from rising, repeatedly, to point out that the meeting was not being run according to democratic practices. Pissarra let out a long, slow whistle when the memory came back. “It was horrible,” people “were booing, hissing  .  .  . so many people didn’t want him there.” Those nearby edged away. Pissarra knew Omar well enough to discern how much effort it took to appear unbothered and to “keep his dignity.” Of course, Pissarra could be wrong; maybe Omar actually was unfazed. All I know is that in all our hours together Omar never shared that story with me; nor, when he narrates his life, does he dwell long on the tale told by the acronyms CWC, NICCC, and FOSACO.53 This being South Africa, I asked Pissarra whether he thought race factored into that crowd’s hectoring response. He shook his head. “There were so many ANC people who shared the same race classification as Omar” and retained popular support. Pissarra thought it was personal, not racial.54 Omar was at an AGM or, back further still, with the unions on Gale Street. Only now, he could not draw on support from the movement or animate a network in the underground, because the movement was aboveground in Johannesburg, and soon in power in Pretoria. He had no constituency; he was a member of no organization or collective. He was just Omar, enduring the neighborhood boys’ taunts, only now with no way to fight

back. He was a boy from the ghetto shut out from Salisbury Island, once more on the outside, looking in. 3

When Jakes Gerwel assumed the rectorship of the University of the Western Cape in 1987, it consolidated the institution’s evolution into the “intellectual home of the left.”55 Set amidst the Coloured and African townships that sprawled north of D. F. Malan Airport, under Gerwel’s predecessor the university had embraced the idea of being a “third world” university, in opposition to both the white supremacist state that had founded it and Western antecedents. Gerwel deepened this commitment.56 He appointed lecturers who had been fired from other universities for their United Democratic Front affiliations, for example, and in Harold Wolpe’s estimation, under Gerwel’s leadership UWC was the first South African higher education institution to think deeply about transformation. The ANC embraced UWC’s proximity to parliament to serve as “the premier institution’ from whence the [party] prepared to govern.”57 That was Gerwel’s outward-­facing work; inwardly, he worked to undermine the apartheid university system by declaring UWC open to all students who had passed their matriculation exams, regardless of race or academic preparedness. It was a bold move, which asked a lot of the staff on campus. In 1990, amidst the surge in enrollments, Gerwel hired Nasima to run the university’s Academic Development Programme.58 The university was determined that the transformation would begin not with “the assumption that the problem lay with individual students, . . . but rather in the recognition of a social phenomenon which required a radical reconceptualization of the university.”59 Addressing society’s failures became Nasima’s job, while Omar tried and failed to turn FOSACO into something similar in the cultural space. Nasima and her colleagues institutionalized tutorial programs for all incoming students and streamlined and strengthened academic advising, all while navigating the turbulence of an institution that both students and academic staff believed was committed to the revolution. Nasima’s job did not afford her the romance of revolutionary dreams, however. She was consumed with practical and seemingly irreconcilable problems, foremost among them how to balance equity—­more students, from more communities, accessing more opportunity—­and outcomes—­not only for the students themselves, but for the new South Africa into which they would graduate. “There was a palpable excitement about collectively imagining and nurturing a post-­apartheid higher education system,” she remembered later, “which would contribute to the social and economic development needs of the country and the deepening of democracy.” These were significant tasks that required extraordinary exertion.60 Millennium

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Following the 1994 elections, Nelson Mandela tapped Gerwel to become the South African equivalent of an American president’s chief of staff. Nasima was appointed UWC’s chief academic officer. In early 1995, she took on an additional role as a member of the national commission charged with surveying the history and structures of the country’s tertiary institutions and developing proposals to promote equity and economic development. The task was fraught. Whether self-­consciously Anglophone and liberal (UCT, Natal, etc.) or staunchly Afrikaner nationalist (Stellenbosch, Pretoria, etc.), historically white universities were anxious to maintain their status as elite institutions, comparable to any high-­achieving campuses anywhere in the world.61 Bantustan, bush college, and other historically Black universities had their own, often distinguished legacies of cultivating learning despite funding deficits and a state that was either repressive, indifferent, or both.62 The imperative to transform higher education was of a different order than the imperative to transform the National Arts Festival and the National Gallery, and the various interest groups were even more entrenched. Unlike culture, education got its own ministry in Mandela’s government, and an ANC member, Sibusiso Bengu, as minister. Since only a small percentage of South Africans matriculated, higher education was only part of Bengu’s enormous and politically complex task. To help ease the load, the Ministry of Education created a new position, deputy director general of higher education, who would be responsible for implementing the commission’s recommendations. Nasima assumed that position in 1997. Farzanah was now eighteen. Her parents’ professions—­and especially her mother’s salary—­had afforded her the opportunity to study at excellent Western Cape schools. It had not been easy to be the brown child of activists, but at least she was better prepared for university than many of the students with whom her mother worked. She enrolled at UCT and stayed in Cape Town. Leila was a decade younger; she had no choice in the matter. By this time, the Badsha family car was so ratty that mold grew inside after a heavy rain. Omar and Leila drove it to Pretoria, where Nasima was already hard at work.63 They arrived to a different life. Nasima’s appointment came with a significant salary increase and a government car—­an Audi station wagon, to which Omar grew so attached that he bought his own when her appointment ended. Omar and Leila spent days driving around Pretoria with an estate agent. Nasima’s salary was good, but not sufficient for the fancier suburbs, or so they thought. But they underestimated at least one recently divorced Afrikaner woman’s motivation to sell. In Waterkloof, 399 Lawley Street was the sort of house that Omar had seen in the swankiest parts of Reservoir Hills. Later visitors would describe it as a mansion.64 It had a pool, a staircase leading up to more rooms than the now three-­person family

needed. One was lined with windows and looked out over a quiet street, planted with the city’s trademark jacaranda trees. In spring, Lawley Street was purple. Omar would have a proper library. Waterkloof had reliable telephone service. The ministry bought the family a computer and a modem. After the elections, Omar had begun to make images again. In 1995 the Danish Ministry of Culture invited him to Copenhagen to photograph and to exhibit his work. The Danes provided film, a darkroom, and travel money; once there, Omar connected with activists associated with both anti-­apartheid and ongoing concerns—­especially people who worked in the trade unions and with the resettlement of refugees and other recent immigrants. It was good to use his camera to probe a society again, although he conceded that he did not “really understand these buggers.” He could not figure out the story and in the end, he was mostly just cold. The Danish government had offered him tickets to see the Rolling Stones, whose Voodoo Lounge Tour passed through Copenhagen in early June. He was keen, but “it was cold. By the time I got to the stadium, I said no, fuck you, Rolling Stones or no Rolling Stones, I’m going back home to sleep.” He took his pictures, hung his show, went back to Cape Town, where it was winter and wet and not much better.65 Another opportunity to photograph came in 1996. Omar had been to Europe and North America. But he had never been to India. With his “Bassa” identity documents, Ebrahim had visited Tadkeshwar and reported back that there were still family members there, although the banyan tree that marked the Nakooda family homestead no longer stood.66 Omar was determined to visit; he appealed to the Indian High Commissioner in Pretoria for support and was awarded a grant.67 The project he had in mind was to choose ten South African families from Gujarat—­a mix of Muslims and Hindus—­and to photograph their relatives back in India. He spent six weeks in the country. Upon arrival, he realized it was too ambitious—­he had underestimated the scope of the project, the difficulty of the travel, and his faltering Gujarati. He ended up spending most of the visit in Tadkeshwar, where people remembered his family and greeted him as “Ebrahim’s son, back from the south.” Ultimately, he found that he understood life there only slightly better than he understood Denmark. The village had evolved into a bedroom community for industrializing Surat. Residents were selling their fields to housing estate developers; others were trying to cash in. In a local archive, Omar found Britons and South Africans looking for property records with which they could make claims. He made some images, then returned to South Africa.68 While traveling and resuming his photography, he also got old, abruptly. He had a heart attack a few months before he traveled to India; it increased his determination to see Tadkeshwar in what time he had left. Once back, faced with the combination of Millennium

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physical vulnerability and too much time without a project, Omar oscillated between depression and idleness, accented with occasional outbursts. The mood in the beautiful house was often sour. Nasima worked. Omar and his now ten-­year-­old daughter spent a lot of time warily circling each other. Leila struggled in school and Omar was hard on her, like Ebrahim had once been on him. Nasima took Leila to see learning specialists who diagnosed dyslexia and recommended extra courses and computer work, which had worked for others.69 Leila’s diagnosis was significant for her education; it was also significant for how Omar understood his own past. In the 1990s, the Badshas were in a different place, which meant that instead of the rod, Leila got special attention at well-­resourced and flexible schools, where she began to thrive. She found that she enjoyed reading, especially on the internet. In Nasima’s absence Omar cooked for them both. From the kitchen downstairs he would hear the beeps and scratches that said that his daughter was logging on.70 Pretoria had been transformed with the coming of democracy and the return of visitors from abroad. There was a vibrant music scene, spreading across the racial divide and into the bars and restaurants that lined the neighborhood around campus.71 Omar hired students to help him organize his library and his documents. He was intrigued by early scanning technology; in the late 1990s, the first of many computer-­competent students began to come to Waterkloof. There always seemed to be “people . . . helping him scan things,” Leila told me. She had no idea where he found them, but there they were—­first one, then more “students at Pretoria . . . heavily tattooed, really into rock music.”72 Liam Lynch was one.73 The son of a helicopter pilot who commanded a Pretoria-­area Air Force base during the transition, he aspired to be a photographer. When his girlfriend mentioned that she had taken a temp job in Omar’s library, he leapt at the opportunity to meet him. Soon enough he became one of those young people whom Leila found at her house when she got home from school. Lynch and her father were a striking pair: the former was skinny, barely in his twenties, all elbows and bony wrists, seated before a swollen dinosaur of a computer, the corded phone’s line plugged into the hard drive. Omar was middle aged, verging on old. Big glasses, no facial hair, thick where he had once been rangy, tired where he had once been hungry.74 Three years after his heart attack he began to have chest pains again. He required a triple bypass, which he delayed to vote in the June 1999 elections, after which Thabo Mbeki became president and Kader Asmal, another Natal-­born activist, became Nasima’s new boss. Omar was struggling physically: his heart, his stomach, eventually a mild case of diabetes. He had not thought much about his body during his first five decades; as he began his sixth, it showed.75 It affected his mood and his prospects.

He flew to Cape Town a few weeks after his surgery to propose a project on Robben Island’s history. The visit was tough. His chest bothered him, he was “unable to sleep all night, feeling lousy,” and the former-­prison-­turned-­museum’s administrators turned down his proposal. He could not escape the feeling that they thought that he was a “mad man, presenting such an ambitious scheme” when he was old and out of the game. Awaiting his flight home, he visited the National Gallery and looked at photographs. There was a picture of someone his father had known in BICA. His mind wandered. “I must complete my research on BICA,” he noted. The thought of one project led to another: “Should we not write something on Afrapix? Maybe put together a series of exhibitions . . . ?” It was an idea; time would tell if it would go anywhere. The lights on the ascent out of Cape Town “spread out on the landscape so beautifully. I am glad to be alive, but . . .” He had written these notes on an unused airsickness bag. The words after “but” are illegible.76 He kept returning to one idea. When he had been Liam’s age, Omar had relished the sheer volume of information that was available to him at places like Old Man Doc’s. Back in the 1990s, before Pets.com and the first bubble popped, the web was more often the stage for dreams of interconnection and access than our contemporary dystopia.77 Lynch introduced Omar to the New York Times on the web, which had recently begun to combine photographs and text in familiar ways. Together, they spent a long time clicking through Gilles Peress’s photographs from the war in Bosnia.78 By late 1998 Omar had developed a proposal for a “comprehensive website aimed at formal educational work as well as the cultural politics of heritage, archives, museums and tourism.”79 He circulated it among people in his network: professors at UWC, people engaged in museum and heritage work in Durban or with the District Six Museum in Cape Town; he reached out to neighbors in Pretoria and others in government. South African History Online would be “an educational and cultural resource and give students in thousands of classrooms and millions of people worldwide access to our history and heritage,” he proposed. The website would “gather and document oral testimonies and community histories,” research that would “instill pride amongst our people in our common heritage.” He did not yet have the exact vocabulary, but whether he called it electronic media or a website, Omar tried to convince potential partners that the internet was a place to “make knowledge and information available to all.”80 He searched for support. “We are one of the few projects actively involved in developing educational information for the web that is specifically African,” he told the CEO of Transnet, South Africa’s largest parastatal corporation. “We believe that our site will become the most important source of information on South African history, culture  .  .  . visited by every school going child, university students, and Millennium

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potential visitors to our country.” For someone who had only just learned about the internet, Omar had already mastered the tone of a start-­up CEO. “We want to explore with you the possibility of Transnet becoming a partner in this exciting and unique project!” But maybe that is not a fair comparison. Omar was no capitalist. He was still more comfortable with movement language (the message was addressed to “Comrade Saki,” from “yours fraternally”) and was proposing to sell history, not pet food. The free commons of the internet were an alluring prospect. The website idea stuck.81 4

In April 2018 Omar posted on Facebook that he had been awarded the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver—­South Africa’s second-­highest honor for achievements in sports, culture, and media, an honor he shared that year with a cricket batsman (Hashim Amla) and a musician (Sipho “Hotstix” Mabuse), among others. Noting his many careers, the citation recognized Omar above all “for his commitment to the preservation of our country’s history through ground-­breaking and well-­balanced research, and collection of profiles and events of the struggle for liberation” on South African History Online (SAHO) “an educational and publishing non-­governmental organization  .  .  . which focuses on the neglected area of the country’s liberation history.” His friends congratulated him for being “the nation’s archivist.” It was the first time that one of the country’s highest honors had been awarded for a website.82 It capped a big year. A few months prior, Stellenbosch University awarded Omar an honorary doctorate. The former bastion of Afrikaner nationalism’s citation described SAHO as “the largest history website on the African continent,” which chronicles “the stories of ordinary people’s extraordinary contributions to a democratic society.” It was Omar’s first degree. “I’ve never been to university,” he told the crowd, but “all my life [I have] been very close to education [and] knowledge production.” There were some people in the room who knew him well. Many could not fathom the lives he had lived before the website. Not that it mattered: by 2018, he been working on SAHO for longer than he worked in the unions and as a photographer combined.83 Most people who knew Omar would not have been surprised that he found his latest—­and most likely last—­calling by focusing on the past. From his childhood at his grandmother’s feet, to the survey work he did in Inanda, to the oral histories he collected to illustrate his photographs, Omar had always been convinced that the past was a precious and fragile thing that was always in danger of being forgotten. In his early twenties he confronted the possibility that fully realized people could be reduced to the puffs of smoke that carried Jeevan Desai’s ideas away. In the late

1990s, Jeevan was all but forgotten. Who would remember that there had been once been a Badsha family that lived on Douglas Lane?84 Omar was not alone in thinking that in the name of reconciliation and state building, post-­apartheid was “a time when there was so much forgetting,” as Ashwin Desai put it in 1996.85 At the CDP, Omar had run workshops with young people and workers “as part of what we call the people’s history movement.” He was struck by how much people did not know. “We began to dig up old photographs. People began to write about the experience of their parents and communities.” Mementos triggered memories and workshop attendees learned how to narrate and preserve such fragile threads.86 In September 2001, SAHO went online to “break the silence on our past” by inviting readers to “narrate your story and that of your community,” thus to write “a people’s history of South Africa.”87 More than twenty years later, SAHO hosts about thirty thousand individual pages, mostly archival material, with significant amounts of purpose-­written content, including nearly ten thousand biographies and studies of movements. SAHO generates material geared toward school-­age learners; the site offers timelines to feed its This Day in History module, as well as lessons and course material for grades 4–­12. It is most significant as an archive. Readers can link to tens of thousands of pages of archival material, including books, publications, and collections from private and public repositories. All of it is free. On SAHO’s servers are held otherwise privileged material that its agents have scanned and uploaded from both national and international repositories.88 Omar relishes such “banditry,” as the historian (and former SAHO board member) Ciraj Rassool describes the site’s approach to information.89 My students have used SAHO for their assignments; I used it to write this book.90 There was an inherent tension in SAHO’s self-­description as a “people’s history project” and its initial posts—­what Omar called the Lives of Courage Project, which was launched by the deputy minister of defense (an old friend from Durban) immediately before the site went live. That project began with the “greatest hits” of the county’s history, with posts on Mandela, Tutu, Luthuli, and similarly famous figures, at a time when the government was involved in renaming and memorialization projects that were intended to rewrite the country’s national narrative around the story of liberation. The Steve Biko post was especially rich, in both word count and hyperlinks—­one could follow Biko’s story to stream Peter Gabriel’s 1980 pop tribute or to find an archive of audio and video clips. Others were more economical. De Klerk’s “life of courage” was worth only a little over five lines of text, for example, which related that as a youth, he had “learned the essential importance of timing.”91 The internet’s greatest potential was not in rehashing the greatest hits, however; legacy media was already churning out Mandela biographies. Early on, Omar Millennium

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and his collaborators realized that websites were uniquely suited to telling the sorts of histories that the CDP’s workshops had intended to facilitate, and in which mainstream publishing was not particularly interested. One could tell South African history without the story of the Durban Students’ Union (DSU) or Old Man Doc keeping the struggle alive in his small corner of Durban; one could narrate the heroic story of trade unionism without recalling Princess Osman’s costly struggle at Prilla Mills or the shop stewards Mbutho and Gumede who had kept the Chemical Workers Industrial Union functioning in their factories against extraordinary odds. But the country’s story was not complete without theirs. Which is not to say that each deserved a page, necessarily; it was that the internet was a place that stories like theirs could be preserved and shared, where everything that it took to keep the people’s struggle alive during those long decades might be remembered. Omar seems to have intuited the internet’s capacity to render daily events exceptionally significant while Mark Zuckerberg was still in college. The struggle had been the great drama of his life. Via SAHO, he tried preserve the script, in all its glorious and overwhelming complexity, available to anyone with internet access.92 The website’s palate, iconography, and slogans recalled the 1980s, when the people’s struggle reached its zenith. But in some of its other work, Omar did recognize that times had changed. Where once it had been necessary to balance difference while holding together coalitions to contest herrenvolk supremacy, via SAHO, Omar began to publish work that took the idea of the “rainbow nation” seriously. South Africa’s democratic constitution described the country as founded on “nonracialism,” yet also “united” in its “diversity.” The constitution enshrined this commitment by doing things like expanding the number of national languages from two to eleven, with others—­like the Badshas’ natal Gujarati—­also protected. In the new South Africa, everyone was supposed to have “the right to use the language and to participate in the cultural life of their choice.”93 Difference was to become the foundation of national unity, as Thabo Mbeki famously attested in a speech to parliament consecrating the new constitution. “I am an African,” Mbeki stated, which meant that his ancestors were descended from “the warrior men and women that Hintsa and Sekhukhune led,” but also from “Malay slaves who came from the east,” “the migrants who left Europe to find a new home,” and “those who were transported from India” and elsewhere. All were African; it was as if Mbeki was channeling the DSU or Sobukwe. It was a culmination of nonracialism, rhetorically at least, with a twenty-­first-­century “diversity”-­conscious twist.94 Almost immediately after going online, Omar began to work with an Ethiopian-­ born UNISA professor named Abebe Zegeye to produce work that dovetailed with this national discourse.95 Under Zegeye’s editorship—­and taking advantage of his

position for institutional and publishing support—­SAHO produced an eight-­volume series called Social Identities South Africa. Xolelwa Kashe-­Katiya was a student at UNISA in the early 2000s when these projects developed. Zegeye was one of her supervisors; he recruited her to go work with SAHO. Working there was like “working in a start-­up in a garage,” she recalls. Kashe-­Katiya had never studied history, nor had she worked on the internet; soon she found herself in the thick of an energetic group experimenting with both web and book design. Omar recruited her to help build out the website in addition to her other work. While laying out the SISA volumes, she “wrote the timeline of the ANC, [and] the women’s struggle in South Africa” for the website, she recalls.96 Other employees had even less background in research and writing. Leila remembers that Omar hired their domestic worker to help scan documents and organize data. “One of his first employees was our painter’s son,” Leila laughed. “He didn’t really have a job. Omar made him sit in the kitchen with the Microsoft manual and today’s he’s a programmer.” Each day they would gather for a staff meeting, Omar throwing out ideas, saying “today is this and that anniversary”; in this improvised fashion, SAHO both built a website and began to churn out books.97 SISA’s first volume, published in 2001, was a collection of photographs that Omar had taken in and around Grey Street during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Called Imperial Ghetto, the project had an exceptionally long gestation: these were images that Omar took once settled in Overport, when he would leave his car on Wills Road and trace his earlier journeys across the railroad tracks into town. He had sought money from Staffrider to complete the project and used the same title to describe both Inanda and Victor Verster. Lynch helped him to design the volume. The cover showed devotees celebrating Badsha Pir’s birthday in front of the Grey Street Mosque. Inside, the first two pictures came from the Badsha family archives: young Ebrahim and his siblings in the 1920s, Omar and his on the same veranda two decades later. It was as close as he would get to an autobiography. He included the entirety of Mafika Gwala’s poem “Grey Street” as an epigraph and posed with one of his drawings for the author’s photograph.98 “The pictures are about echoes of my own family and the ghetto which we called home,” Omar wrote. It was there, on streets named for Queen Victoria’s “retinue of imperial war mongers”—­like Douglas himself—­that “hundreds of socialist and congress activists” worked “to forge an inclusive Africanness.” Emboldened by Mbeki and the constitution, Imperial Ghetto offered its own take on how the Badshas of Tadkeshwar had become South Africans. In his foreword, he noted that in the twenty-­first century the “imperial ghetto” was home to “new economic and political refugees” from both Africa and Asia. Like the old immigrants, these new ones brought “new narratives” and “new energy” to Durban. They lived on streets that bore new names and old, familiar stories. Given Millennium

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time and space, they, too, would become natives.99 Imperial Ghetto was an optimistic charter of progress and belonging that Omar hoped would inaugurate a new and decisively different South African century. Yet as the 2000s progressed, the new South Africa proved to be a difficult partner, and the nation’s commitment to diversity—­of both opinions and demographics—­ shallower than the souring rhetoric suggested. Under Mbeki, the state invested in its own narrative of South African history. In the 2000s, the Ministry of the Presidency endorsed the efforts of a new organization called the South African Democracy Education Trust (SADET) to tell an officially authorized version of the past. Many esteemed historians and academics were invited to participate in The Road to Democracy, the multivolume official history that resulted. Some of SADET’s chapters were essential reading; others were controversial. In one notable instance, the project’s editors made it apparent that official history could be told only in a certain way. This disagreement was about a chapter near to Omar’s heart: written by David Hemson and two others, it covered the revival of the workers movement in Durban in the 1970s and demonstrated how the wages board had evolved into TUACC (Trade Union Advisory Coordinating Committee) and opened the way for the much more significant organizing to come. The editors commissioned a rival chapter that claimed that the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) and the ANC had been behind 1970s militancy; they went further to insert the term white into the title of Hemson’s chapter, erasing Black people like Foszia Fisher, Harold Nxasana, Alpheus Mthethwa, Omar Badsha, and others who had been so critical in those early days.100 In an article that covered the affair, Hemson’s coauthor Martin Legassick bemoaned SADET’s obvious investment in a “seamless picture favorable to the ANC and SACTU,” which pleased the government, but not the historical truth. The project stank of “patriotic history,” Legassick argued, whereby history was “falsified” “for nation-­building purposes.”101 SAHO was not involved in SADET, although the organization’s collaboration with the government in other projects did raise the occasional eyebrow.102 With SADET in mind, for example, some critics worried that SAHO was colluding in the “privatization” of history to favor the ANC. “The partial and distorted understanding and telling of Struggle history” was not really “history,” a critic argued, (mis) naming SAHO as an “ANC / government-­initiated project” through which students “will not learn of the central role” of any organizations that were not currently in power.103 Omar chafed at this mischaracterization, retorting that the government was actively not supporting his efforts. “We have made many requests to the government for support, and while our project has been praised, . . . support has not materialized.” SAHO was independent and ought to be credited as such (although

Omar admitted that its content focused more on the ANC than on other organizations, “because [SAHO’s] shortage of resources” made it difficult to build out less-­well-­known narratives).104 This exchange occurred in 2010, after recurrent crises instigated by Mbeki’s HIV/AIDS denialism and revelations of ANC infighting and corruption. By then, Jacob Zuma was president and Nasima had left the Ministry of Education. Hers had been an exhilarating and exhausting tenure. Earlier in the decade, the ministry announced plans to cut South Africa’s thirty-­six tertiary institutions down to twenty-­ one, citing redundancies and inefficiencies inherited from apartheid. Controversially, few of the formerly white universities were asked to merge, while many of the historically Black universities were. Representatives from UWC and elsewhere protested that “the burden of change” was falling “on historically disadvantaged universities.”105 The ministry pressed ahead, however, and Nasima often served as the spokesperson and public face of such policies. When students on these campuses protested, the ministry dispatched her to negotiate with them or to meet with administrators who refused to accept any dilution of their authority. It was exhausting and demanding work. The people in the SAHO office never saw her—­not once, Kashe-­Katiya told me. Neither did her daughter or her husband all that often.106 Following a cabinet shuffle in 2004, Naledi Pandor became minister. Nasima knew Pandor well—­they had worked together in academic support at UCT back during the transition. Nasima stayed on. By 2006, Black students made up 75 percent of South Africans enrolled in higher education institutions. She was proud of this achievement. True, academic support was still not robust enough to ensure that enrolled students earned their degrees, and the African participation rate (12 percent of the overall population) lagged far behind that of whites and, notably, Indians (both at 60 percent), but it was progress. As was gender equity in the student ranks: by the mid-­2000s, more than 50 percent of enrollments and 58 percent of graduates were female, and female students were more likely to succeed once on campus. There was still a good deal of work to do, but they had achieved a lot.107 Yet that progress seemed fragile. Zuma’s rise was worrying. Revelations of his corrupt relationships with prominent people of South Asian descent contributed to critiques that Indians were doing too well in post-­apartheid South Africa, especially in higher education.108 And at the same time, Zuma’s rise coincided with rising tensions stemming from the country’s serving as a destination for immigrants from elsewhere on the continent. In Imperial Ghetto, Omar had analogized the Indian South African community to recent immigrants who now lived in Grey Street and other inner cities, or in the imijondolo that increasingly sprawled between Johannesburg and Pretoria, or out beyond UWC on the Cape Flats. In 2008, Millennium

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South Africans spouting anti-­immigrant rhetoric attacked and killed dozens of immigrants across the country, once more evoking the specter of 1949 and 1985. Xenophobic violence remains a regular feature of South African political life today, to the degree that some observers describe it as a new form of racial hatred.109 Government and civil society pushed back but nativism remained—­and remains—­a powerful force. During Zuma’s rise, Nasima remembers feeling for the first time “like an Indian, not a South African.”110 In 2008, she left government to become the CEO of a consortium that coordinated policy among the four Western Cape higher education institutions. The Badshas moved back to Cape Town. Omar rented a small office for SAHO and tried to build a new network of collaborators. Jeeva came to work as a researcher for the website; he was in financial straits and Omar offered a lifeline.111 Mads Nørgaard came from Denmark to volunteer in Cape Town in the late 2000s; he was a photographer and wanted to document aid projects. He and Omar talked about a photography exhibition to coincide with the 2010 World Cup. Talk turned to websites; Nørgaard had experience in that field as well. He stayed in Cape Town, working mostly out of Omar’s house, for nearly a decade.112 When Omar had begun to spend time with Docrat, the “old man” had been a mere fifty years old; now, as the 2010s began, Omar was in his mid-­sixties. He was the “old man,” a library in himself. Befitting a new era of instantaneous global connection, woven together by social media, a new generation of researchers and activists began to seek Omar out. Connections and relationships proliferated.113 6

And others ended. Omar and Nasima had lived parallel lives for years, and back in Cape Town, they separated, at Nasima’s initiative. He moved into the house that Nasima had bought for Farzanah in Woodstock, a racially mixed area that had survived apartheid but which was now facing the new challenge of gentrification.114 By all accounts, Nasima was glad to put some distance between them. They had a lot of past and no small amount of mutual anger and frustration.115 SAHO itself was the source of significant tension. The organization never had reliable finances; Omar steadfastly refused to monetize the site, opting instead to preserve it as a piece of independent, activist culture amidst the country’s seemingly open-­armed embrace of corporate capitalism. By the end of its first decade, Nasima was tired of subsidizing SAHO, in addition to the husband whose artistic and activist practices she had supported for more than three decades.116 Omar continued on. He never went to therapy, never returned in a systematic way to the layered and complicated feelings that had led him to displace his personal struggles by total association with the national epic. Both Miriam and

Ebrahim died in 2003. By the time Miriam passed away, Omar had grown more comfortable talking about her mental illness. His daughters did not really know her, whereas Ebrahim doted on them, bringing drawing materials or paints when he visited. Ebrahim’s paintings have passed into their possession. Leila has his palate, Omar his easel. Ebrahim mellowed with age, which made it easier to appreciate how important his influence had been. In 2010, Omar curated a joint exhibition of their work, calling it Under the Umdoni Tree, after the tree that had once dropped its clumps of purple berries in the yard behind 7 Douglas Lane. Omar credited his father for being “a great fountain of inspiration.” The show opened in Durban, then traveled to Johannesburg. In it, Omar showed his drawings for the first time in decades.117 His reputation as both an artist and photographer spread more widely than ever before. His work was exhibited in Canada and the United States; there was a retrospective in the South African National Gallery in 2015 and another in Reunion in 2017. Omar traveled to the latter for the opening, tracing in reverse the steps so many from Surat had taken from India to the islands, to the African mainland, more than a century before.118

Figure 6.4. Omar Badsha at the opening of Seedtimes, at the South African National

Gallery, Cape Town, photograph by Mads Nørgaard, with the permission of Mads Nørgaard, 2015 Millennium

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The recognition has been nice, but on each occasion, Omar drew the focus back to SAHO, to which he remains remarkably—­or stubbornly, compulsively, or addictively—­committed. The website and its associated projects have replaced art, organizing, photography, and politics as the central meaning-­making activity in his life—­the work, in other words, that is his therapy. In the aftermath of their separation, Omar filled the Woodstock house with overseas visitors; with interns and researchers; with old friends and collaborators; with people interested in the history of South African photography and trade unionism; with other people who believed that a better South Africa was still worth pursuing, and that people’s history might provide a charter for a better, more just and equitable people’s present. In its second decade, SAHO continued to grow and more fully realize its historiographical presence. It became relatively commonplace to find Omar participating in and organizing academic conferences, on the hundredth anniversary of the ANC, for example, or the state of archives in contemporary South Africa.119 That SAHO had managed to insert itself into the usually closed circuits of academic publishing and deliberation would be remarkable, had its CEO not already had a long-­established track record for inserting himself into all sorts of conversations that would normally have been closed to someone with his lack of credentials. He continues to live, as one collaborator put it, as if it “were the 1980s,” and these were Afrapix colleagues in Overport, or further still, in the back room in Douglas Lane with The Arts Society.120 In 2020, Omar turned seventy-­five as the CEO of SAHO, having added “historian” and “archivist” to his many occupations. Not that this was uncontested. SAHO’s somewhat ad hoc way of doing things is at odds with a South African academy that relies on accredited publications to earn research ratings and financial support from an aloof and uninterested state.121 Many historians are ambivalent about SAHO’s place in the profession and its utility as an archive and a resource; they are frustrated with its disorganization and opacity.122 But given the circumstances, it is difficult not to be impressed with its productivity. SAHO has won some small grants; its greatest source of funding comes secondhand from the National Lottery, which funds work-­training internships for university students. Through that program, SAHO had found a remarkably diverse pool of computer science, history, and heritage studies students—­over 160 since 2012—­some of whom stuck around for as long as their personal circumstances allowed.123 Otherwise, Omar and a small handful of other permanent employees draw modest salaries from SAHO, which are held back when the funding streams run dry. When Jeeva and I met in 2018, for example, he had not been paid in months. Back in Durban to be closer to his family, he was relying on his children’s support to survive. Omar told me that SAHO “owed” him nearly two million rands in unpaid

salary, which he had kept in its account to make payroll and pay the rent for the organization’s office.124 Jeeva still values the work. A true “people’s history project,” SAHO is committed to the idea “that the more voices it includes, the more accurate an account of the past.”125 The scale of its coverage is eyepopping. When launched, SAHO had twenty biographies; a year later, the site counted more than one hundred. When Jeeva began to work as a permanent researcher, the site had nearly two thousand biographies; now it has nearly five times as many. Inconsistency is still an issue, of course: some biographies are little more than links, placeholders indicating that South African history included people like Jack Nkabinde, who was on Robben Island, or Simeon Kambule, whose name is one typo away from that of a Methodist convert who fought on the British side in the Anglo-­Zulu War. Or maybe SAHO has another Kambule in mind; in February 2022, the link led nowhere, so it is hard to tell.126 Yet when the links work, as an open-­access, multireference, and often narratively engaging resource for history, SAHO is peerless. The entry for Wally Serote exemplifies this. It opens with a brief life history, then expands outwards to encompass the broader context of the “literary revival of the silenced black voices withering under state repression” in the early 1970s. The through line carries Serote’s life into exile in the US, then to Botswana, London, and home; cross-­referenced via hyperlinks, the author connects Serote to other writers, like Chris Van Wyk, who took over for Mike Kirkwood at Staffrider, and Mafika Gwala, who, like Serote, “aimed at mobilizing audiences” via “drama and poetry [to] drive the momentum for change.” It is unclear who wrote this biography. It was surely not Omar, who hates typing and still struggles to write. Most SAHO biographies are not bylined. Whoever did this Serote essay delved deeply into critical analysis of the writer’s works, noting with appreciation how critics compare Serote to Seamus Heaney, who also used language to maintain hope amidst violence and despair. There are sections that would not pass peer review, but the problem is academia’s, not SAHO’s, because is it not true that South Africa, like all nations, needs the “bold imagination, plain truth and redemptive inspiration” that poets like Serote provided in the past? The essay is thin on citations, but, thanks to the magic of data tagging, hyperlinks, and regular updating, it turned up third in my Google search for Serote’s name. There was once something called “cultural work” whereby creators intervened in contemporary politics. At its best, SAHO is historical work that does the same. A box popped up while I was reading. “Know something about this subject?” it asked. I did, and briefly considered submitting the story of Omar and Wally at the FOSACO seminar at UWC, but in the end demurred.127 Millennium

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Some biographies break the SAHO mold by having named authors, notably those that were produced in collaboration with overseas academics. In 2021, for example, Omar and Jill Kelly, a historian based at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, were recognized by the American Historical Association for “using innovative and collaborative methods” in a multiyear partnership between SAHO and SMU. Working with SAHO researchers, Kelly’s students have produced dozens of essays for the site for course credit. SAHO gets the content and, in effect, the knowledge transferred from well-­resourced university libraries and paywall-­protected journal collections in the Global North to open-­access servers and readers in the Global South. (Though it is worth noting that after South Africans, Americans are the website’s most frequent users.) Omar’s relationship with the historian Jon Soske was the prototype for this collaboration. Soske taught in the Historical and Classical Studies Department at McGill University in Montreal; students there were the first to produce content for SAHO as part of their regular coursework. One of Soske’s students wrote Mafika Gwala’s biography; another tackled the tangled history of the Mbeki and Zuma government’s HIV/AIDS policies. Subsequent contributions reflected students’ own research interests—­in rugby, or in jazz, for example—­or they reflected Omar’s (the Dumile biography was written by a McGill student). Soske and Omar both reflected on their collaboration on Facebook, which prompted Kelly to contact Omar to arrange a similar program for her students.128 Before teaching her South African history class each year, Kelly coordinated with SAHO to set a theme based on an identified area of need. The first year, the students researched the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; later they researched women in South African history, then artists in exile. Such “virtual internships” enable students in Montreal, Texas, and elsewhere to connect with South Africa and South Africans, to learn about their lives and their histories. These interactions could be superficial, mediated by Skype and eventually Zoom. But they were also meaningful: for some Americans, it was revelatory to learn about contemporary South Africa from their partners. Kelly relates one humorous incident, in which her student shared that “my partner says there are still socialists in South Africa!”129 Other students appreciated learning basic facts about the social geography of Cape Town: about the townships and vivid legacy of segregation, about the struggle for taxi fare that sometimes made it impossible for interns to make it to the office, about what it means not to be able to buy airtime to let Omar and the supervisors know.130 The opportunity to interact with one particular South African socialist is part of the appeal. Omar set each semester’s theme and launched the program with a long Skype session during which he laid out his take on South African history and politics. “The students loved it,” Kelly says.131 It was one thing to learn that there

were still socialists in South Africa; it was another to have one idiosyncratic and charismatic socialist to yourself, embracing you and your classmates as partners in what he described as a great and meaningful endeavor.132 In February 2018, I was working in the spare room that serves as Omar’s archive while he met virtually with a group of American students from another institution who were set to begin their semester-­long collaboration. It was night in Cape Town and the city was enduring a historic drought. The day had been hot and blustery—­like being inside a clothes dryer. There was an electrical storm high above the mountain, which did not produce any significant rain, dashing Omar’s hopes that it might water his small, thirsty garden. The storm did wreak havoc on his internet connection, however. He was tired. He had been at the SAHO office all day, while also answering my persistent questions. His voice was as dry and cracked as his garden. He had a cup of tea and powered through lags, frozen screens, and the “Hello? Can you hear me?” that characterizes modern communication. When the connection allowed, he mustered his eloquence, giving a history of SAHO and urging the students to learn about South Africa’s present. Parliament was shortly going to vote no confidence in Jacob Zuma. “I hope that in the time you spend with us, [you] will become a little bit more aware of what has happened, why we’ve got ourselves into this pretty mess, where one person becomes so powerful that it distorts the constitution, undermines our democracy, and takes us to the precipice of a huge crisis,” Omar opined.133 He welcomed the students as partners in “reconfiguring the archive” and redefining what history could be. Omar spoke for about thirty minutes, interrupted by peals of lightning. He stopped for questions. “Have you been able to hear me?” he asked, repeatedly. I could hear only one side of the conversation; apparently someone had asked him how he thought about the production of history. It’s a trial-­and-­error thing, there’s no rule other than being sensitive to how ordinary people, in this case black people, or people of minorities in any society, how they’ve been dealt with, or what is their voice. How do you find those voices, and sometimes they are hidden in the archives, other times you find them in different forms, whether they’re in oral or visual forms, and you try and use all those instruments, all of those techniques and hopefully you write a history that allows anyone to read and to engage with it.134 I was lost in the disorder of Omar’s boxes and not really paying attention. I only found this exchange in a transcript, months after the fact. The clarity of his answer struck me: it reflected a certain slant on what counts as historical inquiry Millennium

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and historical writing that was remarkably consistent with how Omar had seen and thought about his various projects since the 1960s. It was most likely lost on the students, who logged off and went to their next class, to lunch or whatever. But I like to think that at least some of them had been inspired. In Woodstock, Omar stood up, drank a final sip of tepid tea, and made his way into the room where I had been working. He looked over my shoulder. I was looking at a photograph from the 1965 Art South Africa Today exhibition. I asked him about it, and we talked about his uncle Moosa. My voice recorder was in its usual place, on the table next to me, its red light on. When I listened to the recording, I heard the long stretch of silence that followed before he walked quietly out of the room to get ready for bed and I clicked the recorder off. Those students’ projects were taking place at a moment of transition for SAHO. Mads Nørgaard understood how the internet worked better than Omar, and, working with interns from computer science and IT backgrounds, he was able to accomplish much of the behind-­the-­scenes labor that drove traffic to SAHO’s pages. He resurrected dead links and ensured that the 13,237 individual users who visited the site on the morning on January 11, 2018, found what they were looking for—­mostly Alan Paton, who had been that day’s Google doodle, and so would the 194 who were visiting at 3:30 p.m., SAST on February 13, 2018, when I happened to watching: 63 percent on desktops, 37 percent on mobile, mostly in and around Johannesburg, twelve in Cape Town, three in Durban, a handful in Nairobi, some in New York. The top page, not surprisingly, was Jacob Zuma.135 After a decade in Cape Town, Nørgaard moved back to Denmark in 2018 and SAHO struggled to find someone comparably talented to run the site. Without maintenance, dead links began to infiltrate it. When the article that Kelly had cowritten with Omar about their internship was awarded the prize from American Historical Association in 2021, she realized that the links to the SMU-­SAHO partnership page had gone dead. It was a poorly timed glitch, which raised a more fundamental issue.136 Without institutional support, SAHO is necessarily dependent on highly contingent factors—­like the National Lottery’s budget for internships and the pandemic conditions that shut down the office in March 2020 and sent Omar scrambling. Despite their separation, Omar still has Nasima, whereas SAHO has nothing on which it can fall back. Omar won national orders and was awarded an honorary doctorate. On both occasions, he focused his remarks on fundraising so that the site and the people’s history project it contains might survive.137 He still refuses to sell advertising, but did concede a donate button, hoping to entice some fraction of the site’s visitors to help sustain its operations. It has not had any real effect on SAHO’s finances.

7

Without institutional or financial support, SAHO and its success depend on people’s good intentions. But people’s circumstances change in ways that are out of Omar’s control. Kelly had poured herself into the collaboration; she was burned out even before COVID made working with SAHO that much more challenging. Abebe Zegeye went from UNISA to direct the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg. He ruffled feathers there and shortly was caught up in an academic integrity scandal, coincidentally or not.138 He left for Australia, and eventually ended up back in Ethiopia. His and Omar’s once productive partnership fizzled along the way. Omar devoted enormous time to both the McGill-­SAHO collaboration and to Soske’s own research on the intertwined and complex history of Indian-­African politics in Durban. He was glad to do so: it is difficult to imagine a project that was more important to Omar’s own vision and experience of South African history. Soske’s study considered a past that Omar believed was being forgotten in an increasingly ethnic-­chauvinist South Africa. It is wonderful history that I have cited frequently in this book. One person’s name was on the cover, Soske’s, but so was Omar’s photograph, and his deep knowledge about the subject lingered behind every word. Yet their collaboration has not had the impact Omar had once hoped for. Soske struggled with addiction and sought treatment in 2017; the process that followed was messy and revealed deeply unprofessional behavior that ruined many of his relationships at McGill and scuttled plans for the tour they had planned to promote the book. Soske left academia shortly thereafter.139 Omar was angry and upset—­not always at the right people—­but also forgiving and understanding. He remains unflappably and, I think, admirably loyal. People are flawed, people are hurt, people hurt, people make mistakes. Jeeva sat on his hands when Omar was expelled from Afrapix. It happens. His uncle gambled away his wages. Rick was stubborn and naive. Dumile was unreliable. Pax Magwaza drank too much. So did Mafika, whom Omar and other friends often had to extract from shebeens, no matter what time of day they visited.140 Their friend’s behavior could appall and embarrass them. But he was a friend and a genius, and they loved him and worked together to endow an annual lecture series in his honor after he passed away in 2014. Omar was born with his eyes open: he took in the people who chased their trauma with drugs or alcohol and the others who chased the past away through poetry or politics. He took in the ones who were broken. He took in the ones who could no longer bear it and walked into the sea at the Blue Lagoon. He took in the ones who hit their children and who mocked out of ignorance. He regretted and remained loyal, forgiving even when their missteps foreclosed projects Millennium

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he had hoped would materialize. When things go wrong, Omar is capable of a complicated, understanding kind of love, which I both admire and try to emulate. Perhaps Omar is capable of such love because he knows that he, too, needs and deserves it. This book opened with an argument, one of many little spats that its author and its subject have shared. Omar is difficult. That is a fact that everyone who knows him admits. When I contacted people to talk about their shared past, I was often rebuffed. “I have nothing to say about Badsha!” one putative friend spat at me before hanging up. In my more paranoid moments, I wondered whether Omar was using me as a vehicle to reconnect or even to apologize to people with whom he had fallen out. That thought was a figment, yet it also approached the difficult truth that Omar has more broken relationships than he does intact ones. We have spoken about this; regret does not appear to be part of his emotional arsenal. Sometimes I grow sad when I think about him, alone in his house in Woodstock, especially during the COVID lockdown. He is fortunate for his family’s continued, if complicated, love. There are people in his life who think that they deserve better from him—­ that they deserve regret and redress, an empathy beyond stubborn, unapologetic, aggressive principle. Some South Africans weathered the struggle with their whole selves intact; there are former activists who can love fully and completely and give of themselves on multiple levels and in multiple ways who have found a way to process their grief, anger, and trauma. But there are also people who find it difficult to do so. It is unclear who Omar would have been had he not set his internal turmoil upon South Africa’s waters, hoping to find a wind. The person who could have done otherwise is gone, though. Raymond Suttner’s argument that political involvement “leads to a negation of intimacy” seems to be accurate.141 Yet Omar’s limits are his own, and they are painful for those who wish that they might have been able to access a different kind of love. My stake in Omar and that of those who are caught up in his wake is qualitatively different. I am lucky for that fact because it affords the perspective necessary to consider his “burdened virtues” toward the end of what has been a twisted, harrowing, and sometimes triumphant journey. Omar is a historian; he is also history. In his bearing, in his person, he embodies an ontology that we find jarring because it has become unfamiliar. From Old Man Doc, Omar learned that the struggle was about seeing the smallest of cracks. To be part of progress was to be a party to process, to trust in a patient, methodical, opportunistic approach, carefully to wedge the crack into a rift that might be flooded with light. Or maybe not. Today, our problems seem insurmountable; change seems impossible, the structures that determine the world too permanent to be moved. This is certainly true in South Africa; it is true in my United States. It is hard to fathom how many steps it will take to enlighten these places. Perhaps as

many steps as it took to get from the stoep at Douglas Lane in the Durban ghetto to Salisbury Street in gentrified Woodstock? We live in a time of lies that become virulent social truths, a time of misapprehension, appropriation, projection, and ill communication, when all that is solid melts into air. Omar sensed this back in the sixties, and he opted to study, in his own way, to learn from his own teachers, to

Figure 6.5. Omar Badsha, photograph by the author, 2019

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develop the principles and politics that could be the foundation for durable alternatives. His life has been about those principles and politics and his eye, the lens with which he strained to see and to make the words and the world make sense. His principles are who he is. Google approached SAHO seeking a partnership during the 2010s. Omar refused.142 When Leila worked for a time as SAHO’s social media director, she joined a chorus of voices urging him to consider monetizing the site by selling ad space. Again, he refused. SAHO is a people’s history project; it is not for sale. Leila already knew that her father could be uncompromising. It remains a source of frustration for many people who work with him.143 In a time of compromise and concession, Omar still “stands his house,” even when it costs him. Today Farzanah and Leila run a high-­end home furnishing store in Cape Town’s Gardens Center.144 They laugh: the family joke had been that the Coovadias owned the shops and the Badshas worked in them. These Badshas own the shop, however, and despite their father ribbing them for being “capitalist shopkeepers,” they loaned him money to make payroll when SAHO was desperate.145 To know Omar is to appreciate how he carries his past with him, the conviction that one more post, one more conference, or one more publication makes a difference merely because it exists, and he exists, and they existed, and the rest of us ought to remember. The light may be fading, but if you squint, there is still enough to see. He does not know how to live any other way. And now he is old: when this book is published, he will be seventy-­nine, one year shy of Miriam’s age when she passed, four years shy of Ebrahim’s. He does not stop long enough to worry or to mourn, even when beloved comrades pass away.146 They go; he will too, and when he does, South Africa will be down one more person who lived a distinctly South African life. But not yet, and until then, “when I wake up every day, I say, great, I’m still here, let’s go.”147 The stakes of “going” are opaquer today than they once were. But there is no shortage of projects. I lost track of the number of times Omar interrupted our conversations to remind himself “of this thing I must do.” There was the collaboration with the local history museum in Simon’s Town, the village on the Cape Peninsula that had been a naval and fishing base for centuries. Like many of South Africa’s local history museums, the Simon’s Town Museum focused on the history of the town’s white inhabitants to the exclusion of the local Coloured working class, not to mention the large African communities more recently established nearby. This needed to be addressed. Then there was the exhibition on Pax Magwaza, an idea to which he returned, repeatedly. Pax had had such a difficult life. He was given amnesty as part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process in 1999, although it was too late to salvage his marriage and “he just drank himself silly.” He contracted HIV and died in 2007, only forty-­five. It was a tragedy; he had been so

Figure 6.6. “Garment worker, Queen Street,” photograph by Omar Badsha, 1986

talented and driven to create. In 2019 Omar was excited that Pax’s children had found some of his negatives in their family papers. He was drafting a “proposal for an exhibition, a catalogue, possibly a short documentary. . . . So I’ll pull a team together and put this thing together.” It has not happened yet, but maybe it will.148 The Simon’s Town project is moving forward, after a long COVID-­induced stasis. Omar and some interns drove out to visit the museum in January 2022. SAHO is building a website to complement the museum’s existing exhibitions; it is also sponsoring an essay competition, named after a Simonite activist and writer who had collected oral histories from many of the more than seven thousand residents whom the apartheid government displaced during the sixties. Citing the “danger that the stories of the forced removals in Simonstown will disappear, as the increasingly elderly individuals pass away,” SAHO and the museum—­Omar and this most recent network—­encouraged South Africans to talk to each other, to collect stories, to produce “comic strips, graphic stories, video series, essays, [or] an illustration, painting, sculpture, mosaic, [or] a photo series, collage, print.” There is no one way to tell these stories, nor wrong way. The only mistake would be not to tell them. Omar and his team have not collected many stories yet, nor is the website done. It is an ongoing project. He thinks it will work out.149 Millennium

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NOTES

Preface Epigraph: Leyla McCalla, “Memory Song,” track 14 on Breaking the Thermometer, May 6, 2022, YouTube, https://​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=​DLYZq5​_wdtE. 1. Omar Badsha (hereafter OB), virtual conversation, Fall 2022. 2. OB, conversation, Fall 2022. 3. Daniel Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–­1977 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010) and The Art of Life in South Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016). 4. There is an enormous scholarship on the intertwined history of artmaking and political resistance in South Africa. See, for example, Sue Williamson, Resistance Art in South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 1989); John Peffer, Art and the End of Apartheid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Shannen Hill, Biko’s Ghost: The Iconography of Black Consciousness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Diana Wylie, Art + Revolution: The Life and Times of Thami Mnyele (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008). 5. Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Viking, 2014), 178. 6. OB, interview, Cape Town, December 2022. 7. Sean Field, “Beyond Healing: Trauma, Oral History and Regeneration,” Oral History 34, no. 1 (2006): 664. 8. As cited in Field, “Beyond Healing,” 34. 9. Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1.

Chapter 1: The Back Room Epigraph: Mafika Gwala, “Gumba Gumba, Gumba,” Collected Poems (Cape Town: South African History Online, 2016), 39.

1. 2. 3. 4.

Lufthansa Data Book, January 28, 1968, OB private archive. Lufthansa Date Book, January 1968, OB private archive. Lufthansa Date Book, November 1967, OB private archive. Lufthansa Date Book, November 1967, OB private archive.

NOTES TO PAGES 7 – 11 23 8

5. Lufthansa Date Book, June 1967, OB private archive. 6. Lufthansa Date Book, June 1967, OB private archive. 7. Raymond Suttner, ANC Underground in South Africa to 1976: A Social and Historical Study (Auckland Park, SA: Jacana Media, 2008), 2. Suttner has identified the unique methodological challenges that inhere in researching the underground, given that “because of its secret character, much of what was undertaken and achieved” eludes the archival record. As we will see, Omar’s participation in the underground was modest, if important, not least for his own self-­understanding: he worked as a messenger for a small network in Durban, while also establishing a network of his own in time. They did not lay bombs, nor did they smuggle weapons or propaganda. Nevertheless, there remains a good deal I simply cannot know and I have opted to take Omar at his word regarding his underground activities. Other scholars (and indeed me in other, more suspicious and cynical moments) would make a different choice. Similarly, Omar’s long career has led some people to wonder whether his relationship to the struggle might have been less “pure” than his narrative suggests. In the course of my research, I spoke with a former member of the Durban Special Branch about Omar’s activities and posed that question to him. He denied it, saying that Omar was interesting to the state mostly because of the people to whom he was connected; he was surveilled, his phone was tapped, his passport applications were repeatedly denied, and he was arrested on a handful of occasions, but he was never turned, according to this off-­the-­record conversation, at least. 8. Nancy Jacobs and Andrew Bank, “Biography in Post-­Apartheid South Africa: A Call for Awkwardness,” African Studies 78, no. 2 (2019): 165. 9. Jacobs and Bank, “Biography in Post-­Apartheid South Africa,” 166. As the editor and CEO of South African Online (ch. 6), Omar has helped to publish no fewer than ten biographies and memoirs, with more on the way, thus contributing to this industry. 10. For dialogue between history (and historians) and biography (and biographers), see Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American History 88, no. 1 (2001): 129–­44; and Lois Banner, American Historical Review 114, no. 3 (2009): 579–­86. This book might serve as an example “historical biography,” which Daniel Meister proffers as a middle ground between social history, life history, microhistory, and standard biography; see “The Biographical Turn and the Case for Historical Biography,” History Compass 16, no. 1 (2018): 1–­10. I have consulted photographers’ biographies and photo theory better to understand how Omar fit into the global lineage of the discipline. Exemplary studies include Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); and, a model for a historian, Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life beyond Limits (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009). My debt to John Berger’s writing on photography is self-­evident. See Joshua Sperling’s recent biography of Berger, A Writer of Our Time: The Life and Work of John Berger (New York: Verso, 2018) for more. 11. Nasima Badsha, interview, March, April 2019. 12. Farzanah Badsha, interview, February 2018. 13. For more on Antonio Gramsci, see “Intellectuals” from his prison notebooks at Marxists.org, accessed February  7, 2022, https://​www​.marxists​.org​/archive​/gramsci​/prison​ _notebooks​/problems​/intellectuals​.htm. 14. For ambiguous histories of South Africa and apartheid, see my Art of Life in South Africa, as well as the essays collected in Shireen Ally and Arianna Lissoni, “Let’s Talk about Ban-

tustans,” South African Historical Journal 64, no. 1 (2012): 1–­4; Stephen Ellis, External Mission: The ANC in Exile 1960–­1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Jacob Dlamini, Native Nostalgia (Auckland Park, SA: Jacana Media, 2009); Jill Kelly, To Swim with Crocodiles: Land, Violence and Belonging in South Africa, 1800–­1996 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2018); Veronica Ehrenreich-­Risner, Bantu Authorities: Apartheid’s System of Race and Ethnicity (Washington, DC: Lexington Books, 2022). Jacob Dlamini, Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-­Apartheid Struggle (Auckland Park, SA: Jacana Media, 2014) presents an even more morally fraught account by focusing on the politics and experiences of former combatants turned collaborators and informers. 15. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), chap. 1. For more on Indians in South African history, see especially Bill Freund, Insiders and Outsiders: The Indian Working Class of Durban, 1910–­1990 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995); Uma Dhupelia-­Mesthrie, From Cane Fields to Freedom: A Chronicle of Indian South African Life (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2000); Goolam Vahed, Many Lives: 150 Years of Being Indian in South Africa (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter, 2010); Jon Soske, Internal Frontiers: African Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora in Twentieth-­Century South Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017); Thomas Blom Hansen, Melancholia of Freedom: Social Life in an Indian Township in South Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). For comparative approaches elsewhere in Africa, see Sana Aiyar, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); James Brennan, Taifa: Making Race and Nation in Urban Tanzania (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012). For a recent and wonderfully surprising transnational approach, see Shobana Shankar, An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 16. Soske, Internal Frontiers, 3. 17. Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 18. One exception to this anti-­teleological strain is revisionist literature that focuses on the corruption and violence that infected both the ANC and its allies in exile, and which scholars like Stephen Ellis have proposed set the stage for post-­apartheid follies. See Ellis’s External Mission, for example, or Mxolisi Mchunu, Violence and Solace: The Natal Civil War in Late Apartheid South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020), for a different perspective on violence, continuities and teleologies. 19. Joan Scott, Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 19. 20. For a magisterial account of the history of the attempted revolution that predated Omar’s own political participation, see Paul Landau, Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2022). 21. Ruth Marshall, Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 22. Lisa Tessman, Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 168. 23. OB, Letter to Farzanah (Durban: Institute for Black Research, 1979); Omar Badsha, Imijondolo: A Photographic Essay on Forced Removals in South Africa (Johannesburg: Afrapix, 1985); Omar Badsha, Imperial Ghetto: Ways of Seeing in a South African City (Cape Town: South

23 9

NOTES TO PAGES 11 – 12

NOTES TO PAGES 12 – 19 24 0

African History Online, 2001). Many captions for Omar’s photographs originally appeared in his published books. Where necessary, I have made silent minor corrections for spelling and syntax. 24. Francis Wilson, ed., South Africa: The Cordoned Heart (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986); Alex Harris and Iris Tillman Hill, eds., Beyond the Barricades: Popular Resistance in South Africa (London: Kliptown Books, 1989); Omar Badsha, ed., With Our Own Hands: Fighting Poverty in South Africa (Pretoria: Community Based Public Works Programme, 2001); Omar Badsha, ed., Amulets and Dreams: War, Youth and Change in South Africa (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2003); Omar Badsha, Mads Nørgaard, and Jeeva Rajgopaul, eds., Bonani Africa 2010 Catalogue (Cape Town: South African History Online, 2010). 25. Tiffany Willoughby-­Herard, “Revolt at the Source: The Black Radical Tradition in the Social Documentary Photography of Omar Badsha and Nadine Hutton,” African Identities 11, no. 2 (2013): 201. 26. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: Penguin, 1972), 10. 27. Darren Newbury, Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2009), 317. 28. See a resonant recent example, see Jacob Dlamini, The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators and the Security Police (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020); other work includes Chika Okeke-­Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-­Century Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Drew Thompson, Filtering Histories: The Photographic Bureaucracy in Mozambique, 1960 to Recent Times (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021); and especially Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley, eds., Ambivalent: Photography and Visibility in African History (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019). See also Saadiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019); and Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 29. See, among others, Willoughby-­Herard, “Revolt at the Source”; Patricia Hayes, “Power, Secrecy, Proximity,” Kronos 33 (2007): 139–­62; Hayes, “Seeing and Being Seen: Politics, Art and the Everyday in Omar Badsha’s Durban Photography, 1960s–­1980s,” Africa 81, no. 4 (2011): 544–­ 66; Hayes, “The Form of the Norm,” Social Dynamics 37, no. 2 (2011): 263–­77; Hayes, “Photographic Publics and Photographic Desires in 1980s South Africa,” Photographies 10, no. 3 (2017): 303–­27; Heidi Hattingh and Rolf Gaede, “Photographer Autonomy and Images of Resistance,” Visual Communication 10, no. 4 (2011): 499–­525; Kylie Thomas, “Wounding Apertures: Violence, Affect and Photography during and after Apartheid,” Kronos 38 (2012): 204–­18; Neelika Jayawardane, “Praise Poem for the Photographer Omar Badsha,” Omar Badsha.co.za, May 13, 2015, https://​w ww​.omarbadsha​.co​.za​/archives​/praise​-poem​-photographer​-omar​-badsha​-neelika​ -jayawardane. 30. Darren Newbury, Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2009), 317. 31. John Peffer, Art and the End of Apartheid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 44. 32. Lufthansa Date Book, August 1966, OB private archive. 33. Lufthansa Date Book, February 1967, OB private archive. 34. Arthur Danto, What Art Is (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 124.

35. T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 19. 36. Mchunu, Violence and Solace, 54. 37. Sean Field, “Critical Empathy through Oral Histories after Apartheid,” Continuum 31, no. 5 (2017): 667. 38. Shula Marks, Not Even an Experimental Doll: The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 1. 39. Mchunu, Violence and Solace, 207. 40. Derek Hook, A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial: The Mind of Apartheid (New York: Routledge, 2012), 18. 41. Derek Hook, “Narrative Form, ‘Impossibility,’ and the Retrieval of Apartheid History,” Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society 16, no. 1 (2011): 79. 42. Sean Field, Oral History, Community and Displacement: Imagining Memories in Post-­ Apartheid South Africa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 35. 43. Raymond Suttner is another scholar who has urged researchers to be sensitive to the moral and psychological implications of underground work. Suttner, ANC Underground in South Africa to 1976, chap. 5. 44. In Double Negative, his thinly fictionalized account of David Goldblatt’s approach to photography, the South African novelist Ivan Vladislavic titles one subsection “Available Light.” He uses it in a way like mine, albeit with fewer overtly political overtones. I recalled this only after I had fallen into the habit of referring to this book by the name and have decided to risk redundancy by retaining it. See Vladislavic, Double Negative (Johannesburg: Umuzi, 2011), as well as the wonderful Goldblatt collection that accompanied the novel, TJ: Johannesburg Photographs, 1948–­2010 (Rome: Contrasto, 2011). 45. Matthew Palombo, “The Emergence of Islamic Liberation Theology in South Africa,” Journal of Religion in Africa, no. 44 (2014): 28–­61; Faried Esack, “Three Islamic Strands in the South African Struggle for Justice,” Third World Quarterly 10, no. 2 (1988): 473–­98. 46. Na’eem Jeenah, “Jihad as a Form of Struggle in the Resistance to Apartheid in South Africa,” in Twenty-­First Century Jihad: Law, Society and Military Action, ed. Elisabeth Kendall and Ewan Stein (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 211. 47. David Hemson, interview, 2019. 48. Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019), 17, 95. 49. Pamela Reynolds, War in Worcester: Youth and the Apartheid State (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 50. Tessman, Burdened Virtues, 8, 12, 85. 51. Tessman, 120. 52. Padraig O’Malley identifies anger—­along with ego—­as one of the outstanding complications in the hybrid autobiography that he produced with Mac Maharaj. Maharaj was capable of producing “explosion[s] of ferocious anger, hard edged and cold with menace,” in O’Malley’s words (24). In their cowritten study, O’Malley strived to understand this anger, to root it in the fact that Maharaj “lived in a special world, one that he had to create in order to survive” (33). Omar’s circumstances, connections, and choices were quite different; even if Nelson Mandela

241

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NOTES TO PAGES 22 – 2 6 242

were still alive, it is doubtful that he would have written a forward to this book. O’Malley’s sensitivity to the wages of his subject’s “special world” instructs nonetheless. O’Malley, Shades of Difference: Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa (New York: Viking, 2007). 53. OB, interview, July 2019. 54. Reynolds, War in Worcester, 15.

Chapter 2: Douglas Lane Epigraph: Mafika Gwala, “Grey Street,” Collected Poems (Cape Town: South African History Online, 2016), 67–­69. 1. Omar Badsha (hereafter OB), interview, February 2018. 2. Goolam Vahed, “Family, Gender and Mobility among Passenger Migrants into Colonial Natal: The Story Moosa Hajee Cassum (c. 1840s–­1921),” Journal of Southern African Studies 42, no. 3 (2016): 521. 3. Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi before India (London: Allen Lane, 2013), 109. 4. Maynard Swanson, “The Rise of Multiracial Durban” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1965). See also Sharad Chari, “The Ocean and the City,” Society and Space 39, no. 6 (2021): 1026–­42. 5. Still the essential account, Keletso Atkins, The Moon Is Dead! Give Us Our Money (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993); see also T. J. Tallie, “The Myth Is Dead! Give Us Our History!,” American Historical Review 124, no. 5 (2019): 1758–­68. 6. Bill Freund, Insiders and Outsiders: The Indian Working Class of Durban, 1910–­1990 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995), esp. chap. 1; Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, Inside Indenture: A South African Story, 1860–­1914 (Durban: Madiba Publishers, 2007); Uma Dhupelia-­Mesthrie, From Cane Fields to Freedom: A Chronicle of Indian South African Life (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2000); Nafisa Essop Sheik, “Colonial Rites: Custom, Marriage Law and the Making of Difference in Natal, 1930s–­c. 1910” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2012); Sheik, “Words on Black Water,” Interventions 24, no. 3 (2022): 389–­98; Preben Kaarsholm, “Aspiration, Exclusion and Belonging in South Africa and Kenya,” African Studies 78, no. 1 (2019): 1–­5; Kaarsholm, “Indian Ocean Networks and Transmutations of Servitude,” Journal of Southern African Studies 42, no. 3 (2016): 443–­61. For a lyrically compelling and brutal account of indenture elsewhere, Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Women: The Odyssey of Indenture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); for a more theoretical approach to indenture in the context of oceanic labor migrations, enslavement, and servitude, Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 7. Freund, Insiders and Outsiders, 10. 8. Abebe Zegeye and Paul Ahluwalia, introduction to Omar Badsha, Imperial Ghetto: Ways of Seeing in a South African City (Cape Town: South African History Online, 2001), 14–­ 15. See also Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, Durban’s Casbah: Bunny Chows, Bolsheviks and Bioscopes (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-­Natal Press, 2023). 9. For more on the history of Durban in the early twentieth century, see Paul Maylam and Iain Edwards, eds., The People’s City: African Life in Twentieth-­Century Durban (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1996). Ismail was established enough to feature in a group photograph of the Durban Shop Assistant’s Association, taken when the Ottoman Consul visited Durban in 1906. See Goolam Vahed and Thembisa Waetjen, Schooling Muslims in Natal: Identity, State and

the Orient Islamic Educational Institute (Scottsville, SA: University of KwaZulu-­Natal Press, 2015), 15. See also Hilda Kuper, Indian People in Natal (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1960). 10. OB, interview, February 2018. 11. The dearth of available archival materials makes it quite difficult to reconstruct Ismail’s to-­and-­fro journeys with any degree of accuracy. The preceding is based off stories Rassool and Ayesha shared with Omar, and the family history notes that he took based on their stories. Goolam Vahed has explored the challenges of doing biographies for this generation in Vahed, “Family, Gender and Mobility among Passenger Migrants into Colonial Natal,” 2016. 12. On families more prominent than the Badshas and their business practices, see Goolam Vahed, “Passengers, Partnerships, and Promissory Notes: Gujarati Traders in Colonial Natal, 1870–­1920,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 38, no. 3 (2005): 449–­79. 13. OB, interview, February 2018; see also Vahed and Waetjen, Schooling Muslims, 57–­64. 14. Goolam Vahed and Surendra Bhana, Crossing Space and Time in the Indian Ocean: Early Traders in Natal: A Biographical Study (Pretoria: University of South African Press, 2015), 63–­64. 15. Guha, Gandhi before India, 78. 16. Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher Bearer of Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016). See also Shobana Shankar, An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), chap. 1; and Milip M. Melon, “Was Mohandas Gandhi a Racist?,” Africa Is a Country, accessed January 11, 2023, https://​africasacountry​.com​/2017​/03​/was​-mohandas​-gandhi​-a​-racist. 17. Vahed and Bhana, Crossing Space and Time in the Indian Ocean, 69. 18. Hesther Hughes, First President: The Life of John Dube, Founding President of the ANC (Auckland Park, SA: Jacana Media, 2011). 19. For recent studies on the history of the ANC in the era of the Union, see Andre Odendaal, The Founders: The Origins of the ANC and the Struggle for Democracy in South Africa (Auckland Park, SA: Jacana Media, 2012); Khwezi Mkhize, “To See Us as We See Ourselves: John Tengo Jabavu and the Politics of the Black Periodical,” Journal of Southern African Studies 44, no. 3 (2018): 413–­30; Bongani Ngqulunga, The Man Who Founded the ANC: A Biography of Pixley Ka Isaka Seme (Cape Town: Penguin Books, 2017). 20. Thuto Thipe, “Black Freehold: Land Ownership in Alexandra Township, 1912–­1979” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2020). 21. Goolam Vahed, “An Imagined Community in Diaspora,” South Asian History and Culture 1, no. 4 (2010): 619. 22. Vahed and Bhana, Crossing Space and Time in the Indian Ocean, chap. 2. 23. “Marriage Certificate in Accordance with Sunni Mohamedan Law,” July 18, 1943, SAHO Archives. 24. Goolam Vahed, “Mosques, Mawlanas and Muharram: Indian Islam in Colonial Natal, 1860–­1910,” Journal of Religion in Africa 31 (2001): 312. 25. OB, interview, February 2018. 26. Vahed, “Mosques, Mawlanas, and Muharram,” 319–­20. Rafs Mayet, interview, February 2018. Omar is adamant that Mayet is mistaken and that Ebrahim’s friends jokingly called him “George”—­referring to King George—­not King. OB, interview, December 2022.

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27. On the history of transport in and demographics in and around the district, see Len Rosenberg Goolam Vahed, and Sam Moodley, eds., The Making of Place: The Warwick Junction Precinct (Durban: Durban University of Technology, 2013). See also Len Rosenberg, “A City within a City” (master’s thesis, University of KwaZulu-­Natal, 2012). 28. See Louise Torr, “Lamontville: A History,” in Maylam and Edwards, The People’s City. 29. Len Rosenberg, interview, July 2019. 30. Jon Soske, Internal Frontiers: African Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora in Twentieth-­ Century South Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017), 45. 31. Lorna Lloyd, “An Acutely Embarrassing Affair: Whitehall and the Indian-­South African Dispute at the United Nations (1946),” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 46, no. 5 (2018): 909–­34. 32. Vahed and Waetjen, Schooling Muslims in Natal, chap. 2–­3. 33. OB, interview, February 2018; Rabia Badsha, interview, May 2019. 34. OB, interview, July 2019. 35. “Natal Indian Schools, Arts and Crafts Exhibition, Certificate of Merit,” awarded to Ebrahim Badsha, 1938. Notably, one of the judges was J.  W. Grossert, who would feature in Omar’s own artistic career. See chapter 3. 36. OB, virtual interview, 2021. 37. OB, interview, December 2019. 38. Freund, Insiders and Outsiders, 39. 39. OB, interview, February 2018. 40. Freund, Insiders and Outsiders, 39; see also Soske, Internal Frontiers, 51, and especially Riason Naidoo, The Indian in Drum Magazine in the 1950s (Cape Town: Bell-­Roberts, 2008), which remains the preeminent account of Casbah culture during this era. The last quote in Niren Tolsi, “Back in the Day,” Mail & Guardian, August 2, 2006, https://​mg​.co​.za​/article​/2006​-08​ -02​-back​-in​-the​-day/. 41. For Manilal’s life in Durban, see Uma Dhupelia-­Mesthrie, Gandhi’s Prisoner? The Life of Gandhi’s Son Manilal (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2004). 42. Anne Digby, “The Last Cohort of Early Black Doctors Who Studied Abroad, 1931–­ 1940,” South African Medical Journal 97, no. 7 (2007): 508–­9; Goolam Vahed, “Monty . . . Meets Gandhi . . . Meets Mandela: The Dilemma of Non-­Violent Resisters in South Africa, 1940–­1960,” Historia 54, no. 1 (2009): 34–­50. 43. Soske, Internal Frontiers, 81; Jamila Docrat, interview, July 2018; Tom Lodge, Red Road to Freedom: A History of the South African Communist Party, 1921–­2021 (Auckland Park, SA: Jacana Media, 2021), 206–­7; see also “A Chronological Look (1943 to 1986) at the Life and Times of Mr.  George Ponnen,” South African History Online, updated November  21, 2018, https://​www​.sahistory​.org​.za​/article​/chronological​-look​-1943​-1986​-life​-and​-times​-mr​-george​ -ponnen. 44. Africans’ Claims in South Africa, African National Congress 1943, ANC Historical Documents Archive, https://​www​.marxists​.org​/subject​/africa​/anc​/1943​/claims​.htm. 45. Soske, Internal Frontiers, 85. 46. Soske, 87, 91. 47. Soske, 105.

48. OB, interview, February 2018, March 2019. 49. Ismail Vadi, compiler, The 1949 Durban Riots: Press Clippings of Haji Ahmed Suleiman Ballim, South African History Online, January  13, 2022, https://​www​.sahistory​.org​.za​/archive​ /durban​-riots​-press​-clippings​-haji​-ahmed​-suleman​-ballim. Quotes taken from clippings from the Sunday Tribune and Natal Mercury. 50. Donald Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 51. Sylvia Neame, The Congress Movement: The Unfolding of the Congress Alliance 1912–­1961 (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2015), 238, cited in Vadi, The 1949 Durban Riots, 3. 52. OB, interview, February 2018, July 2019, December 2019, December 2023. 53. Cited in Daniel Magaziner, The Art of Life in South Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016), 247. 54. For more on Solberg, see https://​www​.nilslandmarksolberg​.com/. 55. Cited in Lize van Robbroeck, ed., Visual Century: South African Art in Context, vol. 2 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2011), 194; “B.I.C.A. to Present Entertainment,” Indian Views, July 21, 1954, n.p. 56. Magaziner, The Art of Life in South Africa, 247. 57. Nisa Mvusi, interview, July 2019. 58. Nisa Mvusi, interview, July 2019. See also Elza Miles, Selby Mvusi: To Fly with the North Bird South (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2015); and Magaziner, The Art of Life in South Africa, 245–­52. 59. Nisa Mvusi, interview, July 2019. 60. Cited in Magaziner, The Art of Life in South Africa, 247. 61. OB, interview, June 2013. 62. Robert Sobukwe, “Speech at the University of Fort Hare as President of the Students’ Representative Council, 21 October 1949,” South African History Online, accessed February  8, 2023, https://​www​.sahistory​.org​.za​/archive​/robert​-sobukwe​-speech​-university​-fort​-hare​ -president​-students​-representative​-council​-21. 63. Robert Sobukwe, “Inaugural Speech, 1959,” South African History Online, accessed February 8, 2023, https://​www​.sahistory​.org​.za​/archive​/robert​-sobukwe​-inaugural​-speech​-april​-1959. 64. OB, interview, June 2013. 65. OB, interview, February 2018. 66. Elizabeth Tonkin, “The Boundaries of History in Oral Performance,” History in Africa 9 (1982): 273–­84; Luise White, Stephan F. Miescher, and David William Cohen, eds., African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 67. OB, interview, February 2018. 68. On sense memory and traumatic events, see Annie Wright, “You’re Not Crazy; You’re Having a Feeling Memory,” Psychology Today, July 26, 2022, https://​www​.psychologytoday​.com​ /us​/blog​/making​-the​-whole​-beautiful​/202207​/youre​-not​-crazy​-youre​-having​-feeling​-memory. See also Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Viking, 2014), chap. 11–­12. 69. OB, interview, February 2018, March 2019, July 2019 (virtual), September 2022.

24 5

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NOTES TO PAGES 54 – 62 24 6

Chapter 3: Durban Epigraph: Mafika Gwala, “A Stalwart—­August 1977 (for ‘Oldman’ Docrat),” Collected Poems (Cape Town: South African History Online, 2016), 141. 1. On Bantu Education, see Cynthia Kros, The Seeds of Separate Development: Origins of Bantu Education (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2010); and Peter Kallaway, ed., The History of Education under Apartheid 1948–­1994 (New York: Peter Lang, 2002). 2. Goolam Vahed and Thembisa Waetjen, Schooling Muslims in Natal: Identity, State and the Orient Islamic Educational Institute (Scottsville, SA: University of KwaZulu-­Natal Press, 2015), 3, 69. 3. Vahed and Waetjen, chap. 5. 4. Vahed and Waetjen, 207. 5. Vahed and Waetjen, 227. 6. Omar Badsha (hereafter OB), interview, February 2018, March 2019. 7. OB, virtual interview, September 2022. 8. Rabia Badsha, interview, May 2019. 9. OB, interview, February 2018. 10. OB, interview, February 2018. 11. Vahed and Waetjen, Schooling Muslims in Natal, 231. 12. Vahed and Waetjen, 275. 13. Ebrahim and Sherene Seedat, interview, July 2019. 14. OB, interview, February 2018. 15. Steve Biko’s trajectory to Catholic school is one of the best-­known examples of this. See Xolela Mangcu, Biko: A Life (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2012). 16. Vahed and Waetjen, 300. 17. OB, interview, February 2018. 18. History Matters, http://​historymatters​.gmu​.edu​/d​/4984/. 19. For more on Cato Manor, see Gavin Maasdorp and A. S. B. Humphreys, eds., From Shantytown to Township: An Economic Study of African Poverty and Rehousing in a South African City (Cape Town: Juta, 1975), 61–­63. On protest in Cato Manor, see Hamilton Southworth, “Strangling South Africa’s Cities: Resistance to Group Areas in Durban during the 1950s,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 24, no. 1 (1991): 1–­34. For the connection between Sharpeville and Cato Manor, see Philip Frankel, An Ordinary Atrocity: Sharpeville and Its Massacre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). 20. Maasdorp and Humphrey, 62. 21. OB, interview, February 2018, March 2019. 22. Far and away the best political narrative of these years is Paul Landau, Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2022). 23. Rafs Mayet, interview, February 2018. 24. Jamila Docrat, interview, July 2018. 25. Saleem Badat, interview, February 2018. 26. Jamila Docrat, interview, July 2018; Rabia Badsha, interview, May 2019.

27. OB, interview, February 2018. 28. Jamila Docrat, interview, July 2018. 29. Rabia Badsha, interview, May 2019. 30. Lufthansa Date Book, May 20, 1967, OB private archive. 31. Lufthansa Date Book, July 14, 1966, OB private archive. 32. OB, interview, February 2018, March 2019, September 2022 (virtual). 33. Rabia Badsha, interview, May 2019. 34. Lufthansa Date Book, April 1967, OB private archive. 35. Lufthansa Date Book, July 14, 1966, OB private archive. 36. The DSU was comprised largely of Indian students at the University of Natal, University College at Salisbury Island, and the ML Sultan Technikon. See also Goolam Vahed and Surendra Bhana, “‘Colours Do Not Mix’: Segregated Classes at the University of Natal, 1936–­ 1959,” Journal of Natal and Zulu History 29, no. 1 (2011): 66–­100. 37. Crain Soudien, The Cape Radicals: Intellectual and Political Thought of the New Era Fellowship, 1930s–­1960s (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2019). 38. Mohamed Adhikari, “Fiercely Non-­Racial? Discourses and Politics of Race in the Non-­ European Unity Movement, 1943–­70,” Journal of Southern African Studies 31, no. 2 (2005): 404. For more on the boycott as a political tactic, see I. B. Tabata, “The Boycott as a Weapon of Struggle,” June 1952, South African History Online, accessed February 15, 2024, https://​www​.sahistory​ .org​.za​/archive​/boycott​-weapon​-struggle​-ib​-tabata​-june​-1952. 39. Daniel Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–­1977 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), chap. 1. 40. Nalini Naidoo, “Voice of Resistance,” The Witness, November  14, 2011, https://​www​ .citizen​.co​.za​/witness​/archive​/voice​-of​-resistance​-20150430/. 41. I. B. Tabata, “Presidential Address, Cape Town, April 1962,” accessed February 9, 2023, https://​vital​.seals​.ac​.za​/vital​/access​/manager​/PdfViewer​/vital:​33171​/SOURCE1​?viewPdfInternal​=​1. 42. OB, interview, February 2018, July 2019, December 2019. 43. “The Students Voice,” Durban Students Union, 1963, 13. 44. “The Students Voice,” 18. 45. “The Students Voice,” 5. 46. Jamila Docrat, interview, July 2018. 47. “The Students Voice,” 13. 48. OB, interview, December 2023. 49. Ebrahim and Sherene Seedat, interview, July 2019. 50. In Spear (2022, p. 127), Landau notes that MK activists used the term mole to describe how they needed to operate underground. 51. Docrat was an NIC delegate to the 1954 Congress of the People, at which the Freedom Charter was ratified. “Struggle Icon Doc’s Connection Donated to UDW,” Way2go, June 2003, 6. 52. Foszia Fisher, interview, 2018. 53. “Heritage Month and Remembering AKM Docrat,” The Post (KwaZulu-­Natal), September 28, 2016. 54. We will consider Meer, Gandhi, and Ramgobin in chapter 4. For Phyllis Naidoo (who also features in chapter 5), see South African Women Celebrated, South Africa Online, https://​

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NOTES TO PAGES 6 9 – 74 24 8

southafrica​.co​.za​/phyllis​-naidoo​.html; and South Africa: Overcoming Apartheid, Building Democracy, Michigan State University, accessed January  19, 2023, https://​overcomingapartheid​ .msu​.edu​/people​.php​?kid​=​163​-574​-751. 55. Raymond Suttner, The ANC Underground in South Africa to 1976: A Social and Historical Study (Auckland Park, SA: Jacana Media, 2008), 87. 56. Ebrahim Seedat, interview, July 2019. 57. Ebrahim Seedat, interview, July 2019. 58. Lufthansa Date Book, January 1, 1968, OB private archive. 59. Lufthansa Date Book, December 31, 1967, OB private archive. 60. Suttner, The ANC Underground in South Africa to 1976, 99. 61. OB, interview, February 2018, March 2019. 62. Unknown author [Omar Badsha?], “Omar,” [1962?]. 63. “African Peoples Democratic Union of South Africa,” South African History Online, accessed February  24, 2024, https://​www​.sahistory​.org​.za​/article​/african​-peoples​-democratic​ -union​-southern​-africa​-apdusa; and “Isaac Bongani Tabata,” South African History Online, accessed February 15, 2025, https://​www​.sahistory​.org​.za​/people​/isaac​-bangani​-tabata. 64. OB, virtual interview, May 2021. 65. OB, Lufthansa Date Book, December 11, 1967, OB private archive. 66. OB, interview, December 2023. 67. OB, interview, February 2018. 68. OB, interview, December 2023. 69. SAIRR, “Annual Report—­Natal Region,” March 30, 1965, p. 2, SAIRR collection, Killie Campbell Collection, University of KwaZulu-­Natal, Durban, South Africa. 70. SAIRR, “Annual Report—­Natal Region,” Dubow, Cape Times, July 10, 1969. 71. Art South Africa Today exhibition catalog, 1965. 72. See Hazel Friedman, “Beauty, Duty and Dissidence,” in Visual Century: South African Art in Context, vol. 2, ed. Lize van Robbroeck (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2011), 45. 73. Grossert’s master’s thesis from the University of Natal was on Hindu temple architecture in Natal, in which he studied how “traditional” architecture was transplanted to Southern Africa and remained recognizably Indian in the new context. For much more on Grossert and the racial element in art, see my The Art of Life in South Africa, chap. 3. 74. Rabia Badsha proudly showed it to me when I visited her family home outside of Brussels. 75. OB, interview, February 2018. 76. Lufthansa Date Book, July 14, 1966, OB private archive. 77. See, for example, OB, Lufthansa Date Book, March 7, 1968, OB private archive. 78. Walter Battiss to OB, May 11, 1966, 1–­2. 79. For much more on this theme, see Lize van Robbroeck, “Race and Art in Apartheid South Africa,” in Visual Century. 80. Lufthansa Date Book, [July 1966], OB private archive. 81. Lufthansa Date Book, [April 1967], OB private archive. 82. Omar has numerous examples of this work in his house, as does his cousin Jamila in her home outside of Pretoria. OB, interview, February 2018; Jamila Docrat, interview, July 2018.

83. Lufthansa Date Book, May 20, 1967, OB private archive. 84. Lufthansa Date Book, July 14, 1966, OB private archive. 85. Leon Trotsky, “Culture and Socialism,” in Art and Revolution: Writings on Literature, Politics and Culture, ed. Paul Siegel (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), 97. 86. Trotsky, 98. 87. Lufthansa Date Book, July 14, 1966, OB private archive. 88. Hazel Friedman includes this drawing in her discussion of the shift toward “socio-­ political” comment in South African art, albeit without noting how the subject was also one deeply rooted in Omar’s personal experiences. Friedman, “Beauty, Duty and Dissidence,” 39. 89. I suggested as much to Omar in one of our more recent conversations (December 2023), gently ribbing his younger self for producing work of such overt and easily analyzed psychological content. He readily agreed, laughing that it was work that was fairly easy to analyze. 90. During the 1960s, Ebrahim supplemented his income by producing silk-­screened greeting cards of Arabic calligraphy for Eid and other festivals. The apotheosis of Omar’s flirtation with sweetness came in 1970, when he produced a silk-­screened mother and child that he, too, tried to sell as a greeting card. 91. OB, Winthrop Labs notebook, January 11, 1967, OB private archive. 92. Foszia Fisher, interview, May 2019. 93. Lufthansa Date Book, August 9, 1966, OB private archive. 94. OB, Lufthansa Date Book, May 17, 1967, OB private archive. 95. OB, Lufthansa Date Book, April 5, 1966, OB private archive. 96. OB, Winthrop Labs notebook, June 1967, OB private archive. 97. On the denial of passports—­a consistent theme in Omar’s life, as we shall see—­see “Karl Edwards, Extract from ‘An In-­depth View of NIC and ANC Activities and Activists with Emphasis on ANC/CP Links,’” accessed January  23, 2023, https://​omalley​.nelsonmandela​.org​ /index​.php​/site​/q​/03lv03445​/04lv04015​/05lv04141​/06lv04147​.htm. 98. OB, Lufthansa Date Book, May 17, 1967, OB private archive. 99. Out there, Motala seems to have spent much of the next decade searching, coming back to South Africa only irregularly. In the mid-­1970s an “Anoo Motala” is credited for cover art on an album by Irene Schweitzer, a West German experimental piano player, and her combo. Ogun Records, a label managed by a white South African expatriate (and bassist) named Henry Miller, pressed the recording in London. Perhaps Anoo connected with Ogun through expatriate circles; perhaps it is just a coincidence and it was another Anoo Motala entirely. Omar thinks that Motala is still alive today and in Cape Town. But neither he, nor Foszia, whom Anoo also left behind, know for certain. 100. OB, Lufthansa Date Book, August 5, 1967, OB private archive. 101. OB, Lufthansa Date Book, [October]1967, OB private archive. 102. Mafika Mbuli, untitled poem, November 11, 1969. 103. OB, interview, February 2018. 104. Mafika Mbuli, “Miners,” in To Whom It May Concern: An Anthology of Black South African Poetry, ed. Robert Royston (Johannesburg: AD Donker, 1975), 70–­7 1. 105. Mbulelo Mzamane, “Literature and Poetry among Blacks in South Africa,” in Soweto Poetry, ed. Michael Chapman (Johannesburg: McGraw-­Hill, 1982), 133.

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NOTES TO PAGES 79 – 83 25 0

106. Inspired by his friend, Omar tried his hand at poetry. Reading about a mine disaster that took fifty lives, he responded with a poem called “Gum Boot Alley,” after Black South African miners’ well-­known footwear: “50 / pairs of gum boots / no more stamp Sunday’s day . . . 50 / pair of hands no more / clamber up gum boot alley.” Omar did not know much about mining beyond the packaged accounts of gum-­boot dancers that the government released to prove that the “natives” were happy with their lot in life. The poem never left his diary. 107. Mandla Langa, interview, July 2019. 108. OB, Lufthansa Date Book, December 27, 1967, OB private archive. 109. Gwala, “A Stalwart,” Collected Poems, 141; Mandla Langa, interview, July 2019. 110. OB, interview, February 2018; Mandla Langa, interview, July 2019. 111. Mafika Gwala, “At Victoria Street Bridge,” unpublished, OB private archive. 112. Mafika Gwala, “Black Fists Lonely Hearts,” unpublished, OB private archive. 113. Both Mafikas came to tough ends. Mafika Gwala and Omar remained close for decades, as Mafika became an increasingly well-­known poet and, eventually, Black Consciousness activist. His addiction plagued him, however, and he never managed to break the patterns that kept him in poverty. Mafika Mbuli’s end was even more tragic: he enjoyed a brief spell as a published poet during the 1970s and otherwise worked as a lawyer in KwaMashu. He was killed there in a battle between Inkatha and ANC supporters, one month before the 1994 elections. 114. For an audio recording of this quote, see “Dorothea Lange: The Camera Teaches People How to See,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, video, 1:12, accessed February 15, 2024, https://​www​.sfmoma​.org​/watch​/dorothea​-lange​-the​-camera​-teaches​-people​-how​-to​-see/. 115. OB, Lufthansa Date Book, February 1 and February 2, 1967, OB private archive. 116. OB, interview, February 2018. 117. Mongane Serote, “City Johannesburg,” in Royston, To Whom It May Concern, 21. 118. OB, Winthrop Labs notebook, February 19, 1967, OB private archive. 119. Egon Guenther shared his reminiscences of Joubert Park with me, as did numerous others. Guenther, interview, February 2011. The once vibrant JAG has fallen on hard times: Julie Evans, “Once Vibrant Joburg Art Gallery Is Crumbling into Ruin,” Daily Maverick, April 1, 2022, https://​www​.dailymaverick​.co​.za​/article​/2022​-04​-01​-joburg​-art​-gallery​-is​-crumbling​-into​-rack​ -and​-ruin/. Dumile Feni (see below) and Ephraim Ngatane were among the artists who got their start selling works in Joubert Park. Christine Eyrene, “Yearning for Art,” in Visual Century, 109. 120. OB, interview, February 2018. 121. OB, interview, February 2018. 122. OB, interview, February 2018. For more on the Fielding Gallery, see http://​www​ .pelmama​.org​/Johannesburg​_artscene​_AdlerFieldingGalleries​.htm. 123. Jubilee was the successor to the Polly Street Art Centre, which had been the first Johannesburg institution to offer classes for aspirant Black artists. In the early sixties, Polly Street’s instructors included Cecil Skotnes, a founder of the Amadlozi group, who judged the first Art South Africa Today. By the time Omar visited, Skotnes had been replaced by Ezrom Legae. For much more on Polly Street, see Elza Miles, Polly Street: The Story of an Art Centre (Johannesburg: Ampersand Foundation, 2004); and van Robbroeck, Visual Century, esp. chap. 4. 124. Aggrey Klaase, “Pipe-­Smoking Artist Teaches All Kind,” The World, July 8, 1965, 7. 125. OB, diary [loose leaf], June 10, 1966, OB private archive.

126. OB, interview, February 2018. 127. Cited in Chabani Manganyi, ed., The Beauty of the Line: Life and the Times of Dumile Feni (Johannesburg: KMM Review Publishing, 2012), 73–­77. 128. Editorial, “This Is Not Our Art,” The World, October 28, 1966. 129. OB, interview, February 2018; Paul Stopforth, virtual interview, December 2020; OB, Lufthansa Date Book, August 1966, OB private archive. See also Anitra Nettleton, “Writing Artists Back into History: Dumile Feni and the South African Canon,” African Arts 44, no. 1 (2011): 8–­25; and Prince Dube, ed., Dumile Feni: The Story of a Great Artist (Johannesburg: Motloatse Arts Heritage Trust, 2010). 130. OB, interview, February 2019; Nettleton, “Writing Artists into Black History,” 15. 131. Lufthansa Date Book, August 9, 1966, OB private archive. 132. OB, interview, February 2018, July 2019. 133. Rabia Badsha, interview, May 2019. 134. Rabia Badsha, interview, May 2019. 135. OB, Lufthansa Date Book, [August] 1966, OB private archive. 136. I’m thinking here about “Railway Accident” (reproduced in Nettleton, “Writing Artists into Black History,” 16), which clearly responded to the numerous train accidents that afflicted commuters traveling between Soweto and Johannesburg. 137. Paul Stopforth, virtual interview, December 2020. 138. Durban Art Gallery, Dumile, August 18–­­September 6, 1966. 139. “Dumile Show in Durban,” The Star, May 12, 1966. 140. “Mother and Child” was reproduced in The World, October 28, 1966, 5, and in my Art of Life in South Africa, 242. 141. These works can all be seen as studies for what came to be Dumile’s best-­known work, African Guernica, which he completed a few months later in 1967. African Guernica was an enormous composition, nearly seven-­and-­a-­half-­feet square, its gray-­to-­black palate the product of innumerable hours labor with charcoal pencils worn down the nub. Its not-­quite-­human subjects are animated, perversely alive, standing astride and riding cows that are at once enormous and yet dwarfed by human depravity. A baby suckles directly from a cow’s swollen teat, near where a priest sits at a small table, a spray of flowers placed incongruously in a vase set over a perfectly lain cloth. A priest, whom the art historian Nettleton suggests might be “a self-­portrait of the artist,” is one of the few subjects rendered within anything approaching “normalcy.” He gestures at the madcap scene, as if to say to the viewer, “look at what you’ve done” (Anitra Nettleton, “Writing the Artist Back into History,” 19). Omar has a different explanation. Dumile started what became African Guernica during a subsequent, even longer stay on Douglas Lane. TAS was meeting more often then, deliberating on the relationship between art and politics. Under Old Man Doc’s tutelage, Omar was also deep into his analysis of the bringing together of rural and urban under colonial capitalism. According to Omar, in African Guernica Dumile captured the relentless collision of rural and urban by placing his semi-­humans amidst animals—­ cows, ducks, chickens, a cat—­lifeways so startingly intermingled that a watching couple seems shocked by what they perceive. Omar insists that the priest is not actually a priest, or Dumile himself, but a sage: Old Man Doc at his little kitchen table, helping others to understand the scene. OB, interview, February 2018.

251

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NOTES TO PAGES 8 6 – 9 5 252

142. Whereas Dumile’s families looked anxiously at the world around them and clung to each other for support, Omar’s tended to project his own unresolved feelings about his family—­ his characters seem focused inward, not outward, the alienation and insecurity coming from inside the home. 143. Durban Art Gallery, “Dumile, August 18–­­September 6, 1966,” CC, UKZN, 29210. 144. Moosa Badsha photos of preparation and opening of Dumile Feni’s solo DAG show, 1966, accessed January 25, 2023, http://​www​.pelmama​.org​/PDFs​/Dumile​_DAG​_1966​_views​.pdf. 145. On the DAG, see Carol Brown, “Museum Spaces in Post-­Apartheid South Africa: The Durban Art Gallery as Case-­Study” (master’s thesis, Rhodes University, 2005), which, despite its title, is a history of DAG from its founding in 1892 through the early twenty-­first century. 146. Eyene, “Yearning for Art,” 109. 147. OB, interview, December 2022. 148. A surviving press clipping does not mention Timol or Ainslie, showing only Dumile, Anoo, and Omar gathered around a small sculpture. The editors having decided that the trend was for one-­named artists, the caption identified them as Dumile, Motala, and Omarbadsha. “Artists’ Exhibition Opens Today,” The Mercury, October 25, 1966. 149. Sherene Seedat, interview, July 2019. For more, see Seedat in Dube, Dumile Feni, 41–­42. 150. Eyene, “Yearning for Art,” 109. 151. OB, Lufthansa Date Book, October 23, 1966, OB private archive. 152. Paul Stopforth, interview, December 2020. 153. Dumile Feni to “Mole,” [January or February], 1967, 1–­2, OB private archive. 154. OB, Winthrop Labs notebook, February 17, 1967, OB private archive. 155. OB, Winthrop Labs notebook, February 17, 1967, OB private archive. 156. OB, Winthrop Labs notebook, February 17, 1967, OB private archive. 157. OB, Winthrop Labs notebook, February 17, 1967, OB private archive. 158. OB, Winthrop Labs notebook, February 17, 1967, OB private archive. 159. Dumile to “Friend,” [1967?], 1, 4, OB private archive. 160. This work is in Omar’s possession. OB, interview, December 2022. 161. OB, Lufthansa Date Book, October [November?] 1967, OB private archive. 162. Stopforth, virtual interview, December 2020. 163. Eyene, “Yearning for Art,” 110–­11. 164. Dumile to “Friend,” [1967?], 1, 4, OB private archive. 165. Eyene, “Yearning for Art,” 110–­11. 166. OB, Lufthansa Date Book, June 12, 1968, OB private archive. 167. OB, Lufthansa Date Book, July 11, 1968, OB private archive. 168. OB, Winthrop Lab notebook, February 19, 1967, OB private archive. 169. OB Lufthansa Date Book, [June?] 1967, OB private archive. 170. OB, Lufthansa Date Book, [June?] 1967, OB private archive. 171. OB, Lufthansa Date Book, [September?] 1967, OB private archive. 172. OB, interview, February 2018, July 2019. 173. For abortion in South Africa, see Susanne Klausen, Abortion under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

174. OB, interview, February 2018, July 2019. 175. The original composition is in Omar’s house, lodged behind a bookshelf in his office. The colors have faded somewhat, and the pencil poem is now illegible. Thankfully, the 1969 Art South Africa Today catalog reproduced the work, including the poem. Durban Art Gallery, Art South Africa Today, Item 67, 1969. 176. Dubow, Cape Times, July 10, 1969. 177. Neville Dubow, “A Disturbing, New Vision of Exceptional Interest,” undated, OB private archive. 178. Hazel Friedman argues that although Omar was part of the first stirring in 1969, “unambiguous” social comment came into its own in the 1971 Art South Africa Today exhibition, when two white artists—­Gavin Younge and Omar and Dumile’s friend Paul Stopforth—­offered explicit political commentary with their work. Friedman, “Beauty, Duty and Dissidence,” 39. 179. OB, Lufthansa Date Book, [September?] 1967, OB private archive. 180. OB, Winthrop Labs notebook, January 1967. 181. OB, Lufthansa Date Book, May/June 1968, OB private archive.

Chapter 4: Natal Epigraph: Mafika Gwala, “A Stalwart,” Collected Poems (Cape Town: South African History Online, 2016), 142. 1. Institute for Industrial Education, The Durban Strikes, 1973: Human Beings with Souls (Durban: Institute for Industrial Education, 1974). 2. Halton Cheadle, interview, March 2019; Omar Badsha (hereafter OB), interview, February 2018. 3. Halton Cheadle, interview, March 2019; OB, interview, February 2019. 4. See, for example, the debate between Sakhela Buhlungu and others in the 2000s, as well as the dueling chapters on the Durban trade union revival in the SADET volumes. I will return to the later topic in chapter 6. 5. Halton Cheadle, interview, February 2018, March 2019. 6. OB, interview, February 2018. 7. Various drafts in OB private archive. 8. Foszia Fisher, interview, July 2019. 9. OB, interview, February 2019. 10. Heather Hughes and David Hemson, interview, July 2019. 11. Foszia Fisher, interview, 2019; Strini Moodley, interview, April 2006. 12. Sam Moodley, interview, February 2018. 13. Sam Moodley, interview, February 2018. 14. OB, phone interview, December 2020. 15. Affidavit of Haroon Aziz, accessed March 1, 2022, https://​www​.ahmedtimol​.co​.za​/wp​ -content​/uploads​/2020​/02​/Haroon​-Aziz​-and​-Annexures​.pdf. 16. Sam Moodley, interview, February 2018. 17. For much more, see Daniel Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–­1977 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010).

253

NOTES TO PAGES 9 5 – 10 4

NOTES TO PAGES 10 4 – 10 9 254

18. “Africa Hurrah,” SAHO Archives; Sam Pillay, “Black Theatre: An Expression of Black Consciousness,” unpublished paper, 1–­4, SAHO Archives. 19. OB, interview, February 2018, March 2019. 20. OB, interview, February 2018. 21. OB, interview, February 2018. 22. OB, interview, February 2018, March 2019, December 2019; Sam Moodley, interview, February 2018. 23. Shamim Meer and Bobby Marie, interview, July 2018. 24. See Anne Heffernan, “Black Consciousness’s Lost Leader: Abraham Tiro, the University of the North, and the Seeds of South Africa’s Student Movement in the 1970s,” Journal of Southern African Studies 41, no. 1 (2015): 173–­86. 25. Heffernan, “Black Consciousness’s Lost Leader.” 26. OB, interview, February 2018. 27. For much more on Manilal Gandhi and Phoenix in Mohandas Gandhi’s absence, see Uma Dhupelia-­Mesthrie, Gandhi’s Prisoner? The Life of Gandhi’s Son Manilal (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2004). Uma Dhupelia-­Mesthrie, interview, February 2018; Ela Gandhi, interview, February 2018. 28. Ela Gandhi, interview, February 2018. 29. F. M. Meer, “The Natal Indian Congress, 1972,” Reality, July 1972, 6. 30. Goolam Vahed and Ashwin Desai, “A Case of Strategic Ethnicity? The Natal Indian Congress in the 1970s,” African Historical Review 46, no. 1 (2014): 22–­47. 31. Meer, “The Natal Indian Congress,” 6. 32. Meer, 6. 33. For much more on Inanda, see chapter 5. 34. Ela Gandhi, interview, February 2019. 35. Uma Dhupelia-­Mesthrie, interview, 2018. 36. Lesley Lawson, interview, May 2019. 37. Alex Lichtenstein, “Rick Turner and South Africa’s ‘Sixties,’” Journal of Labor and Society 19 (December 2016): 449. 38. Billy Keniston, Choosing to Be Free: The Life Story of Rick Turner (Auckland Park, SA: Jacana Media, 2014), 62. 39. For a recent reflection on the book’s importance, see “My Personal Reflections about Writing the Eye of the Needle,” Daily Maverick, March  2, 2022, written by Foszia Turner-­ Stylianou, née Fisher, who became Turner’s second wife. 40. On white consciousness, see Keniston, Choosing to Be Free, 24; Peter Hudson, “Let’s Talk about Rick Turner,” accessed January 27, 2023, https://​files​.libcom​.org​/files​/Turner​.pdf; Ian MacQueen, “Black Consciousness in Dialogue in South Africa: Steve Biko, Richard Turner and the ‘Durban Moment,’ 1970–­1974,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 49, no. 5 (2014): 516; see also Mamphela Ramphele, Across Boundaries: The Journey of a South African Woman Leader (New York: Feminist Press of CUNY, 1999), 158, cited by MacQueen, “Black Consciousness in Dialogue in South Africa.” 41. Rick Turner, Eye of the Needle: An Essay on Participatory Democracy (Johannesburg: SPROCAS, 1972), 7.

42. Lesley Lawson, interview, May 2019; Halton Cheadle, interview, February 2018; Paula Ensor, interview, February 2018; Shamin Meer and Bobby Marie, interview, July 2018. 43. MacQueen, “Black Consciousness in Dialogue,” 513. Schlemmer directed the Institute for Social Research at the University of Natal. Representative work produced in the early 1970s includes “Poverty, Family Patterns, and Material Aspirations among Africans in a Border Industry Township,” 1974, and “A Study of Employee Morale among Africans in a Rural Non-­Farm Employment Situation,” that same year. 44. See, for example, David Hemson, “Dock Workers, Labour Circulation and Class Struggles in Durban, 1945–­59,” Journal of Southern African Studies, no. 4 (1977): 1–­41. 45. OB, interview, February 2018. 46. Heather Hughes and David Hemson, interview, July 2019. 47. OB, interview, February 2018. 48. Keniston, Choosing to Be Free, 66. 49. MacQueen, “Black Consciousness in Dialogue,” 511. 50. Paul Stopforth, interview, December 2020; Sam Moodley, interview, February 2018; Lesley Lawson, interview, May 2019. 51. Keniston, Choosing to Be Free, 68. 52. OB, interview, February 2018, July 2019, December 2019. 53. Notably, in our conversation, Lesley Lawson remembers exactly what Omar was wearing when this incident took place; a picture from the work camp confirms her recollection of Omar’s clothing choice, at least. Lawson, interview, May 2019. 54. Heather Hughes and David Hemson, interview, May 2019. 55. Keniston, Choosing to Be Free, 66. 56. OB, interview, February 2018. 57. Grace Davie, Poverty Knowledge in South Africa: A Social History of Human Science, 1855–­2005 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 58. This shift in white student organizing has resulted in a rich and contested scholarship. See in particular Nurina Ally and Shireen Ally, “Critical Intellectualism: The Role of Black Consciousness in Reconfiguring the Race-­Class Problematic in South Africa,” in Biko Lives! Contested the Legacies of Steve Biko, ed. Andile Mngxitana, Amanda Alexander, and Nigel Gibson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 177–­88. 59. See Davie, Poverty Knowledge in South Africa, 184–­87. 60. For a perspective on this, see Mark Hunter, Love in the Times of AIDS: Inequality, Gender and Rights in South Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), chap. 4. 61. David Hemson, “Trade Unionism and the Struggle for Liberation in South Africa,” Capital and Class 2, no. 3 (1978): 19–­20. 62. Halton Cheadle, interview, March 2019. 63. Halton Cheadle, interview, March 2019; OB, interview, February 2018, March 2019. 64. OB, interview, February 2018. 65. Isisibenzi, December 1972, South African History Online, accessed January  27, 2023, https://​www​.sahistory​.org​.za​/archive​/isisebenzi​-december​-1972. 66. Hannah Keal, “A Life’s Work: Harriet Bolton and Durban’s Trade Unions” (master’s thesis, University of KwaZulu-­Natal, 2009), 131.

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NOTES TO PAGES 10 9 – 113

NOTES TO PAGES 113 – 119 25 6

67. OB, interview, February 2018; Davis Hemson, interview, May 2019; Halton Cheadle, interview, March 2019. 68. Heather Hughes and David Hemson, interview, May 2019. 69. Alex Lichtenstein, “We Do Not Think That the Bantu Is Ready for Labour Unions,” South African Historical Journal 69, no. 2 (2017): 215–­35. 70. Clipping, “Unions Strangled Says Bolton,” Sunday Times, date unclear. 71. For the strikes themselves, see Institute for Industrial Education, The Durban Strikes, 1973. 72. OB, “Usuthu,” unpublished poem, OB private archive. 73. Steve Biko, “Let’s Talk about Bantustans,” SASO Newsletter, 1972. 74. Jabulani Sithole and Sifiso Ndlovu, “The Revival of the Labour Movement, 1970–­1980,” in Road to Democracy in South Africa, vol. 2, South African Democracy Education Trust (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2007), 215–­17. 75. Leslie Hadfield, “Biko, Black Consciousness and ‘the System’ eZinyoka: Oral History and Black Consciousness in Practice in a Rural Ciskei Village,” South African Historical Journal 62, no. 1 (2010): 78–­99. 76. Eddie Webster and Rob Lambert, “Hidden Voices: The Promise and Pitfalls of the Durban Moment,” unpublished paper, 8. 77. For a retrospective assessment, see Lisa Lightfoot, “Ruskin at 120: Has the Workers’ College Lost Its Way?,” Guardian, March 5, 2019. For an anti-­teleological perspective, Charles Sydney Buxton, “Ruskin College: An Educational Experiment,” Cornhill Magazine, July–­December 1908. 78. Institute for Industrial Education, The Durban Strikes, 1974. The book was written by Turner, albeit without being named because of his ban. 79. Institute for Industrial Education, 92. 80. Institute for Industrial Education, 101. 81. South Africa Labour Bulletin 1, no. 1 (1974): 54. 82. Keniston, Choosing to Be Free, 130. 83. Martin Legassick, “Debating the Revival of the Workers Movement in the 1970s,” Kronos, no. 34 (2008): 240–­66, esp. 243–­45. 84. Gatsha Buthelezi, “Africans and the Formation of Trade Unions,” Durban, [1973?], p. 1, OB private archive. 85. South Africa Labour Bulletin 1, no. 1 (1974): 54. 86. Institute for Industrial Education, The Durban Strikes, 105. 87. Institute for Industrial Education, “Minutes of the Working Committee,” September 1973, 1, SAHO Archives. 88. David Hemson, interview, May 2019. 89. Eddie Webster, interview, February 2018. 90. OB, interview, March 2019. 91. David Hemson, interview, May 2019; Halton Cheadle, interview, March 2019. 92. Alex Lichtenstein, “Challenging Umtheto we Femu (The Law of the Firm): Gender Relations and Shop-­Floor Battles for Union Recognition in Natal’s Textile Industry,” Africa 87, no. 1 (2017): 100–­119. Halton Cheadle, interview, March 2019; Jeffrey Butler, Robert Rotberg, and John Adams, The Black Homelands of South Africa: The Political and Economic Development of Bophuthatswana and KwaZulu (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 59.

93. Halton Cheadle, interview, March 2019; OB, interview, March 2019. 94. Rajolvi affidavit, SAHO Archive. 95. Queenie affidavit, SAHO Archive. 96. Dutchmee affidavit, SAHO Archive. 97. Dutchmee affidavit, SAHO Archive. 98. David Hemson, interview, May 2019. 99. OB, “To the Workers at Prilla Mills,” undated [1973?], 1. 100. OB to Manager, Rosedale Textile Mills, undated [1973?], 1. 101. Keniston, Choosing to Be Free, 93. 102. For a very clear (and controversial) example of careerism via trade unionism, see Johnny Copelyn, Maverick Insider: The Struggle for Union Independence in a Time of National Liberation (Johannesburg: Macmillan South Africa, 2016). See also Eddie Webster’s review in Transformation 92 (2017): 158–­68, and Webster, interview, February 2018; and Sakhela Buhlungu, “Rebels without a Cause of Their Own? The Contradictory Location of White Officials in Black Unions, 1973–­1994,” Current Sociology 54, no. 3 (2006): 427–­51. 103. OB, interview, March 2019. 104. Halton Cheadle, interview, February 2018. 105. Halton Cheadle, interview, March 2019. 106. Steven Friedman, Building Tomorrow Today: African Workers in Trade Unions, 1970–­ 1984 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987), 87. 107. Foszia Fisher and Harold Nxasana, “The Labour Situation in South Africa,” in Black Renaissance: Papers from the Black Renaissance Convention, ed. Thoahlane Thoahlane (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1976), 53–­58. 108. OB, “Report on the Union: Our Activities from June 1974 to Sept 1975,” 1975, SAHO Archive, 1. 109. OB, “History of the Union at Q.P.,” undated, 1–­2, SAHO Archive. 110. OB, “History of the Union at Q.P.” 111. Alex Lichtenstein, “A Measure of Democracy: Works Committees, Black Workers, and Industrial Citizenship in South Africa, 1973–­1979,” South African Historical Journal 67, no.  2 (2015): 113–­38. 112. Unknown author, “Workers!,” July 29, 1975, 1–­2, SAHO Archive. 113. OB to Buchwald, October 21, 1975, 2, SAHO Archive. 114. Sian Byrne and Nicole Ulrich, “Prefiguring Democratic Revolution? ‘Workers’ Control’ and ‘Workerist’ Traditions of Radical South African Labour, 1970–­1985,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 34, no. 3 (2016): 374; OB, interview, February 2018. 115. See, for example, Minutes of the TUACC Secretariat, February 9, 1976, 1. 116. Buchwald to OB, April 9, 1976, 1, SAHO Archive. 117. OB to Mr. Lissner, April 9, 1976, 1–­2, SAHO Archive. 118. Halton Cheadle, interview, March 2019. 119. Legassick, “Debating the Revival of the Workers Movement in the 1970s.” 120. Sakhela Buhlungu, “The Building of the Democratic Tradition in South Africa’s Trade Unions after 1973,” Democratization 11, no. 3 (2004): 133–­58. 121. OB, “Visit to Chrome Chemicals,” July 1975, 23, SAHO Archive.

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NOTES TO PAGES 119 – 12 6

NOTES TO PAGES 12 6 – 133 25 8

122. OB, interview, February 2018, March 2019. 123. OB, interview, March 2019. 124. Heike Hartman and Suzanne Lewerenz, “Campaigning against Apartheid in East and West Germany,” Radical History Review 119 (2014): 191–­204. 125. OB, interview, March 2019. 126. CWIU BEC Meeting, Minutes, February 4, 1976, 2, SAHO Archive. 127. Friedman, Building Tomorrow Today, 113. 128. Gerhard Mare, An Appetite for Power: Buthelezi’s Inkatha and South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987), chap. 4, 45–­60. 129. “Minutes of the 4th Council Meeting,” August 4, 1975, 2, SAHO Archive. 130. Keniston, Choosing to Be Free, 129–­32. 131. “Minutes of the 4th Council Meeting,” August 4, 1975, 9, SAHO Archive. 132. OB diary, July 18, 1975, SAHO Archive. 133. “Minutes,” TUACC Secretariat, November 3, 1975, 3, SAHO Archive. 134. “Minutes of the 4th Council Meeting,” August 4, 1975, 2–­3, SAHO Archive. 135. “Meeting of the TUACC Secretaries,” February 12, 1976, 1, SAHO Archive. 136. Mxolisi Dlamuka, “Understanding Harry Gwala’s Radicalisation,” Southern African Humanities 34, no. 1 (2021): 137–­74. 137. Doris Skosana, interview, July 2019. 138. Doris Skosana, interview, July 2019. 139. For much more on this trial, see Mxolisi Dlamuka, “Harry Gwala, Political Militancy and State Trials, 1960–­1977,” accessed March 2, 2022, https://​www​.sahistory​.org​.za​/sites​/default​ /files​/2019​-05​/20190109​_harry​_gwala​_political​_militancy​_and​_state​_trials​_1960​-1977​_by​ _mxolisi​_dlamuka​.pdf. 140. Byrne and Ulrich, “Prefiguring Democratic Revolution,” 375. 141. OB, interview, July 2019, December 2019. 142. OB, interview, February 2018, March 2019. 143. “Minutes,” TUACC Secretariat, January 1976, 2, SAHO Archive. 144. OB, untitled poem [“Wearily”], May 9, 1976, OB private archive. 145. Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets, chap. 8–­9. See also Julian Brown, The Road to Soweto: Resistance and the Uprising of 16 June 1976 (Oxford: James Currey, 2016); and Sifiso Ndlovu, The Soweto Uprisings: Counter Memories of June 1976 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1999). 146. OB, diary, August 25, 1975, SAHO Archive. 147. OB, interview, February 2018.

Chapter 5: South Africa Epigraph: Mafika Gwala, “Letter to a Friend in Exile,” Collected Poems (Cape Town: South African History Online, 2016), 47. 1. For a popular account of Fordsburg, see Shaazia Ebrahim, “How Fordsburg Has Evolved from the Gold Rush to Now,” Daily Vox, August 2, 2019, https://​www​.thedailyvox​.co​.za​ /how​-fordsburg​-has​-evolved​-from​-the​-gold​-rush​-shaazia​-ebrahim/. For a memoir, see Razina Theba, A Home on Vorster Street—­A Memoir (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2021).

2. For the most compelling account of Sophiatown and the removals, see Bloke Modisane, Blame Me on History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963). See also Daniel Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–­1977 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), chap. 1. 3. Carrim Nazir, Fietas: A Social History of Pageview, 1948–­1988 (Johannesburg: Save Pageview Association, 1990). 4. For more on the removals and results for the Indian community, see David Goldblatt, Fietas Fractured (Gottingen: Steidl, forthcoming). More on Goldblatt below. 5. Nasima Badsha, interview, March 2019, April 2019. 6. “Professor Hoosen Mahomed ‘Jerry’ Coovadia,” South African History Online, accessed January 31, 2023, https://​www​.sahistory​.org​.za​/people​/professor​-hoosen​-mahomed​-jerry​ -coovadia. Imraan Coovadia, interview, February 2018. 7. Unlike the Badshas, the Natal Coovadias earned an entry in Goolam Vahed and Surendra Bhana, Crossing Space and Time in the Indian Ocean: Early Traders in Natal; A Biographical Study (Pretoria: University of South African Press, 2015), 122–­23. 8. Omar Badsha (hereafter OB) interview, February 2018. 9. Nasima Badsha, interview, March 2019, April 2019. 10. Nasima Badsha, interview, March 2019, April 2019. 11. Nasima Badsha, interview, March 2019, April 2019. 12. Nasima Badsha, interview, March 2019, April 2019. 13. Nasima Badsha, interview, March 2019, April 2019. Photograph in the SAHO Archives. 14. Nasima Badsha, interview, March 2019, April 2019. See also Kennata Hammond Perry, London Is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 15. A. G. Grove to Nasima Coovadia, June 25, 1975, 1–­2, SAHO Archives. 16. Nasima Badsha, interview, March 2019, April 2019. 17. Nasima Badsha, interview, March 2019, April 2019. 18. “Chrissie” to Nasima Badsha, February 22, 1976, 1–­3, SAHO Archive. 19. OB, interview, February 2018, July 2019. 20. OB, interview, February 2018. 21. OB, interview, February 2018, March 2019. 22. Farook Khan, “Last Farewell to Moosa Badsha,” undated newspaper clipping, SAHO Archives. In the 1970s and 1980s, Moosa became a regular contributor to The Graphic newspaper. Like the man himself (and his nephew), Moosa’s work has a tendency to pop up in surprising places—­including a website maintained by Gallery 101 (cited in chapter 3) and in a photo insert detailing changes in Durban residential patterns in Gavin Maasdorp and A. S. B. Humphreys, eds., From Shantytown to Township: An Economic Study of African Poverty and Rehousing in a South African City (Cape Town: Juta, 1975). 23. OB, interview, March 2019. 24. See Ranjith Kally, Memory against Forgetting: The Work of Ranjith Kally (Cape Town: Quivertree, 2014); and Riason Naidoo, ed., The Indian in Drum Magazine in the 1950s (Cape Town: Bell-­Roberts, 2008). 25. For more on Amra, see Goolam Vahed, “Monty . . . Meets Gandhi . . . Meets Mandela,”

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NOTES TO PAGES 14 0 – 14 6 260

in South Africa and India: Shaping the Global South, ed. Isabel Hofmeyr and Michelle Williams (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2022), 105–­24; Amra’s records of the International Photographic Society are held at UCT, ZA UCT BC940—­A. See also “Cassim Amra,” South African History Online, accessed January 31, 2023, https://​www​.sahistory​.org​.za​/people​/cassim​-amra. 26. OB, interview, February 2018, July 2019. 27. Sunday Times (Natal), November [21?], 1977. 28. OB, interview, December 2019; for Naidoo, see Paul Landau, Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2022), 263; and “Indres Naidoo,” South African History Online, accessed January 31, 2023, https://​www​.sahistory​.org​.za​/people​/indres​-naidoo. 29. Tom Lodge, Red Road to Freedom: A History of the South African Communist Party, 1921–­2021 (Auckland Park, SA: Jacana Media, 2021), 59. 30. OB, interview, December 2019. 31. On police executions during this period, see Zikhona Valela, Now You Know How Mapetla Died: The Story of a Black Consciousness Martyr (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2022). 32. Phyllis Naidoo to OB, March 10, 1980, 1. 33. Billy Keniston, Choosing to Be Free: The Life Story of Rick Turner (Auckland Park, SA: Jacana Media, 2014), 156. OB, interview, February 2019. 34. Keniston, Choosing to Be Free, 158; OB, interview, February 2019. 35. In 2022, Aperture reprinted House of Bondage for the first time since 1967. Lauren Christensen, “For Black South Africans, Apartheid Was a ‘House of Bondage,’” New York Times, December 29, 2022. 36. Helena Pohlandt-­McCormick, I Saw a Nightmare: Doing Violence to Memory; The Soweto Uprising, June 16, 1976 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 37. Magubane had also been in Soweto on June 16; he was arrested and beaten by the police, but nevertheless managed to produce a series of images. His Soweto was published outside of South Africa in 1978. 38. David Goldblatt, interview, February 2018; OB, interview, February 2018, December 2019. 39. OB, interview, February 2018. 40. David Goldblatt, interview, February 2018. 41. For more on reactions to the exhibition, see Thomas Keenan and Tirdad Zolghadr, eds., The Human Snapshot (Annandale-­on-­Hudson, NY: Center for Curatorial Studies), 2013. 42. The relationship between Magnum photographers and their Leica lenses has been well covered, including in documentaries such as Leica and Magnum: Past, Present and Future, accessed January 31, 2023, https://​vimeo​.com​/21145059. 43. OB, interview, February 2019. 44. OB, interview, February 2019. 45. Magnum Photos, “W. Eugene Smith’s Warning to the World,” accessed March 3, 2022, https://​www​.magnumphotos​.com​/newsroom​/health​/w​-eugene​-smith​-minamata​-warning​-to​ -the​-world/. 46. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 47. Fiona Higginson, “Diakonia as a Case Study in Christian Non-­Violent Social Action for Peace and Justice in South Africa, 1976–­1982” (master’s thesis, University of KwaZulu-­Natal, 2009). Denis Hurley was the Catholic bishop of Durban and the organizing force behind Dia-

konia, as well as one of the boldest theological minds in the country, who pushed the church in the direction of anti-­apartheid activism. See Anthony Gamley, ed., Denis Hurley: A Portrait by Friends (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 2001). 48. Shireen Hassim, ed., Fatima Meer: A Free Mind (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2019), 178, 94–­95. 49. OB, interview, February 2018. 50. Omar Badsha, “A Review of Richard Hyman, Disputes Procedure in Action,” South African Labour Bulletin 1, no. 5 (1974): 48–­51. In our conversations, Omar was a bit fuzzy about whether he had actually written that review or had submitted under his own name something Rick had written. OB, interview, December 2022. 51. Omar Badsha, Letter to Farzanah (Durban: Institute for Black Research, 1979). Raymond Suttner writes about the implication of suppressing the personal in service of the political with extraordinary sensitivity and insight in The ANC Underground in South Africa to 1976: A Social and Historical Study (Auckland Park, SA: Jacana Media, 2008), chap. 7, describing what he calls “revolutionary morality” (133). 52. Badsha, Letter to Farzanah. 53. “Uncle J,” in Letter to Farzanah; OB, interview, February 2018. 54. Hassim, Fatima Meer, 178. 55. John Berger, “Paul Strand,” in Understanding a Photograph, ed. Geoff Dyer (1972; repr., New York: Aperture, 2013), 45. 56. Natal Mercury, September 19, 1979. 57. Joyce Ozynski to OB, November 19, 1979, 1–­2. 58. “Artist Takes to Photography,” Sunday Tribune, October 28, 1979. 59. “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it’s not.” Dr. Seuss, The Lorax (1971), 59. And with that, I have achieved my life’s ambition to use The Lorax in lecture (World Circa 2000, L18, “Experiments in Ecology”) and cite it in an academic book. 60. Before it was banned, reviews were published in the The Graphic, September 14, 1979; Muslim News, October 19, 1979; and The Voice, September 20–­­October 9, 1979. Reviewers’ perspectives varied, depending on where these publications stood on the spectrum of political opinion. The moderately quiescent Graphic appreciated that Omar had not made “too much of an overstatement” with his politics, whereas the more radical Muslim News lauded Omar for capturing the Durban region’s obscene inequalities. 61. Rand Daily Mail, November 9, 1979. 62. Sunday Times, November 14, 1979. 63. Muslim News, November 23, 1979. 64. OB, interview, December 2022; a picture of this encounter is in my possession. 65. Elizabeth Le Roux, Publishing Against Apartheid South Africa: A Case Study of Ravan Press (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). J. M. Coetzee is among the writers Ravan first published (Dusklands, 1974). 66. Staffrider 1, no. 1 (1978): 52, 53. 67. Michael Beaubien, “The Cultural Boycott of South Africa,” Africa Today 29, no. 4 (1982): 5–­15. 68. OB, interview, February 2018.

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NOTES TO PAGES 154 – 15 8 2 62

69. OB, interview, February 2018, March 2019, December 2022. 70. OB to Mike Kirkwood, January 28, 1980, 1, OB private archive. 71. OB to James Matthews, January 18, 1981, 1, OB private archive. 72. In time the gallery would evolve into the Market Photo Workshop, founded by Goldblatt in 1989, which remains one of South Africa’s most important centers for training in the discipline. See Joyce Ozynski, “The Market Photo Workshop,” Camera Austria, no. 100 (2007): 15–­17; also Andrew Tshabangu, interview, July 2019. 73. David Goldblatt, “Opening Speech,” January 4, 1981, 1–­4, SAHO Archive. 74. Joyce Ozynski, “Moving, Strongly Individual Depiction of Social Injustice,” Rand Daily Mail, January 9, 1981. 75. Neil Aggett, the doctor and activist, was perhaps Crown Mines’ best-­known resident, before he was murdered by the police in 1981. See Beverley Naidoo, Death of an Idealist: In Search of Neil Aggett (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2013). 76. Lesley Lawson, interview, May 2019; Paul Weinberg, personal communication, February 2018. 77. Neelika Jayawardane, “Afrapix Photographers’ Collective and Agency,” Trigger, November 6, 2019, https://​fomu​.be​/trigger​/articles​/afrapix​-photographers​-collective​-and​-agency. 78. A Staple Diet poster survives in the Art Institute of Chicago collection (Judy A. Seidman, Staple Diet, 1983, Art Institute of Chicago, 2018.494, https://​www​.artic​.edu​/artworks​ /244113​/staple​-diet). It is credited as being a Johannesburg band, when Mayet insists that it was a Durban assemblage (which made sense, given that both Dyer and McKenzie were based there when it formed). 79. Rafs Mayet, interview, February 2018. 80. Omar also has a small, slightly anthropomorphized Dumile bird drawing in his collection. The interest in birds was something they also shared. 81. Rafs Mayer, interview, February 2018. 82. Cedric Nunn, interview, February 2018. 83. Lesley Lawson, interview, May 2019. 84. Mike Kirkwood, ed., South Africa through the Lens: Social Documentary Photography (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983), 2. 85. David Goldblatt, interview, February 2019. Lesley Lawson related similar sentiments to explain why she remained somewhat aloof from Afrapix (interview, May 2019). 86. Peter McKenzie, “Bringing the Struggle into Focus,” Staffrider 5, no. 2 (1982): 17–­18. 87. Some of the best work on the Culture and Resistance Festival focuses especially on the role of visual artists, including Thami Mnyele and others who were part of the MEDU collective. See Diana Wylie, Art + Revolution: The Life and Times of Thami Mnyele (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008). Civil society and cultural resistance to apartheid during the 1980s represents an enormously rich subject, which historians have only just begun to consider. Two of the best single-­volume studies are Ineke Van Kessel, Beyond Our Wildest Dreams: The United Democratic Front and the Transformation of South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000); and Jeremy Seekings, The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 2000). 88. OB, interview, February 2018; Paul Weinberg, personal communication, February 2018.

89. Van Kessel, Beyond Our Wildest Dreams, 47. 90. Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi before India (London: Allen Lane, 2013), 175. 91. Guha, 180; Lauren Jarvis, A Prophet of the People: Isaiah Shembe and the Making of a South African Church (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2024), 29. 92. Heather Hughes, “Violence in Inanda, 1985,” Journal of Southern African Studies 13, no. 3 (1987): 350. 93. Hughes, 342. 94. John Turner, Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977). 95. S. J. Mason and M. R. Jury, “Climactic Variability and Change over Southern Africa,” Progress in Physical Geography 21, no. 1 (1997): 23–­50. 96. Hughes, “Violence in Inanda, 1985,” 344, 346–­47. 97. Hughes, 347. 98. OB, interview, February 2018, March 2019; Ela Gandhi, interview, February 2018. 99. Letters from Amouti residents to “Sir,” SAHO Archive, 1982. 100. OB, interview, February 2018. 101. OB, Imijondolo: A Photographic Essay on Forced Removals in South Africa (Johannesburg: Afrapix, 1985), 13, 15, 74. 102. Heather Hughes and David Hemson, interview, May 2019; Cedric Nunn, interview, February 2018; Farzanah Badsha, interview, February 2018. 103. OB, interview, December 2019. 104. Heather Hughes and David Hemson, interview, May 2019. 105. OB, interview, December 2019; for the long term shifts that Omar was witnessed, see Hughes, “Violence in Inanda, 1985,” and Hunter, Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender and Rights in South Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), chap. 5. See also “Black Urbanization in KwaZulu/Natal, 1980–­2000,” 1985, accessed February  1, 2023, https://​ www​.sahistory​.org​.za​/sites​/default​/files​/archive​-files2​/remay85​.6​.pdf. 106. Imijondolo, 28, 32, 40, 43. 107. OB, interview, February 2018, March 2019, December 2019. 108. OB diary entry, undated, SAHO Archive. 109. Patricia Hayes, “Seeing and Being Seen: Politics, Art and the Everyday in Omar Badsha’s Durban Photography, 1960s–­1980s,” Africa 81, no. 4 (2011): 559. 110. Phillip Bonner, “New Nation, New History: The History Workshop in South Africa, 1997–­ 1994,” Journal of American History 81, no. 3 (1994): 977–­85. Arguably—­and controversially—­this social historical and life historical practice reached its apotheosis with Charles Van Onselen, The Seed Is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper, 1894–­1995 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996). See criticisms such as Christopher J. Lee’s review in Oral History Review 26, no. 1 (1999): 132–­35. 111. Imijondolo, 48, 57–­58, 65. 112. Gerhard Mare, “History and Dimension of the Violence in Natal: Inkatha’s Role in Negotiating Peace,” Social Justice 18, no. 1/2 (1991): 186–­208; Thembisa Waetjen and Gerhard Mare, “Workers and Warriors: Inkatha’s Politics of Masculinity in the 1980s,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies, no. 2 (1999): 197–­216; H. S. Ntuli, “Probing the Roots of Political Violence in KwaZulu-­Natal since 1979,” Gender and Behaviour 14, no. 2 (2016): 7254–­62.

263

NOTES TO PAGES 15 9 – 16 6

NOTES TO PAGES 16 8 – 172 264

113. Sunday Tribune, November 6, 1983, 4. 114. Imijondolo, 16, 27, 69, 70. 115. Imijondolo, 77. See also Thulani Mshengu, Asinamali! The Life of Msizi Dube (Pietermaritzburg: Hadeda Books, 1992). On the impact of Dube’s assassination within Lamontville, see Doug Hindson, Mark Byerley, and Mike Morros, “From Violence to Reconstruction,” Antipode 26, no. 4 (1994): 323–­50. 116. TRC Final Report, vol. 3, chap. 3, subsec. 22, https://​sabctrc​.saha​.org​.za​/reports​/volume3​ /chapter3​/subsection22​.htm. 117. Desmond Tutu, foreword to Imijondolo, 1. 118. Heather Hughes and David Hemson, interview, May 2019. 119. Farzanah Badsha, interview, February 2018. 120. One such raid was reported in the Cape Times, February 21, 1985. 121. Farzanah Badsha, interview, February 2018. 122. Farzanah Badsha, interview, February 2018. 123. Mamphela Ramphele captures this brilliantly in her memoir, Across Boundaries: The Journey of a South African Woman Leader (New York: Feminist Press of CUNY, 1999), 105. 124. OB, interview, March 2019, December 2018. Cedric Nunn remembers Omar telling him that the most important thing he could do to secure his career was to marry a “woman with money.” Nunn thinks this was partially in jest, partially serious, and advice that he failed to heed. Cedric Nunn, interview, February 2018. 125. OB, interview, December 2023. 126. Vanessa Noble, A School of Struggle: Durban’s Medical School and the Education of Black Doctors in South Africa (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-­Natal Press, 2013), chap. 7. 127. Nasima Badsha, interview, March 2019, April 2019. 128. OB, interview, December 2023. 129. Ela Gandhi, interview, February 2018; Nasima Badsha, interview, March 2019, April 2019; OB, interview, July 2019, December 2019. 130. OB, interview, December 2019. 131. During Albertina’s visit, Omar captured an indelible image: Nokukhanya commanding the microphone, Albertina resolute to her left, behind them a vast banner intoning “Long Live Congress”—­here referring to the Natal Indian Congress, with a knowing wink to that other Congress their absent husbands had done so much to promote. 132. See Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, “The Natal Indian Congress, the Mass Democratic Movement, and the Struggle to Defeat Apartheid, 1980–­1994,” Politikon 42, no. 1 (2015): 1–­22. 133. Jo Beale, Shireen Hassim, and Alison Todes, “A Bit on the Side?,” Feminist Review, no. 33 (1989): 30–­56. 134. Farzanah Badsha, interview, February 2018; Heather Hughes, interview, May 2019. Shamim Meer was based in the Phoenix Township during the 1980s. The women there were sometimes skeptical when middle-­class activists insisted they pursue strategies like rent boycotts to protest the state. Meer told the sociologist Shireen Hassim that Phoenix residents ordered their priorities differently: they opposed the state, to be sure, but they also wanted to keep their lights on, the garbage collected, and their children safe (Meer, interview, July 2018); see Hassim, “The Limits of Popular Democracy: Women’s Organisations, Feminism and the

UDF,” Transformation, no. 51 (2003): 55. Activists tried to expand NOW’s reach by publishing Speak, a publication that the historian Ann Sarnak argues “adopted a framework that explicitly promoted women’s liberation from patriarchal control in both the workplace and household.” Speak used the same mix of media as Staffrider—­fiction, graphic art, reportage, and especially photography—­to promote the issues that affected South African women as such and not only because of race (Ann Sarnak, “‘Working Women’: Representations of Female Labor in the South African Alternative Press” [bachelor’s thesis, Yale University, 2017]). 135. Jeeva Rajgopaul, interview, February 2018. 136. As was the expanding trade union movement, which was also reinvigorated in the early 1980s when old TUACC unions like MAWU joined unions across the country to create federations—­first the Federation of South African Trade Unions, then, by 1985, the much larger and much more explicitly Congress-­identified Congress of South African Trade Unions. COSATU’s founding secretary general was Jay Naidoo, a Durban activist ten years younger than Omar. Nasima knew him from his studies at Westville before political activism cut short his schooling. Cedric Nunn met Naidoo at their flat. Trade union rallies were hallmarks of Omar’s photographic practice; he documented huge gatherings that took over Curries Fountain and other venues, hundreds of upon hundreds of women bearing placards boasting “Garment Workers Have Always Fought Discrimination”—­a fact he knew well (Cedric Nunn, interview, February 2018; Nisa Malenge, interview, February 2018; Ari Sitas, interview, February 2018). 137. Chris Ledochowski, interview, February 2018. 138. Paul Grendon, interview, February 2018. 139. Gille de Vlieg, interview, July 2019. 140. Jeeva Rajgopaul, interview, February 2018. 141. OB, interview, December 2019, June 2021 (virtual), December 2022. 142. OB, interview, July 2019; see also “Humphrey Phakade ‘Pax’ Magwaza,” South African History Online, updated January 20, 2020, https://​www​.sahistory​.org​.za​/people​/humphrey​ -phakade​-pax​-magwaza. 143. Darren Newbury, Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press), 246. 144. Richard Sakala to “Sir,” April 13, 1982, 1, SAHO Archive. 145. Patricia Hayes, “Photographic Publics and Photographic Desires in 1980s South Africa,” Photographies 10, no. 3 (2017): 307. 146. Aladdin Books, South Africa List, undated, 1–­2. 147. John Peffer, Art and the End of Apartheid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 258. 148. Francis Wilson and Mamphela Ramphele, Uprooting Poverty: The South African Challenge (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), ix–­xiii; Francis Wilson, interview, February 2018. 149. Francis Wilson, interview, 2018; also “Video Interviews,” Carnegie Corporation Oral History Project, Columbia University Libraries Oral History Research Office, accessed April  25, 2024, http://​www​.columbia​.edu​/cu​/lweb​/digital​/collections​/oral​_hist​/carnegie​/video​ -interviews​/; also Willoughby-­Herard, Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). 150. OB, interview, February 2018.

265

NOTES TO PAGES 173 – 176

NOTES TO PAGES 176 – 181 266

151. OB, interview, February 2018; Francis Wilson, interview, February 2018. 152. Francis Wilson, interview, February 2018. On photography during the first Carnegie Commission, see Marijke Du Toit, “Binnelande Reise: Photographs from the Carnegie Commission of Inquiry into the Poor White Problem,” Kronos, no. 32 (2006): 49–­76. 153. Du Toit, “Binnelande Reise”; OB, interview, February 2018. 154. Afrapix AGM Minutes, March 1, 1986, 4, OB private archive. 155. Francis Wilson, interview, February 2018; Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor, virtual interview, January 2022. 156. See Lesley Lawson, Working Women (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985). 157. Wilson and Ramphele, Uprooting Poverty, 4. 158. Badsha in “South Africa: The Cordoned Heart: Social Documentary Photography,” April 1984, 4, SAHO Archive. 159. Ingrid Jonker, “Poetry: The Child Who Was Shot Dead by Soldiers in Nyanga,” Patriotic Vanguard, posted July 24, 2013, http://​www​.thepatrioticvanguard​.com​/poetry​-the​-child​-who​ -was​-shot​-dead​-by​-soldiers​-in​-nyanga. 160. See untitled sketched title page, OB papers, SAHO Archive. 161. Notably, President Nelson Mandela read the same poem when he opened South Africa’s first democratic parliament in May 1994. Omar chooses to believe that Mandela first encountered the poem in Cordoned Heart. He does concede that there are other explanations, including a persistent rumor that Mandela first read the poem in the serial Farmer’s Weekly while imprisoned. OB, virtual interview, May 2020. 162. Omar Badsha, preface to South Africa: The Cordoned Heart, xv–­xvi. 163. Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris, virtual interview, January 2022. 164. Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris, virtual interview, January 2022. 165. Newbury, Defiant Images, 248. 166. Azoulay, Civil Contract, 11. 167. Afrapix AGM, March 1, 1986, 5, OB private archive. 168. Robert Massie, Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years (New York: Doubleday, 1997), remains the authoritative account of American and South African activists’ efforts to force the American government to act against apartheid—­which culminated in the Comprehensive Anti-­Apartheid Act of 1986, the passage of which coincided with Cordoned Heart’s tour across the United States. 169. OB, interview, February 2018, March 2019, December 2019. 170. Sunday Times, undated press clipping, 1984, SAHO Archive. 171. Omar has these documents in his possession. 172. Badsha to Botha, May 5, 1986, 1, OB private archive. 173. Rajgopaul to Badsha, June 2, 1986, 1, OB private archive. 174. Sartor and Harris, interview, January 2022. 175. Farzanah Badsha, interview, February 2018. 176. Rajgopaul to Badsha, June 2, 1986, 1, OB private archive. 177. OB, interview, February 2018, December 2022. 178. Daniel B. Wood, “Bearing Witness to a Broken Homeland,” Christian Science Monitor, May 6, 1987.

179. Washington Post, June 8, 1986, 7. 180. Charles McCurdy, “Showing the Quiet Horror of Apartheid,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January  28, 1988. Thobejane eventually returned to South Africa; a trained nuclear physicist, he advised former South African president Jacob Zuma in a characteristically corrupted and inflated deal with Russia to sell reactors to South Africa. It is a predictably sad and sordid story. “Looking for Mr. Nuclear,” Mail & Guardian, February 22, 2017, https://​mg​.co​.za​/article​/2017​-02​ -22​-exclusive​-looking​-for​-mr​-nuclear/. 181. Suzanne Muchnic, “‘Cordoned Heart’ Photo Exhibit at UCLA Lacks Soul of South Africa,” Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1987. 182. Andy Grundberg, “At Photo Shows, a Kaleidoscope of Visual Delights,” New York Times, May 16, 1986. 183. Grundberg. 184. David Attwell, Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), chap. 6; Njabulo Ndebele, “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 12, no. 2 (1986): 143–­57. 185. Glossary in Cordoned Heart, 171. 186. Weinberg to OB, April 12, 1988, 1, SAHO Archive. 187. Foszia Fisher, interview, May 2019. 188. OB, interview, July 2019. 189. Lufthansa Date Book, May 20, 1967. 190. David Goldblatt, interview, February 2018. 191. Martin Schneider to OB, June 15, 1987, 1, SAHO Archive. 192. OB, interview, July 2019. 193. Lufthansa Date Book, July 16, 1966. 194. OB, interview, December 2022. 195. OB, virtual interview, September 2022. 196. Cedric Nunn, interview, 2018. 197. OB, interview, July 2019. 198. Undated photograph, 1986[?], OB private archive. 199. OB, interview, February 2018, March 2019. 200. Hughes, “Violence in Inanda, 1985,” 332. See Fatima Meer, ed., Unrest in Natal, August 1985 (Durban: Institute for Black Research, 1985). 201. Hughes, “Violence in Inanda, 1985,” 345. 202. Ela Gandhi, interview, February 2018. 203. Sunday Times, August 11, 1985. 204. Michael Sutcliffe and Paul Wellings, Attitudes and Living Conditions in Inanda: The Context for Unrest? (Durban: Built Environment Support Group, 1985), 2–­3. 205. Hughes, “Violence in Inanda, 1985,” 351. 206. OB, interview, December 2023. 207. OB, interview, February 2018. 208. OB, interview, February 2018; Eddie Webster, “The Two Faces of the Black Trade Union Movement in South Africa,” Review of African Political Economy, no. 39 (1987): 33–­41. 209. Wilson to the Board of African Studies, March 23, 1987, 1.

2 67

NOTES TO PAGES 181 – 19 0

NOTES TO PAGES 19 0 – 19 5 268

210. Heather Hughes and David Hemson, interview, May 2019. 211. Nasima Badsha, interview, March, April 2019; Farzanah Badsha, interview, February 2019. 212. Farzanah Badsha, interview, February 2019. 213. Reitumetse Mabokela, “The Evolution of Admissions and Retention Policies at an Historically White South African University,” Journal of Negro Education 66, no. 4 (1997): 423–­ 33. 214. Mabokela. 215. Nasima Badsha, interview, March 2019, April 2019. 216. OB to Alex Harris, April 4, 1986, 2, OB private archive. 217. In our conversation, David Hemson theorized that, based on what he witnessed in the unions, Omar was much more effective organizing to build something than he was at running whatever resulted from such efforts. Interview, May 2019. 218. Wylie, Art + Revolution. 219. On Mbuli and performance culture during the 1980s, see Tom Penfold, “Towards a New Public Space: Performance Culture in 1980s South Africa,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 27, no. 3 (2015): 311–­25; on the “Interim Cultural Desk” and the cultural boycott, see “Mzwakhe Mbuli,” South African History Online, updated November 16, 2020, https://​www​.sahistory​.org​ .za​/people​/mzwakhe​-mbuli; and Kenneth Grundy, “Cultural Politics in South Africa,” African Studies Review 39, no. 1 (1997): 4–­5. 220. See for example the Afrapix special Meeting, October 4, 1986, 1, during which Weinberg noted the number of photographers then imprisoned. SAHO Archive. 221. Pax to Badsha, May 3, 1987, 1. 222. Cultural Workers Congress, South Africa Art Initiative, accessed February  16, 2024, https://​asai​.co​.za​/peoplesculture​/culture​-workers​-congress/. 223. Diane Stewart, “Afrapix: Statement of Cash Movement,” March 1987–­February 1988, 1, SAHO Archive. 224. Cedric Nunn, interview, 2018. Harris and Sartor suspected that he saw both the CDP and the CWC as useful platforms to launch a career in electoral politics, when change finally came to South Africa, although they note that he never said so explicitly. 225. Cedric Nunn, interview, February 2018. 226. Gille de Vlieg, interview, July 2019. 227. Afrapix, AGM, Minutes, March 26, 1988, 3, SAHO Archive. 228. Joe Slovo, “The South African Working Class and the National Democratic Revolution,” 1988, South African History Online, accessed February  3, 2023, https://​www​.sahistory​ .org​.za​/sites​/default​/files​/The​%20South​%20African​%20Working​%20Class​%20and​%20the​%20 National​%20Democratic​%20Revolution​.pdf. 229. Paul Weinberg to OB, April 12, 1988, 1–­7, OB private archive. Other Afrapix veterans remember that Omar’s threats to reveal the organization’s internal deliberations to the ANC in Lusaka was another common point of contention; Omar disputes these recollections. Chris Ledochowski, interview; Cedric Nunn, interview; Paul Weinberg, personal communication, February 2018. 230. Gaye Davis, “Talking About Pictures . . . and Politics,” Weekly Mail, July 14, 1988. 231. OB, interview, February 2018.

232. When he met Mandela a few years later, this latest “old man” (as Omar called him, a sobriquet shared by Mandela, Ebrahim, and A. K. M. Docrat) reported that he knew about him not because of his photographs but because of his arrest. OB, interview, February 2018. 233. OB, interview, February 2018, March 2019, December 2019. 234. OB, prison diary [loose leaf], SAHO Archive. 235. OB, interview, December 2023. 236. Associated Press, July 8, 1988. 237. OB, prison diary, 2, SAHO archive. 238. Dullah Omar to Nasima Badsha, July 14, 1988, 1, SAHO archive. 239. Nasima Badsha to OB, July 13, 1988, 1–­2, SAHO archive. 240. Return address “the Imperial Ghetto”—­the name he had given to his not-­yet published Grey Street documentary project. 241. OB to Leila Badsha, undated [July 1988?], OB private archive. 242. Chris Ledochowski, interview, February 2018. 243. Chris Ledochowski, interview, February 2018; Jeeva Rajgopaul, interview, February 2018; Paul Weinberg, personal communication, February 2018. 244. Annual meeting, Minutes, April 1989, 1–­24, OB private archive. 245. Van Der Ross and Motala to Chairperson, Afrapix, April 23, 1989, 1–­2, SAHO Archive. 246. Mbuli to “Comrades,” November 13, 1989, 1, SAHO Archive. 247. Paul Weinberg, personal communication, February 2018. For his part, Omar insists that Weinberg was just being paranoid. Interview, December 2022. 248. Cedric Nunn, interview, February 2018. 249. Including analogizing Omar to Jacob Zuma, whom the ANC was in the process of recalling. Weinberg and Gille de Vlieg also made the same analogy. Chris Ledochowski, interview, February 2018; Gille de Vlieg, interview, July 2019; Paul Weinberg, personal communication, February 2018. 250. Later that year he published Beyond the Barricades, an even more intensely polemical series of photo essays, jointly credited to Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies and UCT’s CDP. Harris and Sartor reprised their editorial and design roles. Wally Serote and Nise Malenge contributed verses. The Booker Prize–­winning art critic and theorist John Berger endorsed it. About a decade later, I bought a copy at a Chicago used bookstore. I was twenty, entranced by the images and the history, and did not know enough to recognize the contributors by name. 251. Hayes, “Photographic Publics,” 316. 252. Pax Magwaza, “Gallery,” Full Frame 1, no. 1 (1990): 30; John Liebenberg, “The Rainy Season,” Full Frame 1, no. 1 (1990): 16. 253. On Goldblatt, see Magaziner, “The Empty Space between Earth and Sky,” forthcoming; and David Goldblatt, South Africa: The Structure of Things Then (New York: Monacelli Press, 1998); on Billy Monk, see the Instagram archive of his work: https://​www​.instagram​.com​ /billymonkcollection​/​?hl​=​en. 254. OB, Full Frame 2, no. 1 (1991), 13. 255. OB, Full Frame 2. 256. David Krantz, “Politics and Photography in Apartheid South Africa,” History of Photography 32, no. 4 (2008): 297.

269

NOTES TO PAGES 19 5 – 19 8

NOTES TO PAGES 19 8 – 2 0 6 270

257. Cedric Nunn, interview, February 2018. 258. OB, interview, February 2018, March 2019.

Chapter 6: Millennium Epigraph: Mafika Gwala, “No More Lullabies,” Collected Poems (Cape Town: South African History Online, 2016), 171. 1. Omar Badsha (hereafter OB), interview, February 2018, December 2019, December 2022. 2. Chabani Manganyi, ed., The Beauty of the Line: Life and the Times of Dumile Feni (Johannesburg: KMM Review Publishing, 2012), 15, 16, 97. 3. Manganyi, The Beauty of the Line, 15, 16, 97. For more on Cole’s trajectory in the United States, see “Apartheid, Civil Rights and Beyond: Ernest Cole’s Secret Archives, in Pictures,” Guardian, March 14, 2023. 4. Hugh Masekela, Still Grazing: The Musical Journey of Hugh Masekela (Auckland Park, SA: Jacana Media, 2004). 5. Manganyi, Beauty, 40, 101, 103. 6. Ramadan Suleman, dir., Zwelidumile, Africalia Productions, 2010, accessed February 3, 2023, https://​africalia​.be​/en​/Creatives​-work​-9​/Documentaries​/Zwelidumile​?lang​=​en. 7. Manganyi, Beauty, 40, 101, 103 8. OB, diary [loose leaf], January 1990, OB private archive. 9. Wells to OB, October 31, 1989, 1, SAHO archive. 10. OB, diary [loose leaf], January 1990, OB private archive. 11. OB, interview, February 2018, December 2019. 12. Nan Wells, “Memorandum,” February 7, 1990, 1, SAHO Archive. 13. OB diary [loose leaf], February 1990, OB private archive. 14. Farzanah Badsha, interview, February 2018. 15. OB, interview, February 2018. 16. OB, interview, February 2018. 17. Martha Kole to OB, June 13, 1990, 1–­2, SAHO archive. 18. Marelize van Zyl, “A Passion for Humanity: The Artistic Legacy of Dumile Feni—­the Goya of the Townships,” Daily Maverick, November 11, 2022, https://​www​.dailymaverick​.co​.za​ /article​/2022​-11​-11​-a​-passion​-for​-humanity/. 19. Kenneth Grundy, “Cultural Politics in South Africa,” African Studies Review 39, no. 1 (1997): 6. 20. Cited in J.  B. Spector, “Non-­Traditional Diplomacy: Cultural, Academic and Sports Boycotts and Change in South Africa” (unpublished manuscript in my possession), 13. 21. OB, interview, February 2018. 22. Albie Sachs, “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom: Culture and the ANC Constitutional Guidelines,” TDR 35, no. 1 (1991): 187–­93. 23. Omar Badsha, “Making a New Culture,” Aperture 19 (1990): 65. 24. Barbara Masekela, “Culture in the New South Africa,” Scenaria: A Magazine for the Performing Arts in the Transvaal, 1990, 3–­7.

25. Anthony O’Brien, Against Normalization: Writing Radical Democracy in South Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 78. 26. O’Brien, 78. 27. OB to Kathrada, July 6, 1990, 1, SAHO archive. 28. OB to Mbulelo Nkonzo, July 15, 1991, 1, SAHO archive. 29. NICCC, “An Introduction,” [1990?], 1–­5, SAHO archive. 30. OB to Breyten Breytenbach, October 18, 1990, 1—­2, SAHO archive. 31. Kenneth Grundy, “Art as a Political Weapon: South Africa’s Cultural Workers Debate Their Role in the Struggle,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 1, no. 2 (1995): 229. 32. Brooks Spector, virtual interview, February 2022. 33. Mario Pissarra, interview, July 2019. 34. OB, interview, February 2018, March 2019. 35. OB to Nigel Worden, November 8, 1990, 1, SAHO archive. 36. Various to Saunders, November 5, 90, 1; Saunders to OB, December 17, 1990, 1, SAHO archive. 37. OB, interview, March 2019. 38. OB to Francis Wilson, July 10, 1991, 1–­2. 39. FOSACO, “Cultural Charter: A Summary,” July 1991, 1–­5, SAHO Archive. 40. FOSACO, “Cultural Charter: A Summary”; Wally Serote, “Cultural Workers and the State,” August 10, 1991, 1–­2, SAHO Archive. 41. Thus fulfilling Trotsky’s vision of revolutionary art, which Old Man Docrat had shared with Omar so many decades before. For more on similar ideas, see Ben Davis, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013). 42. For a recent and compelling study of the transition, see Andre DuToit, The Amnesty Chronicles (Stellenbosch, SA: Stellenbosch University Press, 2022). 43. Mario Pissarra, interview, July 2019. 44. Mario Pissarra, interview, July 2019. 45. Minutes, Meeting between FOSACO and the ANC DAC, Johannesburg, April 12, 1992, 1–­7, SAHO Archive. 46. ANC DAC “Response to FOSACO,” July 19, 1992, 1–­3, SAHO Archive. 47. Kenneth Grundy, “The Politics of South Africa’s National Arts Festival: Small Engagements in the Bigger Campaign,” African Affairs 93, no. 372 (1994): 404. 48. Brooks Spector, virtual interview, February 2022. 49. New York Times, September 21, 1992 50. Grundy, Cultural Politics, 14–­15. 51. O’Brien, Against Normalization, 90–­91. 52. Grundy, “Art as a Political Weapon,” 241. 53. Pissarra, interview, July 2019. 54. Pissarra, interview, July 2019. 55. Sean Jacobs, “Jakes Gerwel and ‘the Intellectual Home of the Left,’” Africa Is a Country, October  23, 2012, https://​africasacountry​.com​/2012​/10​/the​-intellectual​-home​-of​-the​-democratic​ -left. 56. Niren Tolsi, “Jakes Gerwel: The Epitome of Integrity and Courage,” Mail & Guard-

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ian, November  20, 2012, https://​mg​.co​.za​/article​/2012​-11​-30​-00​-jakes​-gerwel​-the​-epitome​-of​ -integrity​-and​-courage/. 57. Rebecca Davis, “Remembering Jakes Gerwel,” Daily Maverick, November  29, 2012, https://​www​.dailymaverick​.co​.za​/article​/2012​-11​-29​-remembering​-jakes​-gerwel/. 58. Nasima Badsha, interview, March, April 2019. 59. Harold Wolpe, “The Debate on University Transformation in South Africa: The Case of the University of the Western Cape,” Comparative Education 31, no. 2 (1995): 285. 60. Nasima Badsha, ed., Reflections of South African University Leaders, 1981–­2014 (Cape Town: African Minds, 2016), ix. 61. Teresa Barnes, Uprooting University Apartheid in South Africa (New York: Routledge, 2021). 62. Richard Ilorah, “The Dilemma of the Historically Black Universities in South Africa,” South African Journal of Higher Education 20, no. 3 (2006): 442–­60; Anne Heffernan and Noor Nieftagodien, eds., Students Must Rise: Youth Struggle in South Africa before and beyond Soweto ’76 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2018). 63. Farzanah Badsha, interview, February 2018; Leila Badsha, interview, February 2018. 64. Jon Soske, phone interview, January 2022. 65. OB, interview, February 2018. 66. The idea of the banyan tree stayed with him. Upon his return to South Africa, he chose the tree’s name for his first email address. Maybe he just liked the way it sounded, or maybe he wanted to remember his trip, or his grandmother. My first email address came from a Beastie Boys lyric; these things can be meaningless. But in Omar’s case, it stuck. Once established in Pretoria, Omar began to use the name “Banyan Tree” (or sometimes “Bunyan Tree”) as a catch all for whatever he was doing. 67. OB to Gopal Gandhi, October 4, 1989, 1, SAHO Archive. 68. OB, interview, February 2018, March 2019. 69. Leila Badsha, interview, February 2018; personal communication, December 2022. 70. OB, interview, February 2018. 71. Shalk Merwe, “‘Radio Apartheid’: Investigating a History of Compliance and Resistance in Popular Afrikaans Music, 1956–­1979,” South African Historical Journal 66, no. 2 (2014): 349–­70. 72. Leila Badsha, interview, February 2018. 73. For more on Lynch’s own practice, https://​www​.instagram​.com​/liamlynchphoto/. 74. Liam Lynch, interview, February 2018. 75. Leila Badsha, interview, February 2018. 76. OB, diary entry [loose leaf], July 24, 1999, 1, OB private archive. 77. The authoritative text is Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Steward Brand, the Whole Earth Catalogue and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 78. Liam Lynch, interview, February 2018; “Online: A Bosnia Gallery,” New York Times, June 10, 1996. 79. Ciraj Rassool to OB, October 24, 1998, 1, OB private archive. 80. South African History Online Proposal, 1999, p. 1, OB private archive. 81. OB to Saki Mocozoma, CEO, Transnet, September 30, 1998, 1, OB private archive. 82. See, among other coverage, “Presidency Announces Recipients of National Or-

ders,” TimesLive, April  19, 2018, https://​www​.timeslive​.co​.za​/news​/south​-africa​/2018​-04​-19​ -presidency​-announces​-recipients​-of​-national​-orders/. Quotes from Facebook are preserved in a document in my possession. 83. The ceremony is viewable on YouTube: Stellenbosch University, “Honorary Doctorate: Mr Omar Badsha,” December 11, 2017, YouTube video, 11:37, https://​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​ =​r-​ ​-l0EK071U. 84. OB, interview, July 2019. 85. Ashwin Desai, Arise Ye Coolies: Apartheid and the Indian, 1960–­1995 (Johannesburg: Impact Africa, 1996), i. 86. Charles Hagen, “Making a New Culture: An Interview with Omar Badsha,” Aperture, Early Summer 1990, 65. 87. See opening page for South African History Online website, archived November 30, 2001, at the Wayback Machine, https://​web​.archive​.org​/web​/20011130065031​/https:​/www​ .sahistory​.org​.za/. 88. Jeeva Rajgopaul, interview, February 2018. 89. Rassool, ASA, Atlanta, November 2018. For all its merits, the site is overstuffed and frequently difficult to navigate; the resulting inaccessibility might be why Omar is rarely called to task and made to cease such banditry. 90. And so did Theresa Winchell, in her wonder-­working copyediting. 91. Citations via the Wayback Machine Internet Archive: https://​web​.archive​.org​/web​ /20011130065031​/https://​www​.sahistory​.org​.za/. 92. Of course, SAHO is not only about the struggle, nor is the history it contains and shares limited to what happened before 1994. As I write this, the website features long articles on the history of Eskom, up to the present, befitting the country’s current electricity supply crisis: “A Short History of ESKOM, Part 2 (2001–­2022),” South African History Online, accessed February 5, 2023, https://​www​.sahistory​.org​.za​/article​/short​-history​-eskom​-2001​-2022​-part​-2. 93. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, Government of South Africa, https://​ www​.gov​.za​/documents​/constitution​/constitution​-republic​-south​-africa​-1996​-1. 94. Thabo Mbeki, “I Am an African Speech by President Thabo Mbeki,” May 8, 1996, YouTube video, 45:44, https://​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=​dCeLwTITRoQ. 95. Xolelwa Kashe-­Katiya, virtual interview, February 2018. 96. Xolelwa Kashe-­Katiya, interview, February 2018. 97. Leila Badsha, interview, February 2018. 98. Omar Badsha, Imperial Ghetto: Ways of Seeing in a South African City (Cape Town: South African History Online, 2001), 3; back cover flap. 99. Badsha, Imperial Ghetto, 5; Zegeye and Ahluwalia, introduction to Imperial Ghetto, 21–­25. 100. David Hemson, Martin Legassick, and Nicole Ulrich, “White Activists and the Revival of the Workers’ Movement,” vs. Jabulani Sithole and Sifiso Ndlovu, “The Revival of the Labour Movement, 1970–­1980,” chap. 6 and chap. 5, respectively, in The Road to Democracy in South Africa, vol. 2, ed. South African Democracy Education Trust (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2006). 101. Martin Legassick, “Debating the Revival of the Workers Movement in the 1970s,” Kronos, no. 34 (2008): 240–­66.

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102. This included a collaboration with the Ministry of Public Works and Omar Badsha, ed., With Our Own Hands: Fighting Poverty in South Africa (Pretoria: Community Based Public Works Programme, 2001), which brought former Afrapix photographers together with new collaborators (including Liam Lynch, whose image was on the cover) for what participants considered a “post-­apartheid Cordoned Heart.” Liam Lynch, interview, February 2018. In 2006, SAHO and the Ministry of Education coproduced a lavishly illustrated resource book that was intended to make it easier for educators to refer to “eight historically significant events” whose anniversaries would come that year. Most schools lacked access to the internet. Lynch thinks that by collaborating with the government both to populate the website and to produce pedagogical materials, Omar hoped to “circumvent the whole writing [of] textbooks” in favor of SAHO’s expansion, with government support. Liam Lynch, interview, February 2018. The project culminated in Omar Badsha, ed., The Age of Hope: Century of Struggle to Freedom (Pretoria: Government Printer, 2006). 103. Dale McKinley, “Distorting the Past to Suit the Powerful,” The Mercury, April 8, 2010. 104. OB, “SAHO Is Not a Government Project,” The Mercury, April 13, 2010. 105. Cited in the Mail & Guardian, February 15, 2002. 106. Xolelwa Kashe-­Katiya, interview, February 2018. 107. Nasima Badsha and Naledi Pandor, “The First Ten Years: The Role of Public Policy in Shaping Postapartheid Higher Education in South Africa,” in The Next Twenty Five Years: Affirmative Action in the United States and South Africa, ed. David L. Featherman, Marvin Krislov, and Martin Hall (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 268–­77; “Pushing the Boundaries,” Sunday Times, January 9, 2005. 108. These issues came to the fore during the 2000s at UKZN. See William Saunderson-­ Meyer, “Malegapuru Makgoba and the White Bonobos,” Politicsweb, January 31, 2020, https://​ www​.politicsweb​.co​.za​/opinion​/malegapuru​-makgoba​-and​-the​-white​-bonobos. 109. See, for example, United Nations, “South Africa ‘on the Precipice of Explosive Xenophobic Violence,’ UN Experts Warn,” United Nations, July 15, 2022, https://​news​.un​.org​/en​/story​ /2022​/07​/1122612. On xenophobia as race hatred, see Jonathon Glassman, “Towards a Comparative History of Racial Thought in Africa,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 63, no. 1 (2021): 72–­98. 110. Nasima Badsha, interview, March, April 2019. 111. Jeeva Rajgopaul, interview, February 2018. 112. Mads Nørgaard, interview, February 2018. 113. Jon Soske, phone interview, January 2022. 114. Raymond Joseph, “The Gentrification of Woodstock: From Rundown Suburb to Hipster Heaven,” Guardian, August 12, 2014. 115. Indeed, in the last decade he has been involved in at least two public incidents in which arguments turned violent, seemingly at his instigation. The most striking example came during the opening of the Rise and Fall of Apartheid photography exhibition in 2014, during which Omar came to blows with the curator, Okwui Enwezor, at an event that ought to have been a celebration for photography’s unique role in South African history. There were numerous eyewitnesses, including Cedric Nunn (interview, February 2018). The Sunday Times blog Books Live mentioned their row in a February 2014 blog post, which appears no longer to be live.

116. Nasima Badsha, interview, March, April 2019; OB, interview, March 2019; Farzanah Badsha, interview, February 2018; Leila Badsha, interview, February 2018. 117. Santham Pillay, “Exhibition Showcases Works of Activist and His Late Dad,” Sunday Times, July  25, 2010, https://​www​.timeslive​.co​.za​/sunday​-times​/lifestyle​/2010​-07​-25​-exhibition​ -showcases​-works​-of​-activist​-and​-his​-late​-dad/. 118. “Le militant anti-­apartheid Omar Badsha dans l’île,” IMAZ Press, December 10, 2017, https://​imazpress​.com​/actus​-reunion​/le​-militant​-anti​-apartheid​-omar​-badsha​-dans​-lile. In 2023 Omar’s work was exhibited at the Sharjah Biennale as well. For an assessment, see Christopher J. Lee, “Durban Moments: Omar Badsha’s Afro-­Asian Aesthetic and the Aura of the Ordinary,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Arts 53 (November 2023): 38–­51. 119. The former resulted in a book, published by SAHO and Wits University Press: Arianna Lissoni, Jon Soske, Natasha Erlank, Noor Nieftagodien, and Omar Badsha, eds., One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories Today (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2012). In total, SAHO has published thirty-­three books since 2001, including Mafika Gwala’s collected poems, and extended autobiographical accounts of lesser-­known former activists under the Live of Courage imprint. 120. Jon Soske, phone interview, January 2022. There were many other projects besides. In 2010, for example, SAHO organized the Bonani Africa photo festival to coincide with the World Cup. Fifty-­eight individual photographers and one collective responded to SAHO’s call for contributions, including Afrapix veterans Chris Ledochowski and Santu Mofokeng, along with a younger practitioner, Oupa Nkosi, whose sympathetic portraits of the new Black elite demonstrated that documentary photography could still capture history in process. In his introduction to the catalog, one of Omar’s core recent collaborators, the American academic Jon Soske, argued that documentary photography was the South African artistic vernacular. The photo essays collectively reprised what Omar had first demonstrated in Letter to Farzanah: that, as Soske put, paraphrasing Walker Evans, documentary is “a way of depicting the present as if it were already past.” Soske, “In Defense of Documentary Photography,” in Omar Badsha, Mads Nørgaard, and Jeeva Rajgopaul, eds., Bonani Africa 2010 Catalogue (Cape Town: South African History Online, 2010), 3. The photography festival rode wave of attention paid to South Africa during the World Cup; Omar and the others planned to channel that momentum toward making it a biannual event, which did not materialize. Soske, “In Defense of Documentary Photography,” 8; Omar Badsha, interview, February 2018. 121. Jon Soske, phone interview, January 2022. 122. This was made apparent to me after a panel in which I introduced this project at the 2018 meeting of the African Studies Association, during which numerous colleagues critiqued the website’s organization and functionality. 123. OB, interview, February 2018. 124. Jeeva Rajgopaul, interview, February 2018; OB, interview, July 2019, December 2019. 125. Jeeva Rajgopaul, interview, February 2018. 126. These numbers were reconstructed via the Wayback Machine Internet Archive, accessed February 6, 2023, https://​web​.archive​.org​/web​/20230204213854​/https://​www​.sahistory​.org​.za/. 127. “Mongane Wally Serote,” South African History Online, updated May 12, 2023, https://​ www​.sahistory​.org​.za​/people​/mongane​-wally​-serote. 128. Jon Soske, interview, 2022; Jill Kelly, interview, 2022.

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129. Jill Kelly and Omar Badsha, “Teaching South African History in the Digital Age: Collaboration, Pedagogy and Popularizing History,” History in Africa 47 (2020): 23. 130. Jill Kelly, phone interview, February 2022. 131. Jill Kelly, phone interview, February 2022. 132. And if things went sideways, Omar remained an effective operator. In mid-­2017, one of Kelly’s students’ subjects took exception to the biography that the student had written for SAHO. The subject contacted the student directly and threatened “that unless you remove . . . defamatory statements . . . from your biography, . . . our lawyers will be taking the necessary steps in respect of defamation of character.” The student—­in her early twenties, from the Dallas area—­was not used to the hardball of South African politics. Her subject’s charges were scurrilous, but it was an exceedingly uncomfortable situation. Omar intervened to calm things. He knew the players, he understood the moves that needed to be taken, the words to be said to assuage the subject’s hurt feelings. The biography stayed up and the student went on to complete a distinguished senior project on African immigration to the Dallas metropolitan area. Email in my possession. 133. OB, presentation to students, February 2018. 134. OB, presentation to students, February 2018. 135. Mads Nørgaard, interview, February 2018. 136. Jill Kelly, interview, February 2022. 137. OB Facebook post, 2018, in my possession. 138. David Macfarlane, “Plagiarism Case Kept under Wraps at Wits,” Mail & Guardian, April 15, 2011, https://​mg​.co​.za​/article​/2011​-04​-15​-plagiarism​-case​-kept​-under​-wraps​-at​-wits/. 139. Jon Soske, interview, January 2022. 140. Mandla Langa, interview, July 2019; OB, interview, March 2019. 141. Raymond Suttner, The ANC Underground in South Africa to 1976: A Social and Historical Study (Auckland Park, SA: Jacana Media, 2008), 138. 142. Mads Nørgaard, interview, February 2018. 143. Personal communication with SAHO employees, 2018, 2019, 2023. 144. —­go there! 145. Leila Badsha, interview, February 2018; Farzanah Badsha, interview, February 2018. 146. Jon Soske, phone interview, January 2022. Soske was reflecting on being with Omar when Phyllis Naidoo passed away in 2013. 147. OB, interview, July 2019. 148. OB, interview, July 2019. 149. Simon’s Town Museum, http://​www​.simonstownmuseum​.org​.za/.

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations abortions, 95, 252n173 activism and movements: accomplishments of Omar, 7, 10; activism interests and disenchantment with art, 105; archives of Omar and story of, 11–­14, 238–­39nn14–­15; art, activism, and political vocation, 60–­61, 99, 102; art merger with, 102–­4; collaboration and building base for, 106–­ 7; deaths and extrajudicial killings of activists, 143–­44, 260n31; driving by Omar and ability to change lives through, 102; early involvement in, 4, 6–­7; exile of activists, 143; importance of history of, 220; joint declaration for coordination of protests against racist laws, 40; middle-­class activists, 264n134; network building for, 7, 102–­5, 111, 212; overt forms of, 8; unity and shared commitment of oppressed people for goals of, 4, 6–­7; useful whites, concern about alienating, 105, 108–­9; white student organizing work, 112, 118, 255n58. See also protests and marches Adler Fielding Gallery, 81–­83 Afrapix photographers’ collective: AGMs, 193, 196; Cape Town offices of, 192; closing of, 198; community education project of, 174; demand for photographs from, 174–­75; expulsion of Omar from, 196–­97, 205, 231; focus of work and politics of, 182–­83, 193; focus of work of members of, 157, 174–­75, 193, 262n85; formation of and cofounding role of Omar, 8, 10, 157; Full Frame, 197–­98; Imijondolo publication by, 170; influence of Omar in, 183–­84, 193, 196; insights about in Omar’s archive, 12; membership of, 157, 173–­75, 192–­93; offices of, 157, 173, 174–­75; paperwork related to, 10; photographs and financial contributions of Omar to, 192–­94, 196; redefining terms of membership and changes to organization of, 196–­97, 198; relationships leading to, 155–­57; threat to reveal internal deliberations to the ANC, 268n229; tithing of members to support, 192–­93; writing project about, 217 African Claims (ANC), 39, 40 African Guernica (Feni), 85–­86, 251n141 African National Congress (ANC): African Claims, 39, 40; Arts and Culture department of, 157, 197, 205, 207–­8, 210–­11, 212; banning and unbanning

of, 66, 203–­4; battle with Inkatha, 250n113; culture and arts role post-­apartheid, 204–­12; Culture in Another South Africa conference, 192; election of Youth League members to government positions, 104–­5; government-­in-­waiting status of, 205–­6; Gwala defense support from, 130; history of, 29, 222–­23, 243n19; influence of communism on, 50; membership of, 39; membership of and loyalty to by Omar, 204, 206, 212; national conference, 206, 207, 208; politics and ideology of, 39, 194, 201; reestablishment in exile, 71; reestablishment of, 206; response to violence by, 42, 44; return to South Africa, 201 African People’s Democratic Union of South Africa (APDUSA), 12, 66, 68, 70 Africans: art as employment for Black people, 88, 92; interactions with Indians, 33; life experiences of Black South Africans, 79; racial identification as, 29; racism against, 28, 29; residence and land-­ownership restrictions on, 40; treatment of workers in Durban, 33; violence between Indians and, 41–­42, 44 Afrika Hoorah, 104, 122 Aggett, Neil, 262n75 Ainslie, Bill, 49, 84, 89, 92, 200 Alan Taylor residence, 104, 109, 110, 113, 172 Alexandra, 30 ambiguity and uncertainties, 11–­12 Amla, Hashim, 218 Amouti, 160–­68, 161, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169, 181, 186 Amra, Cassim, 140, 146, 151, 259n25 Amsterdam, 192 anger, 21–­22, 241n52 anti-­teleological ethos, 12, 239n18 ants and anthills, 7 apartheid / separate development: art education under, xiii; BICA as radical under, 46–­48; civil society and cultural resistance to, 262n87; cultural boycott until ending of, 154; diversity of neighborhood and, 3–­4; ending of, 203–­4; expulsion order under, 4, 6, 12, 99, 105; graphic works and depictions of life under, 16–­17, 19, 20; herrenvolkism and, 67, 73, 106–­7, 128; history of and Omar’s history, 7–­8, 10, 238n7;

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Index 296

apartheid / separate development (cont.) Imijondolo and capturing life under, 161–­70, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169, 176, 177, 186; Letter to Farzanah and capturing South African life under, 147–­53, 148, 149, 150, 151, 154, 161, 162, 195, 261n51, 261n60, 275n120; meaning making under, xiii; movements to end, 4, 6–­7, 118; Omar’s role in resistance to, 10; photography and opposition to, 145; principles of, 40–­41; proposal for by Malan and National Party, 40–­ 41; reforms and weakening of, 198; suffocation analogy of, 4; US opposition to, 179, 266n168; white South African support through, 40–­4 1 archives of Omar: computers and scanning documents, 216, 221; scope of, xiii–­xiv, 10–­14, 185–­86, 238–­39nn14–­15, 239n23 art: activism merger with, 102–­4; employment of Black people in, 88, 92; exile of Black artists, 91–­92; experience to carry beyond experience, 19; individuality and experiences as universal, task of artist to make, 16–­17, 19, 22, 74, 92–­93, 149; Islamic artistic traditions, 57; new art vision as social commentary and creative protest, 97, 118, 253n178; nonracial national art exhibitions, 71–­73, 81, 248n74; political resistance and artmaking, xiv, 237n4; politics’ relationship with, 97, 118, 212, 251n141, 253n178; post-­apartheid art and culture, debates about, 204–­12; as therapy for trauma, 97 art and artistic practices of Omar: activism interests and disenchantment with art, 105; art, activism, and political vocation, 60–­61, 99, 102; art classes at Orient, 57–­58; effect of activist ambitions on, 6–­7; first prize award, 97; friendships with other artists, 7, 60, 77–­81, 80, 97, 249n99; graphic works, 14, 16–­19, 17, 18, 20, 70; humanity depictions, 94, 183; influence of Dumile on, 83–­86, 92–­94; outside concept and figures being outside, 76–­77, 77, 93–­94, 94; overseas studies and opportunities, 78, 249n97; personal family-­ life depictions, 14, 16–­17, 19, 74–­77, 77, 249nn88–­ 90; quest to become an artist, 3; reputation as artist and photographer, 225; serious focus on art and identity as an artist, 60, 70, 71–­81; visual language development and influence of Dumile, 16–­17, 20 Artist Contemplating Suicide, An (Feni), 91, 91, 252n160 Artists of Fame and Promise exhibition, 82–­83 Art South Africa Today exhibitions, 71–­73, 72, 77, 81, 94, 97, 230, 250n123, 253n173, 253n178 Asmal, Kader, 216 autobiographical poem, 69–­70 available light, 20–­21, 241n44 awards and honors, 218, 272–­73nn82–­83 Aziz, Haroon, 103–­4 Azoulay, Ariella, 146, 179

babies, 99 Badat, Saleem, 61–­62 Badsha, Ayesha (aunt), 27, 36, 39, 64, 68, 243n11 Badsha, Cassim (cousin), 55, 56 Badsha, Ebrahim (father): appearance of, 37–­38; arranged marriage of, 30; art and drawing aptitude of, 35, 244n35; artistic ambitions of, 4, 44–­46, 48, 60; birth of, 30; calligraphy and woodcut work by, 57, 70, 74, 248n82, 249n90; character, personality, and temper of, 4, 61–­62, 64, 74, 184, 185; Clare Estate move by, 105; conflict between Miriam and, 11, 64; death of, 10, 225; education of, 34, 35, 49, 55–­56; family portrait, 36; financial concerns of, 62; hoarding by, 10; interest in politics of, 37–­38, 40; interests and urbane masculinity of, 37–­38; jobs/employment of, 11, 36; love for cars of, 100; marriage and family of, 30, 35, 36–­37, 61–­62, 64; move to Transvaal by, 35; new Bassa identity documents for, 180, 215, 266n171; nickname for, 33, 243n26; paintings and sketches by, 14, 44–­50, 47, 48, 57, 62, 63, 191, 217, 225; photo on Douglas Lane, 43; photo with children, 9; photo with siblings, 31; portrait of by Solberg, 45; reaction to Omar’s art prize, 73–­74; relationships with mill owners, 119, 122; relationship with granddaughters, 225; relationship with Omar, 4, 63, 67–­68, 73–­74, 184, 225; return to Douglas Lane home, 36; riot response by, 42; sign writing and promotion work of, 35, 36, 37, 44, 73–­74; Special Branch questioning of, 138 Badsha, Essop (uncle), 24, 33, 35, 36 Badsha, Farzanah (daughter): birth of, 141, 143, 144; Cape Town move of, 190; early life of, 170–­72, 171; education of, 190, 214; on grandfather’s hoarding habits, 10; home furnishings store of, 234, 276n144; nanny to help care for, 146, 172; New York visit for Cordoned Heart tour, 180; photos of, 141, 143, 171, 173; relationship with Hughes and Brown, 170; Woodstock home of, 224 Badsha, Fatima (aunt), 30, 36, 37, 64 Badsha, Goolam (brother), 37, 52, 64 Badsha, Iqbal (brother), 37 Badsha, Ismail (brother), 37, 53 Badsha, Ismail (grandfather): appearance of, 24, 34–­35, 37; children of, 24, 27, 30, 31; club and organization memberships of, 27–­28; death and burial of, 44, 144, 154; family portrait, 36; financial resources of, 35, 36; home with Rassool in Durban, 27, 243n11; immigration to Durban, 24–­ 26; marriage and family of, 24; Natal move with Mohammed, 24–­25; ownership of / working in shops by, 25–­27, 26, 36, 242n9; return to Douglas Lane home, 36; riot and brick through window of home of, 42, 51; travel by, 24, 27, 243n11 Badsha, Leila (daughter), 189, 195–­96, 214, 216, 221, 223, 225, 234

Badsha, Miriam Desai (mother): appearance of, 62; arranged marriage of, 30; conflict between Ebrahim and, 11, 64; death of, 224–­25; drawings of mothers and children and, 14, 16–­19, 64, 74–­76, 97, 185, 249nn88–­89; health and mental illness of, 11, 36–­37, 52–­53, 62, 225; home life and education before marriage, 34; marriage and family of, 30, 36–­37, 61–­62, 64; photos of, 52, 141; portrait of, 62, 63; relationship with Omar, 52–­53, 64, 74–­76, 78, 225, 249nn88–­89; removal from home of, 11, 64, 69 Badsha, Mohammed, 24–­27 Badsha, Moosa (uncle): birth of, 30; interest in politics of, 37; photographs by and photography interests of, 37–­38, 43, 53, 62, 71, 86, 86–­88, 87, 88, 139–­40, 146, 230, 259n22; photos of, 36, 139; at Turner’s burial, 144 Badsha, Nasima Coovadia (ex-­wife): activist work and politics of, 172, 195; Cape Town move of, 190; career of and financial security from, 146, 170, 172, 214–­15, 216, 224, 264n124; children of, 141, 143, 144, 189; conflict with and separation from Omar, 224, 274n115; early life of, 133–­37; expulsion of Omar and feelings toward Afrapix members, 197; imprisonment of Omar and recommitment to marriage, 195; interest in politics of, 136; London, move to and education and experiences in, 135–­37, 199; Mandela release and speech, watching of by, 203; marriage to Omar and honeymoon trip, 137–­38; Ministry of Education positions of, 214–­15, 216, 223; New York visit for Cordoned Heart tour, 180; opinion about biography of Omar, 10; relationship with Hughes and Brown, 170; return to South Africa, 137; tensions in marriage, 195; UCT position of, 190–­91; UWC positions of, 213–­14; work of and time with family, 223 Badsha, Omar: achievements and losses of, 97, 99; anger, trauma, and self-­awareness of, 21–­22, 64, 183–­86, 197, 224–­25, 241n52; appearance of, 74, 86–­87, 202; appreciation for father by, 225; aspirations for, 60; birth of, 35, 36; Black self-­description of, 104; childhood memories of, 51–­53, 53, 64; children of, 141, 143, 144, 189; combativeness of and opinions about, 208–­13, 274n115; complexity of, xv; conflict and terror in home life of, 11–­12, 62, 64, 67–­68, 74, 97; conflict with and separation from Nasima, 224, 274n115; diplomacy skills of, 184; driving by and ability to pursue change because of driving, 100–­102; earliest memory of, xiv, xv, 42, 51; exile decision of, 78, 92; hanging exhibitions at the NSA, 73, 95; health and heart attack of, 215–­17; jobs/employment of, 70, 137; legacy of and mentorship by, 185, 224, 231–­35; life as a generalizable story, 22; life envisioned by, 69–­70; limits of world of, 81; living life in layers by, 60–­61; marriage to

Nasima and honeymoon trip, 137–­38; naming of, 35; Nasima’s work and time with, 223; organic intellectualism of, 10, 238n11; organizing skills of, 192, 268n217; photo in Douglas Lane home, 56; photos of, 9, 53, 53, 225, 233; photos with Dumile, 16, 86, 86–­88, 87, 88; principles of, 234; projects and feelings about self and future, 21–­22; raid on home and imprisonment of, 194–­96, 269n232; relationship with author, xiii, xv, 21–­22, 232; relationship with Chorta, 62, 64, 184; relationship with father, 4, 64, 67–­68, 73–­74, 184, 225; relationship with mother, 52–­53, 64, 74–­ 76, 78, 225, 249nn88–­89; rise and prominence of, 8, 212–­13; state security inquiries about, 70; tensions in marriage, 195; violence against and effects of violence on, 186, 188–­89; Woodstock home of, 224, 226, 232 Badsha, Rabia (sister), 9, 36, 53, 56, 62, 64, 84, 85, 89 Badsha, Rashid (brother), 36, 53, 103 Badsha, Rassool Bibi (grandmother): background and family of, 23–­24; children of, 24, 27, 30, 31; death of, 147; family portrait, 36; home with Ismail in Durban, 27, 243n11; marriage and family of, 24; move to Durban by, 27, 30, 243n11; photos of, 141, 143; return to Douglas Lane home, 36 Badsha, Sarah (sister), 9, 36, 53 Badsha, Suleiman “Chorta” (uncle), 27, 35, 36, 42, 55, 56, 62, 64, 67, 134, 184 Badsha family names, 35 Badsha Pir grave and celebration, 32, 33, 44, 154, 221, 243n26 banned books, 152–­53, 154 Bantu Education, 55–­56, 131–­32, 172, 246n1 Bantu Indian Coloured Artists group (BICA), 44–­ 48, 45, 46, 49, 57, 73, 217 Bantu Men’s Social Centre (Durban), xxii Bantu Men’s Social Club (Johannesburg), 84 Bantustan system, 67, 93, 104–­5, 115, 118, 128, 159 Bantu YMCA, 44–­48 banyan trees, 215, 272n66 Battiss, Walter, 73, 184–­85 Bayer, 126–­27 Benefit Fund, 113, 115, 116, 122, 125 Bengu, Sibusiso, 214 Berger, John, 13, 152, 269n250 Beyond the Barricades (Badsha), 269n250 Bhaijee, Yusuf, 39, 68 Bhana, Surendra, 30, 259n7 Biko, Steve, 20, 104, 109, 110, 116, 143, 144, 153, 172, 219, 256n15 biography, xiv–­xv, 8, 10, 219–­20, 238nn9–­10 birds, 17–­19, 18, 20, 94, 95–­97, 96, 98, 99, 185, 262n80 Black Consciousness, 104, 105–­7, 112, 113, 115, 131–­ 32, 137, 143 Black Mother (Badsha), 17, 19, 95–­97, 96, 149, 151–­ 52, 183, 253n173

2 97

Index

Index 298

Black on White, 103 Black People’s Convention, 106 Black Sash, 174 Bodenstein, Wolfgang, 48–­49, 84, 87 Boer Republics and Anglo-­Boer war, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29 Bolton, Harriet, 114, 114–­15, 118, 122, 125 Bolton Hall, xxiii, 114, 115, 118–­19 Bonani Africa photo festival, 275n120 Botha, Louis, 29, 189, 196 Brecht, Berthold, 102, 103 Brown, David, 170 Buchwald, P., 124, 125 Buhlungu, Sakhela, 125–­26, 253n4 bush colleges, 66, 71, 89, 103, 105–­6, 214 Buthelezi, Mangosuthu “Gatsha,” 49, 104–­5, 115, 117, 124, 126–­28, 166, 168 Café Clan, 102–­3, 116 calligraphy, 55, 57, 70, 74, 249n90 Call Me Not a Man (Matshoba), 153 Capa, Cornell, 203, 204 Cape Town: Centre for Documentary Photography at, 190–­96, 208, 209, 219, 268n224; Ebrahim’s painting of, 191; home furnishings store of Farzanah and Leila in, 234, 276n144; Mandela’s speech in after release from prison, 203–­4; maps of, xxiii; Omar’s trip to with union combi, 131; one-­person show in, 97, 105; segregationist regime in, 30; South African National Gallery in, 71, 206, 207, 209, 214, 217, 225, 225 Carnegie Corporation / Carnegie Commission: Centre for Documentary Photography, 190–­96, 208, 209, 219, 268n224, 269n250; first Carnegie Commission, 176, 266n152; Second Carnegie Project, 12, 175–­83; South Africa: The Cordoned Heart, 177–­83, 178, 180, 182, 189, 266n161, 266n168, 267n180 Casbah culture, 37, 244n40 Cato Manor, 8, 33, 42, 165 Cato Manor march, 58–­60, 59, 61 Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University, 178, 269n250 Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, 190 Centre for Documentary Photography, University of Cape Town (CDP), 190–­96, 208, 209, 219, 268n224, 269n250 Cheadle, Halton, 101–­2, 109, 110, 113, 118, 120, 122 chemical production industries, 122, 123–­27, 128, 132, 175 Chemical Workers Industrial Union (CWIU), 12, 122, 123–­28, 131, 132, 137, 138, 220 “Child Who Was Shot Dead by Soldiers in Nyanga, The” (Jonker), 177, 266n161 Chinese Communist Party, 50 Christians, 3–­4, 30, 55, 57, 64

Chrome Chemicals, xxiii, 126–­27, 128, 140 Clare Estate, 105 Clark, T. J., 19 Coetzee, J. M., 153, 261n65 Cole, Ernest, 144, 200, 203, 204, 270n3 Coloured category, 156 combis, 124–­25, 128, 130–­31 common society, 106 Communist Party: anticolonialism and nationalism support by, 39–­40; attending meeting of, 8; banning of, 48; Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), 38–­39, 40, 55; introduction to, 8; Omar’s interests in, 60 computers and scanning documents, 216, 221 Congress of South African Students, 174 Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), 189, 265n136 Congress of South African Writers, 205 Congress of the People, 8, 48, 50, 58 Coovadia, Amina, 134, 135 Coovadia, Ebrahim, 134, 135 Coovadia, Essop, 135 Coovadia, Ismail, 82, 135, 136, 137, 199 Coovadia, Jerry, 134 Coovadia, Nasima. See Badsha, Nasima Coovadia (ex-­wife) Coovadia, Zubeida, 134 Copelyn, Johnny, 125, 128, 131, 184 Copenhagen photography and exhibition, 215 Cordoned Heart, 177–­83, 178, 180, 182, 189, 266n161, 266n168, 267n180 COVID pandemic, xiii, xiv, 231, 232, 235 Crown Mines, 155, 262n75 Cultural Charter, 209–­10 Cultural Workers’ Congress (CWC), 12, 192–­95, 198, 201, 205, 208, 212, 268n224 culture: cultural workers, 157; people’s culture, 195; photographs and resistance to apartheid, 157, 262n87; as politics, 154, 192, 268nn219–­220; post-­ apartheid culture and art, debates about, 204–­12; as weapon of struggle, 192 Culture and Resistance Festival, 157, 262n87 Culture in Another South Africa conference, 192 Dadoo, Yusuf, 39–­40, 135 Davidson, Basil, 95 de Klerk, F. W., 196, 198, 203, 219 democracy: fantasy of, 12; as ideological foundation for Omar, 21; transition to, 8, 10 democratic art, 155 Desai, Ashwin, 219 Desai, Fatima, 30 Desai, Jeevan: burning of archives of, 70, 218–­19; DSU role of, 4, 66, 67; house arrest and death of, 6–­7, 70; influence on Omar, 4, 6–­7, 60, 67–­68, 92–­93, 105; Unity Movement affiliation of, 66 Desai, Miriam. See Badsha, Miriam Desai (mother)

Detainee, 76, 249n88 de Vlieg, Gille, 173–­74 Dhupelia, Sita Gandhi, 108 Dhupelia, Uma, 108 Diakonia and Diakonia News, 146–­47, 154, 260n47 diary, 3, 6, 7, 10, 85, 93, 184 dignity, 20, 151–­52, 155 District, the. See Grey Street neighborhood Dladla, Barney, 115, 119, 124, 127 Dlamini, Irene, 129 Docrat, Abdul Khaled Mohammed “Doc”: advice about race and useful whites from, 105; Communist Party membership and work of, 38, 68–­69; Gwala introduction to, 79, 81; mentor relationship with and influence on Omar by, 68–­70, 73, 74, 78, 92–­93, 105, 217, 232, 251n141, 271n41; message-­carrying for by Omar, 82, 102, 131, 140; NIC and Congress of the People role of, 68–­69, 247n51; nicknames for, 68; protégés of, 69; relationship with and influence on Dumile, 89, 92, 251n141; relationship with Ebrahim, 38; resistant network role of, 71, 103, 220; sleeping on couch of, 95; visit to, 140 Docrat, Jamila (cousin), 68, 248n82 Dorkay House, 84 Double Negative (Vladislavic), 241n44 Douglas Lane: back room in house on, 3–­4, 60; deconstruction of buildings in, 154; demolition of home on, 131; Depression and move from home on, 35; diversity of neighborhood, 3–­4; Dumile’s stay in home on, 84–­85, 86, 86, 88–­89, 91, 185, 251n141; expulsion from home on, 4, 6, 12, 99, 105; family life in home on, 35–­37, 44; front room in house on, 42, 44; map of, xxii; mourning three generations of Badshas in home on, 99; painting of 7 Douglas Lane, 45–­46, 47; return to home on, 36; riot and brick through window of home on, 42, 51; sublet of home on, 35; writing about growing up on, 195–­96 Dube, John, 29, 39, 159, 170 Dube, Msizi, 168, 169, 174, 264n115 Dubow, Neville, 71, 84, 97 Duke University, Center for Documentary Studies, 178, 269n250 Dunn, John, 156 Durban: businesses and shops of Indians in, 24–­27, 26; celebration of Verwoerd assassination in, 89; diversity of neighborhood in, 3–­4; Indian population in, 25–­26; maps of, xxi, xxii, xxiii; prominent families in, 27, 243n12; riots and racial pogroms in, xiv, xv, 7, 41–­42, 44, 51; segregationist regime in, 30, 33–­34; weather conditions in, 81 Durban Art Gallery (DAG): Art South Africa Today exhibition at, 71–­73; BICA exhibition at, 46; Dumile’s show at, 84, 85–­88; history of, 252n145; map of, xxii; Mvusi visit to with

students, 49; photos of Omar and Dumile in, 16, 86–­88, 87, 88 Durban Moment, 21, 111 Durban Strikes, The (Turner), 116, 117, 256n78 Durban Students’ Union (DSU): banning of, 70; Desai’s role in, 4, 66, 67; formation of, 66; goals and focus of work of, 4, 66–­67; importance of work of, 220; influence on Omar and his participation in, 4, 6–­7, 60, 67–­70; insights about in Omar’s archive, 12; membership of, 247n36 Dyer, Steve, 156, 262n78 education: art classes at Orient, 57–­58; consolidation and mergers of universities, 223; dyslexia and struggle of Omar in school, 10, 50–­51, 56, 57, 60, 103, 216; failure of matriculation exams, 70, 212; high school education of Omar, 10, 56–­58; honorary doctorate, 218, 273n83; opportunities for Indians, 34, 54–­58; Orient Islamic School and experience of Omar, 55–­58, 58, 70; post-­ apartheid education, 213–­14; tutors for Badsha children, 59, 103; university segregation, 66 email address, 272n66 endorsement, 92 Enwezor, Okwui, 274n115 ethnicity / strategic ethnicity, 106, 115 ethnographic work, 73, 74–­77, 84 Evans, Walker, 146, 275n120 Eye of the Needle (Turner), 109, 153, 254n39 Family of Man, 140, 145, 260n41 “family outside” drawings, 76–­77, 77 fantasy, 12 Farm Security Association, 203 Federation of South African Cultural Organisations (FOSACO), 12, 208–­12, 213 Federation of South African Trade Unions, 265n136 Federation of South African Women, 48, 172–­73 Feni, Dumile: Adler Fielding Gallery exhibition submissions by, 83; ANC support for, 200; appearance and health of, 83, 200–­201, 202, 202; art and style of, 14, 83–­86, 93–­94, 251n141; attitude of toward apartheid, 84; authority’s suspicions about, 89, 92; biography of, 228; bird drawings by, 156, 262n80; bus conductor’s uniform worn by, 90; in California, 154; calls to Omar or Ebrahim from, 89, 92, 199–­200; character and personality of, 200–­201; death of, 204; departure from South Africa, 99, 156; drinking by, 200, 202–­3; exile of, 14, 20, 91–­92, 93, 97; first meeting with Omar, 83–­ 84; girlfriend and child of, 90–­91; graphic works and depictions of life under apartheid, 16, 20; Islam conversion of, 202–­3; life and life stories of, 84, 85, 102, 200; London show and life in London of, 92, 97, 199–­200; Los Angeles move of, 200; New York move and life in New York of, 200–­201; Omar’s visits with in New York, 179–­82, 202, 204;

299

Index

Index 300

Feni, Dumile (cont.) photos with Omar, 16, 86, 86–­88, 87, 88; Portrait of Omar Badsha, 14, 15; relationship with Docrat, 89, 92, 251n141; relationship with Omar, 14, 20, 84–­93, 86, 87, 88, 156; return to Johannesburg, 89; selling work in Joubert Park by, 82; stay in Douglas Lane home, 84–­85, 86, 86, 88–­89, 91, 185, 251n141; sweetness of, 85; visits with Omar in Johannesburg, 89–­90, 93; visual language of, 16 Field, Sean, 19–­20, 22 Fielding, Adler, 81–­83, 184, 199 film processing workshop, 175 First, Ruth, 135 Fisher, Foszia, 77–­78, 102–­3, 110, 116, 118, 122–­23, 127–­28, 144, 184, 222, 249n99, 254n39 flag burning, mock, 103 flight, transformation, and escape metaphor, 97 “For Ayesha” (Badsha), 18 Fordsburg, 35, 133–­35, 258n1 Fort Hare, 49, 50 Freedom Charter, 134, 206, 247n51 Friedman, Hazel, 249n88, 253n178 Full Frame, 197–­98

project about, 198, 221–­22, 269n240; paradise for intellectuals and creators, 89; photos of, 51, 52; rented room in, 105; riots and racial pogroms in, xiv, xv, 7, 41–­42, 44, 51; trade union activity in, 118–­19 Grossert, J. W. “Jack,” 72, 73, 89, 244n35, 248n73 Group Areas Act, 4, 41, 44, 58 Grundberg, Andy, 182 Grundy, Kenneth, 205, 211 Guenther, Egon, 250n119 Gujarat, Omar’s visit to and photographs of, 215 Gujarati: immigrant children return to India for education, 38; Indian identity of, 30; stratified and multiethnic category of, 30 Gujarati Muslims: diversity of Durban population, 3; dress of, 14, 24, 64, 76, 134; literacy skills of and restrictions on by settler government, 28; Omar’s family as, 3, 24; textile mills ownership by, 119 “Gum Boot Alley” (Badsha), 250n106 Gumede, Mr., 127, 220 Gwala, Harry, 130, 131, 140 Gwala, Mafika Pascal “Mike,” 79–­81, 80, 85, 93, 102, 140, 153, 154, 221, 227, 228, 250n113, 275n119

Gaborone, xxiii, 157, 192 Gabriel, Peter, 219 Gallery 101, 83, 87, 90, 93, 259n22 Gandhi, Ela, 69, 106, 108, 110, 168, 169, 172 Gandhi, Manilal, 38, 106, 254n27 Gandhi, Mohandas, 27–­29, 38, 106, 159, 254n27 garment worker, 235 Garment Workers Industrial Union (GWIU), 39, 113–­15, 118–­19, 125 General Workers’ Benefit Fund, 113, 115, 116, 118, 122, 125 German-­owned companies, 126–­27 Gerwel, Jakes, 213, 214 “Ghetto Act,” 40 Goldberg, Denis, 199 Goldblatt, David, 145–­46, 155, 157, 177, 179–­80, 181, 184, 197, 241n44, 262n72 Gomas, John, 140–­41, 142, 153, 192 Goodwill Lounge, 37, 41, 49, 61, 139 Gordhan, Pravin, 106 Gordimer, Nadine, 206 Govender, Kessie, 140, 147 Grahamstown, National Arts Festival, 204, 207, 210, 214 Great Depression, 34, 35 Grendon, Paul, 173 Grey Street Mosque, xxii, 30, 221 Grey Street neighborhood (the District): businesses and shops of Indians in, 26, 27, 33; demographics and transportation in, 33, 244n27; demolition of buildings in, 131, 132, 132; District name for, 27; diversity of, 41, 89; Imperial Ghetto

Haenggi, Fernande, 83 Hägglund, Martin, 21 Hani, Chris, 206 Harris, Alex, 178–­79, 180, 203, 269n250 Hassim, Shireen, 264n134 Hayes, Patricia, 174–­75, 197 Heaney, Seamus, 227 Hemson, David, 110, 111, 112, 114, 114, 118, 122, 125, 130, 174, 222, 268n217 Hermit Gallery, 152 herrenvolkism, 67, 73, 106–­7, 128 Hertzog, Barry, 40, 159 Hindus, 3, 32–­33 historical biography, 8, 10, 238n10 historical writing and production of history, 229–­30 HIV/AIDS policies, 223, 228 Hook, Derek, 20 House of Bondage (Cole), 144, 260n35 Howard College, xxiii, 66 Hudson, Peter, 109 Hughes, Heather, 160, 170, 190 humanism, 20, 21, 109 Imijondolo (Badsha), 161–­70, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169, 176, 177, 186 Imperial Ghetto (Badsha), 198, 221–­22, 269n240 Inanda: African and Indian residents in, 159–­60, 166, 168; housing and infrastructure in, 108, 112, 160, 162, 165–­66, 166; map of, xxiii; migrant access to labor markets from, 108; migration to, 159–­60; photographs of children and

community, 149, 150, 160–­70, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169; surveys of residents in, 110, 112, 183; tensions between Africans and Indians in, 29, 166, 168; violence and civil war in, 186, 188–­89, 189. See also Phoenix Settlement indentured workers (coolies), 25, 29, 32–­33, 242n6 India: immigrant children return to for education, 38; nationalism in, 38; restrictions on immigration from, 24–­25; visit to and photographs by Omar of, 215, 225, 272n66, 275n118 Indian Ocean map, xxi Indian Opinion, 29, 38 Indians / Indian South Africans: citizenship for, 39; financial resources of, 35, 36, 62, 134, 259n7; identity as and political category of, 30; interactions with Africans, 33; middling position of, 11; migratory network of, 24–­25; racism against, 29; repatriation through apartheid, 41; residence and land ownership restrictions on, 40; response to strikes by, 118–­19; rights of and hostility toward interests of, 33–­34; segregation of in Durban, 33–­34; social, economic, and political role of, 11–­12, 239n15; success of and anti-­ immigration rhetoric, 223–­24; violence between Africans and, 41–­42, 44; voting rights for, 40 Inkatha, 127–­28, 166, 167, 168, 186, 188–­89, 250n113 Institute for Black Research (IBR), 147, 152, 261n51 Institute for Industrial Education (IIE), 116–­19, 122–­23, 124, 126–­28, 256n78 internet, 216, 217, 274n102 interracial marriage, 41 Into the Heart of Negritude, 104 Isisibenzi, 113, 117 Islam. See Muslims/Islam Jassat, Essop, 158 Jews, 3–­4, 38 jihad, 21 Johannesburg: activist community in, 135; Adler Fielding Gallery exhibition submissions, 81–­83, 84, 199; art world in, 71, 81–­84, 250n119, 250n123; buildings in, 82; development and deconstruction of and industrial development around, 29, 133–­34, 258n1, 259n2; map of, xxiii; Market Photo Gallery show in, 154–­55, 262n72; Nasima’s early life in Fordsburg, 133–­35; Omar’s visits to see Dumile in, 89–­90, 93; segregation in, 82; segregationist regime in, 30; train trip to, 81–­83; weather conditions in, 81–­82 Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), 82, 250n119 Jonker, Ingrid, 177, 266n161 Joubert Park, 82, 137, 250n119 Jubilee Centre, 83–­84, 250n123 Kally, Ranjith, 140, 145 Kashe-­Katiya, Xolelwa, 221, 223 Kelly, Jill, 228–­29, 230, 231, 276n132

Keniston, Billy, 109, 128 Kgosana, Phillip, 59 Khanyile, Cyril, 200 Kirkwood, Mike, 153, 154, 227 Kliptown, 134 Kuzwayo, Judson, 130 KwaMashu, 13, 132, 179, 180, 250n113 KwaZulu Bantustan, xxiii, 34, 110, 115, 126–­28, 212 Lakhi, Cassim, 55, 71, 72, 73 Lamontville, 33, 132, 168, 173, 197, 264n115 Lange, Dorothea, 81, 250n114 Lawson, Lesley, 108, 109, 110, 155, 177, 181, 182, 255n53, 262n85 Ledochowski, Chris, 173, 197, 203–­4, 269n249, 275n120 Legae, Ezrom, 83, 84, 250n123 Legassick, Martin, 222 Leica cameras, 146, 260n42 Lenasia, 134, 259n4 Letter to Farzanah (Badsha), 147–­53, 148, 149, 150, 151, 154, 161, 162, 195, 261n51, 261n60, 275n120 life history industry, 8 London: Dumile’s show and life in, 92, 97, 199–­200; Ismail Coovadia in, 82, 135–­36, 137, 199; Nasima in, 135–­37, 199; Omar’s flight and visit to, 198, 201 Lorax, The (Seuss), 261n64 Luthuli, Nokukhanya, 106, 158, 172, 219, 264n131 Lynch, Liam, 216, 217, 221, 274n102 Mabuse, Sipho “Hotstix,” 218 Madondo, George, 41 Magnum Photographic Agency, 145, 260n42 Magubane, Peter, 144, 145, 260n37 Magwaza, Phakade “Pax,” 174, 185, 192, 195, 197, 231, 234–­35 Maharaj, Mac, 201, 241n52 Malan, D. F., 40–­41, 67 Malenge, Nisa, 185, 269n250 Mandela, Nelson, 194, 195, 198, 203, 206, 207, 207, 211, 212, 214, 219, 241n52, 266n161, 269n232 Maphumulo, Mulelani, 150 Maphumulo, Shadrack, 130, 140, 151, 186, 188 Maphumulo, Thandeka, 150 Maqhubela, Louis, 199, 200 Marie, Bobby, 156 Marks, Shula, 19 Martin, Marilyn, 210 martyrdom, 196 Masekela, Barbara, 200, 205, 206 Masekela, Hugh, 200 Matabela, Desmond, 114 Matshoba, Mtutuzeli, 153, 154 Matthews, James, 153 Mauritius, xxi, 24, 25 Mayet, Ike, 156 Mayet, Rafiq “Rafs,” 156, 170, 243n26, 262n78

3 01

Index

Index 3 02

Mbeki, Govan, 200 Mbeki, Moeletsi, 200, 201 Mbeki, Thabo, 201, 206, 216, 221, 222, 223, 228 Mbuli, Mafika, 78–­79, 81, 93, 102, 231, 250n106, 250n113 Mbuli, Mzwakhe, 192, 196, 205, 268n219 Mbutho, 123–­25, 220 McGill University, 228, 231 Mchunu, Mxolisi, 19–­20 McKenzie, Peter, 155–­56, 173, 185, 193, 262n78 medical resources and clinics, 34, 79, 108, 172, 188 medical schools and students, 104, 108, 137–­38, 172, 190–­91 Meer, Farouk, 106 Meer, Fatima, 69, 110, 118, 140, 147, 151, 188 Meer, Shamin, 118, 156, 264n134 memory: childhood of Omar, 51–­53, 53, 64; dead body during Cato Manor march, 60; earliest memory of Omar, xiv, xv, 42, 51; scholarship on, xiv; shaping future through past experience and, xv; traumatic events and, 51, 245n68 Metal and Allied Workers Union, 122, 130, 175 Minamata (Smith), 146 mission stations and schools, 34, 49, 159 Mkhize, Florence, 173, 174 Mkhize, Zweli, 172 Mnyele, Thami, 192, 262n87 Mohamedy’s, 8, 55, 62 Mole/Mol’, 68, 102, 105, 110, 111, 247n50 Monk, Billy, 197 Moodley, Strini, 102–­3, 106, 110, 116 Morphet, Tony, 110–­11 mosques, xxii, 30, 221 Motala, Anoo, 77–­78, 89, 249n99 Motala, Enver, 69 mother and children drawings, 14, 16–­19, 17, 18, 64, 65, 74–­77, 75, 77, 86, 93, 99, 185, 249nn88–­90, 252n142 Mthethwa, Alpheus, 122, 130, 140, 141, 222 Muharram, 32 multiracialism, 50 Muriel at Metropolitan (Tladi), 153 Muslims/Islam: artistic traditions, 57, 70, 74; background of Omar and his family, 21; burial traditions, 144; ideological foundations, 21; Orient Islamic School and Islamic education, 55–­58; religious practices, 32–­33; ritual calendar, 32–­33; Surti Sunnis, 27, 30, 32–­33, 134; unity of believers, 21 Mutloatse, Mothobi, 152 Mvusi, Nisa, 49 Mvusi, Selby, 48–­50, 84, 91 Mxenge, Griffiths, 186 Mxenge, Victoria, 186, 188 Naicker, Monty, 38, 39–­40 Naidoo, Indress, 140

Naidoo, Jay, 265n136 Naidoo, Phyllis, 69, 102, 105, 130–­31, 140, 143, 247n54, 276n146 Nala, Junerose, 114, 125 Namibia, 196 Natal: British settlers claims to, 24, 25; colony status of, 26; concern about Indian immigrants in, 24; indentured workers in, 25; Ismail and Mohammed’s move to, 24–­25; map of, xxiii; prominent families in, 27, 243n12; racism against Africans in, 28; settler government and restrictions on Indians in, 27–­29; smuggling activists out of, 130; violence in photographs of, 185–­86 Natal Indian Congress (NIC): activism and advocacy for community by, 34, 38; attitude toward African population, 28; banning of leaders and dormancy of, 106; focus of work and politics of, 27–­29, 39–­40, 106–­8, 115; founding of, 27–­28; membership of, 27–­28, 39, 68, 102–­3, 106, 134; mentor relationships with activists in, 60, 68–­69; organization of resistance to SAIC elections by, 157–­58, 172, 264n131; Phoenix Settlement work of, 108; relaunch of, 106, 113; response to violence by, 42, 44 Natal Organization of Women (NOW), 172–­73, 186, 264n134 Natal Society of Arts (NSA), xxii, 46, 71, 73, 78, 95 National Arts Festival, Grahamstown, 204, 206, 207, 210, 214 National Interim Cultural Coordinating Committee (NICCC), 206–­8, 209, 212 National Party, 34, 38, 40–­41, 44, 46–­48, 67, 144, 201, 211 National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), 104, 109, 112–­13 National Union of Textile Workers (NUTW), 125, 127 “natives,” 29–­30. See also Africans Natives Land Act, 159 Ndebele, Njabulo, 183 Ndimande, Caiphias, 165 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 38, 40, 44 Nettleton, Anitra, 251n141 Newbury, Darren, 13–­14, 174 New York: Cordoned Heart tour in, 179–­82; Dumile’s move to and life in, 200–­201; Omar’s visit with Dumile in, 201–­3, 202, 204 Ngatane, Ephraim, 82 Ngcobo, Celestine, 172 Ngubane, Ben, 212 Nkonyane (Induna in Inanda), 165, 166, 167 Non-­European Unity Movement, 66 nonracialism, 4, 21, 47–­48, 51, 106–­7, 184–­85 Nørgaard, Mads, 230 Nunn, Cedric, 156, 170, 185, 193, 197, 198, 264n124, 265n136, 274n115 Nupen, Michael, 109

Nxasana, Harold, 116, 118, 122–­23, 130, 222 Nyembe, Dorothy, 173, 186 Nzima, Sam, 144–­45 O’Brien, Anthony, 206 office cleaner, 181–­82, 182 O’Malley, Padraig, 241n52 Omar, Dullah, 195, 196 One Hundred Years of the ANC, 275n119 On the Mines (Goldblatt), 145 oral history, xv, 51 Order of Ikhamanga in Silver, 218, 272n82 organic intellectualism, 10, 238n11 Orient Club, 27 Orient Institute, xxii, 71 Orient Islamic School, 55–­58, 58, 70 Orlando, 131–­32 Osman, Princess, 120, 122, 220 Overport: activists and writers at Omar and Nasima’s home in, 170, 172; Omar and Nasima’s home in, 140, 151, 156, 162, 173; photographs taken in, 150, 151, 151; violence on way to home in, 186 Ozynski, Joyce, 155 Paarl, xxiii Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), 50, 58–­59, 66, 71 Pandor, Naledi, 223 “passenger Indians,” 24–­26, 29–­30, 36 passport applications, 78, 89, 157, 180, 183, 192, 198, 201, 249n97 pass regulations, 49, 84, 88, 101, 112 past, interest of Omar in, 218–­19 Paton, Alan, 230 Peking Review, 50 “people’s culture,” 195 people’s history workshops and project, 219, 226, 227, 230, 234 Peress, Gilles, 217 Performing Arts Council, 206, 207, 210, 211 Phoenix Settlement: car driving toward Omar and Turner at, 111, 255n53; consciousness raising at, 111; establishment of by Gandhi, 28–­29, 159; Gandhi family involvement at, 69, 106, 108; location of, xxiii, 108, 159; Manilal’s responsibilities at, 38, 106, 254n27; medical clinic at, 108, 172, 188; NIC meetings at, 106; NIC work at, 108; photographs taken at, 168, 169, 170; Special Branch surveillance of and safety at, 111; violence at and burning of, 188, 189; work camps at, 108, 110–­12, 155, 186, 255n53 Phoenix Township, 105, 159–­60, 186, 188, 264n134 photography: civil contract of photography, 146; documentary photography as art about reality, 152, 154–­55, 275n120; imprisonment of photographers, 192, 268n220; influence and prominence of Omar, 183–­86; Moosa, 37–­38, 43, 53, 62, 71, 86, 86–­88, 87, 88, 139–­40, 146, 259n22;

photojournalists, 145; political commentary and promotion of action, 144–­46, 157, 262n85, 262n87 photography of Omar: available light, literal and metaphorical use of, 20–­21, 241n44; camera and darkroom equipment from Amra, 140, 146; capture of the wholeness of people, 20–­21, 183; darkroom over theater and practice with light, 140, 147; documenting Chrome Chemical with borrowed camera, 132, 140, 146; early photographs and portraits, 140–­41, 141, 142, 143; financial resources because of Nasima’s work, 172, 224, 264n124; focus of work and relationships with other photographers, 144–­47, 154–­57, 183–­86; freelance work, 146–­47, 154, 189, 192–­94; Grey Street photos, 51, 52; importance of Omar’s archive, 12–­ 14, 13, 239n23; interior photographs and using a light meter, 162–­63, 163, 164; one-­person show, 152; political-­action promotion, 146, 157; reputation, 225; resumption of photography after elections, 215; violence depicted in archives, 185–­86 Picasso, 19, 182 Pietermaritzburg: conditions in textile mills in, 10; driving by and learning to drive, 101–­2; organizing textile workers in, 100–­102, 119–­23; textile mills in and ownership of mills, 114, 119 Pieterson, Hector, 144–­45 Pinetown: Chrome Chemicals in, xxiii, 126–­27, 128, 140; strikes in, 119; textile mills in and ownership of mills, 114, 119; union membership in factories around, 123 Pissarra, Mario, 192, 210, 211, 212 Platform programs, 111, 119 poetry/poems: autobiographical poem, 69–­70; Black Mother poem, 97, 253n173; friendships with poets, 7, 60, 78–­81, 80, 97, 250n113; mining disaster poem, 250n106; Orient school class, 58; poems of friends as models, 79, 81; striking workers poem, 115; therapy for trauma, 97; writing by Omar, 146 political consciousness, xiii, 61, 111, 117 political resistance: artmaking and, xiv, 237n4; sensitivity and responsiveness to suffering and, 21–­22, 241n52 politics: archives of Omar and insights on, 11–­14, 238–­39nn14–­15; art, activism, and political vocation, 60–­61, 99, 102; art’s relationship with, 97, 118, 212, 251n141, 253n178; changes in South Africa, 38–­41; commitment of Omar, 21–­22, 183, 195; culture as, 154, 192, 268nn219–­220; Ebrahim’s interest in, 37–­38, 40; intercolonial politics, 28; Moosa’s interests in, 37; Nasima’s interest in, 136; Omar’s early interest in, 60–­61; photographs as commentary and to promote action on, 144–­46, 157, 262n85, 262n87; platform to launch career in electoral politics, 268n224; as therapy for trauma, 20, 152, 183, 241n43 Polly Street Art Centre, 250n123

303

Index

Index 304

Ponnen, George, 39 Population Registration Act, 46 Portelli, Alessandro, xv Portrait of Omar Badsha (Feni), 14, 15 poverty: Cato Manor living conditions, 58; Inanda living conditions, 108, 112; South Africa economy and wages for workers, 112–­13; South African Indians, 36 precarity, 11–­12 Preparing Ourselves for Freedom (Sachs), 205–­6 Pretoria: Badsha home in, 214–­15; map of, xxiii; move to and life of Omar, Nasima, and Leila in, 213–­15, 216; power of government in, 212; social and music scene in, 216; women’s march on, 48, 172–­73, 186 Prilla Mills, xxiii, 101, 119–­23, 124, 220 protests and marches: Cato Manor march, 58–­60, 59, 61; Omar with protesters, 194; “passive resistance” protest against “Ghetto Act,” 40; women’s marches, 8, 48, 172–­73, 186 Quality Products and Natal Oil and Soap Industries, xxiii, 123–­25, 131 Queen Street, garment worker on, 235 Queen Street darkroom, 140, 146, 154, 156, 157 race and racism/racialism: Africans as focus of, 28, 29; Black on White satire on, 103; Indians as focus of, 29; PAC views and future of Indians and whites in South Africa, 50 racial pogroms, xiv, xv, 7, 41–­42, 44, 51 Rajgopaul, Jeeva, 156, 174, 179–­80, 226–­27, 231 Ramaphosa, Cyril, 203–­4, 206 Ramgobin, Mewa, 69, 106, 107, 108, 110, 140 Ramphele, Mamphela, 177 Rassool, Ciraj, 219 Rattan, Laljeeth, 165–­66, 166, 186 Ravan Press, 153, 165, 261n65 Released Areas, 159 Revolution (record shop and café), 104, 119 revolution: artists’ role in, 93; fantasy of, 12; history of, 239n20; Omar’s vision of, 210 revolutionary art, 271n41 revolutionary culture, 210, 271n41 revolutionary morality, 261n51 Rise and Fall of Apartheid exhibition, 274n115 Rolling Stones show, 215 Rubicon speech, 189 Ruskin College, 116, 126–­27 Sachs, Albie, 205–­6, 210 Salisbury Island (University College for Indian South Africans), xxiii, 55, 66, 68, 72, 73, 74, 77, 102–­3, 104, 105, 134. See also University College Sartor, Margaret, 178–­79, 269n250 Sartre, Jean Paul, 109, 117 Saunders, Stuart, 180, 209

Schlemmer, Laurie, 109–­10, 255n43 scholarship, xiv, xv Schwegmann, Wendy, 177–­78, 178 sculpture, 14, 15, 82–­84, 85, 86, 89 Seedat, Ebrahim “Baba,” 57, 68, 69, 89 Seedtimes, 225 segregation: Asian population expansion and, 29–­ 30; Indian and African experiences in Durban, 33–­34; university segregation, 66. See also apartheid / separate development self-­portraits, 5, 121 Serote, Wally, 82, 197, 200, 201, 210–­11, 212, 227, 269n250 Sharpeville massacre, 8, 58–­60, 135 Shembe, Isaiah, 159 sickly art, 84 Simon’s Town project, 234–­35 Sisulu, Albertina, 158, 172, 264n131 Sisulu, Walter, 172, 204 Skosana, Doris, 130, 140 Skype sessions between Omar and American students, 228–­30 Slezkine, Yuri, 11, 239n15 Slovo, Joe, 206 Smith, W. Eugene, 146 Smuts, Jan, 40 Sobukwe, Robert, 50 social historians, 165, 263n110 Social Identities South Africa (SAHO), 221 socialism, 21 Solberg, Nils, 45, 45, 46 Sophiatown, 133–­34, 259n2 Soske, Jon, 11, 38, 41, 228, 231, 239n15, 275n120, 276n146 South Africa: cultural boycott in, 154; diversity of post-­apartheid, 222–­24; economy of and wages for workers in, 112–­13, 115; government study of and response to violence, 44; history of and Omar’s history, 7–­8, 10, 238n7; honor for achievements in sports, culture, and media, 218, 272n82; immigration to and anti-­immigration rhetoric in, 223–­24, 274n109; map of, xxiii; negotiations between British and Boers for establishment of, 30; rightful natives of, 11; segregationist regimes in, 29–­30, 40–­41; struggle over history in, xiv, 222–­23; unbanning liberation movement in, 203–­4; white immigrants to, 29–­30. See also apartheid / separate development South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), 112–­13, 115, 125–­27, 222 South African Defence Force (SADF), 188, 192 South African Democracy Education Trust (SADET), 222–­23, 253n4 South African History Online (SAHO): awards and honors related to, 218, 272–­73nn82–­83; biographies published by, 219–­20, 227–­28, 238n9, 276n132; collaboration with government by,

222–­23, 274n102; commitment to, 226; computers and scanning documents for, 221; financial support for, 217–­18, 222–­23, 224, 226–­27, 230–­31, 234, 274n102; founding of and CEO role, xiv, 8, 217–­18; Google’s interest in, 234; importance of work of, 8, 217–­18, 226, 234, 275n122, 275nn119–­120; insights about in Omar’s archive, 12; interest of Omar in the past, 218–­19; online content and functionality of, 219–­21, 227–­28, 230, 273n87, 273nn89–­90, 273n92, 275n122, 275n126; paperwork related to, 10; publication of books by, 220–­22, 226, 275n119; Simon’s Town project support from, 235 South African Indian Council (SAIC), 104–­5, 106, 157–­58, 172 South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), 71, 102 South African Labour Bulletin, 118, 148 South African Musicians’ Alliance, 205 South African National Gallery, 71, 206, 207, 209, 214, 217, 225, 225 South African Natives National Congress (SANNC), 29 South African Students’ Organization (SASO), 104, 105, 106, 143 South Africa: The Cordoned Heart, 177–­83, 178, 180, 182, 189, 266n161, 266n168, 267n180 Southern African Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU), 176, 190, 209 Southern Methodist University, 228–­29 Southlight, 198 Soweto, xxiii, 90–­91, 92, 134, 181 Soweto student protests/uprising, 131–­32, 144–­45, 147, 155, 168, 169, 260n37 Speak, 264n134 Special Branch, 6, 89, 92, 103, 105, 110, 111, 122, 125, 130, 138, 152, 238n7 Spector, Brooks, 207–­8, 211 Staffrider, 153–­54, 174, 221, 227, 264n134 Staple Diet (jazz/funk group), 156, 262n78 Stellenbosch University honorary doctorate, 218, 273n83 stevedore strike, 113 Stopforth, Paul, 89, 92, 111, 253n178 Strand, Paul, 152 strategic ethnicity, 106, 115 “struggle, the”: collaboration and building base for, 106–­7; comfort, satisfaction, and peace from, xv; commitment to and persistence of Omar in, 8, 21–­22, 173, 185, 196, 198, 232, 238n7; cost of, 6–­7; depiction of, 8; ideological foundations of, 21; as jihad, 21; meaning of, xv; myth and collective delusion of, 12; telling history of, 222–­23; understanding of, 8 Stryker, Ray, 203 student demonstrations, 131–­32 Surti Sunnis, 27, 30, 32–­33, 134 Suttner, Raymond, 69, 232, 241n43, 261n51

Swaziland, 92, 130 Tabata, I. B., 66–­67, 70 Tadkeshwar, xxi, 23–­24, 25, 27, 44, 215 Tessman, Lisa, 12, 21–­22 textile mills: conditions in, 10, 119–­20, 123; literature on rights of union members, distributing on buses to mills, 101–­2, 119, 120; loss of jobs for interest or membership in union, 101, 119–­20; organizing African workers in, 119–­23; organizing workers in, 100–­102, 119–­23; strikes for wage increases, 116; trade union representation for, 113–­15; transportation of workers to, 101–­2, 119; union membership in, 119 The Arts Society (TAS), 78–­79, 92–­93, 102, 103, 251n141 Theatre Council on Natal (TECON), 103–­4, 110, 111, 118–­19, 122, 143 Thobejane, Senti, 181, 182–­83, 267n180 Three Penny Game, The (Badsha), 71–­73, 72, 248n74 timeline, xxiv–­xxv Timol, Sherene (Seedat), 89 Tiro, Ongkoptse Abram, 105 Tlali, Miriam, 153, 154 Tonkin, Elizabeth, xv township art, 72, 83–­84 townships: conditions in government townships, 112; Omar’s drives to townships, 102; segregated under apartheid, 4, 41, 99, 159–­60 Trade Union Advisory Coordinating Committee (TUACC), 12, 122, 124–­26, 127–­28, 130–­31, 184, 222, 265n136 Trade Union Council of South Africa, 113, 114–­15 trade unions and labor movement: careers of organizers, 121, 257n102; collective bargaining rights of Indian workers, 100–­101; combis use by Omar, 124–­25, 128, 130–­31; communication through unions as way to end apartheid, 118; communist interests, 39; IIE project for leadership, 116–­19, 122–­23, 124, 126–­28; importance of movement’s history, 220; Indian population’s response to strikes, 118–­19; injuries to workers, 20; involvement and organizing work of Omar, 8, 99, 113, 119–­28, 123, 130–­31, 137, 138, 268n217; legal action taken by unions, 120; legality of workers organizing, 113; literature on rights of union members, distributing on buses to mills, 101–­2, 119, 120; logos for unions, 122; membership in unions, 127; organizing African workers, 113, 114–­15; organizing work of Ponnen, 39; photographs of trade union rallies, 265n136; power of union organizers, 119–­21; rights of African workers, 100, 122–­23; Special Branch surveillance of organizers, 122, 125; strikes as political consciousness, 117; strikes for wage increases, 112–­18, 116, 117, 256n71; union organizer work as therapy for trauma, 20, 102. See also textile mills

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Index

Index 306

Trans-­Natal Group exhibition, 89, 252n148 Transnet, 217–­18 Transvaal: colony status of, 26; Ebrahim’s move to, 35; Sharpeville massacre in, 8, 58–­60, 135 Transvaal Indian Congress, 29, 34, 39–­40, 135 trauma: and anger and self-­awareness of Omar, 21–­ 22, 64, 183–­86, 197, 224–­25, 241n52; art as therapy for, 97; politics as therapy for, 20, 152, 183, 241n43; psycho-­social approach to understanding, 19–­20; pursuit of dignity over, 20, 151–­52 Trotsky, Leon, 66, 67, 69, 74, 93, 111, 271n41 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 19, 228, 234 Tshabalala, Thomas, 186, 189 Tsing, Anna, 11–­12 Turner, Rick: background and political philosophies of, 108–­9, 231, 254n40; banning of, 116, 153, 256n78; death and burial of, 144, 154; Eye of the Needle, 109, 153, 254n39; focus of work of, 20; IIE project of, 116–­18, 128, 256n78; labor organizing work of, 112–­13; marriage to Fisher, 110; mentoring and tutoring role of, 109; NUSAS advisory role of, 109; organizing work of, 109; poverty as focus of work of, 111–­13; relationship with Omar, 20, 108; work camps at Phoenix, 108, 110–­12, 186 Turner, Tina, 154 Turner-­Stylianou, Fozia, 254n39. See also Fisher, Foszia Tutu, Desmond, 170, 219 Umlazi, 128, 132 uncertainties and ambiguity, 11–­12 underground: ANC remnants as part of, 60; challenges in researching, 238n7; end of, 212; entrance to, 170; message-­carrying work and participation in, 8, 20, 60, 68, 69, 82, 102, 105, 110, 111, 140, 238n7, 247n50; moral and psychological implications of work in, 241n43; union resources used to support, 128, 130–­31 Under the Umdoni Tree exhibition, 225 United Democratic Front (UDF), 158–­59, 166, 168, 170, 186, 188, 192, 195 United Nations (UN), 40, 147 United Nations (UN) International Year of the Child, 147 United States (US): apartheid opposition by, 179, 266n168; congressional briefing by Omar in, 203; Omar’s trip to, 201–­4 Unity Movement, 66 University College, 55, 104, 105, 247n36. See also Salisbury Island University of Cape Town (UCT), 173, 175–­77, 190–­ 96, 208–­9, 214, 223, 269n250 University of Natal, xxiii, 66, 247n36 University of Western Cape (UWC), 213–­15, 217, 223

university segregation, 66 Vahed, Goolam, 30, 57, 243n11, 259n7 Van Kessel, Ineke, 158, 262n87 Van Wyk, Chris, 227 Verwoerd, Hendrik, 67, 89 Victoria Street, 41, 112, 221 Victoria Street Bridge, xxii, 77, 89, 154 Vladislavic, Ivan, 241n44 Waetjen, Thembisa, 57 Webster, Eddie, 118 Weinberg, Paul, 155, 156, 158, 166, 168, 170, 179–­80, 183, 193–­94, 197, 268n229, 269n247 Wells, Nan, 201, 203 West Street Mosque, xxii, 30 West Street neighborhood, 26 Westville, xxiii, 105–­6 Willoughby-­Herard, Tiffany, 13 Wills Road, 3–­4, 60, 102–­3, 131, 141, 154 Wilson, Francis, 175–­76, 177, 179–­80, 181, 190, 209 Winchell, Theresa, 273n90 With Our Own Hands, 274n102 Wolpe, Harold, 213 women’s marches, 8, 48, 172–­73, 186 woodcuts, 71–­72, 72, 74, 78 Woodstock, 224, 226 Worden, Nigel, 209 workerism, 125 World War II, 35–­36, 39–­40 writings and plays: book review, 148, 261n50; Douglas Lane, writing about in prison, 195–­96; friendships with writers and playwrights, 7, 60, 97; historical writing and production of history, 229–­30; ideas for projects, 217; screenplay ideas of Omar, 146; script about activist Pascal and his family, 102, 115; theater merger with activism, 102–­4 Wynberg, 190, 192, 194–­95, 196 Xuma, A. B., 39, 40, 42 Younge, Gavin, 253n178 Zegeye, Abebe, 220–­21, 231 Zulu: Isisibenzi newsletter for, 113, 117; isiZulu language knowledge of Indians, 34; peace treaty with and land for settlers in Natal, 25; relationship building with, 51; strikes for wage increases by, 115–­16; tensions with Indians over land, 28; trade union federation founding in, 189 Zuma, Jacob, 130, 206, 223–­24, 228, 229, 230, 267n180, 269n249