Apartheid in Durban

THE APARTHEID SYSTEM IN DURBAN: EFFECTS ARE LONG-LASTING

On July 12, 2007, Innocent Charmaine, education director of the KwaMuhle Museum in Durban, was kind enough to show me sites related to the Apartheid era in Durban and the Black townships of KwaMasha and Inanda. While the KwaMuhle museum is officially closed for renovations, Mr. Charmaine and I had a good conversation on how museums of tolerance disseminate their message to students and the possibility of future collaboration involving SA/US educators and students on an Apartheid tour.

The KwaMuhle Museum building itself is an appropriate setting for a museum dedicated to the racial pass system in Durban when, during Apartheid, all races were expected to carry identity cards dictating where they could live/work. Mr. Charmaine himself remembers having to stand in line during a documents identification search of his family as government officials would visit the Black townships and arrest those without the proper paperwork as undocumented Blacks from the rural areas, especially women, were unwanted, in Durban, by the white community. Indeed, the building, although now beautiful and serene, was the site where Black males, new to Durban and looking for employment, were expected to report for medical examination (prior to 1918, Black women were not allowed in Durban). The examination of male genitalia was carried out in public on the main street in front of the building. There is a statue in the museum courtyard memorializing this demoralizing experience.

Mr. Charmaine then showed me the area of Durban from where Blacks were forcibly removed in the early 1960s as the white community wished to create a buffer zone between them and the Black community. Although the land was not developed by the Apartheid regime, the area is now again home to the Black community but in the form of informal settlements as also seen in parts of Soweto, Johannesburg. In the township of KwaMashu, section 14, where women from rural areas were allowed, by permit, to reside with their husbands for two weeks for conjugal visitations was seen as were two room and four room “houses”. Two-room houses in KwaMashu were reserved for Blacks who agreed to marry partners as dictated by the Apartheid regime while four-room houses were for two families/couples already in existence at the time of KwaMashu’s establishment in the early 1960s. I also saw newer housing/apartment units (“hostels”), originally designed for single males but then integrated to include families as a means by which to reduce the level of violence occurring within them. Some members of the extended Zulu royal family, as Blacks in this area are from the Zulu tribe, live in these units. Mr. Charmaine also introduced me to his wife who is a teacher at one of the primary schools in the township. Mr. Charmaine was also a high school language teacher, having taught in both a township secondary school and then Durban High School which is a school for Durban’s elite of all races.
In Inanda, I was fortunate enough to be shown the Ohlange Institution which was founded by Dr. John Dube (first president of the ANC) in 1901. The Ohlange Institution, the first Black school founded by Blacks in South Africa, was based on the institutional model of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, USA. Luckily, Dr. Dube’s grandson was on hand at the original home of Dr. Dube, behind the school, which is now a museum, to answer my questions. Nelson Mandela cast his first vote, in 1980, at the site of the school. Dr. Dube is buried on the hill just behind his home/school. After this, I went to the Phoenix Settlement to see Mohatma Gandhi’s first established ashram.