Durban Casbah nostalgia and the way we live now

Dear Ashwin and Goolam,

You begin your wonderful book with the dramatic line, “Durban’s Casbah. A city within a city.” You speak about the Casbah as this “inner city” or “adjacent city” — and how it originally came into being, and gradually morphed to become such a multitudinous configuration within an apartheid city — at once “typical” and quite unique. With you two intrepid “time travellers”, what a journey awaits us.

Your subtitle — Bunny Chow, Bolsheviks and Bioscopes — opens up worlds within worlds. “Bunny chow” captures the food culture of the Casbah. It is, indeed, one of its defining features: its mountains of spices, live chickens, garden-fresh produce, street food, run-of-the-mill eating houses, and posh goodwill lounges.

Then, “Bolsheviks” reflects the amazing variety of political inclinations and affiliations of the people who came and went in the Casbah. You mention AKM Docrat, who was a confirmed “Bolshevik”, influenced by Lenin. Indeed, the Red Square — where the present Nicol Square parking complex is housed — was the centre of much of the political activity from the time of Gandhi.  I remember its central role in Aziz Hassim’s novel, The Lotus People (published in 2002). The variety of political shades of the rest, who were on a broad spectrum, from passive resisters to defiance campaigners to Biko and Black Consciousness comrades to United Democratic Front runners, is truly astounding; and also shows the changing political colours over the decades.

Then, of course, “bioscopes” shows something of the culture of hyperreality, if not cosmopolitanism, that was so variously and widely invoked, in different ways, in the Casbah of those good ol’ days. “Bioscopes” were absolutely necessary, you would agree, to counter the restrictive and claustrophobic apartheid world that was imposed on this space. We see the influences of US culture on cinema, not to mention its impact on the music, gang life and fashion. And, of course, the impact of Indian and African cinema, popular in the Casbah, transported one across time and space. 

What I love is the style of composition of your book. It is indeed a “riot of short chapters” (24 in all) “mimicking the patchiness” of the world of the Casbah, as you allude to yourself, quoting Anna Tsing, the US anthropologist. I think about how you would have gone about your research over the years and shaping it into the tome you eventually created. Incredible!

I realise that “this book is about meetings”. Past meets the present. Present meets the past. So much has changed. So much hasn’t. This book is your most autobiographical yet. You write of your fathers. “Our fathers, whose origins were in Gujarat, walked these streets in the ’60s and found part-time and full-time work here.” (Desai’s father worked part-time at the Grand Shoe Store; Vahed’s father worked full-time at Dominion.)

You go “in search of your mothers’ and grandmothers’ gardens”, to invoke Alice Walker. You write poignantly about your “Grannies, who tended the ferns on minute balconies” . The intimacy of the Casbah, which you have carried in your hearts from the time you were both growing up, is truly poignant.

The title of your last chapter — “Walking Forward, Backwards” — captures the circularity of your Footprints in Grey Street: “We walk the streets of the Casbah. How different from our childhoods. Changing racial, ethnic and national demographics, new economic activities, and new street names.”

The Casbah is hard to pin down, to define and describe in one-dimensional terms. You capture something of the open and porous space that the Casbah is — a space, refusing to be confined, constricted, demarcated

It is instructive to reflect on the variety of names of the Casbah. “Imperial ghetto”, as Omar Badsha reminds us, juxtaposes two competing notions of this city space. In fact, as some of the diverse images of the Casbah do reveal, this dual naming has much truth behind it. It conjures up, simultaneously, constricted and confined inner-city living, yet with aspirational street names, such as Bond Street  or Victoria Street or Queen Street, recalling the old metropolitan centre. 

Yes, “the Casbah” is hard to pin down, to define and describe. You capture something of the open and porous space that the Casbah is — a space, refusing to be confined, constricted, demarcated. Ironically, its actual “borders” are both inscribed and reinscribed, erased and reinstated continuously. Paradoxically, the Casbah has elements of an “open city”, albeit within an apartheid city, with its real and imagined “barbed wire fences” around it, at once potently grotesque and, inevitably, fraying.

At the same time, there are many “ghettos” within the “Imperial ghetto”. What is evident in your book is the number of enclaves of different kinds scattered across the Casbah. And these different centres cluster around different interests and affiliations and loyalties, such as religion, sport, commercial enterprises, gangs, political activists, schools, hostels for migrant workers, restaurateurs, musicians, street traders, and many more, “all jostling for space in the Casbah”.

Durban’s Casbah is the story of men. “That was the wonder of the Casbah, an incubator of chancers, gamblers, revolutionaries, reformers and people like our fathers ...” The book is an excellent study in masculinities, with its wide range of male personalities — from tailors, to market stallholders and owners, to shopkeepers, to café and restaurant owners, to gangsters, to boxers and sportsmen, to political activists, to actors and musicians, to priests, pastors and preachers, to journalists and photojournalists.

You also paint portraits of the amazing women of the Casbah. The haunting images of your mother, Ashwin, from striding forth to conquer the world in her youth, to the time when she is burdened by Time, will remain with us. We see women in their different roles — from market stallholders, to political activists, to karate champions. You have traced the footprints of remarkable women, from different walks of life — women such as Vino Reddy, Zuby Barmania, Dr Goonam, Fatima Meer, Phyllis Naidoo, Ansuyah Singh, Khorshed Ginwala, Sam Moodley, Romila Chetty and Timmy Singh. 

Reading your book, I think of the trope of the wake, that Christina Sharpe, the US academic, invokes, in relation to slavery. I begin to appreciate how the world of Durban’s Casbah is in the “wake” of indenture. I also think of Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel, Afterlives, set in Tanzania, which traces the “afterlives” of a few generations, who live in the stream of colonialism in that region.

Indeed, there are direct lines and links between indenture and Durban’s Casbah. You have extraordinary stories, like those of the Nulliah family, of indenture stock, who later built the Good Hope Centre in Queen Street, the tallest building in its time in the area. There is also the story of the undaunted and fearless Rajendra Chetty, from my home village of Kearsney, where the early tea plantations were developed, who worked relentlessly in “nonracial” sport and progressive, critical journalism in the Casbah.

I read and re-read the story of the indentured worker, Neelavathi (Colonial No 112892), who arrived in 1905. She later worked in the family market in Victoria Street in the Casbah, and died in 1960. Amazing histories “compressed’ in just one woman. Her valiant and enduring struggles, as she took up market gardening when indenture was over, are remarkable. So many travelled from outposts in the suburbs, starting their journey at midnight, to reach Durban by sunrise, to sell their fresh produce.

The critical connection between indentured and passenger Indian in Durban’s Casbah is also significant, and often overlooked in indenture studies. You remind us that not all passenger Indians were of the merchant class. And in his debut novel, The Wedding — A Novel (2001), Imraan Coovadia shows how some former indentured and passenger Indians lived in the same cramped tenements, behind shops, in the old Durban’s Casbah.

And, we see in your book, after more than a century of oppression and imposed “inconveniences”, continuing setbacks in the present. The story of Patel’s Dominion Tailors, for example, left me absolutely disconsolate. (And I realised later that Goolam’s father worked for them in the 1960s.) After decades of harassment and struggles to establish themselves, and rise Phoenix-life, the events of July 2021, in which the shop is left bereft, were very perplexing indeed.

The present time, you will agree, given the fault-lines, has something to expiate. And it is more than a “pettiness”. It is a colossal betrayal

At the same time, your book is also very much about the present, of the changing face of the Casbah, and how we should embrace it today. You celebrate, simultaneously, the vibrant life of the past and the vibrant life that exists in the Casbah today. Yes, your burning concern deals with connecting past and present, for the present and for the future.

Swetlana Boym, the Russian/American cultural theorist, reflects critically and deeply on the question of The Future of Nostalgia. Given her own Jewish experiences of displacement, she ponders the notion of reflective nostalgia where there is longing and loss, and over the imperfect process of remembrance. She suggests that we have restorative nostalgia — where we revive the past, which often leads to a return to mythmaking, through the erection of monuments. This is fine, but I feel we must go further, and learn to live in the present.

It is for this reason that I love the story, for example, of Roothren Moodley, that you narrate. He wonderfully connects and personifies past and present. He hails from indenture stock. In fact, he traces his roots to Neelavathi. He, as a trustee of Victoria Street Market, was responsible for getting that market and the Ematsheni Beerhall in the Casbah both declared as “liberation” sites. And, as you record, he is, at present, a “proud supporter of the Denis Hurley Centre”. How can stalwarts like him be among the “bridges” between past and present and future? And what kind of further support could places such as the Denis Hurley Centre and the Grey Street Mosque, among others,  be given, as they respond to the current needs of the Casbah?

One of the dominant stories of your book is around the markets. As you state: “The heart of the Casbah were the markets ...” Your book shows the long and convoluted sagas related to these spaces. I cannot believe that the prolonged battles around the Durban Market — after the fire in 1973 (“Durban Inferno”, as you describe it), and the negotiations in the 1980s, to name just two — are still not over!

The stories of the markets are indeed held together by sticky tape. What should one do today?

In The People’s City — African Life In 20th Century Durban (1996), Paul Maylam and Iain Edwards also describe 20th-century Durban in its breathless variety, with it crowds, beer brewing, rickshaw pulling, black pop music, workers, trade unions and political history.

Durban’s Casbah was designated an Indian sector (separate from the white West Street area), but alongside this segregation, you show how there was also much interracial mixing, at various levels and, particularly, the “spatial convergence of the marginalised”, as Len Rosenberg, Durban’s eminent architect and urban conservationist, has pointed out.

Durban is a typical African city, and the Casbah its defining and distinctive feature. Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, distinguished academic and historian, whom you cite, has noted the definitive nature of the “Grey Street area”, which makes Durban, in many ways, for her, “one of the truer African cities that we have”.

The present time, you will agree, given the fault-lines, has something to expiate. And it is more than a “pettiness”. It is a colossal betrayal. You do show a deep longing, from the way you write, for the camaraderie of the past to be invoked, to reinvent itself and restore itself, on the streets of the Casbah. These are your hopes and dreams for the spaces of your childhood, moving into the mid-21st century. Yes, there was tension in the Casbah of the past, but there was also good neighbourliness in its different manifestations.

Your Durban’s Casbah offers the stubborn hope of yesteryear as a lesson for today. In a sense, you have a way of living in different time zones at once. Yes, the Casbah “is at once a harbour of history and a harbinger of what is to come, a place where one can walk forwards, backward, remember and care”.

I must stop now. I am going to make some bunny chow for my niece who is visiting from London.

Durban's Casbah — Bunny Chows, Bolsheviks and Bioscopes by Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed is published by UKZN Press.