Bondage to freedom

Kiru Naidoo | 15 November, 2010 23:52

Sunday Times Extra (published 16 November 2010)

The Big Read: My family was shipped as human cargo. A hundred and fifty years ago today, a paddle steamer, the SS Truro from Madras, docked in Durban harbour. On board were 342 Indian coolies destined for the sugar plantations and eventually the mines, railways and domestic service of colonial Natal.

This history is depressing. But it tells of the triumph of the human spirit. Indenture was a bizarre instrument - bondage by contract. The British had outlawed slavery in 1834 yet many of their colonies hungered for cheap labour. The Zulu kingdom held the British at bay until its eventual conquest in 1879. Wage labour was a strange idea to King Mpande kaSenzangakhona's subjects.

The vast Indian subcontinent "convulsed by the British occupation" was a ready reservoir. The Industrial Revolution dumped its cheap manufactured goods, ruining the Indian village economy. Millions fell on hard times. Debt and drought ravaged the land. Add to this mix the bitter internal tensions in Indian society. Centuries-old caste and kinship laws held particularly the poor in a stranglehold. In a curious way bonding oneself for five years in a foreign land represented some kind of escape.

If the notorious recruiting agents were to be believed there was gold under every chilli bush. They were soon to discover there were no chillies in Natal, let alone gold. This "coolie catching" system beguiled the naive. It also tricked and coerced many others. It was to do so from 1860 right until 1911 with 152184 persons entered on the indenture register. Among them were "potters and clerks, herdsmen and boatmen, . undertakers, barbers, warriors and priests", painters and prostitutes.

Natal was not the only destination. Indian indenture spanned the globe from British, Dutch and French Guyana to Guadeloupe, Trinidad, Ceylon, Fiji and Mauritius.

In contracting to Natal, Fatima Meer noted that Indian workers had unwittingly chosen one of the worst conditions of labour under the indenture system. While some complied, most planters routinely breached their obligations to provide suitable lodgings, food and medical care. The Coolie Commission of 1872 enquiring into the discontent on the plantations found illegal floggings, withheld wages and sexual assault common.

Acts of resistance were not uncommon. They were, however, isolated and unco-ordinated and met violent retribution. It took a young British-trained Indian lawyer, MK Gandhi, arriving in Natal in 1893 to organise mass-based resistance. He came on a legal brief to represent an Indian merchant but was soon caught up in the throng of South African politics.

Sensing trading opportunities, Indian merchants followed their indentured countrymen from as early as 1869. Largely Muslim, most were at pains to keep their social distance from the ragged plantation coolies and styled themselves as Arabs.

In 1860, the Indian worker was the colony's saviour. Sugar exports in 1863 stood at £26000. A year later it was £1000000. But their political agitation turned them into a nuisance. Worse was the competition that Indian merchants as well as those freed from indenture presented to white commerce. Among the conditions of indenture was that those who had served out their contracts and opted not to return to India could obtain a small plot of land.

Soon Indian market gardeners were undercutting white greengrocers. Vegetables, poultry, butter and grain became plentiful in the colony. Not only was there food security, but prices fell to the lowest levels. Others sold their plots and headed for the diamond and gold fields of Kimberley and Johannesburg. Yet others fanned into the Cape.

The once impoverished planters and politicians who had campaigned for indentured labour bristled with racism ranting about "a restless people and a thieving set of vagabonds".

In 1891, the Free State shut its borders. In 1897, the Transvaal forbade marriages between Indian men and white women. By 1903, Indians could no longer enter the Transvaal without a permit.

A barrage of taxes and restrictions followed. While Inkosi Bhambatha was raising an African rebellion against the hut tax, Gandhi was challenging General Smuts on the passes imposed on Indians. The famous act of peacefully burning the passes and inviting arrest was to evolve into Gandhian passive resistance and satyagraha, a strategy that eventually drove the British out of India.

In 1913 the £3 poll tax imposed on indentured Indians saw 2000 coal miners strike in Newcastle. They marched to the Transvaal border to break the law by crossing without a permit.

The state called out the army and deported them back to the mines, which were facing ruin. The mining compounds were fenced and declared jails. White workers were drafted as warders and flogged Indian miners who refused to work. These acts of non-violent resistance led to serious injury and even death. Sixty thousand workers went on strike in solidarity with the coal miners and the Natal economy wobbled on the brink of collapse.

The might of a violent state eventually prevailed, but the die was cast. The descendants of the indentured workers and the Indian merchants featured in every major act of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid resistance to follow, from the trade unions of the 1930s and 1940s to the defiance campaigns and treason trials of the 1950s to the armed struggles from the 1960s and incarceration on Robben Island. They were in the Black Consciousness Movement of the 1970s and the mass defiance of apartheid laws in the remaining decades of the 20th century.

This coolie odyssey lays a just claim to the joys of a free society.