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IOL News
04-07-2025
- IOL News
Indian and African marriages during the system of indenture and beyond: 1860 to 1954
Indian African descendants in Reunion. Image: Supplied MARRIAGE between Indian indentured migrants and indigenous women in colonial South Africa has never been the subject of a historical study. Equally understudied are the children born of these mixed unions that challenge racial categorisation and identity in South Africa. In the colonial archive exist understudied examples of intercaste, interracial, and interreligious unions. An intriguing case of such a union, mined from the Natal Native Court Archives files, found Nomgcibelo Hlengwa guilty of murder. Nora Zwane, the daughter of Hlengwa, resided in the Sawoti Police District of Umkomaas. Nora was estranged from her husband, living apart for more than six months. In her testimony, Nora related that she gave birth to a female child in March 1953, revealing that this was an illegitimate child and that the father was an Indian male. Hlengwa was present at the birth of the child and over the following few days had questioned her daughter, Nora, about the ethnicity of the child's father, commenting that the child's hair was not that of a "native". Two weeks later, Nora was questioned by her estranged mother-in-law and the Induna's wife about the nationality of the child, which she explained was Indian. Interracial unions were evident in colonial Natal. Image: 1860 Heritage Centre Nora's mother, Hlengwa, asked her what she was going to do with the child, seeing that its father was Indian. Nora exclaimed that "the child was mine (Nora's), whether it was an Indian or anything else". The accused, Hlengwa, then asked how she (Nora) could say that the child was Indian and that she was going to kill the child. Later that night in the hut, Nora related how Hlengwa (her mother) placed her right hand at the top of my baby's chest and pressed her thumb and index finger on each side of the windpipe. "I turned my back on what she was doing and started to cry." The baby died that morning and was buried in a shallow grave. The post-mortem report concluded on the 24th March 1953 revealed that the child had died of shock and trauma to the heart and lungs. On 20 July 1953, the Native High Court found Nomgcibelo Hlengwa guilty of murder with a penalty of £25 or two months in prison. East Indian interracial unions in the plantation. Image: 1860 Heritage Centre The case of Nora Zwane reveals uncomfortable truths across the colour line in accepting children from interracial unions. Forty-two years after the system of Indian indentured labour recruitment was abolished in South Africa in 1911, descendants who found love beyond their phenotype were faced with prejudice, shame, and murder. Outside of the interracial unions for love, lust, or circumstance, further transcripts in the archive reveal more spurious information on interracial marriages embedded in a letter to the Assistant Secretary of the Native Affairs department dated 8 June 1906. The correspondence focuses on the intermarriage of Indians and Natives, discussing the marriage of Indian David Soloman, who was born in Natal, to a certain Cape woman. The Registrar of Asiatics noted that "from my experience of the lower classes of the Indian Community, I consider that the marriage tie is very lightly regarded, and that it would be extremely dangerous to make any exception to the restrictions provided for in the paragraph which Clause 2 of Law 3 of 1897 in this respect". Law 3 of 1897 in the South African Republic (Transvaal) prohibited marriages between whites and people of colour. In July 1906, a letter addressed to the Honouree Secretary of the Mahomedan Committee of Pretoria by the Protector of Asiatics revealed that "… certain Pathans in the Transvaal have taken as wives, native girls of this country. So far as I am aware, the marriages have not been registered under the laws for coloured persons. The women embrace the 'Mohomedan' faith and their position is, practically, speaking, that of a mistress." Special Mixed Marriage register of Ramsamy and Mtshali, 1954. Image: Supplied "It was further brought to notice that a Mahomedan Indian had applied for a certificate to enable him to marry under the laws in question, a native girl, and as understood that a mixture by marriage with the lower race is repugnant to the feeling of your community." The Protector of Asiatics goes on to ask the Mahomedan Committee secretary, 'I shall be obliged if you (the secretary) will be obliged if you will kindly furnish me with your view on the question (of mixed marriages)." Further correspondence on the reasons for the marriage of Indians with native women is highlighted in file no 4198 from the Colonial Secretary's Office. The minute paper brokered the concern that, under a recent decision of the Supreme Court, property may be held by a Native in the country. This provision will, in all likelihood, be used by a large number of Asiatics to overcome their difficulty concerning tenure of property. They have merely amalgamated (with native girls) to register their property in the wife's name. The secretary writes that "at least half of the Indians in the Transvaal can marry Natives without violating religious custom, and he considers that the social effects of such a mixture would be deplorable". "These marriages of convenience were precipitated under laws that disallowed Indians in the Transvaal from holding property, and to evade the law, Indians may endeavour to take advantage of the privilege enjoyed by Natives of acquiring land under their right, by marrying Native women with the object of acquiring title." Beyond South Africa, in unpacking interracial unions during the system of indenture, Daphné Budasz in her seminal paper titled, Brown men, Black women, White anxiety Indian migration, interracial marriages and colonial categorisation in British East Africa argues that unlike South African and even though the colonial administration did not act directly against these interracial relationships, the offspring of these unions represented a potential challenge to the colonial order. 'Besides the fact that interracial couples resisted the colonial division of races and British divide et impera political strategy, the existence of 'mixed-race' children was disruptive, because it made visible the irreversibility of Indian settlement and challenged land ownership patterns in favour of White settlers.' Audra A Diptee argues in her paper Indian Men, Afro-Creole Women: "Casting" Doubt on Interracial Sexual Relationships in the Late Nineteenth-Century Caribbean that "there were structural factors, such as residential separation, for example, which limited social interaction". She argued that scholars have overlooked the perspective that "Afrocreole women had a decisive role in negotiating sexual relationships - interracial or not - and this was influenced by the earning power of potential spouses, existing stereotypes, and cultural differences". Suriname scholar, Madhvi Ramautar, who is presently researching interracial Hindustani (Indian) marriages in Suriname from the period of indentureship in 1873 to the present, writes that interracial marriages are not a strange phenomenon in Suriname. Before the arrival of the Hindustanis, interracial marriages were present in the Surinamese community. After the arrival of the British Indian immigrants in 1873, interracial marriages were also entered into with the other ethnic groups due to the lack of women. Ramatautar notes that mixed Hindustani couples were and still are confronted with rejection and discrimination within their family. Brian L Moore's "Cultural Power, Resistance, and Pluralism: Colonial Guyana, 1838 - 1900 in Guyana' revealed that immigrant Chinese men established sexual relations with local Indian and Creole women due to the lack of Chinese women migrating to British Guiana. More common in his research, Moore expresses that more Indian women and Chinese men establish sexual relations with each other, and some Chinese men often took their Indian wives back with them to China. In Guyana, while marriages between Indian women and black African men are socially shameful to Indians, Chinese-Indian marriages are considered acceptable. "Chiney-dougla" is the Indian Guyanese term for mixed Chinese-Indian children. The term "Dougla" emerged in Trinidad and Tobago to describe individuals of mixed Indian and African descent, highlighting a distinct mixed-race identity that challenged colonial racial categories. During Indian indenture in various countries, interracial marriages and relationships, particularly between Indian indentured workers and other groups like Africans, were common, although often undocumented and stigmatised. These unions were often driven by the significant gender imbalance within the indentured population and the need for companionship and support in a new and challenging environment that deserves more scholarly attention in telling the fuller story of indenture in South Africa as we commemorate the 165th year of the first indentured passengers arriving to South Africa on 16 November 1860. Selvan Naidoo Image: File Selvan Naidoo is the great-grandson of Camachee, indentured no. 3297, and director of the 1860 Heritage Centre. ** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media. THE POST
The Star
26-06-2025
- Politics
- The Star
Freedom Charter at 70: tapestry of hope
Selvan Naidoo and Kiru Naidoo | Published 7 hours ago AS SOUTH Africa, this Thursday marks the 70th anniversary of the Freedom Charter, adopted on June 26, 1955, in a defiant gathering in Kliptown, Soweto, it is timely to interrogate its legacy not with nostalgic reverence but with the sharp lens of critique. The Freedom Charter was born of a radical imagination. The activists gathered there dared to envision a non-racial, non-sexist, democratic, prosperous, and egalitarian country. It remains the cornerstone of our nation's constitutional democracy and its rights-based ethos. Yet, this document, hailed as a beacon of liberation, casts a long shadow over a society fractured by enduring inequalities, where the widening gap between rich and poor mocks the charter's lofty promises. To reflect on this milestone is to confront the paradox of a nation that celebrates its democratic triumphs, while wrestling with the reality of unfulfilled aspirations. The Freedom Charter was no mere political manifesto. It was a subversive act of collective dreaming, woven from the aspirations of the African National Congress (ANC), South African Indian Congress (SAIC), Coloured People's Congress, and Congress of Democrats. South Africans of Indian descent, in whose veins ran a century of resistance against colonial indignities from indenture to segregation, were integral to this tapestry. Activists like Swaminathan Gounden, a worker from Durban's industrial heart of Jacobs, embodied the courage of the marginalised. At great peril, Gounden slipped through the apartheid state's surveillance to attend the Kliptown gathering, a journey fraught with the risk of arrest or worse. His return to Faulks shoe factory was met with swift retribution - dismissal for daring to dream of a world where 'the people shall govern.' Such sacrifices were not isolated. Among the apartheid regime's repressive responses was the 1956 Treason Trial, preceded by lightning arrests that ensnared 156 activists, including Chief Albert Luthuli, Nelson Mandela, and Indian African stalwarts like Monty Naicker, MP Naicker and Kay Moonsamy. The trial, intended to smother dissent, instead amplified the Charter's rousing call, exposing the moral bankruptcy of a system that equated the fight for social and economic justice with treason. Since 1994, South Africa has drawn on the Freedom Charter's lofty promises, enshrining its principles in the 1996 Constitution - a document lauded for its progressive ideals such as an independent judiciary, a vibrant civil society, freedom of faith, and the dismantling of racial hierarchies. Indian Africans, once relegated to the margins in the obscene racial pecking order, have carved spaces in the nation's political and economic fabric. Census data points to the fact that people of Indian origin have been net economic beneficiaries of the democratic state on a scale second only to those of European descent. Yet, this narrative of progress is haunted by a brutal truth - South Africa is among the world's most unequal societies, its Gini coefficient a statistical indictment of a dream deferred. The opulence of Zimbali's villas stands in sharp contrast with the squalor of Cato Crest's shacks. Unemployment, officially upwards of 32%, ravages black youth especially, while land reform and wealth redistribution, which were central demands of the Freedom Charter, are caught in bureaucratic red tape and elite capture. The ANC, once the standard-bearer of liberation, is being suffocated by corruption. Its moral authority has been eroded by governance failures that have left the 'born-free' generation grappling in large part with economic despair. Should today's youth honour the sacrifices of Goonam, Gounden, Luthuli, and that golden generation? Young peoples' discontent has been channelled into movements like #FeesMustFall, which echo the Freedom Charter's demand for accessible education. Yet, others, burdened by the immediacy of survival, dismiss the Freedom Charter as a relic, its promises hollowed out by a post-apartheid state that has traded revolutionary zeal for compromises with traditional and new elites. Social media is a vocal outlet for their disillusionment, with hashtags demonising political and economic grandees. This generational rupture threatens to sever the connective tissue between the struggle's heroes and a youth population that feels betrayed by the very democracy they inherit. The state has failed to translate constitutional rights into tangible material benefits. There has instead been an inordinate focus on the burgeoning (and unsustainable) social welfare system as a breathing valve to hold the poor at bay. To read the Freedom Charter in 2025 is to ponder a text that is both prophetic and accusatory. It prophesied a South Africa free from apartheid's straitjacket, a vision partially realised in the nation's democratic stability. In a world convulsed by war from Ukraine's battlefields to Gaza's ruins to the Congo and Sudan, South Africa's upholding of the rule of law and constitutionalism is no small feat. Yet, the Freedom Charter also chastises with its words, translating into a mirror reflecting the nation's failure to bridge the gulf between rich and poor. The struggles and sacrifices of those who fought for freedom compel us to ask - what does it mean to honour a struggle when its fruits are so unevenly distributed? Hope lies not in blind optimism but in the radical act of reimagining the Freedom Charter's possibilities. South Africa's people must reclaim the courage of Kliptown - its defiance, its unity, and its insistence on justice to forge a future where the people truly govern. Selvan Naidoo and Kiru Naidoo are co-authors with Paul David and Ranjith Choonilall of The Indian Africans, published by Micromega and available at * The Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre at the University of KwaZulu-Natal will host a commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Freedom Charter with the launch of veteran activist Saro Naicker's biography, Love for Learning, at 6pm today (June 26) on the Westville campus. ** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media. THE POST
