Ashwin Desai - a short biography and bibliography of this KwaZulu-Natal author.
Ashwin Desai, the holder
of a Masters degree from Rhodes University and a doctorate
from Michigan
State University, is currently affiliated to the Centre
for Civil Society at
the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and lectures part time in
Journalism at the Durban
Institute ofTechnology and The Workers College. Dr
Desai is an unusually
prolific and wide ranging writer whose work has been
published in academic
and popular books and periodicals around the world. One of
South Africa's
foremost social commentators, Dr Desai's work is
internationally celebrated
for its courage and clarity of vision and for its focus on
the lived
experience of oppression and resistance. His work
resolutely resists easy
classification. It is not written in the service of
sociology or journalism
or poetry or analysis or ideology. It just is. And this
independent presence
has made it a material force. The Poors of
Chatsworth is described as "in
part, first rate sociology, then investigative journalism,
then seething
post-colonial writing" which is "indispensable
reading for anyone attempting
to understand contemporary South Africa". Dennis
Brutus, Emeritus Professor,
University of Pittsburgh, and former political Robben
Island prisoner,
writes about Desai's work, We are the Poors:
"One of South Africa??s leading
activist intellectuals has produced a remarkable book
detailing growing
resistance to neoliberalism in post-apartheid South
Africa. Desai gives a
moving picture of desperate conditions in post-apartheid
South Africa, where
things have not changed for most of the people. But this
is also a stirring
account of a courageous fightback, the fight that is being
globalized as we
challenge corporate globalization."
(From the Time of the Writer 2003 Biographies, Centre for
Creative Arts,
University of KwaZulu-Natal). Selected WorkThe Anamuthoo's from The Poors of Chatsworth
(2000)
They said: "Old man, are you moving? And I
replied, I am not moving."
They said: "It is a pity father, for you will be
crying for a little
while" ... So I took my crowbar, pulled the house
down ... I was afraid
maybe they would arrest me if I was left alone - Mr
Mapapu, Glenmore, Eastern Cape, Recorded in the early
1980s
... he took a note from his pocket. It stated:
"You Venkatsamy, are
notified by the City Council to leave your plot number so
and so ... Ma,
I've been living in this place for the last fifty years.
Where do I go
now?" When I went back a few weeks later, the old man
had died. It was
the death of one who did not want to live anymore - Dr
K. Goonam
Among the first residents of Chatsworth were shackdwellers
from the
Amanzimnyama area of Clairwood. Indians had settled in the
area from the
1920s and had access to market gardens adjacent to the
settlement.
Within twenty-one months the community was destroyed and
many forced
into Chatsworth. One of the first to move was Mr Anamuthoo
who was
employed at Consolidated Textile Mills as a spinner for
over two
decades. He had lived in shack A90 in Clairwood for twenty-
two years. He
moved into house 290, Road 328 on September 30, 1963. The
records show
that when asked the reason for his application to move
from Clairwood to
Chatsworth, Anamuthoo's response was, "We must
apply."
Intrigued by the simplicity of Mr Anamuthoo's comment, I
attempted to
track him down thirty-six years later. I arrived at the
residence of
Ramiah Anamuthoo but he had passed away on November 29,
1976. His wife
Ankamma still lived in the flat. She was eighty-one years
old. Her son
Antony, one of eight children joined us. He lived in a
flat around the
corner. He was fourteen when they arrived in Unit 3. The
family lived at
262 Whitehall Place, Jacobs. Before moving to Whitehall
Place they had a
five bedroom house in Balfour Road but it was destroyed
during the 1949
Indo-African riots.
Slowly Ankamma, without frills, told me her story. They
were first
offered a house in Unit 1 but they did not qualify as
Ramiah was not
earning enough. By the time they moved, Ramiah had already
worked at
Consolidated Textile Mills for twenty-seven years. After
thirty-one
years of service, Ramiah's take home pay was R8 a week.
Gross annual
remuneration, according to his 1968 income tax return, was
R459.47. In
Clairwood, Ramiah Anamuthoo supplemented the family income
by going
fishing to the "Wests". With the long distances
from Chatsworth to the
sea, this was only occasionally possible. Ankamma also
worked at the
Natal Bottle Exchange for eleven years and then Bailes for
eleven years.
Ankamma gets a pension of R520. Most of it goes on rent,
lights and
water which comes to between R345 and R360. She has bought
goods at
Shaik Supply Store for the last thirty years on a monthly
credit system.
She is up-to-date with her rent. However, she moans about
the escalating
costs. She shows me a rent slip for R28.46 from 1978.
Another from 1982,
R37.98. Now R350.
The son, Antony, has eight children; one of them from a
previous
marriage. His first marriage broke-up because his in-laws
felt he was
spending too much money on his father's funeral. At the
age of fifteen,
Antony went to work. He worked at R. Faulks footwear for
fifteen years
starting with the princely salary of sixty cents a week.
After a period
of unemployment in the 1980s, he found work at Delano
Footwear in Unit
10, Chatsworth. He was put on indefinite short-time. He
has not worked
since 1997 and has pawned both his and his wife's sewing
machines to get
money for food. He believes that the shoe industry has
collapsed because
of "cheap imports from China". Unable to meet
the rent and provide for
his family, he has built a structure in his mother's back
garden to try
to do some sewing. But he needs money to get his sewing
machine back.
His son in Standard 8 seeks refuge at the grandmother's.
Antony still
hopes to get back into the footwear industry, but the odds
are against
that. Cheap imports have escalated in the last decade
rising from 12.86
million pairs in 1989 to 50.83 million in 1996. A 1997
South African
Clothing Textile and Workers Union (SACTWU) secretariat
report indicated
that since 1990, 13 000 jobs were lost in the footwear and
leather
industries. At the same time production has declined from
72.6 million
pairs in 1990 to 48.3 million pairs in 1997.
I look at Antony and know that at forty-nine years of age
he will never
work again. He left school at fifteen to help his family
as the cost of
living in Chatsworth escalated. He has been put on
indefinite short-time
as a result of the government's tariff lowering policies
which have
destroyed the shoe industry. Will his kid in Standard 8,
sharing a house
with seven other people and aware of his family's plight,
have any
reason to hope for a better life?
But it is Ankamma's hurt that I feel. She is always so
neatly clad in
staid saris. Her house is immaculate. She keeps returning
to the theme
of why seventy percent of her pension is gobbled up by
rent and
electricity and water. One can sense she is worried about
Antony.
My last image of Ankamma is of her unfolding her husband's
certificate
of twenty-five years service received in 1962. Bibliography1996. Arise ye Coolies:
Apartheid and the Indian 1960-1995.
1999. South Africa Still Revolting.
2000. The Poors of Chatsworth.
2002.
We are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid
South Africa.
2002. Blacks in Whites: A Century of Cricket Struggles
in KwaZulu-Natal.
(co-authored with Vishnu Padayachee, Krish Reddy &
Goolam Vahed) - Durban -
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