The amazing story of a community of people which can be found in every country around the world.
Indians were not allowed to visit South Africa until the Apartheid regime was dismantled in 1994 after the great Nelson Mandela formed the first non-racist government. So it was a matter of great pride when I managed to get a visa for South Africa (Indian passports would be duly stamped those days with – Every country except South Africa) to mark the historic release of Nelson Mandela’s 27 years of incarceration. One of the greatest statesmen and human beings was to walk free and I was going to be a witness. History it was!
Having witnessed history as the slightly weak and bent Nelson Mandela with Winnie Mandela by his side, walk out of Victor Verster Prison in South Africa’s windswept Cape Town at the southernmost tip of the African continent. Still reeling from the momentous event where even in 1990 there were hundreds of television channels with private choppers hovering over, the World Report team was the only one from India hoofing the event with its meager resources. On our way back like good journalists we decided to do some Vox Pops and what better than to start with a bunch of school kids making their way back home.
They were barely 10- 12 year-olds and an odd mixture of all the so-called ‘colours’ of South Africa. When asked if he was happy, the White boy nodded a vehement ‘No’ while the Black kid cheerily replied that he was happy. On being asked why such opposite reactions, both the boys shied away from an answer, but at that moment an Indian boy perked up and said, “That’s because he is White” and pointing towards the other kid said, “And he is Black.” Then as if to make his own distinction he stated,”And I am Indian.
The encounter was revealing. Later on in Durban, the port city where a large population of Indians live and are clearly far more prosperous than the Blacks, we witnessed a typical Indian wedding where a Gujarati family was in the process of sending the bride and groom away in Bidaai at the driveway. It was clearly an allIndian affair, no outsiders. The father of the bride, when asked about it, made a shocking declaration: “If we mix our mental fundamentals will not remain the same.”
It got me thinking, especially since Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s journey began as a lawyer fighting for the oppressed Indian and black people in South Africa. In Durban, I was lucky to spend a few days with Ismail and Fatima Meer at their Clare Estate home. A truly hospitable couple Ismail Meer and Fatima were both at the vanguard of the African National Congress (ANC) along with so many other Indians who gave direction and leadership to a movement which finally saw the toppling of the oppressive Apartheid regime a few years after Mandela walked free.
Fatima, in fact, wrote Nelson Mandela’s first biography, Higher Than Hope, published in 1988, along with more than 40 books, essays and lectures. Her book on Gandhi’s life, Apprenticeship of a Mahatma, was made into the 1996 film The Making of the Mahatma, for which she wrote the screenplay.
Gandhiji in South Africa
Nelson Mandela has always spoken of Mahatma Gandhi as the greatest inspiration to the South African struggle. In a letter from prison in 1980, he wrote: “The oldest existing political organisation in South Africa, the Natal Indian Congress, was founded by Mahatma Gandhi in 1894. He became its first secretary and in 21 years of his stay in South Africa, we were to witness the birth of ideas and methods of struggle that have exerted an incalculable influence on the history of the peoples of India and South Africa. Indeed, it was on South African soil that Mahatmaji founded and embraced the philosophy of Satyagraha.”
After the abolition of slavery, the British settlers in the Natal arranged with the Indian Government to recruit indentured labour for their sugar, tea and coffee plantations. Thousands of poor and illiterate Indians were enticed to go to South Africa with promises of attractive wages and repatriation after five years or the right to settle in Natal as free men. The first indentured labourers reached Natal on November 6, 1860. They were soon followed by traders and their assistants. After some time, the whites faced serious competition from the traders, as well as the labourers who became successful market gardeners after the expiry of their indenture. They began an agitation to make it impossible for Indians to live in Natal except in semi-slavery as indentured labourers. In 1893, when Natal was granted self-government, the Government began to enact a series of discriminatory and restrictive measures against the free Indians
The Indian traders who had settled in the Boer Republic of Transvaal were also subjected to similar discrimination, while Indians were excluded from the Orange Free State.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, a young and diffident barrister, arrived in South Africa in 1893 to represent an Indian trader in Natal in a civil suit against an Indian trading firm in Pretoria. Within days, he encountered bitter humiliations such as being pushed out of a train and being assaulted for walking on a footpath. The experience steeled him: he decided never to accept or be resigned to injustice and racism, but to resist.
He helped found the Natal Indian Congress in 1894, bringing together Indians of all classes, speaking a variety of languages, into one organisation to struggle for their rights. It was the first mass organisation in South Africa.
Similar stories abound in countries such as Fiji, Mauritius, Trinidad & Tobago where the once indentured population became heads of state in all three. In Fiji, the government of Mahendra Chaudhury was toppled in a coup by local Fijians whereas in T&T and Mauritius Indians have been at the head of government.
In fact, even as I write this, an Indianorigin doctor is making news having emerged as the frontrunner in the prime ministerial race in Ireland. Leo Varadkar, 38, the Dublin-born son of a Mumbai-born father and Irish mother is currently Ireland’s welfare minister. By the time you would be reading this, he could well have become Ireland’s Prime Minister.
India has the largest diaspora population in the world, with 16 million Indians living outside the country they were born in, according to United Nations report on migration trends.
The survey, conducted by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, found 224 million people lived as international migrants, or in a country other to the one they were born in, in 2015 - a 41 per cent increase from 2000.
The richest Indian diaspora is in the US, where Indians counted for the third-largest ethnic group in 2015, making one per cent of the total US population. Mexico had the second largest diaspora population at 12 million, followed by Russia and China. The Indian diaspora story is old having begun when Indians were transported thousands of miles from their homelands across seas to work in the New World on the sugarcane and rubber plantations of Trinidad, Mauritius and Fiji. The Indians have turned that long and arduous journey into stories of great success in lands across the globe. They have risen to become prime ministers and presidents of distant lands, businessmen and tycoons, artists and filmmakers, poets and writers, chefs and chaplains. It’s been a heart-warming journey, so far