The venue was Ike’s Bookshop in Florida Road, Durban. The date, 2 October 2025. The occasion was the launch of Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed’s “Belonging: A History of Indian South Africans”.
Drifting through the bookshelves came the sounds of Qawwali as the singer’s voice melted into the harmonium and tabla. The voice from where I was standing sounded like the sage of Tamil music, Karthigesan. But as I was later to learn, Karthigesan was in hospital, and it was his son singing. It sounded uncannily the same.
As the son went on to explain, he had sat at his father’s side as a toddler. For this was an ancient craft, and his father was one of the few left. He wanted his son to carry on this tradition.
When Ashwin Desai took to the floor, he explained that this vignette of father and son (mother was on the harmonium) was what their book was about.
The system of Indian indenture was meant to turn people into labouring machines. They were given numbers and their movement confined to the plantation.
Files in the archives show that these prohibitions were challenged. Desai pointed to the case of Durga indentured number 84560. He was indentured to WB Turner of Howick. What was he doing when Turner assaulted him?
Durga told the Indian Protector in 1903 that at around 7pm, he and “the other Indians were sitting in my house and passing our time by singing songs. My master came to the house and took the drum from me and dropped it on the ground. When it didn’t break he went and brought an axe and chopped it into four pieces.”
Turner acknowledged breaking the drum “because they would not stop playing and singing all night after repeated warnings”.
Of course, as the Qawwali turned to Tamil, it showed that people like Durga never stopped playing.
Atmosphere
As the music played through history, the atmosphere was unlike anything I had ever experienced at a book launch. Ike’s is a very special venue. Joanne, the owner, has been there for exactly 25 years. It has a longer lineage, started in View Street in Overport by the legendary Ike Mayet.
Desai and Vahed have produced a remarkable document of history, raiding a number of sources. Innovatively, they use material from the diaries of plantation bosses.
The excerpts from Charles Smythe make for wonderful, if painful, reading. Smythe recorded of his first batch of indentured labourers that they “will be all right in a month or two, but they are not much use at present”.
One of them was “lazy as well as very dirty”, and Smythe dipped him in McDougal’s Mixture, which was used for sheep. Despite his initial misgivings, Smythe wrote in July 1882 that the indentured workers “were well worth their pay”. Their one vice “was a weakness for smoking dagga (marijuana), as a result of which one of them had gone blind one day when out herding sheep”. He regained his eyesight after three days. Dagga had made another worker “temporarily insane”. Smythe locked him up at night in his hut to prevent him from wandering off.
The amount of material the book synthesises, as Desai and Vahed resurrect the tenure of Indian Agent-General Sastri, the emergence of working-class leaders George Poonen and HA Naidoo, and the stunning turnaround in the 1950s that inspired the Congress Alliance, makes for riveting reading.
But there is more to come. They tackle the challenge of the Black Consciousness Movement to apartheid identities, the enduring capacity of the Natal Indian Congress through the 1970s, as the Group Areas Act decimates old communities and new ones start to emerge in the large, barren dormitory townships of Chatsworth and Phoenix.
As they discuss the rise of a professional class in the 1970s and 1980s, they do not allow statistics to overwhelm the narrative; instead, they constantly return to individual biographies. Jairam Reddy is one of those, a child of an indentured labourer, who rises to become the first black vice-chancellor of the University of Durban-Westville (UDW).
The final chapters bring the book into the present, dealing with an insurgent racial nationalism, the vexed issue of Indo-African relations and the persistence of apartheid categories to pursue redress. Once more, the book moves seamlessly from the giddy heights of theory to the everyday lived experience.
As I leave, I think of one of the haunting stories in the book that was relayed at the launch:
Moonien and his wife emigrated to Natal in 1893, leaving their daughter Aiyamah with Moonien’s sister in Madras. She was two years old. The plan was to make some money and then return home. But once indenture had run its course, the couple realised that, on balance, they might be better off starting a new life in Natal. News from home, conveyed by newly arrived indentured workers, was not good. The aftermath of drought and then a devastating famine was still being felt. More and more, peasants were being forced off the land and into a life of begging. By now, Moonien had found work as a barman in Duffs Road, Durban. They pined for Aiyamah. Would their 12-year-old daughter be able to join them?
British Raj officials in Madras held that she would have to go as ‘a coolie emigrant’. Given their own experiences of indenture, how could they sign up their child to five years of servitude? They counted up their meagre savings. Everything would be put into paying for her passage. With some help, Moonien penned a letter on 6 April 1903 on which he pinned all his hopes. It was addressed to Parry & Co., the emigration agents for Natal. In it Moonien explained the circumstances of the parents’ separation from their child and their indentured service, and ended with these heart-rending words: ‘I beg you will address the agents at Madras, giving them authority to embark my said daughter by the emigration steamer upon my undertaking to pay for her passage. Of course, it will be understood that the girl should be delivered over to me on her arrival at the Port of Natal. This would be an act of charity, for which I would prove myself always worthy.’
With payment made, letter sent, and the request accepted, Moonien went alone to the port, fearing that if his wife did not see her Aiyamah, it would be too much for her to bear. We have no record of his first glimpse of the daughter he did not know. But what we can surmise is that somewhere in the vicinity of Duffs Road, late one evening in June 1903, a mother held her daughter for the first time.
Desai and Vahed are an incongruous pairing. Both brilliant intellectuals, but different. Vahed slightly withdrawn, a man more at ease in a library than in front of a crowd. A historian generous in sharing his work, he has produced a startling array of books and academic articles.
Desai is the quintessential engaged intellectual, imprisoned for anti-apartheid resistance in the 1980s, a provocative, pioneering challenger to the ANC’s time in government.
This interplay of archivist and activist, historian and sociologist results in deep and meticulously crafted works of “the present as history”. In their work, the duo have fine-tuned a writing style that appeals simultaneously to the layperson and scholar.
In a world where the academy is once again hostage to convoluted theory and bewildering jargon, this is a remarkable and enviable feat.
Ike’s Bookshop too stands with all its history, in the present. Beautifully held together, it has a breathtaking range, from the Russian classics to the Heinemann African Writers series to the latest in crime fiction.
The venue, the music, the interaction between authors and crowd, made for a book launch like no other I have witnessed. DM