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Abstract
In 1935 the Durban Town Council announced a policy that would require all ‘Native women’ to apply for permission to come to town as part of a system of compulsory registration, which also required proof of legitimate residency for those African women who already lived within municipal boundaries. This article considers how organised African women from the local kholwa (mission-educated Christian) elite asserted themselves as participants in the public sphere of local government. Tensions about the new plans to enforce a system of passes for African women came to a head in 1937 when police conducted raids on homes in the city. In their response, African women's welfare societies organised as part of Daughters of Africa pushed the boundaries of the politics of petitioning through vocal and public protest. I consider the gendered politics of urban segregation through the prism of official, municipal documentation; through reportage in the public forum that constituted Ilanga lase Natal – a newspaper still dominated by men who often expressed ambivalence about ‘their’ women's presence in town – and also through life history interviews conducted many years later with a key organiser of the protests, Bertha Mkhize.
Acknowledgements
I thank Mwelela Cele for his extensive assistance with translations. Our online translation sessions were a highlight during this period of working at home in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper has also been enriched by his expert knowledge of the early twentieth-century communities of amakholwa in Natal.
Author Biography
MARIJKE DU TOIT is teaching and learning specialist for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of the Western Cape. Her earliest research and publications are focused on histories of gender, nationalism and state social welfare in early twentieth-century South Africa. Her interest in photography and urban histories of segregation and apartheid resulted in several exhibitions and a co-authored book, Breathing Spaces: Environmental Portraits of South Durban (2016). Her current research includes a focus on African print cultures and the materialities of paper archives.
Notes
1 Here and elsewhere in this paper I have reproduced the early twentieth-century isiZulu orthography, exactly as used in Ilanga lase Natal. The same words were sometimes spelled differently by various writers, particularly in letters to the editor. Typographical errors have been left as in the original. Please note that the spelling of some surnames also varied and were standardised at a later date, such as Luthuli and Mkhize (often spelled Lutuli and Mkize in the 1930s).
2 ‘Isifazane Sabantu Namadolopa’, Ilanga lase Natal, 11 January 1935.
3 Ibid., Luthuli's readers would have recognised the values articulated here as those associated with the community of ‘amakholwa’ (believers) as mission-educated black, Zulu-speaking Christians called themselves.
4 For detailed discussion of ‘the gender dimensions of the public forum that was constituted […] in the bilingual pages of Ilanga during the 1930s’, see M. du Toit and P. Nzuza, ‘“Isifazane Sakiti Emadolobheni” (Our Women in the Towns): The Politics of Gender in Ilanga lase Natal, 1933–1938’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History, 33, 1 (2019): 623–86.
5 T.V. McClendon, ‘Tradition and Domestic Struggle in the Courtroom: Customary Law and the Control of Women in Segregation-Era Natal’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 28, 3 (1995): 527–61. See also J. Hickel and M. Healy-Clancy, eds, Ekhaya: The Politics of Home in KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2014); N. Essop Sheik, 'African Marriage Regulation and the Remaking of Gendered Authority in Colonial Natal, 1843–1875’, African Studies Review, 57, 2 (2014): 73–92.
6 Natal Native Commissioner Harry Lugg, as quoted in A. Costa, ‘Custom and Common Sense: The Zulu Royal Family Succession Dispute of the 1940s’, African Studies, 56, 1 (1997): 24. Lugg was comparing Edward Mshiyeni to his predecessor Solomon ka Dinuzulu, who had 47 wives. Elevated to ‘Acting Paramount Chief’ in 1939, he was embroiled in a protracted succession dispute in the early 1940s. Costa argues that Mshiyeni’s unpopularity meant that his preferred candidate had little chance of success.
7 McClendon, ‘Tradition and Domestic Struggle in the Courtroom’, 540.
8 K. Jochelson, The Colour of Disease: Syphilis and Racism in South Africa, 1850–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 128–34; P. Maylam, ‘The Local Evolution of Urban Apartheid: Influx Control and Segregation in Durban, c. 1900–1951’, History Workshop, University of the Witwatersrand (1990), 7.
9 Ibid. See also S. Sparks, ‘“Playing at Public Health”, the Search for Control in South Durban 1860–1932’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History, 20, 1 (2002): 1–28 and D. Scott, ‘Creative Destruction: Early Modernist Planning in the South Durban Industrial Zone’, Journal of Southern African Studies 29, 1 (2003): 235–59.
10 E.E. Poodhun, ‘A Long Tradition of Service – the Durban City Police’, The Police Journal: Theory, Practice and Principles, 60, 2 (1987): 175–6; ‘The End of Durban City Police’, Rand Daily Mail, 1 May 1936.
11 P. Maylam, ‘Introduction: The Struggle for Space in Twentieth Century Durban’ in P. Maylam and I. Edwards, eds, The People’s City: African Life in Twentieth Century Durban (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1996), 12.
12 J.C. Wells, ‘Why Women Rebel: A Comparative Study of South African Women’s Resistance in Bloemfontein (1913) and Johannesburg (1958), Journal of Southern African Studies, 10, 1 (1983): 55–70.
13 M. Healy-Clancy, ‘The Daughters of Africa and Transatlantic Racial Kinship: Cecilia Lilian Tshabalala and the Women’s Club Movement, 1912–1943’, Amerikastudien/American Studies, 59, 4 (2014): 481–99.
14 For the roots of ‘petition culture’ in colonial Natal, see H. Mokoena, 'Vigilance: Petitions, Politics and the African Christian Converts of the Nineteenth Century’, in S. Comyn and P. Fermanis, eds, Wordling the South: Nineteenth Century Literary Culture and Southern Settler Colonies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), 327–45.
15 Durban Archives Repository (hereafter TBD), Town Clerk’s Correspondence (hereafter 3DBN), File 4/1/3/1625, Proposed Compulsory Registration for Native Women, January 1926 to May 1946.
16 Two interviews were conducted with Bertha Mkhize as part of the University of Natal Oral History Project. On 14 August 1980 the interviewers were A. Manson and D. Collins, and on 27 August J. Wells and H. Hughes interviewed her. See also A. Burton, ‘Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories’, in A. Burton, ed., Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
17 TBD, 3DBN, 4/1/3/1625, Proposed Compulsory Registration for Native Women, ‘Extract from the Minutes of Native Administration Committee’, 24 June 1936; ‘Draft Amendments: Native Registration Regulations’, 24 June 1936.
18 Ibid., ‘Draft Amendments, Native Registration Regulations’, 26 June 1936.
19 C. Barlen Dhlamini, ‘Yisipi Isigaba Esifanelo Amalungelo (franchise) Ezigabeni Zabantu Ezitatu?’, Ilanga lase Natal, 21 February 1913. The same correspondent also wrote ‘KumaNatal Native Exempted’, Ilanga lase Natal, 4 June 1920.
20 ‘Isifazana sabantu namadolopa’, Ilanga lase Natal, 11 January 1935. The writer used the metaphor of women who were like a flock without a shepherd: ‘isifazana sakubo si ngumhlambi ka Z’alusile’. See also Du Toit and Nzuza, ‘Isifazane Sakiti Emadolobheni’, in particular Herbert Vilakazi’s discussion of ‘our educated women’ and letters to the newspaper discussed as ‘debating and speaking for women’, 67–74.
21 TBD, 3DBN, 1/2/12/1/2, Native Advisory Board Minutes, 13 March 1935.
22 Ibid., 10 April 1935. The Chairman of the NAB presented Rev. Mtimkulu’s request for discussion at this meeting. For Mtimkulu’s complaint about the formation of the Bantu Child Welfare Society, see M. du Toit, ‘Anginayo ngisho indibilishi!’ (I don't have a penny!): The gender politics of ‘Native Welfare’ in Durban, 1930–1939, South African Historical Journal, 66(02) (2014): 291–319 in Durban’, 307–8.
23 See Jochelson, Colour of Disease, 117–31 for her account of intermittent discussions in the Union NAD and also the Durban municipality about whether to implement such examinations.
24 TBD, 3DBN, 4/1/3/1625, ‘Proposed Compulsory Registration for Native Women’, letter from the Town Clerk to the Chief Constable and the Manager, Native Administration Department, Durban, 23 March 1936.
25 Ibid., letter from Clement H. Scott to The Town Clerk, Durban, 9 April 1936.
26 Ibid. C.H. Stott was a prominent architect and land surveyor who first practised in Pietermaritzburg and later in Durban. Land that he owned in Botha’s Hill later became the Valley Trust – his son was Dr Halley Harwin Stott. https://www.artefacts.co.za/main/Buildings/archframes.php?archid=1639, accessed 1 December 2021.
27 J. Hyslop, ‘The Politics of Disembarkation: Empire, Shipping and the Port of Durban, 1897–1947’, International Labor and Working Class History, 93 (2018): 12. Hyslop writes that ‘In 1920, in response to the dismissal of the popular Assistant Town Clerk, H.H. Kemp, municipal employees evoked the rhetoric of the “Soviet”, and seized the council offices – albeit only for a day’.
28 TBD, 3DBN, 4/1/3/1625, ‘Proposed Compulsory Registration for Native Women’, Extract from Native Advisory Board Meeting, 15 April 1936.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., extract from the minutes of the Durban City Council, 11 June 1936.
31 Ibid., copy of letter for the information of The Manager, Native Administration Department. The letter was from the Town Clerk to the City Solicitors, 22 April 1936.
32 Ibid., H.H. Kemp to The Town Clerk, handwritten letter, 12 June 1936.
33 Ibid., extract from the minutes of the Native Administration Committee, 13 June 1936.
34 Fluent in isiZulu, Fred Rodseth was the son of missionary P.A. Rodseth of the Lutheran Norwegian Mission Society. He started his career in Natal, where he was soon appointed Inspector of Native Reserves for southern Zululand. F. Rodseth, Ndabazabantu – the Life of a Native Affairs Administrator (Johannesburg: Volda, 1984), 43–4.
35 Du Toit, ‘Gender Politics of Native Welfare in Durban’, 308.
36 TBD, 3DBN, 4/1/3/1625, ‘Proposed Compulsory Registration for Native Women’, Copy of telegram from Town Clerk to Chief Native Commissioner, Pietermaritzburg, 23 June 1936; letter from Town Clerk to Native Commissioner, Durban, 23 June 1936.
37 Ibid., extract, minutes of NAC meeting, 24 June 1936.
38 Ibid.
39 ‘Umthetho Omusha Wesifazana sabantu eThekwini’, Ilanga lase Natal, 15 March 1935. The newspaper typically had two editorials, one in isiZulu and one in English. See Du Toit and Nzuza, ‘Isifazane Sakiti Emadolobheni’ for discussion of how this newspaper functioned as an ‘ibandla’ (public forum) and a ‘kholwa community of discourse’ within the larger context of African print cultures (64–5).
40 L. Gunner and E. Gunner, Radio Soundings: South Africa and the Black Modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 17; V. Erlmann, African Stars: Studies in Black South African Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 122–7. See also the recent arrangement of Caluza’s compositions by Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng, in T. Moeng and P. Miller, Reuben T. Caluza, the B-Side (SAMRO Music Archive, n.d.), 68–85. The lyrics included the words ‘iRikshaw lam […] Rikshaw Baas/O Rikshaw Nkosi/Rikshaw Miss’. Caluza was choirmaster at Ohlange for many years.
41 I was, however, only able to find reference to the song ‘Bayete’ in published research about Caluza’s music. ‘Bayete’ was composed by Caluza in praise of Prince Edward of Wales when he toured South Africa in 1925. It was also in 1925 that Nkosi Sikilel’ iAfrika was adopted as the ANC’s anthem. D. Coplan and B. Jules-Rossette, ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika and the Liberation of the Spirit of South Africa’, African Studies, 64, 2 (2005): 286.
42 ‘The Latest Example of Class Legislation’, Ilanga lase Natal, 15 March 1935.
43 Du Toit and Nzuza, ‘Isifazane Sakiti Emadolobheni’, 64. H. Hughes provides a few biographical details about A.C. Maseko in First President: A Life of John Dube, Founding President of the ANC (Auckland Park: Jacana, 2001), 295.
44 A.C. Maseko, ‘Yibona Buhle’, Ilanga lase Natal, 15 March 1935. See also the letter from E.G. Ngonyama, ‘Okhala Ngesifazana Sakithi’, which appeared in the same edition of Ilanga lase Natal and also decried the denigration of Zulu women in town.
45 ‘Durban Town Council and Native Women’, Ilanga lase Natal, 12 April 1935. See also Du Toit and Nzuza, ‘Isifazane Sakiti Emadolobheni’, 71, which quotes from the same editorial.
46 Ibid. Luthuli also mentioned a letter by John L. Dube which he referenced as having appeared in the Natal Mercury on 8 March 1935.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid.
49 ‘Natives in Urban Areas’, Ilanga lase Natal, 16 August 1935.
50 The public hearing that took place in Durban was for the Report upon the Question of Residence of Natives in Urban Areas and Certain Proposed Amendments of the Native Urban Areas Act, also referred to as the Young–Barrett report. See I. Evans, Bureaucracy and Race Administration in South Africa (Oakland: University of California Press, 1997), 317.
51 Du Toit, ‘Gender Politics of Native Welfare in Durban’, 308–9.
52 The Natal Mercury, 30 August 1935. Also quoted in Du Toit, ‘Gender Politics of Native Welfare in Durban’, 309.
53 As discussed above, municipal officials corresponded about the meeting on 23 June 1936.
54 'Umhlangano waBantu ethekwini. Wokukhuza Umhlolo Wamapasi kwabesifazana Uma Beza eThekwini’, Ilanga lase Natal, 11 July 1936.
55 Ibid.
56 H. Mokoena, ‘The Black House or How the Zulus Became Jews’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 44, 3 (2018). Mokoena, however, discusses an older usage of this phrase, notably by Magema Fuze but also more generally, as part of her exploration of how mission-educated Christian converts in late nineteenth-century Natal ‘defined themselves as a dispersed people’ and framed ‘their identity as refugees’, not least because their ‘privileges’ as colonial subjects depended on accepting their prescribed identities as ‘mfecane refugees’. It was ‘in this terrain that these literates not only constructed their versions of the Shakan past, but also discovered and debated their membership in “the black house” (“indlu emnyama”)’ (405–7).
57 Ilanga lase Natal, 11 July 1936.
58 Ibid.
59 Rand Daily Mail, ‘Riots Inquiry Witness says Free Beer Was Promised’, 26 June 1936; ‘End of Durban City Police. Men Given Month’s Notice’, 1 May 1936. According to a short history of the Borough Police, the SAP arrived in town after considerable controversy, with their own men and rations and having bought property in various suburbs after the Borough Police refused to cede police stations to them. Poodhun, ‘Long Tradition of Service’.
60 TBD, 3DBN, 4/1/3/1625, Proposed Compulsory Registration for Native Women, extract from NAC meeting, 14 September 1936.
61 Ibid., letter from A.P. Sibankulu, Secretary of the Natal Native Congress to the Town Clerk, 25 February 1937.
62 Ibid., letter from T.J. Chester to the Town Clerk, 4 March 1937.
63 Ibid., letter from Bertha Mkhize to the Town Clerk, 3 March 1937. T. She spelled her name as ‘Mkize’. The letter also provided the names of the deputation. The ‘Convenor’ was Rev. N.M. Nduli and ‘Mesdames’ were listed as ’N M Nduli, C Mtimkulu, Mbhele, Mpanza’. Rev. Mtimkulu, amongst others, was also included.
64 Ibid., letter from S.W. Shepstone to the Town Clerk, 9 March 1937.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid., Letter from T.J. Chester to the Town Clerk, 9 March 1937.
67 Ibid., letter from M.J. Mpanza to the Town Clerk, 9 March 1937.
68 Ibid., extract from minutes of the NAB, 10 March 1937.
69 ‘Amapasi Esifazana eThekwini’, Ilanga lase Natal, 13 March 1937. From its inception in 1903, the newspaper’s front page had been entirely devoted to advertisements. A change of format was initiated on 5 December 1936. As explained in the newspaper, this page was now ‘devoted to news items from various parts of the world’.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid. In Jochelson’s account, the fact that the police were demanding marriage certificates when they conducted raids signalled an effort to identify unmarried women who were ‘involved in informal relationships’ and therefore suspected of ‘being prostitutes and spreading VD’. Her archival reference, however, is the letter that Shepstone wrote to the Town Clerk on 9 March 1937 (see footnote 64) and which does not support this interpretation – instead, it described the extent of anger about the police raids and alerted the Town Clerk to a planned mass meeting of women. See Jochelson, Colour of Disease, 133.
73 ‘Imbhedle Yepasi Imini Nobusuku’, Ilanga lase Natal, 20 March 1937.
74 Ibid.; TBD, 3DBN, 4/1/3/1625, Proposed Compulsory Registration for Native Women, extract from the minutes of the NAC, 15 March 1937. Others were Rev. N.M.Nduli who was ‘Leader’ of the delegation, Rev. M.J. Mpanza of the Native Church Council, Rev. W.M. Mavundhla of the Bantu Ministers’ Association, Mrs A. Mbele, (BWS), Mr T. Gwala, Mrs K. Ndhlovu ‘and several other Natives’.
75 Ibid.
76 ‘Imbhedle Yepasi Imini Nobusuku’, Ilanga lase Natal, 20 March 1937.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid. The phrase ‘abe yizemtidi’ is presented as printed in the newspaper, but the more usual spelling would have been ‘yizemtiti’.
79 Ibid.
80 ‘Imbhedle Yepasi Imini Nobusuku’, Ilanga lase Natal, 20 March 1937.
81 TBD, 3DBN, 4/1/3/1625, Proposed Compulsory Registration for Native Women, extract from the minutes of the NAC, 15 March 1937.
82 TBD, 3DBN, 4/1/3/1625, Proposed Compulsory Registration for Native Women, ‘Pass Laws for Native Women: Mass Meeting at the Bantu Social Centre’. This document contained the resolutions from the women’s meeting and was accompanied by a letter from Bertha Mkhize to the Town Clerk, dated 18 March 1937.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid.
86 Killie Campbell Collections, Oral History Project, Interviews with Bertha Mkhize, 14 and 27 August 1980.
87 Ibid. Mkhize recalled the events of the day twice, in two interview sessions. The quotations have been taken from the two transcripts.
88 Du Toit, ‘Gender Politics of Native Welfare in Durban’, especially 292–3, 312.
89 Ibid., 293.
90 Du Toit and Nzuza, ‘Isifazane Sakiti Emadolobheni’, 70–1. P. la Hausse discussed the ‘Women’s Auxiliary’ in ‘The Message of the Warriors. The ICU, the Labouring Poor and the Making of a Popular Political Culture in Durban, 1925–1930’, in P. Bonner et al., eds, Holding Their Ground: Class, Locality and Culture in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press and Ravan Press, 2001).
91 Killie Campbell Collections, Oral History Project, Interviews with Bertha Mkhize, 14 and 27 August 1980. Mkhize spoke about how she and her brother worked together in their tailoring business; Obituary to Bertha Mkhize, reproduced from Bahá'í World, https://bahai-library.com/memoriam_bw_18#bm, accessed 8 December 2021.
92 TBD, 3DBN, Proposed Compulsory Registration of Native Women, ‘Deputation of Native Women to the Native Commissioner, Durban’, 18 March, 1937. The other women were Alzina Ngidi, Henrietta Mpshe, Ena Mkwanazi, Agnes Mbhele and Lea Ndhlovu. The men noted as ‘also present’ were J. Mpanza, W.M. Mavundhla and Rev. Nduli.
93 Ibid.
94 Ibid.
95 Ibid.
96 Notes on Conference between Municipalities and Native Affairs Department held at Pretoria, 28–9 September 1937, to discuss the Provisions of the Natives Laws Amendment Act (no. 46 of 1937), UG 56-’37.
97 J.D. Rheinallt Jones and H.S. Bloom, ‘The Natives (Urban Areas Act, 1923 as Amended by Acts 25 of 1930 and 46 of 1937)’ (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1938).
98 ‘Improving the Native Conditions of Life: Secret Conference Report Released’, Rand Daily Mail, 17 December 1937.
99 TBD, 3DBN, 4/1/3/1625, Proposed Compulsory Registration for Native Women, letter from the Town Clerk to the Manager, Native Administration Department, 13 February 1939.
100 More careful reading of municipal NAD records would provide some clarity, but what makes this task more difficult is that paperwork pertaining to the Native Commissioner’s Court that had its premises in Stanger Street was lost – my best efforts to find this archive has been unsuccessful. It was this court that would regularly have endorsed women out of the city through application of the Natal Native Code.
101 ‘Umhlangano waMadodakazi AseAfrika’, Ilanga lase Natal, 2 January 1937. The photograph was credited to ‘J.S. Mkwanazi’. An article with the same headline appeared on the previous page of this edition of the newspaper.
102 Du Toit, ‘Gender Politics of Native Welfare in Durban’, 76.
103 Healy-Clancy, ‘Daughters of Africa and Transatlantic Racial Kinship’, 492.
104 Du Toit’, ‘Gender Politics of Native Welfare in Durban’, 319.