Professor Lindy Stiebel
Grey Street in Durban is tied to the history of the Indian population in South Africa and their construction of a ‘home away from home’. Recently renamed Dr Yusuf Dadoo Street after the prominent anti-apartheid activist, ‘Grey Street’ as it is still known by the locals, is where Indian immigrants to Natal inevitably made their way from the late nineteenth century onwards. Inevitably too, South African Indian writers descended from these first immigrants have written about the Grey Street area in their works, describing the close community ties that developed amid the Indian styled buildings their forefathers erected. Writers such as Dr Goonam (Coolie Doctor), Phyllis Naidoo (Footprints in Grey Street), Aziz Hassim (The Lotus People), and Imraan Coovadia (The Wedding) have reconstructed a complex and contradictory past era – nostalgic, passing, difficult – centred in Grey Street’s busy streets, alleys and markets. Post apartheid this area is not as homogenous as it once was, but survives as the old business and residential centre for the Indian community in Durban, and indisputably as its cultural heart.
The Grey Street writers’ trail, developed by the KwaZulu Natal Literary Tourism project in 2006, retraces old identities and current pathways through this district looking at places through the writers’ eyes. Earlier literary trails developed by the project, originally funded by the National Research Foundation, had focused on Alan Paton and Rider Haggard respectively as stand alone well known writers linked variously to this province. The Grey Street writers’ trail was the first of a series of trails having instead an area focus within which a number of writers lived and worked. The trail is constructed around the writers’ perceptions of these places and passages from their works spice the route – for example, Aziz Hassim tells us in his novel, “Life in the Casbah was about politics…There was no other area of under one square mile that could equal it for the intensity of its emotions and its pursuit of justice”. The trail thus links writers together through their shared interest in the Grey Street area as evidenced in their placing works within this setting. In essence the three hour walking trail leads literary tourists on a route through arcades and markets, past places of worship including the famous Juma Mosque, the largest in the southern hemisphere, and even a parking lot where a building owned by Gandhi and housing the Natal Indian Congress once stood. The last stop is the “Little Gujarat” café where food of this region in India is served – hence the title of this paper.
This paper traces these writerly tracks in Grey Street as assembled in the trail and assesses the fictional reconstruction and shifting identities of this area, once a hotbed of political dissent especially during the apartheid era, as evidenced in the short quotation above. The phenomenon of the literary trail will be briefly discussed to provide context as will some of the contemporary experiences of those who have followed this particular trail around Grey Street.
Lindy Stiebel is the Acting Head of the School of Literary Studies, Media and Creative Arts, UKZN.
Date: Tuesday, 10 November 2009
Time: 15:00-16:30
Venue: ccrri seminar room, 2nd floor George Campbell building, South Campus, Howard College Campus. Use the south entrance into the building; and Entrance 3 on Rick Turner (Francois) Road if driving.
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