Their City, Our Terms: The Livelihood and Political Strategies of African Migrant Labourers in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal c. 1874-1906

ABSTRACT Muiruri, Kimathi. “Their City, Our Terms: The Livelihood and Political Strategies of African Migrant Labourers in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal c. 1874-1906.” Hon. Thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2021. The second half of the nineteenth century was an age of confusion for a great many of the Africans who lived in the Southeastern area of the African continent then called the Colony of Natal. In addition to enacting brutal and violent occupation, British settlers also intentionally impoverished African communities so as to render their agricultural and pastoral practices insufficient for survival. These factors caused many Africans to enter into the largest city of the colony, Durban, to find work as wage labourers. This thesis explores how African migrant labourers in Durban navigated the urban space, colonial-capitalist political economy, and indigenous African political economy to develop new livelihood strategies that allowed them to survive and prosper. In particular, this thesis is interested in understanding how dynamics of job seeking, urban housing, and urban labour action affected the self-conceptions and group identities of young migrant labouring men, and how these altered categories of identity fostered challenges toward the settler colonial state and generation-based patriarchal African power structures. I argue that migrant labourers reformed indigenous African ontologies, renegotiated ideas of maturation and masculinity, and developed labour-based political organizing strategies to confront the specific urban challenges of heightened intercourse with the colonial state and dislocation from old African lifeways. In doing so, migrant labourers in Durban both expressed new senses of individual agency and developed durable social identities with other labourers from disparate rural origins. Over time, these labourers constructed a political and social infrastructure which substantially shifted the power in African politics toward the young and the landless; and leveraged this power to pose a genuine challenge to colonial-capitalist domination by acting on their new senses of individual power and collective potential. By focusing on the site of the city, I highlight how urban challenges combined with rural-informed life practices to forge new capabilities for social organizing and expanded political imaginations which could not have found root anywhere else in the colony.Bachelor of Art