EVERY Monday morning in the grounds of our local Anglican church modest food parcels are handed out. This began at a garden gate during the pandemic to help people who had lost jobs and resorted to waste picking. There are still a few of these, and they do a marvellous job of environmental significance (pictured), but most of the recipients are now simply what one could refer to as the precariat; people living on the outer margins of the modern economy. About fifty parcels are now handed out and within a couple of hours supplies are exhausted.
Not everyone appreciates this initiative. All was well until a few weeks ago when a man living opposite the church emerged to vent his opposition in a fashion that may be described as aggressively persistent and clearly designed to shut down Monday’s handouts. He complained about crowds of thirty people invading the area, littering, urinating against walls and ‘sexually assaulting’ (sic) a (i.e., his) domestic worker. There had also been the theft of a lawnmower ‒ or maybe it had just been a wheelbarrow.
There was absolutely no evidence to back up these allegations, but this did not stop the complainant repeating them a month later. Indeed, there needs to be no evidence whatsoever because this is longstanding South African urban legend that pops up decade after decade and reveals fundamental white racism based on insecurity and fear of the other.
If you go back in the provincial archives to the Pietermaritzburg Town Clerk’s correspondence of the 1930s and 1940s, you will find a remarkable echo of these 2024 complaints from the lower end of Pietermaritzburg ‒ in poor handwriting and even worse English on cheap notepaper. Loitering and urinating were the two main complaints and it was in part a reaction to them that the Native Recreation (or Tatham) Ground was established in 1937.
During World War II this refrain was taken up by servicemen protesting that while they were away fighting for the homeland their mothers, wives and daughters were at risk from Africans ‘loafing’ in urban areas. The most extraordinary claim was made by Brother Paul of St Charles College who alleged in September 1941 that ‘defiled dust … with millions of disease germs’ from an area used by Africans for recreation was blown by the wind and endangering his pupils. The very proximity of Africans was a major danger in his view and they should be contained outside the ‘black belt’ five miles from the city.
Back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century there were periodic moral panics that demonised Africans. Sometimes these led to mass demonstrations by hundreds of white men demanding retribution for nothing more than a rumour that a woman had seen a black face at her bedroom window in the night. Violence sometimes resulted. In 1904 in Pietermaritzburg there was a campaign to exclude Africans from pavements because they ‘impertinently’ jostled white women and were a health hazard. A charge brought against three black prison warders for refusing to get off the Church Street pavement was dismissed by a magistrate to outrage from local burgesses and the hypocritical derision of the Durban press. As late as 1912 there were attempts to establish statutory powers to control the use of footpaths by Africans.
Even further back, in December 1886 white men in Durban staged intemperate gatherings, marched in large numbers, staged a riot, and formed a Vigilance Committee in response to reports that Africans had committed ‘outrages’ on white women. In both Pietermaritzburg and Pinetown, Africans were assaulted; and in the capital a Females Protection Society prevented blacks from using pavements. Meetings, consisting largely of men – 1 600 in Durban and 700 in Pietermaritzburg – called for the registration of Africans in urban areas, capital punishment for rape, and flogging and branding for indecent assault. Legislation was indeed introduced and within a few weeks the febrile atmosphere had subsided. The Attorney-General confirmed that the December ‘outrages’ had been minor and that there had been no abnormal activity. The panic had been chimerical, an ‘imagined pandemic’, perception above fact. Yet John Robinson felt able in the Natal parliament in November 1886 to describe ‘social terrorism’, words that his colleague H. Binns condemned as lacking in wisdom. On a well-worn theme, Robinson called for measures to ‘protect the honour of our women, to shield the innocence of our children, and to preserve inviolate from savage lust the domestic sanctity of our homes.’ Fear and viciousness dominated the psyches of white settlers.
White space was privileged, specially protected from a supposedly threatening and insalubrious surrounding environment. As Patrick Wolfe puts it, ‘Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.’[1] Imperialism, colonialism and apartheid are often, correctly, defined in terms of economic exploitation; but basically, they were about spatial control. And in colonial Natal white men’s fears were not only about Africans, but also about the (very slow) emancipation of women.
Common themes run through many decades: the supposed vulnerability of women; the behaviour of young black men are two. But perhaps it is no coincidence that an underlying issue whether it be the 1880s, 1900s, 1930s and 40s or 2020s is an ongoing threat to the dominant status of men. This speaks to the mystery of how on earth a liar, convicted criminal, misogynist, racist, inciter and admirer of authoritarianism like Donald Trump might be the next American president ‒ for a second time, nogal. It surely can be no coincidence that the global rise of right-wing populism in the last twenty years has coincided with a more prominent role for women in society generally and gathering justice for past violence. Male control is crumbling.
[1] Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’ Journal of Genocide Research 8(4) 2006: 388.