South Africa: the Truro, the cane, and the making of Indian Natal
The first indentured Indians reached Natal in 1860. The community they built gave the world, among others, a young lawyer named Gandhi — and made Durban the largest Indian city outside India.
On 16 November 1860 the Truro, a paddle steamer out of Madras, docked at Port Natal — today's Durban — with 342 Indian indentured labourers aboard. It was the beginning of Indian South Africa.
Natal's British planters wanted labour for their sugar estates, and over the next half-century roughly 152,000 indentured Indians made the voyage, the last of them on the Umlazi in 1911. They came from the Tamil and Telugu south and the Hindi-speaking north alike, shipped out of Madras and Calcutta to a five-year bond on the cane.
Alongside the indentured came "passenger" Indians — traders who paid their own way — and it was to serve them that, in 1893, a young, unknown barrister arrived in Durban. Mohandas Gandhi spent two decades in South Africa, and it was there, fighting the indignities heaped on indentured and free Indians alike, that he forged the method — satyagraha — he would later turn on the British Raj itself. Indian South Africa is, in a real sense, where Gandhi became Gandhi.
The community he organised endured the worst of the twentieth century: disenfranchisement, the Group Areas Act, the bulldozing of neighbourhoods under apartheid. It also endured. Today Durban is often called the largest "Indian city" outside India, and Indian South Africans — the descendants of the Truro and the ships that followed — remain one of the country's defining communities.
From 342 people on a Madras steamer to a city on the Indian Ocean that feels, in parts, like home: the cane fields of Natal made all of it.
Continue the series · Children of the Girmit
