Scabs

In 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act was passed. It was passed to the delight of the concerned British liberal that had read about the horrors of such things in the papers. It was passed to the delight of the slave holders who were duly compensated for their loss of property. It was passed to the delight of plantation owners who had already found a cheaper source of labour: The South Asian indentured worker.

The earlier famine’s colonial extraction had placed millions of Indians in a position where taking up indentured contracts wasn't a choice but a means of survival. The sheer number and desperation of those seeking a way out came as a boon to colonial landowners across the world.

For just a blip in time, there was a moment of hope for the now emancipated slaves working on the plantations of British industry; hope that – if not compensated for their previous work – they might form in union and be able to demand fair wages for continued work on their lands.

But the arrival of the indentured labourer, brought in from abroad, fundamentally undermined their bargaining power. So, “the indentured workers were forced into becoming the international scabs of the nineteenth century.”[]

From the point of view of the planter, indenture was even better than slavery because it was cheaper. Enthused the Company of Gillanders and Arbuthnot: 'Their cost is not half that of slaves.' And indeed it wasn’t. The price of a slave at the time of emancipation was between £200-£250 for an average life span of ten years... An indentured worker cost the planter £55 for ten years, inclusive of wages, commissions and passage. Fatima Meer (1985)

Such knowledge puts the emancipation of slavery into a more realistic light. It could pass because a feel-good liberal replacement was on the books where indenture was sold as a "choice" and the land-owning classes would be no worse off for their labour needs.

The marketing of the indentured and the enslaved was similar. European companies engaged the services of the local agents: in Africa the chief, in India the duffadar and the arkatia. The slaves walked in chained coffles, up to 500 miles to reach the port; the indentured were marched in gangs, sometimes for forty days. Both labour commodities were kept locked and guarded at the ports while awaiting shipment - the slaves in barracoons, the indentured in emigration depots. Since indentured labour went under the subterfuge of emigration, the recruits had to signify acceptance of contracts which they could neither understand nor sign, and appear before a magistrate to register their willingness to be indentured. While slaves were branded before departing, the indentured had a tin ticket hung around their necks or wrists. F, Meer (1985)

The contract and treatment of South Asian indentured workers would vary, and it is neither the purpose nor ability of this piece to fairly represent the breadth of experience here. I hope with a few examples, though, I can paint a rough outline.

Indian indenture lasted from 1834 – 1920. During this time, 2 million Indians were brought to other parts of the British empire to work on sugar, rubber, tea, and coco plantations; and on all the ingredients required for effective colonial rule.

This is how the second railway in this story came to be built. Between 1896 and 1901, through the contract of indentured servitude, 30,000 labours from India were brought over to construct the Kenya-Uganda Railway. In doing so, they brought the same plight to native Kenyans and Ugandans as had been brought to them in India. To open the region to the “free market”; to expedite the process of goods for export; specifically, the agricultural goods from the arriving influx of white European settlers.

As European settlers arrived in Kenya from 1902, they claimed land in an ad hoc and irregular manner. Farms were pegged out on the ground and occupied by the settlers long before any proper survey could be completed, and before any formal title deed was issued. It took the colonial survey department nearly twenty years to catch up with the backlog of ratifying these claims. By and large, in areas legally opened from settlement, Europeans could claim the land they wanted. The law stated that the land should be unoccupied, but allowance was made to compensate any Africans who were dispossessed. European settlers paid little heed to these provisions, and hid behind the useful fiction that African’s had no notion of land ownership. D, Anderson (2005)[]

This was enclosure. Enclosure of the free lands and commons of Native Africans, some of the land was already being used for subsistence farming but white settlers believed that if the land was not being exploited properly then the land was not deserved. So, they took it, and the imaginary, real and legally inferred walls arose from the ground, displacing them from what was rightfully theirs - a right to live.

Many of the early white colonizers came from South Africa, and were shocked to find that the British protectorate had not implemented the same punishing level of racial segregation, protections, and violent enforcement that the Dutch had in their previous abode[].

The country is run too much according to Indian methods. If it is to be a white man's country would it not be better to follow a little more in the wake of the administrations of South African Colonies who have now had so many years of experience in similar territory, which they brought to a state of prosperity.

There honestly seems to be very little that they did not complain about: white government officials getting marginally better rates on hunting licenses[]; perceived preference to Africans in the court system[]; that their train driver on arrival was Indian[]; that Indians were buying land near the railway; that there were Indians at all to begin with despite their arrival predating white settlement by 100 years[]; that they were not being given more free land for their very presence[] and that they did not have immunity from arrest by native police officers[]. The list goes on. The settlers wanted nothing less than total dominance of the land, law and its peoples.

One of the Indians that built that railway under what we can only guess were the terms of indentured servitude was a distant relative. Upon completion of his contract, and with knowledge of where stations would soon be constructed, he built shops along the line to sell goods to passengers and new settlers. It was a successful venture.

This was my family’s first foray into Africa and although he would sell his businesses and return to India at the request of his wife, the word would spread back home. There was opportunity in Africa.

Natal

Although almost 2,500 of the roughly 35,800 indentured workers would die in the gruelling conditions during the laying of the Kenyan-Ugandan railway, there were far worse fates for an indentured worker to end up.

Natal quickly gained the reputation of being one of the worst depots for indentured labour. Henry Binns reported to the Coolie Commission that he believed the rates paid in Natal to be the lowest of all colonies. Considerable numbers of the indentured were not even paid their legitimate pittances: employers made large deductions for small transgressions, rations were withheld from women and children and though the law laid down a ten-hour working day, fourteen hours were common. F, Meer (1985)

Natal, a region of South Africa, had one of the largest influxes of Indian indentured workers of all Britain’s colonies. The treatment of them was appalling. Provided housing had no toilets; the white landowners did not believe that they knew how to use them and that it would “only concentrate their filth.”

There is much rubbish about the coolie huts together with human excrement. I found the roads, paths, banks of the river, even the riverbed itself close to the place where the coolies drink in a very filthy state. The stench ... was sufficient to cause serious illness.

And illness there was. But the white landowners did not believe that their labour could fall ill, and so the hospital was turned into a prison. All excuses, under performance and misdemeanours, were treated with a fine and solitary confinement for weeks on end. Such fines would accrue more debt and often after the initial 5-year contract term was over, they would have no choice but to re-indenture under even worse terms as contracts in Natal were not regulated.

It was a life of misery with zero recourse for fair treatment. Gujrati Indians who arrived not as indentured workers but as entrepreneurs, known as ‘passengers,’ would internalise this treatment as a racial failure and embarrassment. Upon settling they would attempt to distance themselves from the indignities suffered by most Indians and claim themselves as Arab.

But the white landowners would not see anyone other than their own as equals deserving of Natal’s land and wealth.

The emergent Indian ’bourgeoisie’ had to be curbed, and the position of the Indian fixed to that of the unskilled workers. This was the essence of white domination. It could not be shared with the colonised… white Natal united against the Indians as a class. F, Meer (1985)

Zambia

My grandfather moved to Ndola in Zambia as a teenager with the rest of his family after the second world war and the partition of India. He arrived into the aftermath of the battle between white settler lobbying and the interests of Whitehall. The result of this dispute was a hyper-segregated landscape.

Y.Ghai and D.Ghai correctly observed that members of the three different races were forced to go to different schools and lived in different locality, unable to share social and culture amenities and it is not surprising that they remained ignorant of one another’s customs, needs and aspiration… The British rulers separated all communities by creating segregated communal zones. The implementation of such a system inadvertently left a deep void in the understanding of the Zambian social and cultural practices by the Indian settlers, thus further destroying any hope of their integration into the fabric of the Zambian society. Kamini Krishna (2020)[]

The level of segregation was so strong that the sighting of a native Zambian or white settler was a rare occurrence. Their communities acted as insular hubs of activity. Open only to the import and export of goods along the railway.

The ability of Indians to sell and set up business was granted by the British colonial government in the first place. This meant that they were competing with the only other sellers allowed - white Europeans. Competition grew and the tight knit nature of the South Asian community in not only family but in finance meant that they became more successful.

An observation of Indian success in Zambia during the first half of the century was made by the former British consul of Asia.

His manner of life domestic in the extreme is nevertheless so thrifty, so fugal and his wants, bounded by a little curry and rice, are so inexpensive, that few there are who cannot remit a rupee to India at the end of the year, to add to the store. L, Gann (1964)[]

Seeking to join the rest of the business class my grandfather embarked on learning the art of tailoring and men’s dress wear, eventually setting up a store of his own.

This entrepreneurial zeal in a highly segregated and controlled environment would define how Indian communities saw themselves and would impact and shape British politics even today.

Resistance

In Natal measures were attempted by the settlers to prevent any form of solidarity either in their worker camps or between races from forming.

It was in the interest of the white colonist to fan any hostility, for any consolidation of interest between the two labour contingents would have been fatal in a situation where the ratio between white and Black was already in the region of 1:10. Consequently, Indians and Africans were separated from each other, and in separation, projected as dangerous to each other. They were at the same time kept within ’viewing’ distance of each other, so that they could be constantly reminded of their strange and different ways. There was the use of African whipping boys on the estates, and the sentencing of a transgressing coolie to the kaffir barracks where he could be terrorised and ridiculed as the master intended; there was the appointment of an Indian overseer over African mill-hands and the use of African police to suppress Indian strikes; and running through it all, constantly reinforced, was the use of stereotypes calculated to present each with an adverse image of the other. Such stereotypes were fabricated, in the first instance, for the peace of mind of the whites themselves, to relieve them of Christian guilt for the humanity they degraded. F, Meer (1985)

Despite this, resistance inevitably grew against their treatment. Class boundaries would be broken between the indentured labourers and the more privileged Indians. They engaged in passive resistance leading to several massive strikes that put the Indians in conversation with whites on a political level.

But these strikes were organised by India for the good of Indians in Natal. On the ground, the lies, the stereotypes and most importantly the walls created by white settlers between the natives and Indians were beginning to crumble.

In 1932 the Natal Indian Congress was met by criticism from a local Indian newspaper, Indian Views, over its strategy of passive resistance[]. Understanding that any action and solidarity must also breach racial lines, they wrote:

To Britain we say may the curse of an oppressed people drag you to your doom. To India - spare us your sympathy, your delegations and your Round Table conferences, to ourselves - purge yourself of every iota of the snobbery that keeps you aloof from the native African - turn native. In this country you are nothing more and nothing less than the native. Thicker than ties of blood are the ties of slavery - one common destiny, one common tyrant, one common hell of tyranny ordains that the two of you shall merge and give battle to the oppressor as one. Indian Views (1932)

Crucially, the white landowners had not headed the example set by British Protectorates elsewhere of allowing the Indians to become a second class buffer race. In their brutal treatment of the Indian indenture servants, they hoped to quell consolidation by dividing along racial lines alone. Instead, the iron strength of class solidarity had emerged.

Leaving

In my visit to see family in Ndola in 1961 all notions of frugality had gone out the window and no one was sending money back to India anymore. They were now part of the burgeoning business elite. Streets with multi-bedroom estates and tracks of land as garden space. Cleaners, gardeners, and chefs with their own lodgings on the property. Car ownership, a rare thing even in 1960s Britain, was a norm in this community. They were, in fewer words, ballin’.

The hyper segregation of before still marked the social character of the country, but the walls were beginning to crumble and views of how the other lived were becoming more frequent. Seeing the wealth in these communities led to rumours that there was collaboration between South Asian communities and the colonial rulers in supressing and delaying African independence. Businesses were boycotted and attacked in protest.

South Asians were largely ignorant of the political struggles of local Africans because of segregation. But after the attacks and boycotts many in the Asian community wanted to set the standing straight on what they thought of their colonial rulers and on African independence.

Indians joined either ANC or UNIP but their participation in African nationalists politics had little effect on Asia businesses as a whole. This was because in the main, their participation was not done openly. Asians contributed to the nationalist cause through moral, and most importantly through financial support which was done quietly. Consequently, their contribution remained unnoticed by the colonial authorities and was misguided as they saw most members of the Asia community as sympathiser of the colonial ruler. Hence, they were left alone to transact their business unimpeded. K, Krishna (2020)

The struggle for independence from British rule was of course, something they could relate to. My grandfather was one of many secret South Asian contributors to the ANC before Zambia gained independence in 1964.

In Kenya, where my mother was born, disenfranchised local natives were fighting to reclaim land from the white settlers that had taken it.

The British response was a mass corral of the populous to find out who belonged to the so called “Mau Mau” guerrilla army. Under this pretence they tortured and killed Kenyans not subservient to the needs of white settlers for cheap/free labour and put many in concentration camps the protectorate had constructed outside the city centres.

Meanwhile, Indians were granted business licenses at the most lucrative areas of commerce. Functioning as a middle class within the retail and service sector. They were educated either by the British in Kenya or in India. The natives were denied the rights to any free education unlike the children of white settlers.

The push and pull between the demands of white settlers and the social engineers at Whitehall to keep the status of Indians elevated as a buffer race prevented the two racial groups from banding together. For any sympathetic Indians the stark nature of the treatment and conditions of native Africans served as a reminder of what was at stake.

This divide and conquer technique worked incredibly well, allowing many Indians to shed the concepts of history, context and material circumstances and regard the native's misfortune, lack of education and reduced opportunities as a failing of their own making. Not one deliberately instilled by the very recent actions of British ruling class social design.

Functioning as a subordinate ruling class, Indians in east Africa enjoyed success in business, finance, and the professions throughout the colonial period, and gained significant control over the economy. By the time Kenya won its independence in 1963, Indians – who accounted for less than 3% of the population – owned more than two thirds of the country’s private non-agricultural assets. Maria del Pilar Kaladeen (2021)[]

There were exceptions to the rule: Indians who fought for Kenyan independence with the Mau Mau like Makhan Singh[] and Udham Singh[]. India even sent lawyers to defend Jomo Kenyatta during his trial in 1952[].

But most put their heads in the sand about the world around them. In places like Kenya and Uganda where the inequalities and segregation had created an insurmountable barrier, they crafted a new story about themselves and their successes. The wealth they had gained and the system that they had navigated was the result of pure entrepreneurial graft and handwork. A “boot-straps” rhetoric with licks of racial superiority inherited from their white enablers was the reality that they could bear. When the colonies started to gain independence from the British empire and the cost of maintaining the colonies became unpopular domestically, then they were left at the mercy of a native populous that had grown bitter with white settlers and their perceived beneficiaries.