IN COMMEMORATING the 165th anniversary of the first indentured workers arriving in their African homes on November 16, 1860, we must acknowledge that this history is far more complex than ordinarily summarised.

In comparison to other former imperial colonies like Reunion, Mauritius, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Fiji, South African scholarship on indenture has been limited to a small cohort of historians, only able to uncover a range that is possible in the average lifespan of an academic.

Eminent scholar on indenture in South Africa, Surendra Bhana’s challenge in 1987 to future scholars to unpack the 75 linear meters of archival data that exists in the archive may never be fully realised if we don’t encourage and devote more time and energy towards developing historians that are devoted to telling the story of indenture.

In the last 51 years since Huge Tinker’s seminal and detailed study on indenture, ‘A New System of Slavery,’ many attempts to understand indenture have been reduced to debating the veracity between free and unfree (coerced) labour. Revisionist scholars have sought to locate Indian indenture as part of the global phenomenon of migration that took place in the 19th and 20th centuries that contributed to the building of the modern world and not reducing these Indian indentured workers to being incapable of significant achievements like their fellow travelers all over the world.

While we must be mindful of not allowing revisionist scholarship to foreground imperial apology in shadowing the truer reflection of the indentured experience in the colonies, it would be equally disrespectful and false if we do not tell stories of agency among Indian indentured workers who contributed to the building of the modern world we know today.

In South Africa, the movement beyond subjugation and enslavement on the plantations was far quicker than in other colonies. In less than 30 years and well before the time that Mohandas Gandhi arrived in Natal in 1894, indentured workers were leaving the plantations, having risen to become highly-trained professionals, lawyers, civil servants, accountants, teachers, and newspaper publishers.

Maureen Swan’s Gandhi the South African Experience reveals that many of these Natal-born colonials were the offspring of indentured or ex-indentured parents. She highlights the extraordinary success in those early years that included names like Albert Christopher, James Godfrey, and Joseph Royeppen, all London-trained barristers, and successful farmer Charlie Nulliah Naidoo, whose family celebrations were lavish enough to excite the attention of most white citizens of Pietermaritzburg.

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Enslavement, re-indenture and prosperity: the rise of indentured workers