Social Disintegration and Changing Zulu Mores

That these problems had attained a degree of urgency in the 1930s and that the social dislocation was considerable there can be little doubt. In Natal, from the beginning of the twentieth century, white missionaries and administrators had deplored the disintegration of 'tribal discipline' as Africans were increasingly proletarianized and in contact with whites in town. As early as 1904, James Stuart, then Assistant Magistrate in Durban, and to become one of the foremost recorders of African oral tradition, outlined what he saw as a 'crisis' resulting from the 'multifarious commercial tendencies' which were acting to transform African 'ancient habits and customs, their beliefs and modes of being'.^[25] As David Hemson puts it, 'Stuart projected the most radical pessimism.' He saw a direct relationship between insubordination in the towns and disruption in traditional social life and the rapid spread of venereal disease.^[26] His response to the growth of individualism and lawlessness was simple: 'moderate corporal punishment' for the youth and a return to traditional mores in relation to women, whose 'universal immorality' was regarded as largely responsible for the current wave of lawlessness.^[27]

In their concern with the loss of control, the views of patriarchal administrators echoed the complaints of African chiefs, headmen and homestead heads who maintained bitterly before the Natal Native Affairs Commission of 1906–7 that

our young people are getting out of hand, instead of recognizing and obeying their fathers and guardians they disobey and sometimes disown them. Sons, who should be working for the house [homestead], appropriate all their earnings to themselves, daughters flaunt their elders to their face, and, duty disowned, claim a right to go to towns or mission stations.^[28]

Probably even more distressing for African men was the extent to which black women were a prey to the lusts of white men. Behind the racist terminology of the Commissioners lurks the intense pain of a people whose ruthless exploitation was not only economic, but also sexual.^[29]

Drawing on their perceptions of the English industrial revolution and British problems of urban poverty, white observers sought to fend off the rapid transformation of Africans into a proletariat, and its concomitant class conflict, through an attempt to restore 'traditional values' and institutions. Stuart was obsessed with this necessity, and he devoted much of his life to shoring up what he saw as Zulu 'tradition'. His dedication to the recording of African oral history and to writing vernacular histories for use in African schools was part of this endeavour. M.S. Evans, a man who could fairly be described as 'a friend of the natives' with all the ambiguity that that phrase implies, put the issues with much force in 1916:

They [the Africans] are utterly unprepared for such a violent change as is implied in the transference of large numbers from their present environment to the industrial life of cities. Galling as it may be to the captain of industry to see thousands of more or less intelligent, exceptionally strong men and women all around and yet unavailable to him, the position would be made infinitely more difficult and embarrassing by any relief which could be given by breaking up their present life, and with it all standards of conduct and the all-wholesome restraints to which they are accustomed. Torn from the present controls and sanctions and plunged into the whirlpool of city and industrial life, without even the occasional return to sweeter and healthier conditions, makes one who knows them shudder for their future. And if our own race life is to remain pure and our ideals uncontaminated, equally for us would such a course be disastrous. At whatever sacrifice of possible economic developments, the remedy of the present difficulty is not by rapid, and what may be easy adjustment, but by more gradual means, at least as much of conservation as of transformation.^[30]

By the mid-1930s, the increase in the African urban population was an even greater cause for alarm, especially as the rate of increase for African women was even faster than that for men, particularly in Durban. Between 1931 and 1936 the ferocious drought which ravaged Zululand and Natal pushed an increasing number of people from the land, while the recovery of South Africa's economy from the Depression and the rapid expansion of manufacturing industry in the second half of the 1930s brought an open-ended demand for additional labour. Thus, whereas in 1921 there were 46,000 men and just over 8400 African women in urban areas in Natal, by 1936 this had risen to 90,400 men and 37,600 women.^[31] While the size of the increase was affected by the redrawing of Durban's municipal boundaries to take in the peri-urban areas in 1930, this was itself a reflection of the rapid growth in the population around the town and the social problems which were arising. The increase over the next decade was also as sharp: in 1946 there were 139,000 African men and 69,700 women in Natal's towns.^[32] In addition, many Natal Africans had by this time settled permanently or temporarily on the Witwatersrand. In the face of the rapid social change and

manifest violence, poverty, and social dislocation in the towns which resulted, patriarchal fears amongst African men also intensified and it is not surprising that there were renewed demands for a return to the 'Zulu' way of life and for increased controls over women and youth.