Four Families in South Africa : Indian Shopkeeper Caught Between 2 Worlds : * ‘Whites still don’t see us as human beings,’ complains Laljeth Rattan. But he is equally mistrustful of the country’s blacks.

The old Indian trader felt betrayed. He’d made a good living from these blacks, spending his days and nights in their steamy, impoverished valley. He sold them their maize meal and their washing powder. And he considered himself one of them, bound by hatred for the white oppressor.

So when the black mob came in 1985, Laljeth Rattan watched in disbelief from beneath the Coca-Cola sign on his general store. He saw many of his customers with bottles, bricks, stones and sticks in their hands and something new--bitterness and envy on their faces.

Rattan and his family cleared out of the store and their house next door. By the next morning, both buildings were burned to ashes, probably by a match and jug of kerosene from Rattan’s own shelves.

“I knew Indian shops were being burned,” Rattan said, still sounding baffled seven years later. “But I was living amongst them. How could they burn me out?”

Yet, Rattan wasn’t frightened away. He took a few weeks off and, “when I returned to my normal senses,” he parked a truck in front of his blackened shop and resumed selling his cheap sorghum beer.

He rebuilt the shop eventually, as did most Indian traders. But Rattan and his family now spend their nights in a well-to-do Indian area, about 10 miles away.

The other day, the short, bespectacled entrepreneur sat at a cluttered table in the middle of his shop, watching black workers in their threadbare clothing serving even poorer black customers. Despite all that has happened, he told a visitor, “we Indians have no difference with the black man.”

The black man would not necessarily agree, though.

The Indian community, primarily descendants of 19th-Century indentured laborers from India and neighboring countries, numbers only 1 million in South Africa, or just 2.5% of the population. But here, in the Indian Ocean province of Natal, they control thousands of businesses, from general stores to factories, and live in moderate prosperity in townships set aside for Indians by apartheid’s social engineers.

Like the black majority, Indians for years were forced to observe the “Whites Only” and “Nonwhites Only” signs on toilets, park benches, bus stops and post office counters.

But, in the cruel pecking order of apartheid, the law always treated Indians slightly better than the darker-skinned Coloreds who, in turn, were treated better than blacks.

To this day, the government spends more on retirement benefits and education for Indians than for Coloreds or blacks. (All receive less than whites, though.) And unlike darker-skinned South Africans, Indians always were allowed to own property.

If the government was trying to encourage racial animosity, it succeeded. The privileges and success of many Indians have made them a target of attacks, both political and criminal, by poor blacks. And those attacks have made many Indians deeply fearful of blacks.

Laljeth Rattan, like so many Indians, views the changes in South Africa as a spectator. White oppressors. Black oppressors. What’s the difference?

As all Indians know, black dictators have a tradition of trying to loosen the Indians’ grip on African business. Twenty years ago, Idi Amin ran 50,000 Indians out of Uganda, hoping to return his economy to blacks. That sent Uganda into a financial tailspin from which it never has recovered. But it also sent a powerful message to the Indian merchant minority elsewhere in Africa: keep a low profile and survive.

Rattan and his family now live in a five-bedroom, two-story home in Verulam, an Indian suburb north of Durban. On the living room wall is a painting of his grandfather, who came to South Africa in 1860 to work in the cane fields as an indentured servant and stayed on when his five-year contract expired.

Early each morning, the 62-year-old onetime schoolteacher drives his dented, wheezing Ford to his general store in the vast black settlement of Inanda. (His Mercedes-Benz always stays at home.) He removes two heavy padlocks and a thick iron chain from the front gate and opens for business.

The dusty metal shelves of Rattan Brothers display milk and eggs, but also sweet sorghum beer (about 30 U.S. cents a quart) and inch-thick branches of aloe, which the customers burn and mix with snuff. The shouts of drunks and small children echo through the store, and Rattan keeps some semblance of order in broken Zulu.

Most of Rattan’s customers live in shacks without electricity or running water. Those lucky enough to have jobs work as laborers in Durban, 15 miles away, and their meager wages vanish quickly on bus fare, food staples, beer and jugs of water, which they push in wheelbarrows from a central tap.

“I feel very sorry for them,” Rattan said. “They are a deprived lot.” But later, with a shrug, he observed: “They are drunk most of the time, these people.” Mostly on his sweet sorghum beer.

Rattan prefers doing business with blacks because, as his wife, Jeyseri, explained, “They’re not fussy about anything. If something is torn or something, they don’t mind.”

The Rattans’ biggest worry at the shop is crime. They are an easy mark, this older man and his wife in her red sari, doing business across from a bus stop in the isolated valley. Their business is the largest in the area--and the only one with a cash register.

That cash register has been robbed twice and the store shelves cleaned out six times in nighttime raids since he rebuilt the store. Last year, during daylight, three blacks overpowered Rattan and took the handgun from his ankle holster. The gun was used later in a bank holdup.

There isn’t much he can do for protection. Rattan no longer keeps a gun because it seems to invite thieves after weapons. The police do not patrol places like Inanda, either. They come only when summoned, and it often takes them hours to arrive.

About the only thing he can do, he’s concluded, is keep the shelves sparsely stocked, and race for home as soon as night falls.

For his trouble, Rattan earns more than $60,000 a year, a handsome living by South African standards. Most of that comes, not from the store, but from his sorghum beer license. Illegal black taverns in the area use Rattan’s license to buy their stocks of beer, and they cut him in on the profits.

Thanks to sorghum beer, Rattan was able to buy the oldest of his five children a $40,000 seat at a private medical school in India.

“In this country,” Rattan said, “there’s a lot of scope (opportunities) for business, if you live on your wits.”

The sweeping reforms in South African society over the last two years have brought little change for the Rattans. They may no longer be second-class citizens by law, but the racial distrust that created those laws is not so easily erased.

“Whites still don’t see us as human beings,” Rattan said. “They see us as kaffirs (blacks) and koolies (Indians).”

When Indians think of how whites have treated them, they feel like part of the oppressed black masses. But when they think of having blacks in control of the country, many Indians are worried.

They share white fears that their homes and businesses will be overrun by poor blacks, thousands of whom have erected squatter shacks near Indian neighborhoods.

“I’m sure if they were allowed, they’d live right in our driveway,” said Vanisha Rattan, Laljeth’s 26-year-old daughter-in-law and the mother of his two grandchildren.

Laljeth Rattan blames the white government for not preparing blacks to run the country. Indians also worry about the bloody power struggles among black political groups, which have in the past been at least partially encouraged by white governments hoping to sow division among blacks.

Zulus have been at each other’s throats in Natal province for more than five years in a battle between those who support the African National Congress and those who back the Inkatha Freedom Party. The death toll is 4,000 and counting.

“I dread to see how these people will govern,” Rattan said. “If they can kill one another for politics, what will they do if they are ruling you?”

Although a few Indians have helped lead the black liberation struggle, their superior air and preference for segregated Indian enclaves have generated plenty of black resentment.

The stereotype accepted by many blacks is that Indians are difficult, tightfisted employers. The Rattans pay their 20-year-old maid, Monica, 129 rand (about $45) a month, plus room and board. That’s about a third of the average pay for domestic workers.

“Indians are as guilty as whites because we practiced apartheid, too,” said Rattan’s daughter, Saadhna, a law student. “And no Indian wants to live with blacks.”

Residential segregation was eliminated from the statute books two years ago, but most Indians still live together, often practicing age-old Hindu customs such as arranged marriages. Rattan still takes his meals in the dining room, while the women of the house eat separately in the kitchen. And although the family speaks English at home, the TV set is often playing Hindi-language videos.

Yet Laljeth Rattan has never considered moving away. He visited India a few years ago, he said, “but I couldn’t take the climate. It’s very hot and sticky.”

India “is like a foreign country to me,” he added, pausing from dinner to call for coffee from his wife in the kitchen. “South Africa is my home. I know no other home.”

BACKGROUND

The Indian community numbers only 1 million in South Africa. But in the province of Natal, Indians control thousands of businesses and live in moderate prosperity. Most are descendants of 19th-Century indentured laborers from India and neighboring countries. Under apartheid, they have ranked second--below whites but above Coloreds and blacks.