The Gold Kings: Sonū Smugglers in Johannesburg, Durban and Lourenço Marques, 1890s–1920s

Abstract

This article opens up the 1914 case of smugglers Hira Naran and Dulabh Vira, to consider an illicit trade in gold between the eastern ports of southern Africa, east Africa and southern Asia. From a newly compiled database of two and a half thousand known gold dealers active in southern Africa between 1906 and 1926, it is evident that illicit gold dealing was a significant, if hidden, aspect of the region’s towns and ports. Gold was informally ‘exported’ from Johannesburg by an amorphous, diverse group of runners to Durban and Lourenço Marques. At the ports, Gujarati firms, increasingly marginalised by racial legislation, took a leading role in transmitting gold, or sonū, eastwards across the Indian Ocean. The article shows, rather than discusses in the abstract, how a transnational method can reveal hitherto obscure but important themes in southern African history. The article argues that a half-millennium-old indigenous gold trade between south-east Africa and India, in apparent decline by the 1870s, was invigorated by the growth of the Witwatersrand mining economy. Administrators saw the ports as important sites of regulation and restriction, but failed to rupture the old gold smuggling networks decisively, in ways that posed important, unresolvable questions about the institutional capacity of the South African state at its maritime gateways.