From numbers to names: How indenture stories reclaim identity

Detailed summary

As Indian Arrival Day marks the landing of the SS Truro in 1860, descendants of indentured labourers are reclaiming their ancestral stories and identities…

With Indian Arrival Day on 16 November marking 166 years since the SS Truro landed at Port Natal, the legacy of the indenture system continues to shape South Africa’s political and cultural landscape.

However, this rich heritage was carved on the back of labourers who were stripped of their identity. When they arrived in Durban in 1860, their names were replaced by numbers. Digits reduced them to a statistic devoid of humanity, history or backstories.

One hundred years later, a Trinidad-born descendant, Nobel Laureate VS Naipaul wrote A House for Mr Biswas. His novel voiced untold accounts and unflinching truths about indenture and its reverberations.

Today, writers garner gossamer threads of oral storytelling whispered in once frowned upon languages to craft a tapestry of chronicles that speak of this erasure, but also to show how music, dance, food, prayer and cohesive families prevailed.

This act of reclamation from South African descendants like Joanne Joseph, Aziz Hassim and Ronnie Govender, capture the tales of those who crossed the kala pani or black water to toil on Durban’s sugarcane fields. Their writing highlights how indenture also sowed intergenerational trauma to reap a unique harvest that mushroomed from the weeds of colonialism and apartheid.

Race, class, gender and identity hurtle towards one another in stories on indenture to present a prism of the richness and pathos of the 1860 settlers.

However, many narratives were only written after colonial and apartheid gatekeepers of news cycles, reports and history books had their iron-clad fists prised from publishing portals. Self-appointed custodians further sought to erase the history of the indentured.

Professors Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed in their book Inside Indian Indenture. A South African Story, 1860-1914 present facts and case studies on the brutal conditions the settlers endured: starvation, flogging, sexual abuse, loss of freedom.

I discovered that my paternal great-grandfather, Kirpan, was 22…

Opening of the article, excerpted from Mail & Guardian. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.