’The cows of Nongoloza’: youth, crime and amalaita gangs in Durban, 1900–1936

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Abstract
Forms of youth organisation and culture which emerged amongst African migrants in towns during the first decades of the century remain obscure. Based on oral and archival sources, this article attempts to disaggregate, periodise and construct an understanding of those forms of cultural organisation which came to be known as amalaita. In Durban the amalaita emerged in the wake of the massive social dislocation experienced by African societies in Natal and Zululand in the late nineteenth century. It is argued that they were first and foremost migrant youth organisations whose members adapted a repertoire of Zulu rural cultural practices and forms of self‐organisation to cope with new conditions of life in town. This is an interpretation supported by oral testimonies although even within popular memory itself the meaning of the term is sometimes extended to include relatively discrete forms of adult migrant and even criminal association, for reasons which the article explains. Although the amalaita cannot be described as ‘political’ in any advanced sense, their organisation and consciousness could, at times, provide the basis for more concerted challenges to local political authority. While the cultural idioms of Zulu youth were absorbed into a local popular political culture after 1925, there is also evidence to suggest the mobilisation of certain youth gangs by ICU activists. It is also argued that official attempts to de‐politicise popular cultural expression together with qualitative changes in police control and the rapid social transformation of local society, had, by the late Thirties, begun to re‐mould patterns of migrant youth association in Durban.

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