Indian Ocean Networks and the Transmutations of Servitude: The Protector of Indian Immigrants and the Administration of Freed Slaves and Indentured Labourers in Durban in the 1870s

Abstract

Focusing on Durban and its harbour, the article discusses the importation of different kinds of transnational bonded labour into Natal in the last half of the 19th century, and examines the ways in which Southern African and Indian Ocean histories were intertwined in the processes that built the colonial state. The institution of the Protector of Indian Immigrants is highlighted as a central ingredient in state building, which served to give legitimacy in regulating the supply of labour. The early history of the Protector’s work in the 1870s is given special attention as regards the introduction into Natal of freed slaves from the Indian Ocean coast, of indentured labourers from India, and of ‘Amatonga’ migrant workers from Mozambique. An 1877 murder case is discussed, which led to the forced resignation of a Protector, as it threatened to undermine the respectability of the institution. The article shows the continuities that existed between forms of servitude from slavery and forced labour through the recruitment of ‘liberated Africans’ and indentured Indians to more recent types of migrant and voluntary wage labour.

Notes

¹ The development of these contradictions is brought out brilliantly in Jeff Guy’s book Theophilus Shepstone and the Forging of Natal (Pietermaritzburg, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2013). The significance of hut tax payments for colonial state revenues is explained in Patrick Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Labourers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860–1910 (London, James Currey, 1994), p. 20.

² Harries, Work, Culture, p. 19. In the mid 1870s, there are monthly accounts in the records of the Protector of Indian Immigrants from John Dunn and from W. Jackson, Immigration Agent at Lower Tugela, of ‘emigrants coming to Natal through Zululand’, and ‘ferried across the Tugela’ in numbers of usually between 300 and 500 per month. Pietermaritzburg Archives Repository (PAR), Indian Immigration Papers (II), 1/1, 1875–76.

³ Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (London, Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 63. For permission to import Indian labourers from Mauritius into Natal, see, for example, PAR II, 1/1, 815/1876. For the employment of ‘refugees’ from Zululand, see, for example, ‘refugee regulations’ in minute from Theophilus Shepstone, PAR II, 1/1, 191/1876.

⁴ Nafisa Essop Sheikh, ‘Labouring under the Law: Gender and the Legal Administration of Indian Immigrants under Indenture in Colonial Natal, 1860–1907’, Master’s dissertation, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2005, pp. 29ff.

⁵ Report of Coolie Commission, Appointed to Inquire into the Condition of the Indian Immigrants in the Colony of Natal (Pietermaritzburg, Keith & Co. Printers to the Legislative Council, 1872), p. 13.

⁶ Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, Inside Indenture: A South African Story, 1860–1914 (Durban, Madiba Publishers, 2007), pp. 75ff.

⁷ Ibid., p. 78.

⁸ Tinker, A New System, pp.14ff, 105; John Edwin Mason, ‘The Slaves and their Protectors: Reforming Resistance in a Slave Society, the Cape Colony, 1826–1834’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 17, 1 (March 1991), pp. 103–28; Wayne Dooling, Slaves, Emancipation and Colonial Rule in South Africa (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2008), pp. 85ff.

⁹ Tinker, A New System, pp. 77, 105.

¹⁰ Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 226–75.

¹¹ Law No. 12 of 1872. See Mabel Palmer, Natal Regional Survey, vol. 10: The History of the Indians in Natal (Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 37.

¹² Nafisa Essop-Sheikh, ‘Making the Personal Civil: The Protector’s Office and the Administration of Indian Personal Law in Colonial Natal, 1872–1907’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History, 23 (2005), pp. 43–72. Cf. Desai and Vahed, Inside Indenture, p. 74.

¹³ James Heartfield, The Aborigines’ Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1836–1909 (London, Hurst, 2011), pp. 233–91.

¹⁴ On slave labour at Delagoa Bay and Inhambane, see Harries, Work, Culture, p. 25. On Portuguese slaving and the mfecane, see Julian Cobbing, ‘The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo’, Journal of African History, 29 (1988), pp. 487–519. Cf. Norman Etherington, The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815–1854 (London, Pearson Education, 2001), pp. 81ff.

¹⁵ Guy, Theophilus Shepstone, p. 42. The taking of slaves by the Boers was an important theme also in media coverage of the wars against the Pedi of Sekhukhuneland – see, for example, Natal Mercury, 25 January 1877, ‘Slavery in the Transvaal’.

¹⁶ Guy, Theophilus Shepstone, pp. 269, 374.

¹⁷ PAR CSO 613, 1244/1877, ‘List of Immigrant Ships which have arrived from Calcutta since the opening of Indian Immigration in 1874’, 31 March 1877.

¹⁸ John Kirk had been an expedition companion of David Livingstone, while Elton – before coming to Natal – was an officer in the Bengal Army, had taken part in the ‘relief’ of Delhi and Lucknow during the Mutiny, and subsequently fought in China. In Mozambique, Elton was a successor as British consul to Lyons McLeod, who was prominent in the efforts to expose the post-abolition French trade in ‘libres engagés’ to Réunion. See Lyons McLeod, Travels in Eastern Africa (London, Hurst and Blackett, 1860), vol. 1, Chapter 15, pp. 303–41.

¹⁹ PAR CSO 613, Government Notice No. 177 of 22 August 1873 from the Colonial Secretary, D. Erskine, thus refers to ‘the “Mâkooas” recently brought by the HMS Briton’. The term ‘liberated African’ dates back to the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807, and prominent in, for example, Sierra Leone’s ‘Liberated African Department’ and ‘Registers of Liberated Africans’. See Suzanne Schwarz, ‘Reconstructing the Life Histories of Liberated Slaves’, History in Africa, 39 (2012), pp. 175–207.

²⁰ PAR II, 1/2, 3590/1877, letter from Murdoch McLeod, 26 December 1876, and letter from Dr Kirk to McLeod, 5 May 1877.

²¹ Abdul Sheriff, ‘The Origins of the “Zanzibari” Diaspora in Durban, South Africa’, in K.K. Prasad and J-P. Angenot (eds), TADIA The African Diaspora in Asia: Explorations on a Less Known Fact (Bangalore, Jana Jagrati Prakashana, 2008), pp. 560ff. Cf. Z.K. Seedat, ‘The “Zanzibaris” in Durban: A Social Anthropological Study of the Muslim Descendants of African Freed Slaves Living in the Indian Area of Chatsworth’, MA dissertation, University of Natal, 1973, p. 10.

²² Sheriff, ‘The Origins’, p. 562.

²³ Ibid., p. 563.

²⁴ Ibid., pp. 563ff.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 564.

²⁶ Seedat, ‘The “Zanzibaris”’, pp. 10ff.

²⁷ Sheriff, ‘The Origins’, p. 565.

²⁸ PAR II, 1/2, 1589/1877, ‘Asst. Protector’s [Louis Mason] reports to circumstances att. landing of liberated Africans off SS Natal’, 23 April 1877.

²⁹ Sheriff, ‘The Origins’, p. 567. Cf. PAR CSO 613, 1272/1877, Return of Liberated Africans, discussed further below (re-classified after later utilisation as 3725/1877). Sheriff did not have access to the ‘Return of Liberated Africans’ and estimated that 285 came from what Gwyn Campbell has called the ‘Southern complex’ of the East African slave trade, focusing on Mozambique, Madagascar, and the Mascarene islands. By contrast, 146 came from the ‘Northern complex’, focusing on slave markets in Zanzibar (closed down in 1873) and the island of Pemba, while it was not possible for Sheriff to establish in the case of 77 of the ‘Liberated Africans’, whether they originated in the southern or northern complex. My own research on the ‘Return’ leaves no doubt, however, that the 77 originated in the northern complex, and that a total of 285 thus derived from the southern complex and 223 from the northern complex. The origins of the Durban ‘Zanzibaris’ may well therefore have been more mixed – more northern, and less dominantly Makua – than has been assumed, though they all in due course became Makua speakers. Cf. G. Campbell, ‘The East African Slave Trade, 1861–1895: The “Southern” Complex’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 22, 1 (1989), pp. 1–26.

³⁰ CSO 611, 3575, ‘Twenty-Third Year. The Mayor’s Minute for the Year Ended the 31st July, 1877’, p. 3.

³¹ PAR CSO 613, 1244/1877, ‘List of Immigrant Ships which have arrived from Calcutta since the opening of Indian Immigration in 1874’, 31 March 1977.

³² PAR CSO 613, 3725/1877, ‘Report on R1272/1877’ by Murdoch McLeod, 26 April 1877, with ‘List of Employers of Liberated Africans’. Cf. PAR II, 1/2, R125/1877, ‘Return of Liberated Africans of the Colony’.

³³ Originally all of them had been reserved for public works, see PAR CSO 613, Government Notice No. 142, [11 July] 1873: ‘The Administrator of the Government directs to be notified that in the event of freed slaves being received from Zanzibar, the Government will require the entire number received; at first to be employed upon the Harbour Works, the Public Wharves, the Roads, and other Public Works’. This was modified in PAR CSO 613, Government Notice No. 177, [22 August] 1873: ‘In modification of the Government Notice No. 142 of 1873, dated 11th ultimo, His Excellency the Lieutenant-Governor has been pleased to direct that, in consideration of the very pressing general demand for labour, one-half only of such freed slaves as may be received from Zanzibar shall be reserved for the service of Government’. These two notices are included as ‘Document 45’ in Y.S. Meer, Documents of Indentured Labour: Natal 1851–1917 (Durban, Institute of Black Research, 1980), pp. 175ff. Eventually, as it emerges from ‘Return of Liberated Africans’ of 1877, discussed below, only 92 of the 508 freed slaves were employed on public works. The calculations of the Colonial Engineer showed that – because of the large proportion of women and children – ‘slave labour would … be more expensive than the ordinary native labour of the Colony’. PAR CSO 613, 3725/1877, Minute from Colonial Engineer, 14 May 1877.

³⁴ Government Notice, No. 177, 1873.

³⁵ Notice. Immigration Department, of 17 August 1874, signed by ‘F. Elton, Acting Protector of Immigrants’, in Meer, Documents, p. 239. The Notice states further that ‘On and after your arrival in Natal, there is a Protector of Immigrants ready to advise you at all times during your residence there’.

³⁶ PAR CSO 602, 2663/1877, Response to Protector McLeod from Attorney General M.H. Gallwey 24 July 1877.

³⁷ Palmer, The History of the Indians, p. 38. Cf. overview of physical punishments imposed in Report of Coolie Commission, p. 7.

³⁸ PAR CSO 613, Government Notice No. 177, 1873.

³⁹ Palmer, The History of the Indians, p. 33.

⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 32. As the records show, the Protector of Immigrants’ office processed many applications also from European immigrants. The assumption that it was more exclusively oriented towards Indian immigrants may be founded in the ways in which the archives documentation was reorganised and segregated in the course of the 20th century; perhaps also in the way research on immigration in South Africa has had a primary focus on ethnicity and race.

⁴¹ PAR CSO 614, 3845/1877, Minute from Colonial Secretary to Lieutenant Governor on the appointments of Bennet and Beningfield.

⁴² R.N. Currey (ed.), Letters and Other Writings of a Natal Sheriff: Thomas Phipson, 1815–76 (Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 102.

⁴³ PAR II, 1/3, 4397/1877, Penalty of £50 imposed on Mr Bennet for unauthorised importation of labour. On the negotiations conducted by Elton with the Portuguese, see PAR CSO 614, 3845/1877, Letter from Elton to Lieutenant-Governor with enclosures, 30 July 1877.

⁴⁴ Guy, Theophilus Shepstone, pp. 101, 113, 195, 253.

⁴⁵ Desai and Vahed, Inside Indenture, p. 73.

⁴⁶ Reuben Beningfield is reported to have owned land also in Mozambique, and he continued to be active as a labour agent in Mozambique into the 20th century. See Simon E. Katznellenbogen, South Africa and Southern Mozambique: Labour, Railways and Trade in the Making of a Relationship (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1982), p. 53.

⁴⁷ Seedat, ‘The “Zanzibaris”’, pp. 30ff. Cf. Gerhardus Oosthuizen, The Muslim Zanzibaris of South Africa: The Religious Expression of a Minority Group of Freed Slaves (Durban, University of Durban–Westville, 1982), pp. 16ff; Preben Kaarsholm, ‘Zanzibaris or Amakhuwa? Sufi Networks in South Africa, Mozambique and the Indian Ocean’, Journal of African History, 55 (2014), pp. 191–210.

⁴⁸ The discussion here links up with the focus on the centrality of civil servants’ biographies in Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie’s article in the present issue on Clarence Wilfred Cousins as Chief Immigration Officer in Cape Town. See also the portrait of Harry Smith as administrator of immigration restriction, and the transformation of the geography of the port of Durban ‘from vibrant hybridity to fortress’ in Andrew MacDonald’s ‘Strangers in a Strange Land: Undesirables and Border Controls in Colonial Durban, 1897–c.1910’, MA dissertation, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2007. Cf. the portrait of Charles Sievwright as a differently scandalised Protector, in Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, ‘Masculinity, “Race”, and Family in the Colonies: Protecting Aborigines in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Gender, Place & Culture, 16, 1 (2009), pp. 63–75.

⁴⁹ Palmer, The History of the Indians, p. 25. The succession of Protectors as given in Desai and Vahed pp. 98ff is incorrect.

⁵⁰ Report of Coolie Commission, p. 36.

⁵¹ P.S. Thompson, Black Soldiers of the Queen: The Natal Native Contingent in the Anglo-Zulu War (Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 2006 [1997]), p. 29.

⁵² This can be seen from the 1877 ‘List of Employers of Liberated Africans’ and ‘Return of Liberated Africans’ discussed further below.

⁵³ PAR CSO 613, 1272/1877, Minute from Lieutenant-Governor to Colonial Secretary, 3 April 1877.

⁵⁴ PAR CSO 613, 1272/1877, ‘List of Employers of Liberated Africans’ and ‘Report on 1272/1877’, 26 April 1877.

⁵⁵ PAR CSO 613, 1272/1877, Minute to Colonial Secretary from Lieutenant Governor, 9 May 1877. This is followed up in CSO 602, 2622/1866, Minute from Colonial Secretary Napier Broome, dated 13 July 1877, to ‘The Protector of Indian Immigrants, D’Urban’.

⁵⁶ PAR CSO 613, 1272/1877, ‘Return of Liberated Africans’, Immigration Department, Durban, 1 September 1877, signed Murdoch McLeod, Protector of Immigrants.

⁵⁷ This and subsequent quotations are from PAR CSO 613, 1272/1877, Report to His Excellency the Lt. Governor in Council, 2 October 1877.

⁵⁸ For a photographic register of liberated slaves who were taken to the Seychelles, see Iconothèque historique de l’Océan Indien, Exposition Virtuelle – Esclaves Libérés aux Seychelles, 1861–1872 (Saint-Denis de La Réunion, Departement de La Réunion, [2014]), available at http://www.ihoi.org/app/photopro.sk/ihoi_expo/publi?docid=91003, retrieved 29 June 2015.

⁵⁹ PAR CSO 613, 1272/1877, Minute to Colonial Secretary from Lieutenant Governor, 3 November 1877; Minute from Colonial Secretary to Acting Protector of Immigrants, 7 November 1877; Minute from Acting Protector of Immigrants, 12 November 1877, signed S. Graves, Major, Act. Protector of Immigrants.

⁶⁰ This was highlighted in articles about him published in the Natal Mercury during February 1877.

⁶¹ Desai and Vahed, Inside Indenture, p. 83, which refers to the ship as the ‘Blendail’. The name of the Captain of the Blenheim was ‘J. Blendail’, see ‘Ship List. S. S. Blenheim. Captain J. Blendail for Natal. The 12th June 1874 – 1st Voyage. Arrived 26th July 1874’, ‘Document 49’ in Meer, Documents, p. 179.

⁶² PAR CSO 586, 3858/1877, Minute to Colonial Secretary of 9 October 1877, signed Murdoch McLeod, Protector of Immigrants, in reply to 3706/1877, Minute from Colonial Secretary to McLeod.

⁶³ PAR CSO 586, 3858/1877, Minute to Colonial Secretary of 18 October 1877, signed F. Henry Bulwer, LG.

⁶⁴ The other newspapers being the Natal Witness – which like The Times of Natal was Pietermaritzburg-based, and whose editor in 1877 was the pro-Boer Francis Reginald Statham – and the two Durban papers, the Natal Mercury, edited by another future PM, John Robinson, and the Natal Colonist and Herald.

⁶⁵ PAR CSO 586, 1026/1877, ‘Original copies of papers detached from Captain McLeod’s “Statement” and sent to Government House for the purpose of being sent home’, attached to Minute from the Protector of Immigrants to the Colonial Secretary, 16 March 1877, enclosure G. ‘Statement of Capt. McLeod, put in at the Trial’.

⁶⁶ Ibid., enclosure D. ‘Report of trial as published in the “Natal Mercury”’ (with hand-written marginalia by McLeod), p. 3. The trial took place on 16 February 1877.

⁶⁷ Ibid.

⁶⁸ Ibid., p. 12.

⁶⁹ Ibid., marginalia on p. 4.

⁷⁰ This was contradicted by Dr Kretzschmar, the district surgeon for Verulam, who testified at the trial, and who, on examining the dead body, found no traces of gunpowder blast, and that the bullet had gone through the head sideways, entering ‘somewhat from behind’. Vencatapah could therefore not have been shot face-to-face at very close quarters. Ibid., pp. 4, 6. On Kretzschmar, see Meer, Documents, p. 240.

⁷¹ Ibid., enclosure B, ‘Committal for Trial. To the Goaler [sic] of D’Urban’ on charge of murder, signed Charles Barter, Resident Magistrate, 6 January 1877. The charge was changed before the trial to ‘culpable homicide’.

⁷² Ibid., enclosure D, pp. 7, 9.

⁷³ Ibid., p. 11.

⁷⁴ Ibid., p. 16.

⁷⁵ Ibid., p. 14.

⁷⁶ Ibid., p. 8.

⁷⁷ Ibid., p. 15.

⁷⁸ Ibid.

⁷⁹ Ibid.

⁸⁰ Ibid., p. 16.

⁸¹ Ibid.

⁸² Ibid., enclosure E, ‘Original copy of the address in Tamil and Hindoo from the Indian Association of Natal’ (n.d.). This document illustrates that there were also among the wards of the Protector those who collaborated, and found it in their strategic and civic interest loyally to support the institution.

⁸³ PAR CSO 586, 1026/1877, ‘Minute Paper. Protector of Immigrant’s Statement relative to his late trial for culpable homicide’, dated 16 March 1877.

⁸⁴ PAR Government House (GH) 1220, Copies of Despatches to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 5 December 1876–15 April 1879, no. 10 of 11 January 1877, and no. 17 of 16 January 1877.

⁸⁵ PAR GH 1220, Copies of Despatches to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 5 December 1876–15 April 1879, nos. 56 and 57 of 18 March 1877.

⁸⁶ PAR II, 1/2, 65/1877, Minute from Colonial Secretary to McLeod, 7 March 1877; II, 1/3 411/1877 Minute from Colonial Secretary to McLeod, 2 October 1877.

⁸⁷ PAR II, 1/3, 1305/1877, Minute from McLeod, 26 March 1877 with enclosures and responses.

⁸⁸ PAR II, 1/3, 3643/1877, Minute from McLeod to Colonial Secretary on Harrison’s obstructing the Protector.

⁸⁹ PAR II, 1/2, 61/1877, Disappearance of Vellowpah; II, 1/2, 201/1877, Minute from McLeod of 14 June 1877 concerning Narsimloo with sentencing sheet of Protector’s Court of same date.

⁹⁰ Natal Witness, 20 and 23 February 1877. On F. Reginald Statham as editor of theWitness, see Simon Haw, Bearing Witness: The Natal Witness, 1846–1996 (Pietermaritzburg, Natal Witness, 1996), pp. 99–106.

⁹¹ Natal Mercury, 13 October 1877; Natal Witness, 12 October 1877; Natal Colonist, 12 October 1877 and 29 October 1877; The Times of Natal, 10 October 1877.

⁹² PAR II 1/3, 560/1877 and 1388/1878, Correspondence with Captain McLeod. In November 1878, the money had still not been paid, and the new Colonial Secretary, A.M. Mitchell, wrote in a minute that ‘As he now has a good Govt. Appt. I submit that he should be called upon to pay us this money’.

⁹³ Philip Warhurst, ‘Obstructing the Protector’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History, 7 (1984), pp. 31–40.

⁹⁴ Report of the Indian Immigrants Commission, 1885–7, Pietermaritzburg 1887, ‘Document 58’ in Meer, Documents, p. 255.

⁹⁵ Ibid.

⁹⁶ Ibid., Chapter III, pp. 258–66.

⁹⁷ Sheikh, ‘Making the Personal Civil’, p. 64.

⁹⁸ Desai and Vahed, Inside Indenture, p. 125.

⁹⁹ Pradip Kumar Datta, ‘The Interlocking Worlds of the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa and India’, in Isabel Hofmeyr and Michelle Williams (eds), South Africa and India: Shaping the Global South (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2011), pp. 56–81.

¹⁰⁰ Hofmeyr, Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 54; Duncan Du Bois, Labourer or Settler? Colonial Natal’s Indian Dilemma, 1860–1897 (Durban, Just Done Publishing, 2011), p. 162. Escombe went on to become Prime Minister of Natal from February to October 1897.

¹⁰¹ Kaarsholm, ‘Zanzibaris or Amakhuwa?’, pp. 193ff.

¹⁰² Preben Kaarsholm, ‘Diaspora or Transnational Citizens? Indian Ocean Networks and Changing Multiculturalisms in South Africa’, Social Dynamics, 38, 3 (2012), pp. 454–66.