MANY were filled with high hopes as they crossed the Indian Ocean, making their way from India to Durban in South Africa in the late 1800s.
But dreams of a better life and the opportunity to save money and return to the village as ‘success stories’ were not to be, for many returned ‘home’ with less than they had started out with and found that home was no longer the same place they had left.
Neither were they the same people.
Caste had been transgressed, parents had died and spaces for reintegration closed as colonialism tightened its grip. Home for these wandering exiles was no more.
The modern South African Indian community is largely descended from Indians who arrived in South Africa from 1860 onwards.
The first 342 of these came on board the Truro from Madras on 16 November 1860 followed by the Belvedere from Calcutta.
They were transported as indentured labourers to work on the sugar cane plantations of Natal Colony.
In total, approximately 150 000 arrived over a period of five decades, later also as indentured coal miners and railway workers.
Indians were imported as it was found by colonial authorities that local black Africans were economically self-sufficient, and thus unwilling to subject themselves to employment by colonial farmers.
Other colonial authorities believed that the ‘hunting and warrior’ African culture of the time was incompatible with a sudden shift to employed labour.
By 1904, Indians outnumbered whites in Natal.
Mistreated Indentured labourers on sugar plantations were frequently mistreated and lived in unsanitary conditions.
A large percentage returned to India following the expiry of their terms, and some of those who returned alerted authorities in India to abuses taking place in Natal.
This led to new safeguards being put in place before further recruiting of indentured labourers was allowed to take place.
Former labourers, who did not return to India, quickly established themselves as an important general labour force in Natal, particularly as industrial and railway workers, with others engaging in market gardening, growing most of the vegetables consumed by the population.
Indians also became fishermen, clerks in the postal service and court interpreters.
Indians, who initially worked in Durban, moved inland to the South African Republic (Transvaal), establishing communities in settlements on the main road between Johannesburg and Durban.
Natal’s Indian traders rapidly displaced small white shop owners in trade with other Indians, and with black Africans, causing much resentment.
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