An “Indian commons” in Durban? limits to mutuality, or the city to come

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which memories of Black South Africans in Durban, identified by racial discourse and often by themselves as Indian and Coloured, reach back to early twentieth century processes of dispossession and occupation. Through historical and ethnographic research in (formerly Coloured) Wentworth and (formerly Indian) Merebank in South Durban, I show how some people from Merebank imagine their past and present in relation to a still-recognisable and creolised “Indian commons” forged a century back, while their neighbours in Wentworth recall constant change and dislocation. These distinct modes of reckoning with the past, with questions of land and landscape, and with practices of racialised mutuality, point to the limits of a subaltern “Indian commons” but also to the possibility of a different mutuality.