While such forces drew the colony together, they failed to destroy and fully assimilate the region’s preexisting societies, most importantly the powerful Zulu Kingdom, which defended its independence until 1879. Even as significant numbers of Africans came to live on mission stations or in reserves (Natal was also a pioneer of indirect rule), converted to Christianity, and entered into the colony’s economy as migrant workers, the continued existence of an autonomous Zulu way of life—symbolized by the monarchy and the royal house—contributed to a profound consciousness of belonging and indigenousness across an increasingly differentiated African population.48 Furthermore, the continual violence of conquest may have integrated settlers and Africans into a range of hierarchal formations, but the settler state was not yet strong enough to restructure social relations according to a single, overarching racial order. A binary discourse of race burnished the increasing heterogeneity of both white and African society. Among Natal’s Africans, new social categories proliferated and combined: urban and rural, Christian and traditional, aspirant middle class and migrant worker—each generating different versions of a common Zulu identity.49
Into this chaotic and inchoate universe, the SS Truro (sailing from the southern Indian port of Madras) brought 342 workers of South Asian origin on 16 November 1860.50 The ship’s list tells its own story of distinct and interwoven worlds. The passengers included men, women, and children whose “castes” were identified variously as Christian, Muslim, Rajput, Gentoo, Pariah, Malabar, Myset, and unknown. Ten days later, a second ship (whose voyage started over a thousand miles north in Calcutta) arrived bearing a cargo of people from an equally diffuse range of backgrounds. Because most Africans still retained access to land (and therefore a measure of independence from the colonial economy), Natal’s coastal planters turned to the indenture system—developed in the Caribbean after the abolition of slavery in 1834—to support the colony’s struggling sugar industry. By the time that the colony terminated the system in 1911, 152,184 indentured workers had come to Natal. In their powerful account, Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed capture the motivations that drove people into contracted servitude: fathers chasing means to support families in the midst of imperialism’s economic ravages; “untouchables” hoping to escape caste oppression; young men thirsting for adventure or elusive fortune; widows and single women escaping forms of patriarchal constraint; and unfortunates simply defrauded by recruiters.51 After the conclusion of their contracts, a significant number remained in Natal despite the hardships of poverty and colonial racism. Others signed new contracts after returning to India or traveled back to South Africa on their own tickets.
These migrants largely originated in two different regions of the subcontinent (the Tamil- and Telugu-speaking south and the Bhojpuri-speaking plane of the Ganges River), spoke at least seven distinct Indian languages, and carried (willingly or not) numerous religious, village, familial, and occupational identities.52 Nonetheless, the momentous act of boarding a ship together began a long process of discarding, reconfiguring, and expanding notions of self and community that would eventually produce a common sense of Indianness across persistent ethnic, class, and religious divides. As Desai and Vahed underscore, Indian immigrants to Natal resisted the colonial labor system, in part, by struggling to create new homes: the construction of a shared India through places of worship, festivals, new family traditions, plays, songs, and dress.53 The relationship with an Indian past was not automatic, but complex, selective, and contested. The formation of the Colonial Born Indian Association in 1911 reflected the growing sense, at least among a literate stratum of former indentured workers, of common political interests among a population that planned to stay. At the same time, the establishment of regional, language, and religious associations—which became the central focus of community outside the family—and the influence of Hindu missionaries encouraged an inward-looking social life that assumed some caste-like elements and further insulated Indians from interaction with Africans.54
Following the indentured population, a second group of South Asian migrants, sometimes traveling through Mauritius or East Africa, began to arrive during the 1870s. Generally described as “passengers” (since they paid their own fares) and identified with the male figure of the Gujarati merchant, this group—as Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie shows—was considerably more diverse in gender, origin, and occupation.55 Involved in almost every aspect of Natal’s economy (from agriculture to blacksmithing), many passengers retained close ties to India, returning home to visit or marry, and they soon began to establish institutions in South Africa on the basis of religion, language, and (more rarely) caste. In the late nineteenth century, this group stressed its distinction from “coolies” (a derogatory term for unskilled labor that was also used as a slur against Indians) on religious or racial grounds. In an effort to differentiate their legal status from the formerly indentured, for example, some Indian Muslims asserted an “Arab” identity. As newer migrants followed opportunities across South Africa, they established communities in the Transvaal and the Western Cape (with Indian populations of 9,979 and 10,242 in 1909, respectively) of significantly different ethno-religious compositions and demographic weight than in Natal.56 This layer created a new hierarchy among South African Indians, which overlapped partially with the division between Muslims and Hindus/Christians, while interspersing Indians within the sociopolitical landscape of the country as a whole. Because many passengers made their living through activities such as running stores or working in service professions, they frequently resided in urban centers catering to shoppers of all races or in the neighborhoods where their customers lived. Driven by the backlash among whites over perceived economic competition, the provinces attempted to restrict Indians to specific locations starting the 1880s or, in the case of the Orange Free State, banned Indian residents altogether. Nevertheless, Indians became the group most likely to live near or among other racial groups. The 1950 Group Areas Act, the apartheid legislation that established segregated residential and business zones in cities, resulted in the displacement of Indians at a higher rate than any other section of the population.57
GANDHI IN SOUTH AFRICA
No figure looms larger in the history of Indians in South Africa than Mohandas Gandhi. As a substantial literature attests,58 Gandhi’s South African years were the most important period of his adult intellectual formation. The man who arrived as a prim, suit-wearing lawyer—a quirky Anglophile who believed in the promises of liberal empire—would eventually leave after he had renounced the materialistic philosophy of Western civilization and devised a series of new ideas that he would employ to historic effect in India. Born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar, Gujarat, Gandhi qualified as a lawyer in England where he became interested in vegetarianism and theosophy. In 1893 he traveled to the Transvaal in order to translate in a legal dispute between two Gujarati businessmen. Gandhi then remained in South Africa for the better part of the next twenty-one years. In 1894 he plunged into local politics by organizing opposition to a bill introduced by the Natal legislature that would have disenfranchised Indians on the basis of race. Initially, Gandhi’s political agitation centered on the defense of Indian rights as British imperial subjects. He adopted the legalistic methods of elite nationalist politics. However, his experience living in South Africa (he was a firsthand witness to the industrial revolution emanating from Johannesburg) slowly propelled him toward different forms of spiritual and communal experimentation. In 1903, he established the journal Indian Opinion, which—as Isabel Hofmeyr argues—served as a space for nurturing different modes of community and subjectivity through “slow” practices of reading. Slowness, for Gandhi, functioned as an ethical counter to the acceleration of modern capitalist society.59 In 1904, he established the first of a series of famous retreats or ashrams, the Phoenix Settlement outside of Durban, where he practiced collective forms of work, prayer, and service with family and followers. After the tabling of the Asiatic Registration Act in 1906, Gandhi again assumed leadership of the opposition, but this time he departed from his earlier legalistic methods by refusing to comply with the measure. The resulting struggle, which ebbed and flowed until Gandhi’s departure in 1914, witnessed definitive moments in his biography and South African history: Gandhi’s first imprisonment, the public burning of the hated registration cards, the entrance of women into the struggle in opposition