NEW NOVEL INSPIRED BY MY FAMILY’S STORY AS INDENTURED WORKERS, SAYS AUTHOR
JOANNE JOSEPH, a freelance broadcaster and writer in Johannesburg, has told the story of the 1.5 million-strong Indian population of South Africa, descended from 152,184 indentured labourers brought from India to Natal between 1860 and 1911 by the British colonial administration.
She has done so through her novel, Children of Sugarcane.
Her principal protagonist is Shanti Manicksham, a spirited 14-year-girl from the “insignificant” village of Vakkuruti in Madras Presidency, who undertakes a treacherous sea voyage to Natal in 1874 to escape an arranged marriage. The idyllic new life she had been promised turns out to be a nightmare. Like many of her co-workers in the sugarcane estates, she is brutalised, tortured and repeatedly raped over the next five years. Trying to defend herself against the estate’s white owner, “Master Wilson”, on one of his regular nightly visits, she grabs a broken bottle and strikes a fatal blow to her assailant’s neck. After a show trial, Shanti is sentenced to death.
Joseph’s novel, which has become a bestseller in South Africa, is also being published in the UK and in India.
The author has done exhaustive research into Indian indentured labourers, who were given the chance to go back to their home country once their five-year contract had ended. But many chose to stay on because they had left behind an impoverished life and there was no incentive to return.
Behind Shanti’s character is one of Joseph’s own relatives, whose photograph had been in the family but about whom very little was known.
“I knew little about my maternal greatgrandmother, Athilatchmy Velu-naiken, who was actually the inspiration for this book,” Joseph told Eastern Eye from her home in Johannesburg.
Records show that Athilatchmy was born in 1862 in the village of Yathavoor in Salem in Madras Presidency, arrived aged 22 in September 1884 in South Africa and probably worked in the Natal government railways. With her were three younger siblings – a brother, Komeran Velu-naiken, who was ill and sent back to India within a year, and two sisters, Ammanee Velu-naiken and Meenatchy Palany.
Athilatchmy completed her indenture and married twice. The first marriage was to Arunajalum Padayachee, who was born in Natal to indentured migrants. She had three children with him.
After her divorce, she married a white British man, John Edward Powys, a clerk in the Durban Post Office and later supervisor on a sugar estate. Mixed marriages were not banned but society disapproved of them. She had seven children with him, including Jacob, the author’s maternal grandfather. She was baptised and took on the name, Athilatchmy Magdalene Powys. She died on October 4, 1940, aged 78. Her husband, who had been born in India, was a troubled man. He did not get on with his children and finally shot himself in the head.
On Joseph’s father’s side, the history is just as complex. “My father’s maternal grandfather came from Madras Presidency.
They were educated, and were already Christian by the time they came to South Africa. On my father’s paternal side of the family, we have an ancestor from Mauritius. His name was Louis Jules Joséph. His name was anglicised and that is how we got the name Joseph.”
The author was born in Chatsworth, an Indian township in Durban, in 1976, but moved away at the age of 18. She and her husband have a daughter, Jade. “I have married across the colour line – my husband is South African of German and Scottish descent. We came out of apartheid only 27 years ago. It was illegal to marry across the colour line until then.”
What intrigued Joseph and planted the seed of the novel was spotting a photograph of her great-grandmother in a book, Many Lives: 150 Years of Being Indian in South Africa.
Joseph decided to tell the Indian story through the experiences of Shanti in an historical novel. “Sadly, the experiences of Shanti, her friends and compatriots are based on actual case studies drawn from several verified historical sources. South Africa is fortunate enough to boast a range of respected historians who have dedicated decades of their work to trawling through the archives and researching indenture in painstaking detail.
“Of course, much of this historical research recedes into the background in Children of Sugarcane as the lives of the characters unfold in the foreground. But it was important to highlight these heinous incidents which stayed with me for a long while after the research was complete.”
The indentured labourers were brought by the British “to fuel their commercial enterprises in the Colony of Natal between 1860 and 1911. The British called these workers ‘coolies’, now deemed a racially offensive term. Indenture was born of the British necessity for cheap labour after slavery was abolished in Britain in the 1830s.
“Though divergent from slavery in many technical aspects, historians describe the ship’s journey, the living and working conditions of the indentured as akin to slavery. There was extreme brutality of a physical, emotional and sexual nature on the sugar plantations which served as the main employer of the indentured in Port Natal.”
Joseph pointed out that “many committed suicide to escape the violence on the plantations. Lawmakers eventually voted to end indenture following pressure from vociferous activists, including prominent women, who argued that the practice could no longer be justified given the undeniable cruelty which had accompanied it.”
South Africa’s Indian population, made up mostly of Hindus and Muslims with a small minority of Christians, is concentrated in Durban, but some have moved to Cape Town and other parts of the country. “It is one of the most educated communities in the country. It’s amazing that that generation of indentured labourers had the foresight to educate their children. There’s a huge cultural emphasis on education in the Indian community in South Africa. It has carried through from one generation to the next.”
Her character, Shanti, is punished because she has somehow learnt to read and write and is deemed to have ideas above her station.
The idea of what India means varies from family to family.
Joseph said: “I’ve never been to India, and so for me, there’s a certain distance between India and South Africa. I see myself as Indo-African.
“But there are families, particularly Hindu families, that crave more of a relationship with India. A lot of them do travel to India. They might go on a religious pilgrimage. When there are family weddings, they will go to India to buy saris and jewellery.”
She said that “when there are racial tensions in South Africa, people are often told to ‘go back to India’. Actually, four generations on, that isn’t even a possibility or a reality for us.
“We are greatly divorced from that life and culture. And we are distinctly South African, even though we’re not always thought of in that way.”
That said, she would like to pay her first visit to India, “just to give me a greater sense of the connection to where Shanti comes from and, of course, my great-grandmother’s story. And I want to trace some of my origins. Do we have any relatives, third or fourth-generation cousins? I’m very curious to find out.”
Children of Sugarcane by Joanne Joseph is published by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
‘I want to trace my origins’