Marikana and the New Politics of Grief by Jon Soske

by Jon Soske, History Matters

In July 1981, 1,700 workers at the Penge asbestos mine in the Northwestern Transvaal struck after a bitter, two year struggle for recognition by the Black Allied Mine and Construction Workers Union. After four days, the mine owners fired all of the workers, who then responded by occupying the living compounds attached to the mine. The company brought in scabs and petitioned the South African supreme court to evict the mineworkers: since the strike was technically illegal, the company claimed that the workers had quit their jobs, and therefore had no right to remain in its quarters. Predictably, the Pretoria court ruled in the mine owner’s favor; the company offered to reemploy 1,000 of the striking workers at reduced wages. The strikers refused. Given the absence of ventilation and other basic safety measures, most of the workers faced a slow and excruciating death from silicosis if they returned to work. One trade unionist later explained: “We don’t envisage a situation where we would choose to die in order to earn very little. We’d rather starve than sell our lives.”

The Life and Death of Dr Abu Baker ‘Hurley’ Asvat, 23 February 1943 to 27 January 1989

by Jon Soske

At the time of his murder in 1989, Dr Abu Baker ‘Hurley’ Asvat was widely revered as ‘the people’s doctor’ based on almost two decades of medical work in Soweto and health projects initiated across the Transvaal as Azapo’s secretary of health. Despite his close relationship with leading African National Congress (ANC) figures and his major role in anti-apartheid medical activism, Asvat’s name rarely appears in histories of the liberation struggle and his life’s work has been almost completely overshadowed by the controversial circumstances of his death. This article reconstructs Asvat’s biography from his childhood in the multiracial Johannesburg neighbourhood of Vrededorp to his medical study and political activism as part of a Pan Africanist Congress (PAC)-aligned student group in Pakistan; from his significant role in non-racial cricket to his emergence as a central figure in Soweto’s life and politics. This article also reflects on the relationship between Lenasia and Soweto as social spaces during the years of apartheid and interrogates the ways in which apartheid racial categories – particularly ‘African’ and ‘Indian’ – continue to structure how historians represent the recent past.

‘Wash Me Black Again’: African Nationalism, the Indian Diaspora, and KwaZulu Natal, 1944-1960

by Jon Soske, PhD Thesis

My dissertation combines a critical history of the Indian diaspora’s political and intellectual impact on the development of African nationalism in South Africa with an analysis of African/Indian racial dynamics in Natal. Beginning in the 1940s, tumultuous debates among black intellectuals over the place of the Indian diaspora in Africa played a central role in the emergence of new and antagonistic conceptualizations of a South African nation. The writings of Indian political figures (particularly Gandhi and Nehru) and the Indian independence struggle had enormous influence on a generation of African nationalists, but this impact was mediated in complex ways by the race and class dynamics of Natal. During the 1930s and 40s, rapid and large-scale urbanization generated a series of racially-mixed shantytowns surrounding Durban in which a largely Gujarati and Hindi merchant and landlord class provided the ersatz urban infrastructure utilized by both Tamil-speaking workers and Zulu migrants. In Indian-owned buses, stores, and movie theatres, a racial hierarchy of Indian over African developed based on the social grammars of property, relationship with land, family structure, and different gender roles. In such circumstances, practices integral to maintaining diasporic identities — such as religious festivals, marriage, caste (jati), language, and even dress and food—became signifiers of ranked status and perceived exclusion. Despite the destruction of this urban landscape by forced removals beginning in the late 1950s, these social relationships powerfully shaped African and Indian identities in Natal, the popular memory of different communities, and the later politics of the anti-apartheid struggle.