Commemorating 162 years since indentured workers arrived in SA

Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter –

FACED with a labour drought, the sugar cane planters managed to persuade the colonial government to organise the importation of bonded labour from another British possession, India. The indentured workers, therefore, came from India from 1860 up to 1911 on board 384 ships carrying some 152 184 souls.

Their purpose was to provide labour in growing the colonial economy of British Natal. A life of pain and hardship followed as they experienced a new life in in Africa.

In a nutshell, as explained by Kathryn Pillay in her academic paper titled, The Coolies Here: Exploring the construction of an Indian ‘Race’ in Southern Africa, Indians came to Southern Africa to fill a labour shortage. Slavery had been abolished and sugar cane planters were left with a labour challenge as African people refused to engage in the arduous physical labour that working in the plantations entailed, especially for the pay that was offered.

The explanation of the term ‘indenture’ and ‘coolie’

According to Rachel Sturman, in her piece, Indian Indentured Labor and the History of International Rights Regimes, in earlier periods in England, the term “indenture” was used in reference to an agreement binding an apprentice to a master.

The specific colonial usage referred to the contract by which an individual agreed to work for a fixed period for a colonial landowner in exchange for a passage

to a colony, and earned a wage accommodation and food rations.

Freedom of movement was not permitted in the term of indenture. While indenture was the system associated par excellence with Asian, especially Indian labour movements, immediately after the era of slavery, it was also associated with English and Irish “servant” moving to the colonies.

The term indenture draws on the root dent, ultimately based on Latin dens (tooth), referring to the indented or serrated edges of the contract by means of which the original and duplicate copy could be separated by being torn or clipped off (note also the general related word indentation).

As is well-known, points out Sturman, the indentured labourers of Indian origin generally called the system of indenture girmit (agreement in English). This word is known throughout the indentured diaspora in exactly this form – and hence clearly arose in India itself, before being taken to the colonies.

As is also well-known, as observed by Sturman, the migrants styled themselves as girmitya in Hindi (according to Wikipedia, girmitiya or jahajus were indentured Indian labourers whom the British Empire sent to

Fiji, Mauritius, South Africa, and the Caribbean – mostly Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, and Jamaica – to work on sugar cane plantations for the benefit of European settlers).

The agentive suffix -ya adding the meaning “one associated with” – hence the term means one who signed the girmit.

In Tamil, the equivalent term occurred as girmit karan, the term karan referring to “man”, with the related term kari for “female”. Girmit has been taken up as an iconic term by Indian South Africans, evoking the harsh world of plantation work, but not without pride in the commitment of the preceding generations.

There seems to be some kind of general consensus among South African scholars, especially of Indian descent, that while there are many studies focusing on indenture and indentured labourers, this vast and intensive body of work regarding people of Indian descent in South Africa lacks personal history, individual narratives, and experience.

It is, however, gratifying that more recent scholarship, such as that by Uma Dhupelia-mesthrie, Goolam Vahed and Ashwin Desai, have attempted to move the historiography of indenture in Natal focusing on the intimacy

and terrain of the everyday lived experiences of Indians in Natal.

It is also important to mention the role played by the 1860 Heritage Centre, an agency museum of the Kwazulu-natal Department of Arts and Culture, led by the conscientiously and passionately assiduous Selvan Naidoo.

The exhibitions run by the centre are breathtaking. Most importantly, they are educational. The public is encouraged to visit the centre to, as the late sagacious and repository of African world history, the New York African-american scholar Dr Henik Clarke would say, “feel in the missing pages” of the history of indentured workers in South Africa.

Indeed, as the African proverb aptly puts it: “Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.”

As long as the lion can’t write, the hunter keeps telling his side of the story. His heroic acts in the jungle, his expeditions, medals and bravery are glorified in all of his stories. He could say that the lion runs away and hides on his arrival, scared of him.

He could tell stories of how he saved the animals under the attack of the lion. He may describe the stories of the cruel and barbaric nature of the lion and how he spared its life when he caught it. The people who listen to him will trust him as they don’t know the other side of the story.

But by the time lion learns to read and write, it can debate and reject many of the claims, revealing the true nature of the hunter. It can write its version of the story saying how scared the hunter is on seeing the lion, how he survived on dead animals, how cruel he was to the small and innocent creatures, and how he hunts down animals for fun. It can describe how he trapped the animals and tortured them to death and how he disobeyed the laws of the forest.

Although the explanation is the literal description of the sentence, it has a more subtle meaning. Every time a civilised society is established in history, a barbaric tribe or invaders attack and destroy their history and re-write what they intend it to be. It was the reason many of the flourished civilisations remained in history. Their cultures, languages and religions were lost. Some of the invaders who destroyed them are hailed as great emperors.

The stories of the war are told by the one who won it. Most of the emperors are described as great because no one dares to write against them. The invaders eradicate the cultural identity of native kingdoms and establish their rule as if they are doing them a favour.

Then the religious practices and ceremonies are ridiculed. Finally, they instil a sense of inferiority in the native people and exploit it in their favour. The colonisation, too, followed this pattern.

This concept is widely applicable to many events in history. And it frankly describes to us that what we call history is just one side of the story.