Controlling the Indian Immigrants of Natal & their Resistance

Satyendra Peerthum

An Overview of Indentured Labour in Natal (South Africa) [1860-1911]

Many immigrants had serious grievances. There were commissions of inquiry set up to probe the working conditions of the immigrants. Between the 1860s and the 1870s, Sir Theophilis Shepstone as Secretary for Native Affairs, Director of Native Affairs, and key member of the colonial government of Natal played an important role in the enactment of laws which controlled the Indian indentured population. Notorious labour and pass laws were implemented which regulated the lives, labour, and mobility of the Indian indentured men, women, and children. This led to the mistreatment, abuse, and discrimination of the local Indians by the local British settlers and colonial officials.

In return, between the 1860s and the 1900s the Indian immigrants filed complaints, ran away, deserted their employers, and engaged in other acts of individual and collective resistance like strikes, arson, verbal and physical abuse against their employers. During the same long period, the Indian immigrants filed hundreds of cases against their employers and hundreds were arrested for what was considered crimes such as vagrancy, desertion, illegal absence, refusal to work, sabotage, and insolence.

Between 1869 and 1870, the complaints of the immigrants in Natal coupled with hundreds of returning Indian immigrants who also complained to the Protector of Immigrants in Calcutta about their terrible working and living conditions and the inhuman and racist treatment they endured in Natal. In 1870, the British imperial government appointed a royal commission to inquire into the treatment of the Indian indentured workers. Two years later, the Commission published its report and made several recommendations which took many years to implement and there was little improvement in the lives of the immigrants.

After 1874, there was a brief cessation of immigration largely due to the grievances of the immigrants and as a result of the findings of the report. However, it later resumed with revised regulations in an attempt to eliminate some of the problems that had arisen between employer and indentured worker. Subsequently a Protector of Immigrants was appointed during the late 1870s with increased powers and the appointment of interpreters was improved.

The Labour & Contribution of the Indian Indentured Labourers in Natal

During the 1860s and the 1870s, the early immigrants worked in various spheres of the colonial economy in Natal. The vast majority or more than 60% were allocated to employers as agricultural labourers on sugar estates along the coastal belt, from Verulam to Umzinto, which, at that time, were growing a variety of crops while experimenting with growing various types of sugar-cane. The rest or around 40% were indentured to residents of Durban as domestic servants or to the Corporation as labourers, as special workers in hospitals, hotels, private clubs, and dockyards in Durban, Pietermaritzburg, and the other major towns of the colony.

Between the 1870s and the 1890s, Indian indentured workers were instrumental in the successful extension of Natal’s railway network as hundreds of them worked for the Natal Government Railways. Many of these men had formerly been employed in railway construction in India and were specially imported into Natal because of their experience or skills. `Special servants’, were also brought from India, particularly from Madras, thereby contributing to the growth of the hotel industry in Durban and Pietermaritzburg. They provided the waiters, dhobies, doormen, carriage drivers and chefs, attired in crisp white uniforms, turbans and coloured sashes.

The Free Indians and the Abolition of Indenture in South Africa

By the late 1870s and the early 1880s, there were already thousands of immigrants after completing their indenture, were known as Free Indians and were engaged in many types of occupation – agricultural, technical and commercial, skilled and unskilled. Many took to market-gardening, hawking and a few opened up petty stores. In the port area of the city of Natal, some worked as stevedores for the African Boating Company, forming the bulk of their labour force.In 1860 Masulah boatmen, had been imported to assist the Port Captain, and Indian fishermen were active in the Bay, using seine nets. On Salisbury Island many free Indians took to curing fish and earned an income.

Between the 1880s and the 1930s, there were thousands of Free Indians and their descendants or the Indo-South Africans who purchased small portions of land in different parts of the colony of Natal. They emerged as a small, but important class of small planters, landowning, entrepreneurs, businessmen, merchants and traders, and skilled artisans which made an important contribution to the local colonial economy. Although in a limited way, they were able to achieve some measure of social and economic mobility. Gradually by the 1890s and early 1900s, they became inspired and galvanized with the activities of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s passive resistance movement and founded the Natal Indian National Congress where they fought for their economic, social, and political rights as free British subjects.

Indian indentured labour migration to Natal ended in 1911 as a result of pressure from Indian nationalists led by the leaders of the Natal Indian National Congress, local influential Indian and Indo-South Africans, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Mohandas K. Gandhi, who was then based in the Transvaal and leading the protest against anti-Indian legislation. Furthermore, by the early 1900s and the 1910s, there were tens of thousands of local born Indians or Indo-South Africans who were the children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren of Indian indentured workers.

The tendency of the state to treat Indians as a homogenous entity should not mask the fact that they were extremely heterogenous. There were clear differences of class, caste, religion, language and experiences of migration. However, all these groups from within the Indian community came together in the former British colony of Natal along with the other colonies in South Africa to help forge a rich and complex multi-cultural society which was underpinned by social hierarchy, racism, and paternalism during and long after the end of the age of indenture in that part of the world. Therefore, they greatly contributed in the long and complex struggles against racism, segregation, and apartheid and its eventual defeat and in the rise of the new South Africa. [End of part 2]