South Africa quietly passed an anniversary last week, the arrival of the SS Truro in the British colonial port Durban Bay on 16 November 1860, which brought 342 women, men and children from Madras on the Indian subcontinent. Over the six months that followed, the Indian population grew to about 1,200, and expanded further to an estimated 200,000, carried on 384 ships to the colonial port. Almost all the Indians who arrived in the 1800s were indentured labourers. I gathered these thoughts through a haze of fever, aches and pains, and my usual grumpiness (it’s a strain of flu, I think), during visits to places across KwaZulu-Natal on unrelated business.
This history, and the place of the Indian community, is eloquently captured in Joanne Joseph’s historical fiction, Children of Sugarcane, which tells the story of “the cruel and patriarchal world of the British-owned sugarcane plantations of Natal”.
There were, of course, people of Indian descent who had arrived in the Cape when the Dutch brought political exiles, enslaved peoples and workers from South East Asia, where centuries of trade between India and South East Asia blended influences from Asia and South East Asia. It was after the first arrival of those exiles and enslaved people during the earliest Dutch settlement, when indigenous Africans and European settlers (newly arrived on the continent) all came together, as it were, to help shape the hybrid communities from today’s Cape Town to the north.
This hybridity is a great gift for those of us who take account of our cultural heritage or “origins”, and reminds us of the various streams of our past, and how it continues to shape the present and the future. My postie friends should not get too angry at my use of the word “hybridity” – which, though I’m not a postie (a portmanteau concept for post-modernists, post-structuralists or post-colonialists, etc), I picked up from Homi Bhabha’s work.
Vibrant South African community
We are, then, a vibrant South African community made up of predominantly indigenous African people, people of Asian (Indian and South East Asian) descent, and of Europeans who first arrived as settlers and colonialists after 1652. The European settlers who came from northeastern, western and southern Europe would insist that they are indigenous, never mind the complete lack of scientific evidence that confirms a European presence in the deepest south of the country between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. I have been reading about the climate of the southern coast of South Africa, 250,000 years ago, so these numbers are not randomly selected.
Indigenous Africans were in southern Africa thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans, and subsequently of people from western, southern and South East Asia. This should be fairly widely accepted, but European claims of being indigenous to Africa will not go away. They don’t like the evidence, but hold onto their theories or claims of indigeneity. It would be a bit like me going to one of Sweden’s most remote islands and claiming that because there was nobody on the island at the time that I arrived, all the (about 30,000) Swedish Islands belonged to me. That, really, is how absurd it is.
People may, of course, claim whatever identity that best suits them; all of which is swayed, anyway, by the caprices of fashion. Some of us are proud to be coloured and mixed, Indians are proud of their heritage and, it has to be said, one of the worst things about the old political order is that most of us don’t quite know how rich and varied and exciting and meaningful indigenous cultures are. For instance, although I speak a few words of Bapedi, I know little to nothing of the people; or any of the other indigenous cultures for that matter.
Some of us, very many of us, are descended of Khoi and/or San people, who faced forced assimilation after the arrival of the Dutch. That is why so many of us speak Afrikaans as our moedertaal. I also speak smatterings of Gujarati, one of the main languages in South Asia, Melayu, spoken by more than 200 million people in South East Asia, and Arabic, spoken by about 400 million people in the world. (It’s really fun being coloured.)
All of that aside, the arrival of Indian indentured labourers during the colonial era added to our passages of hybridity. The Indian influences on South African culture are quite brilliantly tracked and detailed by the artist and writer Parusha Naidoo. I especially liked her findings about that (not so) unique South African pickle, atchar – a staple on the South African table.
Pickle or atchar?
“Most Black South Africans call what I – a South African of Indian heritage – know as mango pickle, ‘mango atchar’. And although ‘atchar’ has its roots in India, the condiment is now seen as African in South Africa. ‘It’s up there with pap, mogodu, and dombolo,’ says chef Sanza Sandile of Yeoville Dinner Club,” Naidoo wrote in Wanted earlier this year.
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I’m not a fan of supermarket brands of atchar. It has to be made, fresh, in the back yard by an uncle (or an auntie) with gnarled fingers, working a blunt knife (!) and a dangling cigarette – which never seems to burn out, nje!
By one account, which I could not verify, the famous Komatipoort on the border between South Africa and Mozambique derived its name from Telegu. I have not tried to verify that source, and stay with the indigenous African etymology. Anyway, this is a sign, surely, of how interwoven the diverse cultures of “non-white” people is, and how we continue to define and redefine ourselves as part of this country and its cultural landscape.
Quite unscripted, I bid farewell to a group of people from the North Atlantic community a few hours ago, and said: “South Africa is an argument. And the great thing about an argument is that it’s a learning opportunity.” I thought I should write that down. DM