The Indian Africans

Race, ethnicity, identity and the story of the struggle for South African freedom get turned on their head in a lavish new book. The Indian Africans is co-authored by United Democratic Front co-founder Paul David, along with Ranjith Choonilall, Kiru Naidoo and Selvan Naidoo.

Choonilall remarks: Our goal was to tell the story of indenture within the richer tapestry of deepening nonracialism and building a common nationhood. That theme runs across the book in short chapters that variously look at food, culture and history.

Fresh insights came from the diary of a ships captain, Max de Gruyter, who commanded various vessels taking the bonded workers from India to colonial Natal from the last decade of the 19th century into the first decade of the 20th century.

Indian workers were shipped to far-flung corners of the British Empire from Fiji to Mauritius and the Caribbean. Even the Danish colony of Saint Croix and the Dutch possession of Guiana were happy to replace slave labour with indenture. De Gruyter talks about sleeping and bathing arrangements, romances, births, deaths and more.

The fourth author, political analyst Kiru Naidoo, stresses that the greater value of the book is that it publishes, for the first time, images on board indenture ships. De Gruyter kept a meticulous record, which he reflected on in his columns in the Lourenço Marques English language Guardian newspaper in the 1930s. This is an uncanny record that is a radical shift from the reliance on official documentation and third-party records of oral testimonies, says Kiru Naidoo.