Population Movements, Islam and the Interaction of Indian and African Identity Strategies in South Africa During and After Apartheid

Abstract

Colonialist segregation and, subsequently, apartheid in South Africa were centrally focused on the control of population movement, and a central prerogative of the state was the authority to delimit the boundaries between populations and to codify the characteristics of their difference. Against this power of the colonial and the apartheid state were poised the energies of people depending for their livelihoods on movement and capacity to circumvent and demobilise the obstacles placed in their way by geographical restrictions and state authorised definitions of identity. At the same time, the groups of population subjected to such forms of power also sought the recognition of the state, and interacted with it around attempts to fixate boundaries and identities in order to consolidate their own strategic position and situation within the hegemony of cultures, on which the legitimation of state power depended. Following the demise of apartheid and its deconstruction into constitutional democracy after 1994, such confrontations, struggles and manoeuvres have continued, and new types of battles around citizenship and entitlements have emerged in the context of both immigration and affirmative action for greater social justice. This article sets out to examine some of the institutional frameworks and discourses through which African and Indian identities have been articulated, confronted and negotiated in South Africa – and in what is now KwaZulu-Natal in particular – from colonialism and the apartheid era to the “New South Africa.” It discusses some of the ambiguities inherent in Islamic identity formation, and looks at ways in which it has interacted with other strands of identification, with Indian as well as African nationalism in South Africa. In what is now KwaZulu-Natal, Islam has quite predominantly belonged to people of Indian origin– though from very different backgrounds – and has provided an important register of discourse and organisation for both the unification and delimitation of Indian identities against others as well as for the articulation and debate of cultural and political differences within the Indian “community.” African Islam in KwaZulu-Natal has been of much more limited dimensions and – until recently – has been kept carefully apart and segregated from the world of Indian Islam. With the onset of new programmes and mobilisations for dawah among Africans (starting with the work of Achmet Deedat and the Islamic Propagation Centre International from 1957 onwards), with a new political playing field opening up after 1994, and the waves of transnational migration following it, the relationship between Indian and African Islam has begun to change, and new varieties of Islamic discourse and institution building have come about. The paper argues that the impact of these new energies of islamisation is in itself ambivalent: On the one hand it offers possibilities for new dialogue and elaboration of ideas of citizenship across historical divides of racial segregation and discrimination. On the other hand, it also provides the possibility for new hardenings of identity and of new types of confrontation between groups keen to exploit and monopolise the cultural capital represented by Islam.