Is a fresh take on contested terrain

November was marked as Indian Arrival Month in KwaZulu-Natal. Various provincial events paid homage to the workers shipped from the subcontinent in the 19th century to service the labour demands of colonial Natal.

Those 150,000 workers found themselves bonded to sugar, tea and wattle plantations; the coal mines; the Natal Government Railways; municipal sanitation services; and even domestic service. They came variously from the southern and northern provinces of India impoverished by a rapacious British colonial system intent on fuelling its industrial revolution with loot from the colonies.

This “human cargo” loaded on “coolie ships” in the wake of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire fanned the globe from Trinidad to Guyana, Mauritius, Fiji, Réunion, Guadeloupe, Suriname and Natal. The workers spoke languages as diverse as Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam and Bhojpuri, and carried with them faiths and cultures as vast as the contemporary subcontinent. Over the past decade, the descendants of the workers have told the stories of “worker histories from below” outside the formal academic circuit – where the indentured are telling their own history.

The delayed release of The Indian Africans, coauthored by late struggle stalwart and United Democratic Front cofounder Paul David, along with his younger comrades Kiru Naidoo, Ranjith Choonilall and Selvan Naidoo, has turned several dominant storylines on their heads. The lavishly illustrated book is the latest offering from the stable of heritage publisher Micromega.

Prominent among the contested narratives is the image of the passive Indian mythologised by Gandhian non-violence. They argue that Indian workers have a powerful track record of rising in revolt in the face of injustice. In the authors’ view, the 1913 strike, which had 20,000 Indian workers down tools, is the largest single mobilisation of workers to threaten the stability of the state.

Dispensing with the usual reliance on domestic sources, the authors scoured untapped archives including the United States Library of Congress and the American press of the period. The New York Tribune of 18 November 1913 is cited at some length saying: “The East Indian residents of Natal today declared a general strike which was accompanied by rioting and the burning of sugar plantations. The police force is insufficient to deal with the rioters, and white women and children are in a state of terror. Troops have been ordered to some of the disaffected districts. In Durban itself practically the whole East Indian community struck work and became so aggressive that a demand was made for the proclamation of martial law… The revolt of the East Indians was brought about by the exclusive laws in force against them…” The quote is accompanied by a graphic cartoon showing a group of strikers, one with a hitched sari and a clenched fist.

The authors stress that in 1946, “Indians rose in revolt yet again” with the Passive Resistance Campaign that defied residential racial segregation by the Durban Municipal Council, which was a forerunner to the 1950 Group Areas Act. Thousands were sentenced to hard labour under the radical leadership of Dr Monty Naicker, Dr K Goonam, Kesval Moonsamy and MD Naidoo of the Natal Indian Congress.

The authors take the view that the Natal Indian Congress campaign “was in good part to inspire the celebrated 1952 Defiance Campaign Against Unjust Laws”. To back up the claim they refer to the robust debates in planning the 1952 programme, about which volunteer-in-chief, Nelson Mandela, wrote in Long Walk to Freedom: “[T]he state was far more powerful than we, and any attempts at violence by us would be devastatingly crushed. This made non-violence a practical necessity rather than an option.” In this instance it appears that Indian Opinion editor Manilal Gandhi had a profound impact on the direction of Mandela’s thinking at a time when other African countries were mounting armed resistance to colonial rule.

In the apartheid repression that followed, with the 1956 Treason Trial and the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, it became clear that non-violence was a limiting and frustrating strategy.

The Indian Africans is a fresh take on the contested terrain of race, ethnicity, identity and political strategy. The authors took up the challenge from the activist photographer and poet Omar Badsha that the history of South Africans of Indian descent has to be looked at through African lenses. The book produced by the amateur historians is a thoughtful addition to the growing literature on worker-inspired narratives.

Dr Imraan Buccus is senior research associate at the Auwal Socio-Economic Research Institute.