Caught wrongfooted by change

Barely a fortnight before elections, Visvin Reddy, chairman of the Chatsworth branch of the African National Congress (ANC), put his foot in his mouth. Indians who do not vote ANC, he Facebooked, should go back to where they came from. His foot stayed resolutely in his mouth even after he confessed to being “an idiot” for saying what he did. He boasted that his African friends had rung him to echo his sentiments.

Outrage followed; a day before the campaigning ended on Sunday, May 4, radio stations carried comments by irate Indians rebuking Reddy even as the ANC suspended the voluble politician in a bid to control the damage and appease South African Indians being wooed assiduously even by President Jacob Zuma.

For a member of the Indian community to make that statement in and from a place like Chatsworth was like committing political hara-kiri. The township has the highest concentration of Indians anywhere in South Africa.

It is to Durban what Southall is to London, Jackson Heights to New York. But there are differences that make Chatsworth unique. Southall and Jackson Heights predated ‘çolonisation’ as it were by migrant Indians or South Asians. Chatsworth was created for local Indians and has always remained Indian.

It’s a sprawling township south of Durban with which it is had been so intimately associated, and in more ways than one also influenced. The settlement of Chatsworth along the Higginson Highway shocks a first-time visitor by its sheer size. Set among rolling hills like so many towns in this eastern coast of Kwa-Zulu Province, Chatsworth stands out. Bungalows, flat-roofed single story houses with stamp-sized garden plots stand cheek-by-jowl. Densely packed up and down gentle hillsides the first impression of being in an Indian settlement kicks in.

But it is replaced by another; this is no shanty town or crummy suburb of dispirited Indians on the margins of the metropolitan ethos: Prosperity, even wealth overlays a restless bourgeois existence of commerce and consumption.

The ISKCON temple dominates a part of the city close to the highway. Set among fussily neat lawns, its main hall is richly opulent; its domed roof is divided into panels depicting the life of Krishna and Radha.

The frescos put you in mind of the Sistine Chapel; perhaps to let you know that it is a labour of not just a religious faith but capital and wealth, an eloquent testimony to the rites of passage indentured labour from India have undergone over 160 years or so.

The story of Chatsworth is the story of Indians in South Africa. It was planned and developed in 1964 under the Group Areas Act of 1950 that demarcated areas for each race — whites, Indians Coloured and Blacks. Chatsworth was built into eleven units and now has 64 suburbs, predominantly Indian.

Built to act as buffer between white residential areas and the large black township of Umlazi, the city has become a metaphor for more than just the upward mobility of former indentured labourers.

They landed on the eastern shores of Natal Province mainly from the districts of the former Madras Presidency in batches, starting sometime after 1860 well into the first to decades of the twentieth century

For South African Indians, Chatsworth symbolises the rainbow at the end of the long climb from the sugarcane fields to middle class sensibility and bourgeois wealth.

NM Pillai, a third generation South African Indian and a retired school principal in the seaside town of Port Shepstone, 115 kilometres south of Durban, claims that two things served the indentured labourers, of whom his grandfather was one, well; their religious beliefs and a fanatical faith in education’s lasting gains.

For the labourers that stayed back after their indenture contracts had expired and took advantage of the British colonial government’s promise of land equivalent to the cost of the return passage home, the path to future prosperity, if not wealth lay, through education and religious bonding.

Every cluster of indentured labourers living in barracks built schools with vernacular and religious curricula with voluntary donations. Classes held under trees, in shacks, produced the next generation of educators and the advance guard of an Indian middle class.

Like magpies, Indians picked up English from missionaries in black and Indian townships. Some converted but many brought the language of the ruler to the local schools, providing a leg-up for the steady movement towards a middle class existence: at first just primary schools, then colleges and in 1941, the ML Sultan Teknikon funded by a wealthy Muslim family.

The emerging petty-bourgeois sensibility, of savings, elementary consumption and a better roof over the head was bolstered by the arrival of traders, both Hindu and Muslim from Gujarat and some from Madras Presidency over the decades.

They serviced a growing number of freed labourers turned small plot farmers and the educated Indians entering the lowest rung of the colonial bureaucracy.

In apartheid South Africa, gentrification moved the Indian a shade above the black majority. Education and a growing rootedness turned them as an inevitable buffer between the White minority ruling elite and black majority poor.

Subject to the same apartheid laws as the other non-whites many Indians joined the freedom struggle. But in post-apartheid Africa, black empowerment is the name of the game.

Even as the equation between the whites and the blacks has changed, Indians are still caught in the middle.

Many new generation Indians in South Africa with high skill levels feel the heat of black economic empowerment at the doors to medical colleges and professional jobs that favour blacks even with low grades and skills.

Education was once the key to freedom from the sugarcane fields; it created the first non-white middle class in Apartheid South Africa. As South African Indians get ready to vote on May 7, the irony of being stuck in the middle of an inverted pyramid creates its own challenges.