The struggles of a disrupted family unit

Colonialism and indenture are to blame for the social issues black and Indian families still face

A RIVETING Youtube social experiment called the $100 Race, questions how we understand privilege. The online video shows a group of college students gathered for a 100m race. At the starting line, each student is asked to take two steps forward if they experienced what most people would call a normal family existence. If they had not, they had to stay at the start.

Questions like, take two steps forward if you grew up with a father figure in your home; take two steps forward if you had access to private education; and so the questions go on. At the end, the students closer to the finishing line are asked to look back. All the students stuck close to the starting line were black.

The purpose of the experiment was to acknowledge privilege – or lack thereof. The starting point for each runner was determined by his or her social situation and, from the start, it was clearly an unfair race.

The history of family living in South Africa for the majority of black people is important to understand. Before colonisation, black people in South Africa lived pastoral and agrarian lifestyles. The same was true of their indentured Indian brethren, shipped by the British to labour on the plantations between 1860 and 1911.

Indenture-like slavery and migrant labour disrupted family and kinship bonds to advance colonial greed. The history of black life from the Dutch invasion of 1652 reveals a sorry state of abnormal family living. Combined with the Natives Land Act of 1913, which denied black people the right to own land in the country of their birth, and the Group Areas Act, black people could never truly experience normal family lives. The phenomenon of grandmothers raising children persists to this day.

For the indentured Indians the hopes of a normal, structured family life like they had in their original homeland was a fantasy.

The yearning for a return to this is primarily what led to the unusually high rate of suicides. The low numbers of women recruited into indenture made family living virtually impossible. Many colonialists feared that the introduction of women to Natal would lead to a populous “alien menace” whose task was only to provide labour and leave once the job was done.

During the first phase of indenture, 6448 Indians were brought to the colony of Natal: 4116 men, 1463 women and 869 children. From the outset, the female quota was seen as dead stock. Over time, this attitude changed when the colonialists saw the benefits of women working hard at tasks like weeding and fertilisation.

This change of attitude gave hope to the development of a family nucleus that had significant religious, social and cultural bearings.

Up to the 1960s, the majority of the descendants of the Indian indentured continued to experience abnormal family lives that saw tens of thousands living in overcrowded barracks or extended family homesteads. Despite the barracks being periodically condemned for human habitation, these “homes” provided a semblance of normality.

Mothers and wives in an extended family were responsible for keeping the family units together in the absence of fathers. Fathers often worked long hours or double shifts, sometimes in menial jobs. The roles of women in generating income by making pickles and vedas for sale must also not be underestimated, nor must their work in places like the textile and footwear industries.

The little leisure time men had invited social ills like alcoholism. That malaise extended to the townships spurred by the Group Areas Act.

This comparison between the destruction of the African and Indian family by colonialism and indenture is an important backdrop to understanding many of the social issues facing our society. The Youtube experiment should also open our eyes to the fact that we have not all started the race in the same shoes.