Mapping an indentured labour route in SA

IN CAPE Town, four walking trails trace the history of slavery from where the first slaves set foot upon those shores, to where they lived, the sufferings they endured, and the profound contributions they made to the building of Cape Town and the unique cultural heritage of the Western Cape.

- SELVAN NAIDOO

Listed on the route of the walking trail is the Iziko Slave Lodge, the most prominent marker of slave history, which now serves as a museum dedicated to human rights and the legacy of slavery in South Africa.

The Slave Lodge was built in 1663 to accommodate slaves next to the Dutch East India Company’s Garden, where many Indian slaves worked. Other sites of slave consciousness include Church Square, where a raised dais near the Slave Lodge marks the spot where slaves were auctioned.

A slave bell at Oranjezicht Farmstead is featured at the small park on a site where the 18th-century farmstead’s barn and the slave bell tower are still retained as Cape Town's sites of conscience to memorialise slave history.

The bell reminds us of a time when ships came into the bay and were rung for slaves to come running, fetching baskets of fresh fruit from the farm, and then heading down to sell to the new arrivals.

A prominent feature of many slave plantations, the bell tower structures that housed bells used to regulate the daily lives of enslaved people, served as a means of surveillance over the enslaved population, becoming a symbolic feature of plantation architecture and landscape.

For KwaZulu-Natal, the indentured labour system that brought 152 184 Indian workers to Africa from 1860 to 1911 to advance an ailing colonial economy of Natal, barely has any recognisable sites of conscience that mark where the indentured workers had landed, where they were processed, and where they lived.

In recent years, ongoing research to map an indentured labour route in KZN is being led by the author of this column to memorialise the built environment that was shaped by the system of indentured labour, particularly in the context of Indian indentured migration to South Africa.