Where do we come from?

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 gold miners 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-17th 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 those numbers might sound large, they pale in comparison to 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 millions of Africans into the oppressive migrant labour system, mainly on the gold mines of the Witwatersrand. South Africa has yet to recover from the seismic impact of this colonial greed and the destruction of settled societies.

Across the Indian Ocean, 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. Note the common usage of the word “arkaat” in South African Indian English used to describe a person of bad character.

Peppered among these Indian migrations were the handful of workers brought to Natal before 1860 by individual planters to assist 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.

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, shop assistants, and clerics brought out to service the needs of the growing Indian community.

Indian soldiers were also part of British regiments in the Anglozulu, Anglo-basotho and Angloboer Wars, as well as the two World Wars, with some opting to remain after being decommissioned. The Sikh, Pathan and Gurkha presences in South Africa are accounted for in part by these soldiers.

Nearly 18 000 Indian soldiers served in the Anglo-boer wars. A war memorial on Observatory Ridge in Johannesburg records on a tablet: “To the memory of British Officers, Native 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 19th century was the unhappy saga of indenture.

In the third decade of the new millennium, new challenges abound. Covid-19 has compelled people all over the world to reset systems and priorities. The sensible will see the world as one, that there is more that unites the human race than divides it.

A particularly oppressive system of labour bondage in the form of indenture brought the majority of Indians to South Africa in the 19th century. Their descendants are the Indian Africans who have seized the opportunities beyond indenture but must yet still fully embrace the possibilities to change the world from within.