Country: South Africa

Group: South Asian Indians

Date Finalized: 2/15/2020

Team: Colleen Clauss (lead), Jayline Martin, Payton Thompson

Over the course of January 13th-15th, 1949, the Durban Riots escalated in the Cato Manor area of Durban, South Africa. Sparked by a crowd observing a fight between an Indian store owner and African boy, mostly migrant African workers (with some whites approving or participating) committed assaults on Indians, breaking windows and looting their stores. This escalated to the burning of property and systematic killing and expulsion of Indians in the area, resulting in 137 deaths (53 Indians, 83 Africans, 1 European) and 25,000 displaced Indians (Ramamurthi, 1994). The Indian minority population in South Africa was established by the forced removal of over 160,000 Indians from India to the African continent from the time period of 1860-1911 for slavery and indentured servitude. Encouraged by the white minority’s segregation of society by race, tensions had been building between Africans and Indians because of competition over rights to land, competition in the job market, and being pitted against each other by white slave owners and employers. Indians may have been perceived by Africans as receiving more legal and economic advantages, such as the ability to form trade unions and the ability to keep some customs, and to be overcharging African customers in shops and buses (MRG, 2018). Anti-Indian rhetoric by white politicians and press promised that forcing Indians to leave would give Africans economic benefits, and passive or approving police responses gave rioters the impression that violence against Indians would go unpunished.  We rated the data quality as a 3, because several peer-reviewed journal articles about the event were found. By the way the authors spoke about different accounts of the event, it seemed to be very thoroughly documented and analyzed in many sources.

Sources

  1. The World Factbook (n.d.). “Africa :: South Africa. Central Intelligence Agency.” Accessed February 9, 2020. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sf.html.
  2. Brah, Avtar. Thinking Identities: Ethnicity, Racism and Culture. Springer, 1999.
  3. Minority Rights Group (2018). South Africa: Indians. (2018, March). Retrieved from https://minorityrights.org/minorities/indians/
  4. Ramamurthi, T. G. “Lessons of Durban Riots.” Economic and Political Weekly 29, no. 10 (1994): 543–46.