Shining new light on the indentured past
New, exploratory accounts of history always require close inspection in forging well-grounded perspectives for the world we live in today. The book launch of An Incredible Journey from India: An Untold Part of South African History by Mansingh (aka Jaipaul) Narrandes is one such book, providing fresh insight into the indentured history. Narrandes, who was born in Ladysmith and now lives in the UK, said the book used evidence from his family history that was placed into a wider historical context. In his own research, Narrandes inherited by chance vital, rare, original and authentic documents from his Aunt Betty, that she kept with her in the UK. These have provided a picture, not only of his own family but of Indian indentured life from 1860 and beyond.
IT IS everyone’s wish to find out where we came from. As a human being, I doubt we will ever know how the human race came into being.
History has so many different theories. Was it the fossil found in the Transvaal in 2015 that dates it back 2 million years ago?
With this new technology that is at our disposal, it is amazing what we can find out of the past. Let’s step down from this theory and discover how we have arrived in the country where we live.
To know ourselves, who we are, and where we are going, we must delve into our past, where we came from and the people who preceded us, and how they strove to overcome obstacles in the pursuit of happiness for themselves and their descendants.
In my own search I was fortunate, inheriting quite by chance some vital rare, original and authentic documents from my Aunt Betty.
These give us an illuminating picture not only of my own family but also of Indian indentured life at a crucial period in the history of South Africa.
If we can’t recall the past, we will repeat our mistakes. Everyone loves to think they embrace change, but character, opinions, habits and behaviour are typically fairly settled by age 16.
So if you really want to know your goal, look back and study history. We live in a busy world when few bother to read whole serious books like The Incredible Journey from India: An Untold Part of South African History, preferring to gather information from Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, etc.
But such snippets cannot substitute for a proper appreciation of the context and detail of the life of an entrepreneur or a person who left behind their own legacy.
The Incredible Journey from India is a true story. It shows that when the Indians set sail from India for a better life in 1860, they were no pushovers. It set the scene for what follows.
It is addressed primarily to South African readers of the present generation, most of whom are in the dark about their history.
The Indians here were the first set of people who downed tools when they were ill-treated. The Indian government, pressured by public opinion and outraged by the barbarous mistreatment of its sons and daughters in Natal, ended emigration to the Natal colony on July 14, 1866. This ban was lifted in June 1874.
Remember, the Natal indentured were the first to bring the colony to its knees, and not India. We South African Indians should be proud of this legacy.
The mass of Africans, apart from a handful of political scholars, are ignorant about the Indian presence in South Africa. Many still refer to the Indians as “coolies”.
So let’s look, for instance, at the origin of the word “coolie”. Few people, even the Indians, know it is derived from “kuli”, the Tamil word for wages.
I am proud to be called a coolie. I hope that some of these people, particularly the politically mature among them, will appreciate that the Indians, the so-called coolies, not only helped to build modern South Africa, but played a heroic role in the Struggle, which ended in the triumph of a free, independent, sovereign, secular and non-racial democratic nation.
The only justification for this book is that I have something new to say, supported with letters, documents and photographs. I also like to think this is being said in an attractive and well-informed way.
The Indians were deeply divided. There were the merchants, with their unashamed agenda for trading rights in white areas, and the indentured, with their demands for the universal franchise and an end to white domination.
Gandhi himself used the indentured as a bargaining counter in his efforts to get Natal to abandon its discriminatory trading policies.
It is against this background that we now look at the role of the chief actors in our drama, the Narrandes Brothers.
They refused to have anything to do with the politics of opportunism and treachery, and they rejected the anti-African policies of Gandhi and the merchant class. They gave their all to the self-reliance and caring and sharing of the Indentured. They did not make the mistake of dividing the Struggle into separate compartments.
This is best illustrated by the Narrandes’s combination of social work with sport, an overall integrated strategy that was to prove quite effective in the broader Struggle.
When sugar was first produced from cane in Natal in 1851, the colony seemed set for an economic boom. There was one problem: a lack of cheap labour. This was a big concern, as some public figures at the time were becoming concerned about the lack of good cheap labourers.
Before 1860, when 1 500 Indians came to South Africa in the first batch, there was a lot of political debate about the introduction of foreign labourers to man the sugar cane farms in Natal. This was the main form of income for the colony and the white farmers were experiencing problems with their own labourers.
The Incredible Journey from India: An Untold Part of South African History, deals with the harsh realities that the indentured faced from their recruitment in India, their stormy and perilous passage to Natal and their experiences in that colony.
It breaks new ground in that it shows Gandhi in an entirely different light to that portrayed by most historians of the Indians in South Africa.
Narrandes has donated his book to be sold at the 1860 Heritage Centre. All proceeds will be donated to the centre