India in South African History INDIA IN SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORY

By E.S. Reddy, 1995

One of the urgent and essential tasks in the efforts to rebuild as a "" is to rediscover and rewrite the history of the country.

Successive South African governments have seen to it that the history taught in schools was predominantly a history of the European minority, oriented toward their stamlands (lands of origin), particularly Holland and emitain. The history of the indigenous African people was ignored and distorted. The Coloured people were treated with contempt, and Indians regarded as alien intruders.

A non-racial and democratic society cannot be built without educating the people in the true history of all segments of the South African population, and their contributions to their common homeland. The development of the culture and civilisation of the African people from long before the arrival of Europeans will be central in such a history. In the modern period, when South Africa became a microcosm of the world, there will need to be as much attention to Africa and Asia as to Europe.

India and Indonesia are no less the lands of origin of the South African people than Holland, Britain, Germany and France. Historians from India and Indonesia will need to cooperate with South African historians in research and analysis which will not only help in preparing an objective , but will enrich the histories of their own countries.

In this paper I wish to present some observations on the place of India in South African history and suggest areas which need further research and discussion Complementary to it is the role of South Africa in Indian history which is significant though little known. I hope that governments and institutions of the two countries will take action soon to promote exchanges of scholars and discussions among scholars for this purpose.

Centuries-old Contacts

Much has been written in India and in South Africa about emigration from India to South Africa, from 1860 to 1911, of indentured workers and traders, the oppression and humiliation they faced, and the struggles they waged for their security and honour - especially the great satyagraha led by Mahatma Gandhi from 1907 to 1914. Some studies have been published about the contribution of free India to the struggle for liberation in South Africa. But that is only a small part of the history of relations between India and South Africa.

India's contacts with South Africa go back centuries before the arrival of Europeans to the Cape of Good Hope. After the Dutch settlement was established at the Cape in 1652, it had a substantial amount of trade with the Dutch settlements in India. During the next century, a large number of Indians were taken to the Cape and sold into . Their descendants - among the Coloured people and the Afrikaners - constitute a substantial percentage of the population of South Africa, exceeding in number the million Indians in South Africa. They have made a significant contribution to the development of South Africa.

As this phase of history is little known, some facts, based mainly on studies by scholars on slavery in South Africa - such as Anna Boeseken, Margaret Cairns, Frank R. Bradlow, Richard Elphick, Robert Ross, Robert Shell, Nigel Worden and Achmat Davids - may be recalled.

INDIA IN SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORY 1 India in South African History Indian slaves in South Africa

People from India were taken to the Cape and sold into slavery - soon after set up a Dutch settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 - to do domestic work for the settlers, as well the dirty and hard work on the farms.

A woman from Bengal named Mary was bought in 1653 for van Riebeeck in Batavia. Two years later, he purchased, from the Commander of a Dutch ship, a family from Bengal - Domingo and Angela and their three children. On May 21, 1956, the marriage was solemnised at the Cape between Jan Wouters, a white, and Catherine of Bengal. Later in the year Anton Muller was given permission to marry a slave woman from Bengal.

From then until late eighteenth century when the import of slaves from Asia was prohibited, many hundreds, if not thousands, of persons from India - mainly from Bengal, Coromandel Coast and Kerala - were taken to the Cape and sold into slavery.

Officers of ships and officials of the Company returning to Holland usually took slaves or servants with them and sold them at high profit in the Cape.(They could not be taken to Holland where slavery was prohibited). Many others were carried by Danish, British and other ships. While most of the Indians were taken from Indian ports, a considerable number were also taken from Batavia where thousands of Indians had been transported by the Dutch as slaves.

Bradlow put together available information from various studies on the places of origin of the slaves and free blacks between 1658 and early nineteenth century. The information is very incomplete after 1700 and covers only a little over three thousand persons. The figures indicate that the Indian sub-continent was the place of origin of the largest number of slaves (36.40 percent), followed by Indonesia (31.47 percent) and Africa (26.65 percent).

Of those from India, 42 percent were from Bengal (including Bihar and Orissa), 23 percent from the Coromandel Coast (especially Trancquebar, Tuticorin, Nagapatnam,Pulicat and Masulipatnam); and 32 percent from the Malabar Coast (including Goa, Bombay and Surat).

South African scholars, with little access to Indian sources or contacts with Indian scholars, have tended to make some errors in their conclusions. They assume, for instance, that the Asian slaves had been purchased from the "slave markets" or "slave societies" in Asia.

Many of those sold in the Cape, however, had not been slaves at all in India, but domestic servants, bonded or other. The Reverend William Wright, a missionary in the Cape in the 1830s, wrote of the slaves: "Some are natives of Bengal and other parts of India, who came to the colony as free servants, and were bartered or given away to the colonists."

In fact, there is reason to believe that many of the slaves - far too many of them were children, even less than ten years old - had been kidnapped in India. Warren Hastings, the British Governor-General of India, wrote in a Minute on May 17, 1747: "... the practice of stealing children from their parents and selling them for slaves, has long prevailed in this country, and has greatly increased since the establishment of the English Government in it... Numbers of children are conveyed out of the country on the Dutch and specially the French vessels..."

In 1706, a Dutch political prisoner, Jacob van der Heiden, was confined in a dungeon in with Ari, an Indian slave charged with serious offences. He found that Ari had been kidnapped as a child while playing

Indian slaves in South Africa 2 India in South African History with other children on the Surat beach. He had been sold from one master to another and had been treated so harshly that he had run away. He joined other fugitive slaves and lived on stolen food until he was caught. He escaped torture and persecution because of the intercession of the Dutchman.

The economy of the Cape was developed in the 17th and 18th centuries by slave labour. Freed Indian slaves owned vineyards in Stellenbosch. Indians were also prominent in slave resistance.

Slavery in South Africa was as brutal as anywhere else. But skilled slaves were often allowed to earn money as artisans and buy their freedom. Moreover, because of the scarcity of women, a number of Dutch settlers married Indian women after freeing them. Some of those who had sexual intercourse with their slaves baptised their children who were then accepted into the Dutch community. The South African archives contain information on some of these freed slaves, as also of other slaves who were brought before courts.

Angela and her three children were freed in 1666. She integrated easily into the white community. In 1669 she married Arnoldus Willemsz Basson, with whom she had three children. Her daughter from the first marriage also married a Dutchman.When her husband died in 1689, Angela took charge of the estate which had a considerable value when she died in 1720.

Sexual relations between whites and Asian slaves were quite common in the 17th and 18th centuries, and several studies show that half or more of the children of slave women had white fathers. Asian ancestry did not automatically lower one's status. The grandmother of Simon van der Stel, the most prominent Governor of the Cape in the 17th century, was an Asian woman.

J. A. Heese, in Die Herkoms van die Afrikaner 1657-1867, estimated that in 1807, between 7.2 and 10.7 percent of the ancestors of the then living Afrikaner population were Africans and Asians. His figures were perhaps inevitably conservative. It may well be that a tenth of the present Afrikaner population and more than half of the Coloured population has Indian ancestry.

Research on Indian slaves in South Africa - from the archives in South Africa, Indonesia, Holland, and India - will shed light on the export of Indians into slavery, an aspect which is totally ignored in Indian historical studies.

Slavery to indentured labour

After Britain took over control of the Cape from the Dutch and consolidated power in India, early in the nineteenth century, intercourse between India and South Africa increased. The sea route from India to Britain passed through the Cape until the Suez Canal was built. Raja Rammohun Roy was one of the distinguished Indians to make a stop over in Cape Town.

Soon after slavery was abolished, it was replaced by the semi-slavery of indentured labour in which people of India were the main victims. A substantial Indian population settled in South Africa in the latter half of the nineteenth century when two major developments took place.

The resistance to alien occupation led by the kings and tribal chiefs was crushed by the 1880s and, as in India, a modern national movement emerged after a period of time. Because of the nature of the system of oppression imposed on the non-white people, this movement developed in three streams - African, Coloured and Indian. The small Indian community was ahead in organisation because of the leadership of Gandhiji and the impact of the Indian National Congress.

Second, with the discovery of diamonds and gold, South Africa ceased to be a mere way station to India, and

Slavery to indentured labour 3 India in South African History became a source of wealth which attracted capital and adventurers from Europe and America. The Anglo-Boer War with its enormous casualties was a consequence of this discovery. The need for cheap unskilled labour for the gold mines led to cruel measures - which became the basis of - to impoverish and force the Africans into slave labour. The moves to degrade the Indian settlers were a corollary of this.

Indian and South African histories give little attention to the involvement of India in the Anglo-Boer War, at best noting only the initial transfer of British soldiers from India to reinforce the garrison in South Africa, and the brief service of the Indian Ambulance Corps organised by Gandhiji. There is generally no mention of the fact that a large number of Indian auxiliaries accompanied the British soldiers from India: they worked as medical orderlies, horse trainers, etc., since there was an unwritten agreement between the warring parties that only whites would be combatants. The auxiliaries suffered heavy casualties and some of the survivors settled in South Africa after the War.

Over 9,000 Boer prisoners of war were brought to India and housed in cantonments all over the country. One hundred and forty-two Boer prisoners died and were buried in 18 cantonment cemeteries in the Indian sub-continent.

Studies on Indians in South Africa concentrate on recounting the many laws and regulations enacted against the Indian settlers in violation of solemn promises and the numerous petitions by the Indian community to the Imperial Government in London and the authorities in South Africa, before Gandhiji decided in 1906 on defiance of unjust laws. They have paid little attention to the powerful economic forces which were leading to the convergence of interests between Africans and Indians despite all the efforts by the racist rulers to provoke conflict between them.

There has been no study of African-Indian relations or of Coloured-Indian relations.Some of the leaders of the Coloured community were of Indian ancestry - notably Dr. Abdulla Abdurahman, leader of the African People's Organisation. As a member of Cape Town City Council, he was helpful to the Indian community. He was a friend of Gandhiji who was aware of his Indian ancestry. He was chosen to lead the delegation of the South African Indian Congress in 1925 to India where he addressed the Kanpur Congress and was received by the Viceroy, Lord Reading.But strong bonds of kinship did not develop between the recent Indian immigrants and the descendants of the Indians brought earlier to the Cape.

Gandhiji and the Satyagraha

The satyagraha led by Gandhiji in South Africa has been described in several books and articles, notably in the writings of Gandhiji himself. But there has been little analysis of its impact on India and South Africa.

For India, the satyagraha was a part of its own struggle for freedom and honour. It was launched at a time when the Indian National Congress got split between "moderates" and "extremists". It united the whole of India, from princes to students, in solidarity. While "moderates" were opposed to any violation of law, their leader, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, was the greatest supporter of mass defiance of unjust laws in South Africa and pressed for the first Indian sanctions against South Africa. The satyagraha inspired public opinion in India and soon transformed the ideology and the methods of the Indian national movement.

There has been hardly any research and writing on the impact of the satyagraha on South Africa, except for generalities without much evidence and analysis.Gandhiji, of course, left a deep imprint on the Indian community, but his precept of satyagraha was not followed by it until 1946, except for a pledge in 1919 and a symbolic action in 1941. The 1946 passive resistance was a joint action of Marxists and Gandhians. While the movement was non-violent, the Marxists had great influence on its objectives and strategy. Gandhiji,

Gandhiji and the Satyagraha 4 India in South African History however, gave it his full support.

The example of Gandhiji had a great influence on the thinking of African and Coloured leaders. But they did not follow his path, except for the anti-pass movements of 1913 and 1919, until the of 1952. (The non- violence of the African National Congress until then was passive, a reflection of weakness rather than strength.) By that time, the influence was more that of the national movement in India, including the writings of Pandit Nehru, and of the Indian passive resistance of 1946-48, than of the satyagraha of 1907-14.

Whatever the immediate inspiration in 1952 the African National Congress embraced active non-violence but without accepting non-violence as a creed. This had a continuing impact on the thinking of the leadership even after it decided to embark on sabotage and guerilla warfare. The movement refrained from indiscriminate violence and the struggle culminated in 1989 in a mass defiance of apartheid, a very effective adaptation of satyagraha under new conditions.

The reasons for the delayed resort to non-violent defiance, the differences between the campaigns of the African National Congress and satyagraha and the enrichments of satyagraha if any, deserve serious study.

The influence of Gandhiji, I believe, is not only on Indians and the struggle against apartheid. Though the white rulers wished to ignore him, he had an impact on the nation as a whole and its history. That may well have been one of the factors which facilitated the reconciliation in South Africa. This matter requires study and discussion by scholars of all racial origins in South Africa.

India's Support to the South African Struggle

India was the first country in the world to impose sanctions against South Africa But this action was taken by the Viceroy's Executive Council before Indian independence in protest against discriminatory legislation against Indians in South Africa. But, under Pandit Nehru's leadership, India's support was soon extended to all the oppressed people of the country. India's role was crucial in international action against apartheid until the early 1960s and remained important, though not central, until the defeat of apartheid.

This pioneering role of India, with no selfish motives, had, I believe, a significant influence on the liberation movement in South Africa.

In 1946, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and other African leaders were espousing an and were hostile to joint action with the Indian community. By 1952, they embraced an inclusive nationalism which embraced all the people of South Africa. They abandoned their hostility to the communists and built a broad united front. They secured the support of an international solidarity movement, with the help of India, and called for international sanctions against apartheid. The they adopted in June 1955 was in harmony with the outlook of the Bandung Conference of April 1955 which rejected all forms of racism.

This evolution of thinking came through the experience of the struggle and consultations among those involved, and it would be utterly wrong to attribute any changes in policies to India which never sought to tell South Africans how to conduct their struggle. But the South Africans were impressed by the steadfastness of India as the leader in the international campaign against apartheid and derived inspiration from its approach.

On the other hand, the strong feeling in India on the racial problem in South Africa had a significant impact on India's foreign policy and international relations.

Since the 1960s, India and the South African liberation movement worked together in several international

India's Support to the South African Struggle 5 India in South African History organisations, governmental and non- governmental This has led to a close convergence of their foreign policies. Now that the African National Congress is the leading force in the South African government, the foreign policies of South Africa and India are largely parallel. If there are any divergences, they are perhaps due to failures in timely consultation.

The relations between India and the South African liberation movement since 1946 deserve study as the background for the future relations between the two countries.

India's Support to the South African Struggle 6