THE Indian presence in South Africa came through various routes. In the millennium before the Dutch conquest of the Cape in 1652, one theory put forward by Cyril Hromnik points to Dravidian gold miners having settled in Southern Africa perhaps a thousand years ago.
A preserved site of Shiva worship from the period lies deep in the greenery of Mpumalanga province.
Their likely port of entry was presentday Maputo traversing Komatipoort, a name derived from Tamil, and travelling beyond into the Karoo. Khoisan folklore is a potent encyclopedia of the mixing of the heritages of the southernmost tips of Africa and India.
Indian migration that is better known is that of 152 184 indentured workers that were shipped from 1860 until 1911 to provide labour in the growing ailing colonial economy of Natal.
Lesser known are the Indian slaves from Bengal, Surat, the Coromandel, Ceylon and Malabar coasts, trafficked by slave-trading Europeans to the Cape since the mid-seventeenth century.
Anna Böeseken, a founder of the Genealogical Society, noted that over 50% of Cape slaves in the 17th and 18th centuries were Indian.
Marina Carter and Nira Wickramasinghe back up this claim, demonstrating that tens of thousands of slaves were procured by the Dutch East India Company (DEIC) from the Indian subcontinent, first primarily from the Coromandel coast and the BengalArakan region, later also from the Malabar coast, especially the important coastal settlements of Cochin and Ceylon. New research points to slaves being purchased in South India and transported to Ceylon and then being re-shipped to other Dutch settlements such as the Cape and Mauritius.
Nigel Worden refers to Cupido, a slave from Malabar who in desperation about his enslavement threatened his mistress with a knife and was subjected to a slow death, having his limbs broken on the wheel.
Cupido remains a common surname in the Western Cape. Toponyms listed in the surnames of slaves that were listed on slave estate registers at the Cape reveal the best data in locating the geographical data of the origins of slaves.
Over the course of the 17th century, tens of thousands of slaves were traded by the DEIC from the Indian subcontinent.
This is a neglected area of academic study in perceptions of the origins of slaves at the Cape.
Household inventories used to list the Indian Ocean origins of slaves in the 18th and early 19th centuries emphasise the importance of South Asian records and archives in writing fresh histories of the Indian presence in South Africa.
These sources of information are neglected in contemporary academic study of the origins of slaves and it is only since about 2007 that South Africa’s place in the slave and trade networks of the Indian Ocean world has begun to be recognised by transnational scholars.
The Cape's slave population came from a much wider geographical range
than Southeast Asia where Java and the Malay peninsula receive the bulk of attention.
A seminal study originally published in Afrikaans, titled “Groep Sonder Grense” by Dr Hans (HF) Heese and later translated into English called “Cape Melting Pot: The Role and Status of the Mixed Population at the Cape 1652 -1797”, was published in 1985 at the height of apartheid repression.
Heese unearthed the most comprehensive data on the mixed origins of South Africa’s notionally white population. His research pointed out that “many ‘white’ families ... descend from interracial unions between the European occupying population, imported African and Asian slaves, the indigenous populations and their vari-hued offspring”.
The extent of interracial unions at the Cape is recorded from the earliest times of settlement in 1652. In 1666, the Church Council of the Cape baptised children fathered by free burghers (freed from their contracts with the DEIC) with slaves. Various commissioners who reported on the trading station established by the Dutch were astonished by the high number of slave children who had white fathers.
Among the first recorded interracial
unions in 1658 was that between Jan Sacharias of Amsterdam, a free burgher, and Indian slave, Maria van Bengale. Another high-profile marriage in the early years of settlement at the Cape and one that is very interesting given the high numbers of the Bassons in South Africa was the union of Arholdus Willemsz Basson and Angela van Bengale who is credited as being the founding matriarch of the local Basson brood.
For long periods, many free burghers
co-habited with slave women and only solemnised their unions after the birth of several children who needed to be baptised. In the early years of marriages between Europeans and slaves, the records show all the slaves as coming from India.
Even in later years, the number of children and descendants of these marriages between European burghers and Indian slaves was much greater than that of slaves from other regions.
Eventually, the majority of these offspring were assimilated into the dominant European society.
It is a moot point that a large number of those presently identifying as white
Afrikaners have maternal and paternal lineages that can be traced to Indian mothers.
As we marked Heritage Day on Tuesday, with its inevitable calls to diversity and multiculturalism, one might hazard the thought that the notion of difference should give way to the idea that all our DNA is enmeshed far more closely than colonialism and apartheid forced us into thinking.
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