IN COMMEMORATING the 165th anniversary of the first indentured workers arriving in their African homes on November 16, 1860, we must acknowledge that this history is far more complex than ordinarily summarised.
In comparison to other former imperial colonies like Reunion, Mauritius, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Fiji, South African scholarship on indenture has been limited to a small cohort of historians, only able to uncover a range that is possible in the average lifespan of an academic.
Eminent scholar on indenture in South Africa, Surendra Bhana’s challenge in 1987 to future scholars to unpack the 75 linear meters of archival data that exists in the archive may never be fully realised if we don’t encourage and devote more time and energy towards developing historians that are devoted to telling the story of indenture.
In the last 51 years since Huge Tinker’s seminal and detailed study on indenture, ‘A New System of Slavery,’ many attempts to understand indenture have been reduced to debating the veracity between free and unfree (coerced) labour. Revisionist scholars have sought to locate Indian indenture as part of the global phenomenon of migration that took place in the 19th and 20th centuries that contributed to the building of the modern world and not reducing these Indian indentured workers to being incapable of significant achievements like their fellow travelers all over the world.
While we must be mindful of not allowing revisionist scholarship to foreground imperial apology in shadowing the truer reflection of the indentured experience in the colonies, it would be equally disrespectful and false if we do not tell stories of agency among Indian indentured workers who contributed to the building of the modern world we know today.
In South Africa, the movement beyond subjugation and enslavement on the plantations was far quicker than in other colonies. In less than 30 years and well before the time that Mohandas Gandhi arrived in Natal in 1894, indentured workers were leaving the plantations, having risen to become highly-trained professionals, lawyers, civil servants, accountants, teachers, and newspaper publishers.
Maureen Swan’s Gandhi the South African Experience reveals that many of these Natal-born colonials were the offspring of indentured or ex-indentured parents. She highlights the extraordinary success in those early years that included names like Albert Christopher, James Godfrey, and Joseph Royeppen, all London-trained barristers, and successful farmer Charlie Nulliah Naidoo, whose family celebrations were lavish enough to excite the attention of most white citizens of Pietermaritzburg.
In South Africa, farming was especially crucial to ex-indentured labourers.
There were 2 000 Indian market gardeners in and around Durban by 1885, and by 1910 Indians owned 10 000 acres of arable land in Natal and leased a further 42 000 acres. Photographs of Indian houses and settlements and houses from the end of the 19th century show that those who had moved off the plantations had, by this date, acquired sufficient capital to build themselves substantial properties.
Beyond the material advancement of indentured workers, a particularly understudied area of the agency is the area of re-indenture, which showed their ability to use the system of indenture to their advantage. By the turn of the 19th century and against the imposition of the 3-pound tax, serving their full term of indenture and returning to India on a free passage, a significant proportion of indentured migrants were unable or unwilling to reintegrate into Indian society for various reasons and proceeded to re-indentured or re-embarked to other indenture colonies as a result of their dislocation in India.
The Indian Immigration Ordinance of 1891 in colonial Natal stipulated that re-indenture was to be fixed for a period of three years and that the old immigrant would sign a certificate in the presence of the employer and a magistrate, thus showing that there was no coercion involved for re-indenturing.
The many cases of re-indentured Indians in Natal warranted the setup of a separate administrative office where a Clerk of Re-Indenture was employed by the Protector of Indian immigrants to manage the flow of indentured workers wanting to re-indenture. Located in the Pietermaritzburg archive is a letter dated November 11, 1912, addressed to the Office of the Protector of Immigrants requesting for the re-indenture of five workers to the Beaumont Tobacco plantations, immediately after their 5-year indentured contract, forgoing their free return passage to India on the completion of their original indentured contract.
Another example of the indentured turning re-indenture is cited by Latchmi, indenture no: 72759, who requested to be re-indentured after her husband took their 12-year-old son with him to India after they had completed their term of indenture.
After being deserted with the two other children, Latchmi lived with an indentured worker by the name of Narsiah by whom she had one child, requesting to re-indenture to the Wattle Plantation that Narsiah was indentured. There was also a great sense of mobility among the indentured, as revealed in the statement of Amirtham that shows the degree of mobility that some former indentured worker families experienced, to reunite their family.
Her deposition derived from Bhana S. & Pachai, B’s A Documentary History of Indian South Africans, made on September 4, 1895, in Natal, reveals that she had travelled extensively between Reunion (Bourbon), Mauritius, India, and South Africa, in search of her husband:
I am the wife of Seeniwasa Padayachi... I was married to my husband at Bourbon about 17 years ago. I lived with him for 10 1⁄2 years in Bourbon. I had five children by him... About 7 years ago my husband left me at ‘Bourbon’ taking with him 2 boys... I went to India and searched for them at Pondichery and other places but could not find them.
Then I started for Mauritius, stayed there 15 days and searched for them, but could not find them. I then went to Bourbon and stayed there for a year, went back to India, stayed there for 7 months, returned again to Bourbon and remained there 3 years, when I received a letter from my eldest son Sawapathy giving me the full particulars of my husband and himself. At once I started for Madras and then made enquiries at the Indian Emigration Office there. They informed me that my husband emigrated for Natal with a woman named Valliammal as his wife...
I then started for Natal with my youngest son Gurusamy and arrived here in December 1894... I found my son Sondram there. He told me that my husband was in Swaziland.
Amirtham eventually caught up with her husband in Natal, but he refused to leave his new wife and return to live with her. It is not known where she eventually ended her travels. Her story is nevertheless a striking testimony to the impulsion for us to relook at indenture against the populist gaze of neo-slavery.
It would be equally foolish to suggest that, despite the horrendous conditions that indentured workers endured, workers did not succeed in obtaining a measure of personal improvement from the system of indenture. Many of them returned to their places of origin, re-indenturing or, in some cases, returning as passenger traders with substantial savings in their adopted homeland. Others became farmers, shopkeepers, school teachers, and even plantation owners themselves.
Selvan Naidoo is the great grandson of Camachee, indentured no: 3297, and director at the 1860 Heritage Centre.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.