A story of strength, endurance
In a three-part series, and in the run-up to the commemoration of the arrival of Indians to South Africa on November 16, 1860, Betty Govinden, a member of the 1860 Heritage Centre’s research and development unit, writes about a woman of peace and calm, Se
I am a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That’s me.
Maya Angelou
WHEN you meet Senthamani Govender, also known as Salatchi, and affectionately known to us as Granny, you are immediately drawn to her. Granny, who was 87 on her last birthday, is the epitome of strength and grace. She is composed and focused, with a remarkable memory of her young days, which she recalls with spirit.
Granny is among the many ordinary women of indentured stock, who were born in South Africa and who struggled against the odds to establish a life for themselves and their families in this country. Her life is a remarkable story of endurance and strength in the building of this country. We need to remember that women and men, whose names never get into the history books, also shape a lot of our history.
Listening to Granny’s story, I realise that here is a woman who moved six times in her lifetime. She settled into and adapted to a new home, only to move, for one reason or another, to a new place of abode. Her relocations were due to personal circumstance as much as to the vicissitudes of fortune and government policy.
In her life, we see played out the wider general story of South Africa – land of both discrimination and of opportunity.
Her story shows that the personal and private life is always entrammelled in the wider public domain. Indeed, her story – of settling down in a home, dismantling it or being separated from it, and establishing a new home, of constantly making new beginnings – is a perennial, universal one.
Her story of loss and restoration echoes in the lives of countless human beings, especially those dispersed across continents, settling in a land of adoption. Yet, it is in the particularities of each story, especially those of individual women such as Granny, that we appreciate the contradictions and pressures played out in a single life.
Granny was born on November 29, 1923, in Nonoti Park, in the Natal North Coast, and her birth was registered nine days later, on December 8, 1923. Records reveal that the day of the week on which she was born was a Thursday, already suggesting that as “Thursday’s child, she had far to go”.
Granny hails from indentured stock, her father coming from India to work on the tea estates in the Natal Colony at the turn of the 20th century. His name was Kandasami Sami Gounden (Colonial Born Number 92720). He arrived in Durban in April, 1902, at the age of 25, from the village of Kolapaloor in the District of North Arcot in Madras, India. Kandasami came on the ship Umlazi XVII.
His employer was William R Hindson, who owned Clifton Tea Estate, in Nonoti, in the Stanger area. On Granny’s birth certificate, her father’s occupation is listed as “labourer”. She recalls that he also worked as a chauffeur for a white farmer at Nonoti, who was referred to as Ignis.
Her father would occasionally ride a horse, given to him by his employer, and he would travel around the Estate, supervising the workers. The photograph above portrays a person of strong will and determination.
It also suggests strong individuality and contradicts the white, colonial practice of referring to all Indians derogatively and anonymously as “Sammy” or “Mary”, according to gender.
Granny points out that there were also sugar cane plantations, on which Africans and Indians worked together, and there was much mutual tolerance and respect between the two groups of labourers.
The meeting and interaction of peoples from diverse backgrounds in the same colonial space is a feature of plantation history, even while a chasm existed between employer and employee.
Meera Kosambi, drawing from Mary Louise Pratt and Indira Ghose, speaks of the “notion of the ‘contact zone’ – the social space where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination, like colonialism” (Kosambi 2003:5).
This was true of the Hindson Estate as it was of similar estates elsewhere. William Robert Hindson was born in Cumberland in 1852 and developed his skills as a “tea-taster” from an early age.
He came to South Africa in 1879 and amassed a considerable fortune through his work as an accountant and financial agent on the diamond mines in Kimberley. He purchased the Clifton Estate in the Kearsney District, a property of 350 acres.
By 1892, the Estate had expanded to cover 4 000 acres, and the commercial department was managed by Kenneth A Brown. The brand of tea that was produced here was “Natalinda” and even secured a gold medal in South Africa in 1905.
The Estate had advanced technology for its time, and was able to show an impressive turnover of tea.
So phenomenal was the growth in general that in 1902 a number of 19 000 “c ****** ” were applied for from the Immigration Department, as “c ***** ” labour was deemed indispensable to the development of the tea industry.
It is important to note the contribution of Granny’s parents, and so many others, to making this enterprise profitable.
Granny’s mother, Alamelu Vythilingam (Colonial Born Number 104770), came to work on the same farm two years later in 1904.
Alamelu, who was 22 years old when she came from India, hailed from Tanjore, in the district of Nagpur, Madras. She came on the ship Umlazi XXII. She also went to work at Hindson Tea Estates, and it is clear that is where Alamelu and Kandasami met and later married.
Granny does not know if they were still indentured at this time, and whether they required permission to marry. By 1906, Granny’s father and mother were among the 500 Indian workers on this highly successful tea estate, with four “European” officers (see Twentieth Century Impressions 1906:318).
Who were Alamelu and Kandasami? Why did they leave India? What were they like? What was their long transoceanic voyage from India like? How did they feel about crossing the kala pani?
What were their experiences on the Tea Estate in this outpost in Natal? Did they have families they left behind in India? What were their difficulties on the Estate? Did they long for their homeland?
What trauma of indentured exile did they experience? Did they want to go back to India? How did their sense of identity change with time? How did memory (of India) and experience (of the Colony) coalesce?
What were the specific things, real and imagined, that they brought in their gunny sacks? How different or similar were their experiences, compared to those of the other “c ****** ”?
As girmityas, what coercion did they experience, what resistance did they display? How did they cope with some of the challenges of their new life, given that a “new vocabulary had to be learnt, an unfamiliar geography explored, a new terrain mastered, new pragmatic social relationships established” (Lal 2004:26)?
These and many more questions are not answered by the standardised, monochromatic “Ship’s List” that was completed for each immigrant, and which is our only link in many instances to that past.
There is much in the past of Granny’s parents that is a blank page. At a time when sheer survival preoccupied the immigrants, and when there was no valuing of one’s life and story, or when one did not have the resources to record one’s story, this is understandable.