THE INDIAN AFRICANS
As South Africa marks 160 years of the arrival of the first Indian indentured workers, this is an edited excerpt from the authors’ book The Indian Africans to be launched this weekend.
The Indian presence in South Africa came through various routes. In the millennium before the Dutch conquest of the Cape in 1652, one theory put forward by Cyril Hromnik points to Dravidian goldminers having settled in Southern Africa. Their likely port of entry was present day Maputo traversing Komatipoort, a name derived from Tamil, and travelling beyond into the Karoo.
Much easier to demonstrate are the Indian slaves from Bengal, Surat, the Coromandel and Malabar coasts trafficked by slave-trading Europeans to the Cape since the mid-seventeenth century. Anna Böeseken, a founder of the Genealogical Society noted that over 50% of Cape slaves in the 17th and 18th centuries were Indian. Nigel Worden refers to Cupido, a slave from Malabar who in desperation about his enslavement threatened his mistress with a knife and was subjected to a slow death being broken on the wheel. Cupido remains a common surname in the Western Cape.
The better-known migration is that of Indian indentured workers to the plantations, railways, coal mines and domestic service of colonial Natal between 1860 and 1911 numbering 152 184 souls transported on 384 ships. While these numbers might sound large, they pale in comparison against the massive upheaval in African societies in Southern Africa during this period.
Colonial conquest was accompanied by the impoverishment of the African peasantry and the destruction of their economic base. In addition, forced taxation drove thousands upon thousands of Africans into the oppressive migrant labour system mainly on the gold mines of the Witwatersrand. Present day South Africa has yet to recover from the seismic impact of this colonial greed and destruction of settled societies.
Britain’s systematic extraction of the wealth of India and the violent destruction of its economy is starkly demonstrated by Shashi Tharoor in among others, “An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India”. That destruction was a push factor for indenture. In an elaborate ‘coolie catching’ system, recruiters or ‘arkatiyas’ deliberately targeted people driven to desperation.
Peppered among these Indian migrations were the handful of workers brought to Natal before 1860 by individual planters to work in agricultural experimentation with crops like indigo.
The first four Indians with experience in sugar cultivation were brought to the colony by Ephraim Rathbone in 1849. Baboo Naidoo arrived in the colony from Mauritius in 1855. Candasami Kuppusami believes that Naidoo arrived with a Mr Clarkson. Surendra Bhana and Joy Brain citing Muller suggest that he may have been brought by Edmund Morewood or Rathbone.
Naidoo was to emerge as a man of considerable influence both as an interpreter and a businessman. He opened the first Indian shop in the Durban central business district in 1861 and may eventually have made his way to the diamond fields of Kimberley. Bhana and Brain found the name Baboo Naidoo in some of the Kimberley
records in 1870 and believe it to be the same person. A photograph presented by the family to the local museum suggests that one of the men with Naidoo is Cecil John Rhodes. In 1876 he was among three Indians licensed to sell wine and spirits in Kimberley. Clearly a fascinating pioneering personality of the Indian presence in South Africa warranting further investigation.
A class of “free Indian” merchants or people paying their own passage started to arrive in the 1870s outside of any arrangement between the governments of India and Natal. Landing variously from Gujarat, Bombay and Mauritius, their main interest was trade. There were in addition interpreters, teachers, clerks, accountants, lawyers and clerics brought out to service the needs of the growing Indian community.
While there are good records of indentured arrivals, the same is not the case with “passenger Indians”. Details of their commercial, educational or religious activity is however well documented in the literature, in institutional and family records. One must however not gloss over the historic tension between the commercial elite and the indentured class, with the former having gone to great lengths to distinguish themselves as a class apart. Gujarati Muslims in both the Transvaal and Natal preferred identification as Arabs. As a group, irrespective of faith they were also referred to as “Bombay merchants” or “Bombay traders”, distinct from the plantation coolies. In time, another colonial-born elite was to emerge as professionals and business people but conscious of their indentured origins.
Indian soldiers were also part of British regiments in the Anglo-zulu, Anglo-basotho and Anglo-boer Wars with some opting to remain after being decommissioned. The Sikh and Pathan presence in South Africa are accounted for in part by these soldiers. Nearly 18000 Indian soldiers served in the Anglo-boer War. A War Memorial on Observatory Ridge in Johannesburg records on a tablet: “To the memory of British Officers, Natives NCOS and Men, Veterinary Assistants, Nalbands and Followers of the Indian Army who died in South Africa, 1899-1902”.
Whatever the motivation or avenue of arrival, a prominent narrative of Natal’s economic history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the unhappy saga of indenture. The labour policy of indenture arose in the wake of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834. There was nothing benevolent about indenture. Hugh Tinker in his exhaustive study on indentured labour borrowed Lord John Russel’s 1840 coining of the term “new system of slavery”.
Tinker argues that slavery left a legacy which the colonial and imperialist powers had no real interest in overcoming. A convincing case can be made that indenture reproduced the actual conditions of slavery. Physical labour was favoured over mechanisation. Indenture was characterised by intense violence including summary physical, psychological and economic punishments. Women were especially vulnerable to sexual violence and exploitation. Freedom of movement was heavily constrained even when passes could be obtained. The disproportionate number of women created unstable relationships, social ills and immense difficulty in creating family life.
Henry Polak took the view that indenture was a system of temporary slavery. Prinisha Badassy cites him as saying that Indians were treated as “a mere chattel, a machine, a commercial asset to be worked to its fullest capacity, regardless of the human element, careless of the play of human passions. The system lends itself to heartlessness and cruelty, if not on the part of the employers, then on that of his Sidars and overseers.”
Revisionist historians toy with suggestions of people leaving their homes in search of a better life and indeed some finding that in the colonies. While there may be some merit in those assessments, experiences varied. The records demonstrate that Natal was among the most violent and vicious in the treatment of indentured workers – rape, torture, murder, denial of food and earnings, and codified racial discrimination. Our bias is in telling the stories of the (in)human exploitation of the working people from whom we are descended.