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Belonging by Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed: The History of Indian South Africans

Belonging by Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed: The History of Indian South Africans

Author: By Ashwin Desai
Date: 2025-09-25

Belonging by Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed: The History of Indian South Africans

Across oceans and centuries, this sweeping narrative shuttles between the corridors of the Colonial Office in London, the contested streets of Durban, and the changing power dynamics inside of the British Raj.

The first boatload of indentured Indians arrived in Natal in 1860. Thousands were to follow. In haunting detail the book captures the plight of these labourers as well as the vicious onslaught faced by the merchant class for daring to outpace their colonial rivals. At its core are the untold struggles of Indian South Africans as they confronted the ever-present threat of repatriation.

Rather than laying down straight lines of march from the past into the future, thus presenting 'a triumphant and seamlessly progressive rhythm', this book tracks the 'paradoxes and reversals', ambiguities, forks in the road and convolutions that people experienced. As we scoured the archives, pored over commissions of inquiry, read the diaries of white settlers, and examined the proceedings of court cases, and as we examined how white antagonism was codified into laws of segregation and calls for the repatriation of Indians grew shriller, we were humbled by the power of the human spirit. Lives were disrupted and ruptured, homes lost, talents strangled, dignities trampled on. Lodged within the stereotypes of many of the peoples with whom Indians wished to unite in nationhood was a view that Indians were alien, exotic, dangerous, at once too competitive and too backward. The very fragility of their presence in South Africa evoked among them a fierce desire to belong.

How this sense of belonging developed in the Indian community in the face of huge challenges as well as opportunities, and how they negotiated inclusions and exclusions on many fronts and within various power relationships, form the subject of the following pages.

Sensitive to shifting political terrains, the book weaves together seismic events - the independence of India, the coming of apartheid and the threat once more of mass expulsions - with the texture of everyday life. The granting of citizenship in 1961 is accompanied by mass relocations as the Group Areas Act rips communities from their roots. Yet, out of this despair, barren townships on the edges of cities are turned into places of hope.

In the final chapters, the fall of apartheid offers a moment of transcendence. Yet it also asks: what does it mean, at last, to belong? It is a fascinating story of the global and the local, of resistance and collaboration, and undefeated optimism.

Belonging will be launched at Ike's Books, 48a Florida Road on Thursday 2nd October at 5.30 for 6pm. Rsvp - ikesbooks@iafrica.com