Words on Black Water: Setting South African “Plantation Literature” Afloat on the Kala Pani

Abstract

This essay challenges the historiography of indenture in South Africa for its focus on land and schemas of belonging, which do not attend sufficiently to the opacity and fluidity that crossing the Kala Pani entailed. Crossing of the “opaque” ocean invited the re-invention for lower and middle-class indentees, literally inserting them into different life-worlds. The Kala Pani had the effect of a magician’s black box, a space for transfiguration, of aspiration and mobility outside of the terrestrial strictures of castes ordained by birth and maintained by village communities. If one were to centre analyses that focus on this oceanic crossing and its transformations of self and other, rather than its elision, this would necessitate a literary focus on individual stories of indenture, where the idiosyncratic transformations exist alongside the more familiar narratives of community. In this vein, the last part of the essay suggests a reading of Aziz Hassim’s book Revenge of Kali (2009) as a potentially revelatory form, to which pluviality and its cultural histories are central.

KEYWORDS:

• Historiography
• indenture
• Kala Pani
• literature
• slavery

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery and Sarah Emily Duff for their especially insightful engagements with this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The unequal gender ratio of indenture was the subject of much violence, suicide and domestic strife, evidence of which is profuse in the archives of indenture and captured summarily in the evidence given to numerous commissions of inquiry during the nineteenth century (see Meer et al. 1980).

2 Pietermaritzburg Archives Repository (NAB), Natal Colonial Publications (NCP), Natal Blue Books, Census, 1902.