Green Shoots: Lessons from a place once called good

There’s a museum in Durban called KwaMuhle. It’s the original building in the city that managed the influx of black men who came looking for work. To meet the need for cheap labour, colonial policy imposed measures like land tax to drive people from their rural homes in search of jobs for cash to pay the tax.

This system of influx control was referred to as the Durban System, and consisted of laws that required black men to carry passes, to buy liquor in designated beer halls, and to live in residential areas on the periphery of the emerging town. It became the model for the pass system that would entrench segregation and the exclusion of black people from the centre of economic and social life. It would lead to resistance, captured in history as we remember the Sharpeville massacre, the women’s march on the Union Buildings, and other acts by a people who refused to lie down. The pass system was a key foundation on which the mining industry was built, and the system of exploitation that made white South Africans very wealthy.

The name "KwaMuhle" means "the place of the good one". Muhle was the name given to J.S. Marwick, the first manager of Durban's Native Administration Department which was established in 1927. Apparently, this fellow had helped 7 000 Zulu people escape the Transvaal during the South African War. The faded pictures of English colonial administrators reminded me of my own great grandfather, whose picture is displayed in a poster in my hometown under the banner “Colonials of Newcastle”. These migrants from across the sea had nefarious intentions to extract all the wealth in service of the imperial ambitions of Britain and were part of a machinery that would alter the shape of South Africa and the world. 

There is also the 1860 Heritage Centre in the city, named in remembrance of the the year that the first group of Indian indentured labourers arrived to work in the sugar plantations of Natal. This marked the beginning of a system of forced labour that brought over 152 000 Indians to South Africa over the next 51 years. 

There is a long history of tension between the  Indian and Zulu communities in Durban. This division was deepened by apartheid and its control of access to resources. Whites would of course be at the top, and in descending order, Indians, Coloureds and then Blacks. Apartheid nomenclature is used for ease of communication – I will eventually get to discuss issues of identity at a later stage. This underlying tension remains today, and was most recently expressed in the outbreaks of violence between residents in some parts of Durban during the 2021 riots.

It is dishonest to disregard this painful history as we seek solutions to the complex problems in our society today. In my youth, I would visit Addington Hospital on the South Beach in Durban, trying (successfully in the end) to convince one of their trainee nurses to marry me. Today, Addington is the site of a disturbing practice by South Africans of physically excluding poor people from accessing public health services. A group that can only be described as vigilantes operating outside the law will demand to see identity documents of those seeking help. South African ID documents list your country of birth, and people possessing these documents but born outside the country are told they cannot enter the hospital.  The spurious argument is that  the public health system is overrun with foreign nationals. We are 65 million people living here. There are an estimated three million foreign nationals in this number. They must all be sick at the same time to overrun the system. The numbers don’t add up.

If we buy into the story peddled by ideologically bankrupt political parties that it is migrants who are responsible for the failures of our government, we disregard our history and will only repeat the pain of our past. We cannot allow ourselves to perpetuate the idea that poor people from other countries are the cause of our problems. It is simply not true. If in our conversations at home or work we continue to argue this position, we perpetuate the things that the badly nicknamed ‘Muhle’ represented – exclusion, segregation, and the othering of people. History has shown that it is in embracing multiple cultures and talents that migration offers that social progress can take place. Let’s take back what is beautiful and good and make South Africa a genuine "Kwamuhle" – the place where goodness lives.