Legacy of Slavery and Indentured Labour

Linking the Past with the FutureConference on Slavery, Indentured Labour, Migration, Diaspora

and Identity Formation.June 18th – 23th, 2018, Paramaribo, Suriname

Org. IGSR & Faculty of Humanities and IMWO, in collaboration with Nat. Arch. Sur.

AFRO-INDIAN RELATIONS IN SOUTH AFRICA:HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVESI

GOOLAM VAHEDDepartment of History

University of KwaZulu-NatalE-mail: vahedg@ukzn.ac.za.

Abstract:This article examines Afro-Indian relations in South Africa from the colonial to the post-apartheid period. It provides a brief background on relations since the nineteenth century, examining how and why these were strained at certain historical junctures. The arrival of indentured migrants undercut the bargaining power of African labour and Indians and Africans were also competitors in the emerging urban centres, with economic competition becoming racialized. This historical background is is critical in understanding the post-apartheid period, where Indians feel sandwiched between an economically dominant white class and the majority African population. While the category ‘Indian’ is increasingly heterogeneous as a result of class, language, and religious divides, the legal definition of South Africans according to race and a rising racially exclusive African nationalism means that Indians continue to be identified as a separate racial group. This article explores issues of identity, nationality, and citizenship in the post-apartheid period, which has seen the population of Indian South Africans augmented by new arrival from the Indian sub-continent.

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IntroductionPost-apartheid South Africa continues to define and categorise its peoples according to race. The four broad race groups are ‘Black African’, ‘White’, ‘Coloured’, and ‘Asian’. According to the 2011 Census, Asians, who mostly include Indians and a small number of Chinese, made up 2.5 percent of South Africa’s population of approximately 51 770 000. Black Africans were the overwhelming majority, at 76.4 percent of the population. While Indians are deeply divided by language, class, religion, and mode of migration, they continue to be categorised as a homogeneous group by the state, and are perceived as a monolith by non-Indians. Even though there are large number of working class Indians in township townships like Phoenix and Chatsworth, old stereotypes about Indians persist, and get repeated at different times for different, mostly negative purposes. This includes the idea that they are materialistic and care only about money, of refusing to contribute to the development of the wider society, of sending their profits beck to India, and of being snobbish and cliqueish by not mixing with the wider society. This article examines how these relations has transformed over time and whether, in the post-apartheid period, South Africa is shaping into what Archbishop Desmond Tutu once called the ‘Rainbow Nation’. This is done by demanding the Indian experience into four broad time periods: the colonial period, the era of segregation, apartheid and the post-apartheid period.

The Colonial PeriodAlthough some of the slaves who were imported to the Cape Colony from the seventeenth-century were of Indian descent, the bulk of South Africa’s Indian population comprises of migrants who came to Natal in the nineteenth-century. The British annexation of Natal in 1843 led to the territory’s establishment as a sugar colony. Natal turned to indentured migrants from India to provide labour for the plantations. This was part of a new international circulation of labour which evolved after the British Parliament abolished slavery in 1833. Over a million Indian contract labourers were exported to Mauritius, Jamaica, British Guiana, Trinidad, St. Lucia, Granada and Natal to meet the demand for cheap labour (see Desai and Vahed 2010). Indian indentured workers were followed from the 1870s by free Indian migrants, known as ‘passengers’ in the literature because they paid their own passage (see Vahed and Bhana 2015). The decision to import Indian labour to Natal had great consequences for the colony. On the one hand, Whites became increasingly anxious about the presence of Indians whom they saw as an economic threat, while Indians and Africans also came into competition over work and land.

Given the large indigenous African population, why was there a labour shortage in Natal? The labour shortage was due to the fact that Africans were unwilling to work for white settlers while they had access to land on the locations that the British had established to segregate the Zulu; on Protestant missions where converts to Christianity flourished as market gardeners; and on land that they rented from the government as well as from land speculators (Bhana and Vahed 2005: 28-29). Once Sir George Grey, High Commissioner over British territories in Southern Africa, gave permission for Indian labour to be imported to Natal negotiations began with the Indian

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government, and the first group of Indian workers arrived aboard the Truro on 16 November 1860. By the time indenture ended in 1911, 152,641 workers had arrived in Natal.

Free Indians (those who had completed their indentures) and passengers thrived as small traders, hawkers, and market gardeners, and aroused the concern of whites as it became evident that they were a permanent component of the Natal population, and their numbers equalled those of whites. According to the 1894 census, the Natal Indian population of 46,000 exceeded the white population of 45,000. Once Natal achieved self-government in 1893, a series of laws were passed to force Indians to reindenture or return to India upon completing their indenture and to legally subordinate non-indentured Indians who remained in Natal (Vahed 1995: 34).

During the colonial period, the policies of the white minority government led to a pattern of stratification in which race shaped life experiences and determined access to resources. White settlers saw race as the most effective political and ideological means of suppressing indigenous social formation and ensuring a cheap labour supply. The population was divided into distinct racial groups - Indians, Africans, Coloureds, and Whites - who were seen as naturally different, with Indians and Africans inferior to whites.ii Racial boundaries were placed around the political struggles as well, with Indians and Africans pursuing separate struggles against white minority rule.

The arrival of Indians generated competition and conflict over land and labour with Africans. Indian labour undercut Africans’ refusal to work the white man’s land; employers placed Africans in positions of authority over Indians and used Africans to ‘discipline’ Indian workers; and many Africans were angry that agricultural land was made available to Indians while there were land shortages in the reserves that the colonial authorities had set aside for African occupation. Academic and anti-apartheid activist Fatima Meer made the following critical observation:

Whatever the Africans' perception of the Indian in 1860, included in it must have been the sense, if not knowledge, that he had been brought by the white colonists to replace him and to be used against him…. Hostility must have been one of the components in his approach to the new black stranger. It was in the interest of the white colonist to fan this hostility for any consolidation of interest between the two labour contingents would have been fatal in a situation where the ratio between white and African was in the region of 1:10. If the African bonded with the Indian, the ratio between white and black would rise in the vicinity of 1:20. Apart from this, the African was perceived as an innocent, if not noble savage: the Indian was perceived as conniving, artful, wily. He could not but spoil the African. Consequently, Indians and Africans were separated from each other, and in separation, projected as dangerous to each other. They were at the same time within "viewing" distance of each other, so that they could be constantly reminded of the strange and different ways of the other (Meer 1985: 46).

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African leader Dr John Dube, who built the Ohlange Settlement in close proximity to Gandhi’s Phoenix Settlement, stated in the early twentieth-century that ‘people like the Coolies have come to our land and lord it over us, as though we, who belong to the country, were mere nonentities’ (Bhana and Vahed 2005: 30). Bhana and Vahed (2005: 30) note that ‘resentment against Indians was deep in some areas.’ Bhana and Vahed (2005: 26) show that in the late nineteenth-century Indians and Africans mainly came into contact as ‘employers and workers, landlords and tenants, and buyers and sellers’ with ‘little by way of assimilation of Indians into African society and vice versa.’ Over time, ‘racial tensions emerged and officials and employers alike exploited them for their own ends.’ Hughes (2007: 165) has argued that the ‘presence of Indians served to deflect much (African) tension away from the colonial state: it was a classic case of people with equally little purchase on Natal’s land and labour policies blaming each other.’ Whites depicted Indians and Africans as inferior in order to subordinate them socially, economically and politically. Middle class Indians, in turn, emphasized that Indians were a homogenous collectivity with common interests and eschewed an alliance with Africans in a context where race was used to create a naturalized hierarchy.

The post-Gandhian periodDuring the inter-war years, Indian society in Durban underwent radical change as the vast majority moved off sugar plantation to urban areas, and white fears of the “Asiatic Menace” led to ever increasing discrimination against Indians. Indians were not only segregated from Africans in work and residence, but in their political responses as well. Indian politicians, for example, declined an opportunity to participate in the Non-European Co-operation Conference in June 1927. The South African Indian Congress (SAIC) sent a delegation to the conference but argued that in view of the Cape Town Agreement on 1927, which placed an Indian Agent-General in South Africa to oversee the welfare of Indians, they could not align themselves with Africans. The Indian Opinion newspaper, edited at the time by Gandhi’s son Manilal, explained that Indians were citizens of the British Empire and had a different status from Africans who possessed the right ‘to ask the rulers to quit. They have, however, not attained the standard of education or civilization to enable them to do so’ (Indian Opinion, 17 June 1927).

Sir Srinivasa Sastri, the first Indian Agent-General, warned that if Indians pursued political unity with Africans, India would not be able to take up their grievances, and that both white public opinion and the government would be antagonised and less amenable to Indian demands. As late as 1941, long after he had left South Africa, Sastri argued at a public meeting in India that Indians stood a better chance of getting redress ‘if we fight our own battle, for their (African) status is greatly inferior to ours and by making common cause with them, our community will only be disabling themselves in the very severe combat that has fallen their lot’(The Leader, 2 April 1941).

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The emergence in the 1940s of Dr Yusuf Dadoo in the Transvaal and Dr Monty Naicker in Natal, two Edinburgh-educated doctors, as key political figures amongst Indians, changed the political landscape as both strove for unity with Africans. In March 1947, Dadoo, in his capacity as president of the Transvaal Indian Congress (TIC) and Naicker, president of the NIC, signed a joint declaration of co-operation, known as the Doctors’ Pact, with Dr A.B. Xuma, president-general of the African National Congress (ANC), pledging ‘the fullest co-operation between the African and Indian peoples.’ (Vahed 1995: 256).

From 1946 to 1948, the NIC embarked on a passive resistance campaign against the government’s segregationist policies. Some two thousand people were arrested for defying segregationist laws and the campaign drew international attention. The Indian government indicted the South African government at the newly formed United Nations Organisation (UNO). The dominance of the UNO by Western countries ensured that the world body failed to take concrete action against South Africa. But India’s actions certainly raised the ire of the apartheid regime, with NP Minister Oswald Pirow, describing Indian Prime Minister Nehru as

just another coolie …. There are some non-whites who, with White education, have made White moral principles their own.…. There is another sort of non-White – you get them on the west coast of Africa but particularly in India, who accompany a great amount of book learning with a total lack of moral responsibility. An outstanding example of this undesirable type is the Prime Minister of India, Mr Nehru. He knows the West, is a good speaker and a sharp debater, but immediately he opens his mouth it is all too clear he is only a coolie…. We should not help to make the coolie even important by criticizing him (Vahed 2015: 55).

While India intervened on behalf of Indian South Africans, Nehru, it should be noted, was adamant that they embrace the African majority in the struggle against White minority rule. Speaking in London in June 1953, Nehru said that Indians in South Africa were not Indian nationals, and that

the question of Indians, though important to us, has been deliberately allowed by us to become a secondary issue to the larger issue of racial discrimination. The opposition movement there is far more African than Indian. The leadership is African – we want it to be so. We have told Indians in Africa very definitely and very precisely that we do not encourage or support them in anything they might want which goes against the interest of Africans. We shall support them, of course, in their legitimate demands (The Graphic 20 June 1953; Vahed 2015: 71).

Africans and Indians competed for Durban's limited resources as the population more than doubled between 1936 and 1951. Bill Freund observed that during these decades there was

very little indeed in the way of assimilation of Indians into African social structure. Peripheral Durban included a significant number of Africans with wavering commitments to the city and the urban economy. Here, … Africans were tenants of Indian shopkeepers, and neighbours, although there was a strong tendency towards neighbourhood clustering. Indians constituted a

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distinct labor market. In the workplace, the work was done by racially and gender defined work groups….. Indian conservatism and an inward-looking ethnic community was one within which the four-pronged identification of race, language, religion and family, served to define one’s place in the world (Fruend 1995: 38).

While whites controlled political and economic power in the city, Africans lived in close proximity to Indians and saw them as direct competitors for the city’s limited resources. This undermined the political alliance between the ANC and NIC. At a public meeting of Africans a few weeks after the riots, prominent ANC member A.W.G. Champion, called on the ANC to:

impress on the Indians that African economic progress can no longer be delayed or obstructed; ensure that whenever the African expresses willingness to take over the services at present in Indian hands in predominantly African areas the Indian should give proof of his goodwill by disposing of these to the African at a reasonable price and that the African be given every facility to trade and to run buses to and from African areas; ensure that where Indian buses run or shops are established, and where these do not come under African management, African drivers and conductors and salesmen be employed (The Natal Mercury, 8 March 1949).

The Apartheid period

The National Party (NP) government that came to power in 1948 institutionalised racial segregation and racial identities through its apartheid policy which sought the division of South Africans across race in every sphere of life. Within months of the NP coming to power, there were riots between Africans and Indians in Durban in January 1949.iii The new government saw the riots as proof that the various “races” could not live together. Minister of Interior T.E. Donges stated that the riots ‘show the dangers of residential juxtaposition, for the peace and quiet of the country’ (The Leader on 2 July 1949). While progressive African and Indian activists argued that third party forces instigated the riots, the violence reflected ongoing tensions between Indians and Africans over such things as competition over trading licenses, alleged sexual relations between Indian men and African women, alleged exploitation of African customers in Indian-owned shops, and competition over land and housing in a rapidly industrialising city which had become racialized (Edwards and Nuttall 1990).

The ‘Doctors Pact’ of 1947 marked an attempt to forge Afro-Indian racial unity but both the national ANC Youth League (ANCYL) and ANC in Natal opposed the Pact. In a letter to James Calata on 30 June 1947, Selby Msimang an executive member of the Natal ANC, insisted that it should be left to the Natal ANC to negotiate a pact of cooperation with Indians and that any such pact should examine ‘important and vital issues involving political, economic and social differences … in the light of the very strained relations between Indians and Africans’ in Natal.’ Msimang added that the NIC had ‘done nothing to foster the spirit of cooperation which involves

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the fulfilment of certain vital conditions responsible for the very strained relations between the two races’ (Dlamuka 2018: 61). Even Jordan Ngubane, who favoured an alliance with Indians, stated in an editorial in Inkundla ya Bantu, 20 February 1947, that ‘the Indian’s battle is ours’, added the proviso, ‘it is true that the Indian community on the whole is interested only in making money out of us and when it has done this, it avoids doing anything tangible to help the African march to a better life’ (in Dlamuka 2018: 59). Following the riots, the Native Locations Combined Advisory Board met with the mayor and requested that non-African hawkers be excluded from African locations and only Africans be allowed to trade in areas where they were in the majority (The Leader, 22 January 1949). The Native Vigilance Committee organized a boycott of Indian buses and demanded that Cato Manor be set aside for African occupation (The Leader, 29 January 1949).

Despite the setback, the ANC National Executive decided in June 1951 to invite other ‘National Organisations of the non-Europeans peoples’ to participate in a program of direct action against the segregation laws introduced by the NP government. The result was that the 1950s marked the highpoint of inter-racial cooperation as major figures like Monty Naicker, Yusuf Dadoo, and I.C. Meer among Indians, and Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo amongst Africans working hand-in-hand to resist apartheid. The decade witnessed the Defiance Campaign of 1952; the Congress of the People which led to the adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1955; and the Treason Trial that lasted from 1956 to 1961and led to the Congress movement acquiring a national profile. These struggles were non-racial and great strides were made to break down racial barriers at the level of leadership. 1960 was witness to the killings at Sharpeville on 21 March, and the banning of the ANC and its turn to the armed struggle.

Hopes that political cooperation would lead to social interaction and improved relations at an indivudal level on a day-to-day basis was not to bear fruit. The Group Areas Act of 1950 cemented racial differences by creating separate education, work, social, and political structures for Indians and Africans, furthering racial distance. The late 1960s saw the emergence of a Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), led by Steve Biko, and including young Indian university activists like Saths Cooper, Strini Moodley and Asha Moodley. While this tendency drew inspiration from the Black Power Movement in America, Fatima Meer, academic and anti-apartheid activist, told a New York Times reporter that ‘Black power here is, really a misnomer for unlike the American Negro, the black South African has no power at all. It would be better to speak of black consciousness —the overcoming of the whole process of inferiorizing nonwhites’ (Hofmann 1971). The BCM defined Black as all who were oppressed by the white minority government, and included Indians. Organisations like black consciousness organisations like the South African Students Organisation (SASO), the Black People's Convention (BPC), and the Black Community Programme (BCP) included Indian and African members, in contrast to the Congress movement where racial organisations cooperated in campaigns.

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The period after 1973 saw the emergence of worker activism, and the dramtic growth of the trade union movement. But neither the non-racialism of the Congress tradition nor the trade union movement forged a non-racial identity. Indeed, as the 1980s wore on, many Indians were concerned about the possible consequences of African majority rule even as they engaged in protest against the government. Thomas Blom Hansen’s assessment that post the Soweto1976 protests by mainly African students, ‘the vast majority of Indians embraced the notion that the community was indeed their actual horizon for any political action’ (Hansen 2012: 294) has much resonance. Hansen’s point is that Indians were mobilized in the 1970s and 1980s over issues such as housing shortages, high rentals, and lack of service delivery in the new apartheid townships, the shortage of high school and tertiary education facilities, and opposition to government created political structures which attempted to create a separate “parliament” for Indians. These were bread and butter issues that impacted directly on Indians and drew them into political activism. This did not translate into a “Black” identity comprising of Africans, Indians and Coloureds.

Political activism amongst Indians not sustained as a result of apartheid censorship of new media, the imprisonment or banning of activists, as well as some activists going into exile to join the banned ANC. This removed the leadership from the masses and it was difficult to build sustained mass support and created a leadership vacuum in the townships. The government created structures such as Local Affairs Committees (LACs) and the South African Indian Council (SAIC) in the 1960s, and the House of Delegates (or ‘Indian Parliament’) which was established as part of the Tricameral Dispensation of 1983. Africans were not given a parliament but “Bantustans” were established for them in rural areas, further dividing Indians and Africans. Though the majority of Indians rejected these bodies in elections where turnout was less than ten percent in most cases, as Hansen (2012: 75) points out, township politics was a ‘hothouse of monopolistic cronyism’ in which individuals such as Amichand Rajbansi and his party, the Minority Front (MF), and J.N. Reddy and his Solidarity Party, who participated in government created structures, gained in popularity as they tackled issues of day-to-day concern to Indians. Politicised Indians, however, saw them as “sell-outs”.

Attempts to forge broadbased non-racial resistance, tenuous at the best of times, suffered a major setback in August 1985 when racial violence broke out in Inanda, a predominantly African township north of Durban that adjoins the Phoenix Settlement established by Gandhi in 1903 (Hughes 1987).The underlying cause of the strikes were high levels of unemployment and land

i Presented at the ‘Conference on Slavery, Indentured Labour, Migration, Diaspora and Identity Formation,’ 19 – 23 June 2018 , Paramaribo, Suriname. Org. by IGSR, Faculty of Humanities, IMWO, in collaboration with NAS, Dept. of Culture, NAKS, Fed.fu Afr.Sr., CUS, NSHI and VHJI. E-mail: diasporaconfsuriname2018@gmail.com; mauritshassan@yahoo.com.ii This article accepts that race has no biological basis but is a social fact and legal reality in South Africa. iii The three days of rioting left 142 people dead and 1,087 injured. While more Africans than Indians died, many Indian homes, businesses and vehicles were looted and destroyed. On 17 January 1949, 44,738 Indians were housed in refugee camps which had been set up in community halls, schools, temples and mosques all over Durban.

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shortages among Africans, but the fact that demonstrators attacked Indians, many of whom were evicted from their homes, and looted Indian-owned shops and destroyed the Phoenix Settlement, attracted international attention and resulted in the portrayal of the riots as “racial” violence. The memory of 1949 meant that the 1985 riots touched a raw nerve among many Indians who feared African majority rule in a context where between 1960 and 1985, Indians had achieved rapid economic mobility as a result of increased educational and work opportunities which resulted in the rise of artisan and professional classes as new careers opportunities opened up in engineering, accounting, architecture and a host of other fields. As the NIC sought to establish itself as an anti-apartheid force in the late 1980s, this chasm between Indians and Africans made it difficult to forge non-racialism. The political correspondent of the Daily News, a daily newspaper in KwaZulu Natal, Graham Spence, observed in 1988 that the NIC ‘failed on one basic issue—that of allaying the insular Indian community’s fears of group security if an African majority were in power. Many Indians tacitly support the Group Areas—not necessarily because of racism, but rather a fear of being swamped by blacks’ (Daily News, 6 January 1988). As the first democratic elections loomed so did many Indians’ fears of majority rule.

The post-apartheid periodIn South Africa’s first non-racial elections in April 1994, over sixty percent of Indians voted for the former white NP which had oppressed them. This support was greater among working class Indians who feared the impact of African majority rule, especially affirmative action policies. This voting trend was replicated in 1999, but more Indians voted for the governing ANC party in 2004. In 2009 and 2014, the ‘Indian vote’ has been tilting towards the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), which evolved from the former NP and the liberal white Progressive Federal Party (PFP). Indian fear of Africans is not unusual of minorities. To take Mauritius as an example, as independence approached and with it came the likelihood of Indian rule, ‘many members of Mauritius’s other racial groups were intimidated, as Mauritian independence approached, by the possibility that their cultural identity might be lost. Thus, Franco-Mauritian Jacques DeMarusem says, ‘We were scared to lose our quality of life. We were scared that they would make us eat with our hands’ (Houssart and Croucher 2017: 496).

The historical suspicion of Africans towards Indians surfaced periodically in the post-apartheid period, especially during periods of economic and political tension. Playwright Mbongeni Ngema released a song in 2002 in Zulu entitled “AmaNdiya” (“Indian”), which criticised Indians for their alleged unwillingness to accept Africans as equals, resisting the changing political and economic order, voting for white leaders, exploiting Africans as workers and customers, and for not investing in businesses in the former apartheid era African townships. He also protested the large numbers of post-apartheid migrants from the Indian sub-continent (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh) and called on the ‘strong men’ of the Zulu ‘nation’ to fight back against Indians. The song message was that ‘Indians are abusive to Black people, being more racist than Whites’ (Bhana and Vahed 2005: 150). The Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa (BCCSA) ruled in June 2002 that the song amounted to ‘racial hate speech with incitement to

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harm’ and banned it from airplay but as Baines (2009: 54) has argued, censorship cannot ‘mask the deep fault lines in the society that have been manifest in the particularism of identity politics’

Underlying race tension is the dire economic situation for the majority of South Africans as their country is facing the serious problems of extreme poverty, high levels of unemployment and gross inequality. Wealth and land remains concentrated in the hands of a minority, and more than half the country still lives below the national poverty line. Victor Sulla, a senior economist for the World Bank in charge of southern Africa, stated that ‘there is no country that we have data about where the inequality is higher than South Africa.’ Sulla’s report states that the poorest people in South Africa get wages comparable to Bangladesh while the top ten percent earn wages comparable to countries in Europe and the United States. South Africa is also one of the most unequal societies in the world, the top one percent owning 70.9 percent of the nation's wealth and the bottom 60 percent controlling 7 percent of the country's assets (Sulla 2018).

South Africa is one of the most unequal societies in the world, with a gini co-efficient, which measures inequality within societies, ranging between 0.660 and 0.696 (with 1 expressing maximal inequality) over the past decade (Bhorat 2015). Census 2011 showed that average annual household income for Indians was four times that of Africans. This is a reflection of the fact that Indians are predominantly urban while most Africans are rural; larger size of African families; higher levels of education among Indians; earlier entry into the industrial workforce; higher levels of unemployment among Africans; and other such factors. Relations between Indians and Africans are delicate. Why is African anger directed at Indians and not the former white ruling class? The historical relations between Indians and Africans, sketched above, is important to understand this phenomenon. Indians were the immediate “enemy”, for they monopolised trade with Africans, were their landlords, and competed with them for jobs. In the post-apartheid period, apartheid geography remains largely intact, with African and Indian areas contiguous but separate. They compete for places at tertiary institutions, and jobs at the lower and upper end of the occupational hierarchy. Meanwhile, whites are both spatially and economically largely invisible from the everyday lives of Africans.

The idea that Indians, like Africans, suffered equally under white minority rule, no longer holds much influence. In 2016, economist Siphamandla Mkhwanzi claimed that Indian benefited from apartheid. ‘Being less oppressed during apartheid has worked to the relative advantage of Indians,’ he stated, pointing out that between 1996 and 2014, Indians’ average per capita income increased by 468 percent, the fastest growth rate of any racial group. Another economist, Dawie Roodt, explained that this was because Indians ‘have relatively few kids and old people. The number with qualifications has skyrocketed and unemployment is falling. It is a sweet time for Indians.’ The economists argued that Indians should not benefit from Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) and Affirmative Action (AA) policies (Daily News 11 August 2016). Indians, for their part, pointed to their humble origins as indentured migrants, and stressed that their economic progress was due to

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hard work and that reports such as by these economists were deflecting attention from Whites who remained the dominant economic class. This debate reflected the defensive posture of Indians who want to while highlighting their hard work and investment in education as factors responsible for their progress, while stressing their suffering under apartheid,

These tensions provide fertile ground for the emergence of often racist African nationalist sentiments. This is embodied by the Mazibuye African Forum (MAF), a grassroots movement that has been active against Indians since around 2012. It was started by Phumlani Mfeka and Zweli Sangweni, who stated that their aim was to address the ‘economic marginalisation of Africans’ (City Press 19 January 2014). According to Sangweni, Indians ‘benefited through colonialism and apartheid…. We do not regard them as Africans but… (as) Indians in the diaspora’ (Daily News 16 July 2013). MAF accused Indians of growing wealthy through ‘deceit and stealth and by exploiting and subjugating African people, including their children’ (Daily News 22 July 2016). During January 2014, the group called on government not to give tenders to Indians and to redistribute Indian-owned land to Africans (City Press 19 January 2014). Sangweni criticised a planned statue to commemorate the arrival of indentured Indians in Natal in 1860 as a ‘a monumental insult’ to African leaders like John Dube, King Cetshwayo and Bhambatha ‘who uncompromisingly defended the length and breadth of KwaZulu-Natal’ (Daily News 22 July 2016).

In 2015, the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) and Ahmed Kathrada Foundation made an application to the Equality Court accusing the MAF of hate speech. They claimed that the MAF was unfairly singling out Indians for ‘being exploitive and being responsible for the poor economic conditions of Africans’ and was peddling lies to generate anti-Indian feelings (Ahmed Kathrada Foundation 2015). The matter was set before the Durban Equality Court in July 2016, but the MAF did not turn up (Daily News 22 July 2016). Following Ahmed Kathrada’s death in 2017, the matter seems to have fallen away.

But the sentiments expressed by the MAF are not confined to a fringe minority. Julius Malema, leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) political party has consistently spoken out about Indian dominance of the KwaZulu Natal economy. At the EFF’s party congress in Durban in July 2017, he accused Indians of exploiting African workers and of ill-treating their African customers. Malema accused ANC leaders of being on the payroll of Indian businessmnn in exchange for government tenders (Hans 2017). Malema, Ngema, and MAF’s tirades question whether Indians can ever be “African’ even though they been on the continent for over a century and half. While the law may be used to muzzle these individuals and organisations, their sentiments are widely shared. While many of the arguments can be countered factually, that is irrelevant because act according to what they perceive and believe. Rather than sweep the problem under the carpet, Indians and Africans should confront these strained relations head-on so that the false stereotypes and genuine grievances can be addressed.

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ConclusionThe difficulties that South Africa is experiencing in developing a non-racial society is due to multiple factors. This includes the historical competition between Africans and Indians, the policies of successive white minority governments to segregate South Africans according to race, and the post-apartheid ANC government’s continued racialisation of the population and the economic difficulties faced by the country.

In the absence of accelerated redistribution programmes, Afro-Indian relations will likely be headed for more tense times, with Indians feeling more vulnerable in a context of racial nationalism and economic distress. I conclude with the concerns of Fatima Meer, which capture the challenges and concerns of Indians:

While throughout the anti-apartheid struggle of the seventies and eighties [Indians] saw themselves as part of the disenfranchised majority, now they are more conscious than ever before of their minority status. As a minority, they suffer misgivings and insecurities. In the final analysis, it is up to them to overcome these, to accept the inevitable process of Africanisation and make an even more meaningful contribution to their own lives and the lives of South Africans in general. Whatever their frustrations, South African Indians have to bear in mind that they are relatively privileged participants in a poor country and they have to join in the struggle to alleviate poverty which continues to be race-bound…. From race prejudice, Indians must now move with the rest of South Africa to race freedom. The constitution empowers them to do so and they must use that constitution meaningfully. The government and the governing party needs to be more sensitive to their perceptions of them and to their needs. The government and the governing party needs to be more sensitive to their perceptions and needs. Indians must and will give serious consideration to negative feelings projected against them because of their great desire to be integrated as a South African people. But there must be an objective basis for the "hate-speaks". Careless, unresearched and baseless accusations by empowered media workers is as racist and as unjust as all the verbal persecutions by white racists (Meer 2000).

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