From the book: A.I. Kajee His Work for the Southern African Indian Community by C. H. Calpin
An early photograph of " A.I."with C.F. Andrews
The main road south from Durban is never far from railway and the sea. In 1900 it was a sandy earth road, baked in winter and seldom free from the dust thrown up by the ox-drawn cart or the trail of natives and Indians who used it. There were established settlements on the road, mostly of Indians, the majority of whom clustered into shacks and raised large families on the bare subsistence which they gained from a steady employment in the sugar fields or from the growing of a few vegetables from the miserable patches of land which they could afford to buy or rent.
Fannin Government aided Indian School, Wyebank. Built by Moosa Hajee Cassim Charitable Trust.
(Founded by Abboobaker, Abdulla & Ismail Moosa)
One of these settlements is Isipingo. Fifty years ago it was too far from Durban to attract Europeans as a residential area. Its beach had not then received the attention of the merchants in real estate. Instead it was almost entirely Indian in character. It might have been a village of Southern India, tucked between the sea, over which, in summer, a heat haze hung with metallic oppression, and the undulating country where banana groves sucked moisture from the dry air in winter and green sugar waved in a breeze stirred by the heat.
There were a few hundred people in the village. The oldest of them remembered the days when the coastlines of Natal were covered with natural bush being cleared by colonial settlers for the planting of cane which became the crop on which the colony's later prosperity depended. Some of them had arrived from India under the recruitment of contract labour instituted by the British Government in agreement with the Government of India. These were the indentured labourers. They were housed, fed and paid ten shillings a month to till the earth, tend, and raise the crops, and provide some of the domestic service which the barbarous Zulu was then not able to perform.
The Indian labourer was for the most part hard working and thrifty. After three or six years of contract labour, during which his pay rose to 15 shillings a month and his family increased yearly, he was sometimes in a position to take advantage of the freedom he had earned and to accept the gift of a piece of crown land in exchange for the free passage back to India which his contract guaranteed.
In these small beginnings lay the foundation of what prosperity Indians enjoy in these parts today. Reports of their life in Natal spread to the families they had left behind in India. Others came and not under contract to join their relatives. Traders emigrated from Mauritius and India as passenger-Indians. Along the coast there arose the Hindu temple, and in Durban the dome of the mosque, beneath which the Muslim trader combined shrewd business with the service of Allah. Quickly in the eyes of British colonials all the children of India, labourers and shopkeepers, Hindus and Moslems, became 'coolies' to be despised or used as occasion demanded.
The vegetable 'sammy' rose from hawker to market gardener; the petty shopkeeper to wholesale merchant; the labourer to sugar planter. The young man brought his aged parents and returned to his ancestral village to choose a wife. Among them was the father of Abdulla Ismail Kajee.
He was a restless individual from Kathor, India, a petty trader encouraged by the reports of opportunities in Natal. He settled at Isipingo, in a little corrugated iron structure which he turned into a store catering for Indians and natives in a conglomeration of Kaffir truck, which has provided the means of so many European fortunes in South Africa, and the disordered array of Indian commodities which give character and odour to the Indian store of today.
Inside, the store was dark. Heavy striped blankets, the personal necessity of the Zulus, hung over wires stretched from wall to wall, next to colourful silks and cottons, the material for Indian sarries and dhounies. Bags of dholl, beans and marsala powder, spices of the East, held up in confused array by bags of green and crushed mealies, m'dombies and samp. Bunches of Natal tobacco hung from the ceiling; green mealie cobs heaped on the floor with heavy stalks of bananas. The counters 'were heavy with cheap Indian jewellery, the bangles and earrings without which no Hindu maiden is properly dressed. These lay side by side with the rich red beans of the 'Kaffirboom' and beads, products of Japanese factories, beloved of the Zulu maiden. Over all hung a mixture of odours and exudations of perspiring Natives, so reminiscent of phosphorus, and the sickly pungency of smouldering aggerbetti.
Behind the shop, the women of the Kajee family prepared their meals of curry and rice, chatted in Gujerathi, with an ear always to the call which demanded their presence at the counter. Once the women folk were able to look after the place, the father went off into the interior and was away for long intervals establishing similar small stores in various parts of the Country and giving them up with carefree abandon.
The boy of five, Abdulla Ismail Kajee, was one of three children the inheritor of some of his mother's frailty, small for his age and no different from any other child, except to his sister, Kathija, then aged about 15 who loved him with a devotion which, even at seventy, shone from her face at the mention of his name.
It fell to this girl to take charge of the family and the shop during her father's absence. She became the buyer and the seller, dividing her time between the kitchen and the counter. All Indian girls of that day were women long before they were out of their teens. Often they were mothers at 15. Kathija took her duties seriously. As she had never enjoyed leisure, she was not aware of its existence. It was not, then, a question of submission to a harsh fate or surrender to a prospect of a lifetime of hard work that concerned this serious-minded girl. The difference between the East and the West in the education and rearing of children of that generation was very real. The Indian girl was brought up on the principle that the earlier she took on the responsibilities of marriage and life; the more certain was her salvation. Her schooling was of the poorest. Her only learning was that of the kitchen and of the family, of work and religion. Kathija not only as the will of Allah, a duty to be performed, but as part of a life to be lived accepted an event which would leave a European girl of fifteen completely helpless and unprepared. To take the place of her mother in the care of her mother's children was as natural to her as to be a mother herself and to undertake the care of her own children. There was no rearrangement of the house to be made at the expense of her education or career. The gap which bereavement brought, time filled with its abiding solace for the human spirit.
Kathija called him 'Abdullara' and gathered him to her bosom. She was pale for an Indian girl, on the smallish side. She had the olive complexion and soft skin of girlhood, high cheekbones and violet black eyes, a ready smile and a quick sympathy. The child Abdulla clung to her skirts on every occasion he felt the need of comfort, played in the shop with beans, within her sight and hearing, and came to love her as she loved him. No woman ever took her place in his life; no child-not even her own-could ever displace him in her affections. He was her own Abdulla, grubby, naughty, and self-willed. They were knit together with bonds of warm affection. All through his life, at moments of stress or crisis he turned to her, and when he could not return, being too faraway on his travels, in New York or in India or in England, every burden of mind or body drew him back to the demure girl of his childhood, to find in her womanly constancy a haven for his spirit.
As he grew up to leave the places he knew, to travel hither and thither at the bidding of a consuming ambiÂtion and driving will, Kathija grew old, never leaving the little shop, never ceasing to work, always there waiting, the only change in her, the deepening lines in her face, expressive of the nobility which waiting brings. His fortune lay in becoming a man of the world, in expanding his contacts and politics beyond the limits of his origin; hers in staying where she was. Yet everywhere he went he took her with him, and she kept him beside her. Often she was a hard task-master. Work which was her second nature demanded of the small boy, given to play and mischief, a discipline which, though not appreciated then, became his chief mainstay. Ambition is almost a universal quality among Indians. The Indian youth, faced with a score of obstacles unknown to European children, soon realises that independence is an end to be achieved as rapidly as possible. This is particularly true of Indians in a foreign land where the disabilities of the Indian in an alien political environment intensify his natural ambitions and provide the impetus to seek financial independence at the earliest possible age. Indeed much of the quarrel of the Europeans with Indians is the result of the success which accompanies this fierce pursuit by Indians of material success. It is responsible for the economic competition, in trade and commerce, and for the determination with which Indians sacrifice for the education of their children.
Young as she was, Kathija knew a little of this matter. Though she was unaware of the politics of South Africa and of the teeming problems which beset the country, she knew the fundamental facts of success. In this she was in total contrast to her father. No sooner did he set up a store in one place in Natal or in the Transvaal that he tired of it, closed it up and went elsewhere to repeat the process. He was the perfect example of a rolling stone that gathers no moss. His daughter, Kathija, for her part, might have been a student of the American metaphysician, Samuel Smiles, so ardent an exemplar was she of the business principles which he advocated. For Kathija there was virtue as well as success in hard work. Her soft hands, which were so obviously made to be held, ladled the mealies, smoothed the cloth, weighed the spices, and held the money. The same hand that stroked her brother's head and held him to her, cuffed him sharply in reprimand when need arose. The voice that soothed him so softly as a baby rasped into admonishment as he grew up. She dealt with him faithfully, He must work; he must go to school; he must attend the Madressa. As soon as he was able to carry he carried, moving things from one part of the shop to another, running errands about the place, watching Kathija counting the money and fingering it himself.
Many a small Indian boy learns the rudiments of business leaning over the counter of his father's shop. Kathija was his "father". As he grew he became stronger and was able, though unwilling, to pull the hand-cart loaded with goods from the station at Isipingo to the shop a quarter of a mile along the road. At the Madressa the Moslem boy is introduced to his religious education. He repeats passages from the Koran in Arabic. It is a painful exercise for a child who is not disciplined to such intellectual ascetism. Abdulla accepted this routine after some rebellion. He had already learned to play football, and was never happier than when, with a few unshod Indian boys and bare-footed Native children, he kicked a football about the road, or, if he were fortunate enough to escape for a whole afterÂnoon, on one of the flat patches near Isipingo beach.
The Madressa provides no English education. When he was seven or eight he was entered at the Higher Grade Indian School in Durban. The Dartnell Crescent Indian Girls' School occupies the site now, but parts of it have not -changed very much in the intervening years. He was an intelligent boy at school and a quick learner, though not more so than many of his class. He travelled to Durban every day to attend school and fell to the usual pranks and fights either with his fellows or with European boys, with who quarrels could easily be picked.
There is seldom anything remarkable about the school life of a boy who is adjusted to his environment. Abdulla was no introvert. His early boyhood was spent before the new psychology in education had discovered child and parent problems, or set both parents and child thinking on lines which create the problems psychology is there to treat. Nobody died of appendicitis before King Edward VII was cured of it!
At the Higher-Grade School Kathija's Abdulla attended, the corrective of all wickedness was a light cane wielded with skill by "A man in blotting paper wise, Acute, severe, in tongue and eyes".
Abdulla was never happy in the presence of schoolÂmasters. He seldom visited his old school when he became a man, but when he did he trod its floors with trepidation, the memory of his beatings returning with the sight of the building. As a result he treated schoolÂmasters with distant respect, having little regard for them as men of the world but much respect for their profession. He always had a profound respect for learning.
The subjects taught at the school were limited. In those days there was great reverence for the three R's, and in them Abdulla showed a very adequate competence. He wrote the large free bold writing of the day, the script writing of the new education had not arrived to ruin the handwriting of the modern school child. Forty years ago every Indian child wrote a beautiful hand; today few children write well. Never again will the books of Indian merchants reflect such care on the part of the teachers or such muscular obedience and control on the part of the youthful Abdulla Ismail Kajees.
It was at arithmetic that Kathija's Abdulla showed promise. Some of his friends who were connected with him in business or politics in his later life will see some significance in the ease with which Abdulla worked out examples of simple and compound interest, and how inÂvariably he solved any problem in which pounds, shillings and pence played a part. One page of his exercise book does not bring out as strongly as it might do the boy's bias towards the arithmetic of commerce. The same exercise book contains his attempts at sums on the metric system. Here he was by no means so successful. It may be that his teacher was also not very interested, for, whereas all those sums having pounds, shillings and pence as their basis are carefully marked right, the sums which tell of kilometers, decameters and centimeters are not marked at all, as if neither man nor boy was interested in their fate.
The boy left school early. Indian education was conÂfined to standards one to four, and to obtain schooling after attaining Standard IV the Indian boy had to find it in private study. Only recently has Indian education been put on a free basis and been extended in progressive form to the secondary schools, of which there are too few. Though this condition is far from the ideals of western democratic society it possesses certain advantages. The progressive improvement in educational facilities for the masses throughout western society has proceeded with the democratisation of society. If this has done something for the enlargement of men's minds it has effectively destroyed initiative and enterprise, self-reliance and independence. That which is bought at a price is highly valued; that which is accepted as a right is often despised. The withholding of freedom and equality in South Africa has produced in Indian youth qualiÂties of sacrifice and hard work nothing can deny.
On leaving school, young Kajee attached himself as a general help in the business of a relative, where for a few shillings a month he made himself useful and began his business experience. There are many such today who, at the beck and call of their employers in offices, workshops, and factories, absorb the routine of commerce almost without knowing it. I remember calling at one Indian wholesale house during a quiet period and saw there behind the counter a bearded bespectacled Moslem who, at sight, was at least 60 years old, but who, in reality, was no more than forty, with a small boy at each side of him, clambering over the counter and peerÂing at a large ledger. The father was explaining to his sons how their pocket-money account was kept and how their credit stood. Small boys similarly placed, spend hours in the warehouse, amusing themselves and unconsciously absorbing bits of information, getting the feel of trade by touch, learning by the mere chance of being there. With no sports fields they automatically find their way to the places where there is always some activity.
Raised in the atmosphere of the store, young Kajee was soon master of retail business. He went into the country for a time to work and live with a relative at Bulwer for £18 a year. He became a bookkeeper at Amod Bayats store at Pietermaritzburg and at Durban, and for a few years after this there was neither distinctÂion nor spectacle in his person or abilities. He did all the things that any young Moslem Indian does, from playing football and managing a football team in India, where he had a rollicking time on little money, to frequenting the 'hot spots' which, in reality, were pretty dull places. Amusement and entertainment for Indian youth in those days was not exciting, and did not go far beyond the sedate respectability of a Sunday-school treat. There were no clubs.
They are numerous in Durban today, their aims and objects are legion, many of them being sporting and recreational, others of them being cultural. One or two of them-such as the Orient Club, of which Kajee was president at the time of his death-were established not merely to provide facilities for businessmen but for the purpose of inviting prominent Europeans for functions. There was a belief among the members of the Orient Club that by bringing Europeans to it an exchange of views and social intercourse would do much to better race relations. The Orient Club-essentially Muslim in membership-is the richest of them. At its establish ment it had the blessings of Sastri, the first Agent-General. It is situated on the landside of the first un-dulation from the sea at Isipingo and is a delightful setting r its purpose. One of the rules is that no European woman be invited or be allowed to enter the club without an escort. For some years its members entertained Europeans lavishly, quite apart from official functions in honour of distinguished visitors. Now the entertainÂment has been dropped, Indians being finally persuaded that the acceptance of hospitality does not carry with it an obligation to think well of Indians. Indeed, at a hazard, I fancy that the majority of Europeans who have enjoyed a Sunday at the Orient Club as guests of the President and members have left wondering what Indians have to complain about in South Africa, so pleasant are the surroundings and so obvious the signs of hospitality.
Before Kajee settled down completely to business and politics he spend a short time at Aligarh College in India. Here he got himself into trouble as an agitator. The story is that at debating societies he spoke extravagantly in support of Indian's independence, and got him expelled as a consequence. Report has it that he afterÂwards went to sea as a tally-clerk in a cargo boat plying between Indian ports and Malaya. It is a pity there are no records of his experiences. His relatives in Natal were not at all pleased with him. Eventually he returned to Durban, probably a much sadder and wiser young man. The experience, no doubt, reflected his father's wandering instincts. It was a good thing to get such wanderlust worked out of him early in life. It was time to get down to business and a future. He took a room at 175 Grey Street as the first step towards it, and started business as a broker and agent.
This is the usual course adopted by Indians who as clerks in the offices of others are ambitious enough to strike out as individuals. They all become agents and brokers. It requires little or no capital; it can be operated even without an office; the use of somebody's telephone and business address is sufficient office furniture. A youngster of twenty will start thus. He scours the newspapers and the manufacturer's list looking for an agency. He wants a quick seller, something like tea or cooking oil, sugar or soap, the necessities of the larder. He does not want pots and pans that never break and that stand gathering dust in the retailer's back premises. If he can get cooking oil he is made. He comes round with a sample, leaves his business card-he loves his business card-and hangs like a leech to the job. He sees no more of the product than the sample. He pays no money to the manufacturer. He passes orders. The manufacturer does the rest. There is no risk except in a bad payer, and even then the young salesman can, with the discretion with which he is endowed, avoid diffiÂculty. The two qualities he requires are almost natural to his race, a flair for selling and that virtue of the economist, abstinence. Of these the more important is abstinence; a willingness, a determination to give up pleasure, to work late and early, and to eat only when hungry, to live, in fact, on "the smell of an oil rag".
There are hundreds of young Kajees, in and out of retail shops in Durban and throughout the settlements and villages in Natal. To watch any of them-is to watch Kajee himself at work, for scores of them started at the telephone switchboard in his office and having spent a few years under his "accursed" disciplined direction find themselves quite capable of earning their own five pounds a month, their seven pounds ten and their ten pounds. Before the young European in business has reached the stage of paying for a girl at the cinema, the young Indian has put down the installments for a travelÂler's car.
It took only a few months for Kajee to get established. He engaged two clerks, mere boys, one of whom Mr. Harry Naidoo was one of the first Indians in Natal to be expert at a typewriter, and the other of whom, Maganlal, was equally expert at accounts. Among their other qualÂities was a willingness to sleep on the floor at night, to accept goods in lieu of money as wages, and, when both were scarce, to accept less than their wages on a promise that they would be richly blessed when money and goods were plentiful. Mr. Maganlal was about twelve or thirÂteen years old. He was employed as a messenger boy at first and was responsible for packing the samples of sugar in seed packets, which Kajee, looking older than his years as a result of wearing a moustache slightly larger but of the same texture as that usually attributed to Mr. Charles Chaplin, carried round with him in a bag of the sort used by old family doctors and itinerant barbers.
The first agency Kajee obtained was the result of some semi-political interests and association with Mr. Karl Gundelfinger of the wholesale firm of that name. Mr. Gundelfinger was a prominent member of the Chamber of Commerce. With that propensity for associations and societies which is one of the characteristic features of Indian life in South Africa, a few Indian merchants had formed the Indian Merchants' Association. Its chief function seems to have been in safeguarding the interests of creditors in cases of insolvency. Kajee got himself appointed the association's secretary, and in that position soon became known to a few European businessmen who, if they had no particular liking for his race, were inclined to take to Kajee's personable ways.
Kajee's first agency, then, was sugar. He has sold a lot of sugar since the days he canvassed with samples in seed packets. To sugar he added rice, representing C. A. Bassa Ltd. and others, and to rice, the flour and wheaten products of Daniel Mills Ltd. This was sufficient to go on with, and it was much later that he obtained the agency for Nestle, to be followed by Five Roses Tea, Quality Products Soap, and Natal Oil Products. All these are quick sellers, and the early struggle gradually gave place to substantial financial relief.
He lived at Avoca. He had married, in the custom of Muslims, a very young lady from India. In those days the majority of young Muslims went to India for their brides. His wife Amina was about thirteen or fourteen years old, without any English education, and without knowledge of South Africa. These child marriages are now rapidly disappearing, but the marriage age is still below that of the West and accounts for the youthful character of the Indian population of South Africa and has much to do with the "problem".
Kajee had three sons and three daughters. His eldest son Ismail, now a director of the firm has three children. His sons Abdulhaq and Sadekh are, at the moment, unmarried. His third daughter will be married before this book is read, but she is twenty and not much older than his eldest granddaughter. Uncles and nephews, aunts and nieces look like brothers and sisters in Indian families, and there is no easy way of sorting out relationÂships of cousins and uncles first-removed, so intermingled are they.
It was in these days of struggle that Kajee became friendly with Sorabjee Rustomjee. 'Sorab' was a Parsee, the son of an Indian benefactor of these parts, monuÂments to whose charity stand in various parts of Indian Durban. Abdulla and Sorab were 'buddies'. A hand more cunning than mine might have written Kajee's life around his relations with Sorab. Allies and conspirators in their twenties, the two became political rivals in their thirties, and personal enemies in their forties. The fight was rising to the final rounds when Kajee died, and who knows how it would have gone with them had he lived.
In the nineteen-twenties there is no sign of rivalry. Kajee was making his way in the world. It is only when he has made it that he must stand guard over it against all men, friends and enemies. I am told, and my unfortunate lack of experience in this respect is willing to give credence to it, that the making of a fortune is easy. "It's easy to make" Kajee used to say, "but to keep it is a task requiring superhuman qualities." In politics the truth of this matter is common knowledge. No man has political enemies until he has a political reputation. Kajee and Sorab, then, were fast friends.
Here is " A.I." seen in familiar surroundings addressing a conference of the SAIC - 1940
It is said that Kajee was first interested in politics as a result of the example of Mr. Gandhi, and it is true that Kajee must have known something of the Indian lawyer's exchanges with the authorities. One report has it that as a boy in his 'teens Kajee spent a short time at Phoenix, where Mr. Gandhi had established a settlement and where an ascetic life could be lived in tilling the soil and in meditation. If the report were true it is certain that he did not stay long. The simple life did not appeal to Kajee. Solitude and the rigours of work in the fields had no appeal to so restless a spirit. Rather is it likely that he was fired by Mr. Gandhi's revolt against the Government and his leadership of the Passive Resisters across the Natal border. This was enough to fire any young man in his teens, even as it does today in the young Indians of the present passive resistance movement. Few young people escape a phase in their lives when a crown of thorns is the highest glory. It is the old who prefer a nightcap. Mr. Gandhi was a household name, and not far short of being a household God, among South-African Indians when Kajee was in his early teens. In 1914 Mr. Gandhi had reached agreement with General Smuts, and not long afterwards left the country for India. In passing, it is worth remarking that Indians were not united behind Mr. Gandhi any more than Dr. Dadoo unites them today, or anymore than they were united behind Kajee in the heyday of his leadership.