REFLECTING ON THE JOURNEY
“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
November 16 marks a historic moment for Indian South Africans. On this day 163 years ago, the Truro arrived in Port Natal. It carried the first indentured labourers. This was part of a worldwide dispersion of indentured Indians to places like Mauritius, Jamaica, British Guiana, Trinidad, St Lucia, Granada and Fiji. It is not a coincidence that this migration came in the wake of the abolition of slavery, leading Hugh Tinker to call it a “new form of slavery”.
Migration forged new identities,
