Landless indenture in a place called home
GENERATIONS nurtured from my seed will clasp their hands and say our ancestors carved those fields which have given us meanings meanings to stand tall
This land is ours too. in
LAND ownership remains one of the most fiercely contested debates well into 30 years of South Africa’s democracy. The right to own land has pitted title deed holders against the landless masses who were historically dispossessed of it by colonial and apartheid policy.
Historically in KwaZulu-Natal when it governed as a British Colony in 1847, Sir Theophilus Shepstone developed and managed a native policy that inhumanely attempted to categorise and ‘civilise natives’ in the Locations System. This system, went on to influence the racist legislation of the 1913 Natives Land Act that systematically forced black people into ‘native reserves’, thereby relegating ownership of South Africa’s land to the majority race group to a mere 13 percent.
To address this imbalance, the Restitution of Land Rights Act was signed into law in 1994 at the advent of South Africa’s democracy, providing for restitution or equitable redress to persons and communities. Any person or a community who was dispossessed of a right to land after June 19, 1913 as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices, and who did not receive just and equitable compensation at the time of dispossession, can claim for restitution of that right in land or equitable redress.
Up to March 31, 2023, the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights has settled a total of 82 976 claims with R53 billion being paid out from 1995.
This right to compensation is also available to a tenant who is entitled to a standard settlement offer. Despite this progress, in May 2024, the eThekwini Municipality in Durban was handed a memorandum by members of the Indian Land Claimants Association requesting the resolution to their 30-year-old land claims.
The claimants who lost land during apartheid in areas like Inanda, Glen Anil, Malacca Road, Durban North, Riverside, Greyville Block AK, Cato Manor, Sydenham, Overport, Springfield, Newlands, Phoenix, Chatsworth, Avoca, and the Bluff among others are yet to be recompensated.
Access to proper documentation that either lies buried in the official archives or sitting undiscovered in family files prevents compensation for claimants to their share of a budget of R3bn allocated for the KwaZulu-Natal Restitution Commission in the 2024 financial year.
For Indian Africans domiciled in South Africa, land claims have a longer history with the promise of crown land being denied to former British Empire’s subjects, its indentured Indians between 1860 and 1891. In the trail of Britain’s abolition of slavery in 1834, the government of India oversaw the migration of close to 2 million Indians who signed contracts of indenture up to the end of World War I. The new system of labour provision saw the “migration” of the Indian diaspora to British and French colonies that included the Mascerene Islands of Mauritius and Reunion, South Africa, the West Indies, and Fiji.
Globally, labour acquisition, free and unfree, to advance colonial capital from the 17th to the 20th century remained a consistent priority within the matrix of slavery and indenture. To retain the
labour of indentured workers once their contract ended, powerful plantocracies and later ‘sugarocracies’ schemed to extend the stay of workers, enticing them with the promise of crown land through legislative means. To the indentured worker, the acquisition of land anchored their casteless moorings in adopted homelands albeit with newfound identities.
Higher wage rates in Natal and the availability of land in Trinidad saw the growth in numbers of indentured workers as a destination of choice in the early part of the twentieth century. Leased or purchased, land became a sacred possession for landless indentured workers seeking a place to call home. Despite the proviso of a paid return passage written into their contract, many indentured workers chose to stay in their adopted lands from 1834 to 1920.
The detention of five or at most 10 years, seemed to be a viable option to access land for free Girmitiyas who set upon their own in settlements of leased or privately acquired lands.
The length of the contract signed at the ports of embarkation in India for the system of indenture was a protracted point of dispute. The Colonial Office was in favour of 3 years, but the planters wanted a longer period of service. In 1862, 5-year periods were sanctioned with the option of a second term of indenture. Employers cleverly linked the period of “industrial residence” with the issue of sponsoring return passages. Should the indentured person be entitled to a return passage after 5 or 10 years of service? In Natal, indentured individuals could commute their return passages for crown land.
In Natal, 3 years after the
first lot of indentured Indians arrived on the SS Truro on November 16, 1860, a few workers gained early release from their 5-year contracts exchanged for a £5 payment to their employers as permitted under Law 14 of 1859.
The Mercury, a publication that played a key role in advocating for indentured labour in the colony, suggested residential segregation in the vicinity of the present-day Greyville racecourse through its editor John Robinson, who rather suggested that Indians could supply white colonists “with vegetables and dairy stuff ... at far cheaper rates than we now enjoy”.
According to the seminal research of Dr Duncan du Bois in his book on Sugar and Settlers, A History of Natal South Coast 1850 -1910, by 1874 two plantation workers, Goodoo and Cassim Saib, who completed their contract of indenture, were fortunate to have been granted 50 acres (20 hecares) of land in the Umzinto area of the Natal South Coast.
By 1875 the size of the land grant was in dispute with the Protector of Indian immigrants endorsing 15 acres per family. Land in the Braemar district, north-west of Umzinto in Alexendra county, was allocated to free indentured workers who arrived in Natal from 1860 to 1866. A total of 52 Indians were eventually granted land in terms of section 51 of Law 2 of 1870.
By 1882 the divisional report for uMlazi near Durban read as follows “... they (ex-indentured Indian workers) prefer the independence of a farmer on one acre of land, to employment in European service”.
In that year, the Protector of Immigrants reported that: “The facility with which land can be obtained in this Colony, while injurious to the employer of labour, enables any Indian who desires to raise himself in the social scale to do so: with a little industry and moderate good fortune, the man who was yesterday a labourer becomes an employer, competing with his late master”.
The Wragg Commission of 18851887
observed that: “Indians do remarkably well as cultivators of small parcels of land rented on short leases. Those settled in the vicinity of Durban have succeeded in winning for themselves, almost entirely, the supplying of the local markets with vegetables”.
In 1908, Ramsamy, a farmer from Cato Manor, explained why he and others like him, took to farming: “I have no capital, nor have I a trade, the hoe and I have been friends for the last five years, I have strength; if I put thrift on my side I will make one strong effort and see if I cannot succeed.”
According to Bill Freund, an “Indian farmer paid his taxes, obeyed the laws, made his white landlord rich, and became a ‘useful citizen’.” By 1910 Indians owned about 10 000 acres of land in Natal, while the acreage held by Indian tenant farmers and landowners increased from 11 722 acres in 1896 to 42 000 acres in 1909.
Some 30 years later the Ghetto Act of 1946 paved the way for the Apartheid Group Areas Act to be passed into legislation by 1950. Black communities in prime areas designated for whites were soon forcibly removed to segregated townships for ‘Indian’, ‘coloured’, or ‘African’ occupation. The repressive legislation caused a major uproar and led to the two-year passive resistance campaign from 1946 to 1948 when thousands of Indians courted arrest by defying the law. By 1950 there were adverts in the newspapers for an exclusively Indian suburb called ‘uMhlatuzana’. Later, Red Hill and Silverglen were also advertised. Reservoir Hills was reserved for the richer Indians.
In the north of Durban, La Mercy, and Isipingo Beach in the south, were also designated Indian areas. In Merebank, formal houses replaced the makeshift settlements, and by the late 1950s a reconstructed Merebank offered cheap houses for which the purchaser had 10 years to pay.
By the mid-1960s and 1970s, thousands of families were relocated to Chatsworth
and later Phoenix under the forced removals of the Group Areas Act of 1950. Many of these families came from Magazine Barracks, Railway Barracks, Clairwood, Greyville, Riverside, Cato Manor, the Bluff, and other areas where the law made them and their descendants unwelcome on the land of their birth, with many of whom yet to claim recompensation for dispossessed land.
“The land shall be shared among those who work it.”