“Suddenly someone grabbed me from behind and pushed me,” Madondo told a reporter. “It was a big Indian. Then the glass broke, and I fell with my head bleeding.”

Victoria Street was packed at the time, full of African and Indian workers on their way home or to the bus rank. By the time Madondo regained his bearings, “other Natives had caught the Indian.” A pitched battle broke out and spread quickly through the neighborhood. Dozens of people ended up in the hospital after large groups of African men careened through the district, smashing windows and breaking into stores, while Indians responded in kind, raining bricks, stones, or glass bottles down onto the crowds from the rooftops. Fires broke out across the area.

Thursday’s violence petered out with nightfall, leaving clothes, shoes, and discarded goods scattered on the streets. The next morning it started again, as people who resented their treatment at the hands of Indian bus and storeowners, among other slights, unleashed their anger on Ismail and his neighbours’ homes. The Badsha family patriarch commanded 7 Douglas Lane’s front room, from where he could look out over the veranda and see the block of flats then under construction across the narrow street. That was where he smoked his pipe or welcomed his grandchildren up onto his lap.

On Friday morning someone threw a brick through the front room’s window, shattering glass onto the floor. Chorta had joined his brothers to debrief the previous day’s events; he grabbed a hunting rifle, ran out onto the street, and fired a single round skywards. Smoke from the day before still hung in the air.

Years later, Omar would claim this event as his earliest memory.

Ismail’s family was fortunate to only suffer a broken window; some neighbours lost their stock or their shops. As Friday ended and Saturday began, it was apparent that Grey Street’s residents were many times more fortunate than their poorer confederates who lived further afield, in places like Cato Manor, where the African and Indian working class were jumbled together in indistinguishable shacks.

Terrible violence broke out there over the weekend. On Booth Road in Cato Manor, “Indian buses were burned and every Indian house or shop was destroyed.” Indian children were trapped in a house and burned alive. When an African man tried to rescue them, he too was trapped and killed. Rumours circulated of a widespread uprising, rape, and looting; in some places the reality was not much better.

Ebrahim and his brothers kept their rifles close at hand until the police and South African military finally acted to get the situation under control. The final toll counted nearly two hundred people dead, thousands injured, and almost half of Durban’s Indian population displaced.

Community welfare organizations tried to care for the “pitiful clusters of refugees, clutching the little valuables rescued from their homes,” who sought shelter at local police stations or huddled together in open fields. Ismail and Ebrahim’s family remained secure on Douglas Lane, while many of their politically involved neighbors fretted about what the violence meant for African and Indian unity.

Some people called the events a riot, others a pogrom. Whatever the terminology, in time the three awful days became a literal textbook example of “ethnic riots.”

In what remained of January and the months that followed, however, the NIC and the ANC’s response was more triage than sociological analysis. Xuma condemned the violence, although other ANC representatives conceded that Africans did have some legitimate grievances. Indian community leaders meanwhile tried to assuage residents’ fears that it could happen again. The argument became that the only way to prevent such things was to demonstrate solidarity with the African majority, in word and deed.

Together, the ANC and NIC leaders stated that “the fundamental and basic causes of the disturbances are traceable to the political, economic and social structure of this country and the preaching in high places of racial hatred and intolerance.”

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The fearsome days of the Cato Manor riots

The Art of Power: Pursuing Liberation and Nation Building

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