First published in Daily Maverick 168.

Race, ethnicity, identity and the story of the struggle for South African freedom get turned on their head in a lavish new book. The Indian Africans is co-authored by United Democratic Front co-founder Paul David, along with Ranjith Choonilall, Kiru Naidoo and Selvan Naidoo.

Choonilall remarks: “Our goal was to tell the story of indenture within the richer tapestry of deepening nonracialism and building a common nationhood.” That theme runs across the book in short chapters that variously look at food, culture and history.

Fresh insights came from the diary of a ship’s captain, Max de Gruyter, who commanded various vessels taking the bonded workers from India to colonial Natal from the last decade of the 19th century into the first decade of the 20th century.

Indian workers were shipped to far-flung corners of the British Empire from Fiji to Mauritius and the Caribbean. Even the Danish colony of Saint Croix and the Dutch possession of Guiana were happy to replace slave labour with indenture. De Gruyter talks about sleeping and bathing arrangements, romances, births, deaths and more.

The fourth author, political analyst Kiru Naidoo, stresses that the greater value of the book is that it publishes, for the first time, images on board indenture ships. De Gruyter kept a meticulous record, which he reflected on in his columns in the Lourenço Marques English language Guardian newspaper in the 1930s. “This is an uncanny record that is a radical shift from the reliance on official documentation and third-party records of oral testimonies,” says Kiru Naidoo.

The authors have looked to match the photographs with the ship lists of De Gruyter’s voyages to put names to faces. Unlike other colonies that have pictures of every indentured worker landed, those images are missing in the Natal records.

In studying De Gruyter’s notes, which were shared by his grandson Stewart Fairbairn in Australia, the authors extended their detective work to local newspapers and almanacs of the period. They found that De Gruyter himself kept two indentured workers on his property in Durban. They could have been retained as domestic servants.

The latter part of the book tells vignettes of especially young South Africans of Indian origin making their mark in the country. There is a reference to Previn Vedan, elected as one of the youngest municipal councillors in the country, who has worked to bridge the divide between Indian and African communities in his constituency in Chatsworth.

Interestingly, The Indian Africans draws on Cyril Hromník’s theory that Dravidian goldminers were settled in southern Africa in the millennium before the Dutch conquest in 1652. The evidence cited is from linguistic and archaeological evidence. They similarly point to genealogical research arguing that 50% of all Cape slaves were of Indian origin.

The book is dedicated to David, who recently passed away just days short of his 80th birthday and before the publication. The Indian Africans will be available nationwide at the beginning of December. DM168

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