A LABOUR OF LOVE

The plight of female Indian labourers

Joanne Joseph’s novel, Children of Sugarcane, puts the spotlight on a subject hardly mentioned in mainstream literature: the female indentured labourers who the British shipped from India to the colony of Port Natal in the 19th century. Much of the research Joseph’s book is based on was for her PhD in African literature, which focuses on the depiction of female indentured labourers in South African indenture literature.

“It is a very small canon,” Joseph says. “It’s seen very much as minority literature. The female characters get some airtime, but not a lot. There are hardly any books that really focus on them as the protagonists and yet they were the people caught in the darkest corners of indenture. They were the ones who suffered the most hardship.”

Women who came to SA in this manner earned half the wages of men and there was a quota system, which meant only a very small percentage of imported labourers were women. As Joseph puts it: “The British did not want them; they were seen as baby machines who would eat up the resources and not be half as productive as the men.”

The unequal numbers of men versus women had good and bad sides. “In some ways that allowed women to choose the man they wanted and allowed them to discard the relationships they did not want or were not good for them, but it also put them at incredible risk,” Joseph says.

“That risk started from the time they set off on their journey to the depot; the predation starts, first at the hands of their own countrymen, then as they get onto the ship, more exposure to the British, and then when they get to the plantations.”

Joseph’s academic research, as well as her decision to adapt some of this into a popular novel, was sparked by curiosity about her own family history.

Her great-grandmother, Athilatchmy Velu Naiken, arrived in SA from India in the late 1800s and after divorcing her second husband, married a British clerk, Joseph’s great-grandfather.

Joseph says there has always been reticence and partial ignorance among her relatives about this part of their history.

“It’s not clear what the nature of the relationship was, whether it was a love match or something else. Clearly it wasn’t arranged, as was the convention at that time. It would definitely have been frowned upon, but they had a number of children who got their father’s name and became quite influential in the community. My grandfather was a school principal and married my grandmother, who was a teacher.

“But the family history is sketchy. Nobody talks about how these two ancestors met or their relationship. You glean from conversations that my relatives aren’t comfortable talking about my greatgrandfather. And it seems with every generation they know a little bit less.”

Curiosity prompted her to dig up whatever she could. “I managed to find a record that showed my great-grandmother came to SA when she was 21, with a younger brother and two younger sisters. I don’t know which plantations or work spaces her young siblings were allocated to, but she worked for the Natal Government Railways, which was the secondlargest employer in the colony at that time.”

It was not the norm for a young woman with siblings in tow to make this journey. Joseph speculates that “perhaps her parents died and she was forced to fend for herself and her siblings, and they decided the best option was the colony”.

There the trail went cold, but Joseph’s greatgrandmother resurfaces in a history book, Many

Lives: 150 Years of Being Indian in South Africa. “I got quite a shock when I found a picture of her, now a much older lady who has had a number of children and who runs a Methodist mission from her home.”

Since she did not have enough material covering the lost decades between these discoveries, Joseph decided to write a novel that also wove in many of the real stories of other indentured women of the time.

“I wanted it to be an unashamedly feminist novel,” she says. “There wasn’t enough focus in existing literature on the stories of women, and there is widespread ignorance about indenture, even among the descendants of the indentured. Sometimes there is a kind of perception that Indians arrived in SA wealthy and have remained wealthy for generations, and that’s not true. More than 152,000 people came because of indenture, and many who stayed did so despite the measures the British used to try and get them out after a certain time, like a hefty tax.”

Children of Sugarcane could be called a universal human story that highlights women’s plight, but it is also in many ways a cultural education that Joseph hopes might help in some ways to heal interracial tensions, like those that flared up recently in Phoenix.

“I hope it encourages us to ask some questions about how relationships were formed,” she says. “We need to understand why African and Indian people in SA see each other the way they do.”

Her father’s history provides some insight into this separation, says Joseph. “He grew up in what used to be the Durban city centre, an area where people of all colours and cultures and backgrounds lived, a very mixed community.

“When my father was a teenager they razed the house and forcibly removed his family to Chatsworth, which is where I grew up. My dad’s stories of Stratford Road and his first home have come to seem almost as much my stories as they are his stories, but it’s bittersweet. He also tells me about how he used to go there after the house was demolished — they turned it into a cricket pitch for white boys — and he’d sit there and reimagine the house, trying to pinpoint where each of the rooms was, before someone came and chased him away.”

The lords of apartheid were not the first to create divisions. Joseph’s book reveals how the British in colonial Port Natal would tell Indian people: “‘We don’t actually need you because if you don’t work hard enough and make this a profitable venture for us, we’ll simply bring in the indigenous people.’ Then they’d turn around to the indigenous people and say: ‘We don’t need you, we’ve got the Indian people.’

“So Indians and Africans never look at each other directly: they always look at each other through the eyes of the oppressor. We have inherited that gaze, we’ve been socialised into distrust that is based purely on lack of knowledge about each other.”

Joseph is gratified that she has been getting feedback from readers of all races and backgrounds, but says South African women of Indian descent seem to have been affected by it in a very particular way. “Some of them have referred to it as transformative, as having taken them back to a place that has always lived inside them but that they didn’t know was there. It’s almost as though women have been carrying things for generations, carrying the sum of what happened to their ancestors, but never quite able to pinpoint where the tragedy comes from. It’s somehow in the marrow of their bones.” One of the most pleasing letters she got, however, was from a young man, who wrote: “I’ve never asked myself the question about what life was like for my great-grandmother. I’ve never thought of her experience, and all of a sudden I’m asking myself what hardships did she suffer, how did she navigate the oppression in her own home and what have subsequent generations, including my mother, gone through? Now I’m having conversations with my mother about her life and her existence that we’ve never had before.”

Many of the travails endured by Joseph’s 19th-century heroine, such as poverty, inequality and gender-based violence, are still with us. Joseph believes that historical fiction can be a powerful platform from which to address modern problems. “You have to remain loyal to the genre, but at the same time, postcolonial writers have got a chance to do something different with historical fiction. We can allow the oppressed and the subjugated to talk back.”

They were the people caught in the darkest corners of indenture. They were the ones who suffered the most hardship