Dynamic Africa

The History of Zulu Ricksha Puller’s (1892 - 2000)

The first ten Rickshas / Rickshaws imported to Natal arrived in 1892, imported by sugar magnate Marshall Campbell from Japan.

The ‘Ricksha’ became Durban’s main mode of transportation, both in the city centre and docks. By 1902, 2170 Rickshas crowded the streets, pulled by a small army of registered ‘natives’.

Because of the money offered by this occupation at that time, pulling a rickshaw a highly sought after and competitive means of employment. It is said that in two days a puller might earn a shilling, equal to what a ‘head boy’ working in a home might earn in a month.

Soon after their introduction in South Africa, the British proposed that rickshaw drivers wear uniforms. This was partly done so that police could identify ‘pullers’ from other ‘natives’ who were most likely bound by a strict curfew that restricted their movements after a certain time.

The uniform was an ordinary unbleached calico suit, trimmed with a single band of red braid. Pullers were allowed to dress their hair in a traditional manner and opted to walk barefoot. The feathered tufts (as seen above) were called ‘Isiyaya’ or ‘Isidlukula’.

As time went by, these Zulu pullers began customizing their uniforms by adding extra braids and wearing bangles of plaited reeds with seeds which rattled upon their white washed lower legs. Fierce competition developed among the pullers to design the most original and elaborate costume, giving rise to the elaborate aesthetic now associated with them today.

By 1904 there were over 2000 rickshas trekking around the city. It became fashionable to own your own private ricksha. Durban’s steepest roads had notices stating ‘Dangerous to Rickshaws’. Because of this, overweight people would often employ two pullers, adding to uphill power prowess and downhill breaking.

Durban rickshas became so popular that its imagery was used internationally by the government to lure pith helmeted travellers to the country (centre). Collectable ‘cigarette cards’ (left) were produced as well as large paper fabric labels (right). The labels were used in the UK to visually identify a type of export fabric.

By 1918, horse drawn rickshas had also become popular, but the increasing popularity of the motor vehicle created a traffic problem in Durban.

By 1930 it became unbearable, with over 9000 motor vehicles and an excess of 10000 horse drawn vehicles on the city streets. Increasing numbers of trams and buses added to ricksha competition. Even so, the convenience of short journeys in and around the city centre kept rickshas somewhat popular. However, by 1940 less than 900 were left to ply the streets.

According to public records, by 1968 there were only 260 rickshaw’s left in operation. In 1970 there were one hundred eight six registered pullers and in 1971, ninety. At that moment, the very last of the Mpondo pullers working around the market area were seen. By 1975 there were only twenty nine rickshas working the beachfront. By 1980 - 10 remained, these in poor condition.

(information lifted and partly edited from this source)

But never mind Shaka—how does the image of the Zulu, in general, enter the consciousness of the global imaginary? Photography works on the premise of presences and even greater absences, while often denying those absences. What’s missing in the production of photographs with Zulu subjects? The manufacturing hand of the photographer in constructing these embodiments of Zuluness, as performed and posed by European image-makers who are themselves informed by their European settler/tourist audiences’ expectations of Africa in general and Zuluness in particular. These images maintain the African as a static entity, aiding useful colonial notions of black Africa as a place that contacted no one, borrowed nothing, shared ideas with no others: such notions helped encourage separations that later developed into apartheid.

No doubt, the Zulu captured Europeans’ attention: the archive contains a plethora of photographs and postcards—sent by visiting Europeans to their friends. In addition to the chiefs and warriors, there were Zulu “belles,” brides, and mothers carrying the requisite babies on slings (photographed in profile, in order to highlight, for the European audience, this particular method of keeping a child close to the body). There are no names or differences in identity permitted: the people pictured are framed by the photographer’s or postcard maker’s captions, typified by being placed in categories, branded before that became a thing to do on purpose.

Whatever we picture of when we think “Zulu” is conjured up by the same machinery of calculating colonial crazy that constructed their colonised subjects as representatives of the anteriority of capitalist modernity. Remember Oprah Winfrey’s claims about being Zulu? She should realise that for every card-carrying romantic warrior-type invented by missionaries’, explorers’, and settlers’ narratives—from North America (Apaches and the Sioux) to South Asia (Sikhs in the north west, and the Coorgs in the south) to Africa (Maasai, Nuba, and of course, the Zulu)—there’s an accompanying fear of the over-sexualised destructive native who wasn’t too well-endowed in the intellectual arena—and thus, had to be contained because of his proclivity towards marauding and raping. (Hilariously, the British, French et al. didn’t see their own marauding, raping generals and armies in the same light; and judging by the rhetoric surrounding the Global War on Terror and the Muslim Other, still don’t.)

Mokoena says that historically, the Zulu came into being under Shaka (there had been no other “king” of the Zulu before him); it is necessary to begin theorising about being Zulu as an encounter with “pictorial fantasies,” endless documentaries (often inaccurate and racist) and “historical” re-enactments on film and television mini-series. What it means to be Zulu in the twenty-first century is a kaleidoscope of refractions and reflections, informed by performances of performances.

She herself has a commanding sartorial presence—right down to the Modernist-inspired brooches, earrings and impeccably tailored suits. No wonder Mokoena is beginning a research project on the meaning and symbolism of clothing in nineteenth-century colonial Natal:

The availability and desirability of clothing is often associated with the arrival of missionaries who depicted clothing as the antithesis and an antidote to the ‘adornment’ associated with indigenous cultures. My research focuses on how nineteenth-century Africans made sartorial choices that blurred this line between clothing and adornment and how these choices were captured in paintings and photographs.

Excerpt from ‘Zulu Metrosexuals’ via AIAC