The memories of diaspora: a South African family's story

WE IN SOUTH Africa are the descendants and inheritors of the Indian diaspora. To inherit is to be given a gift, indeed many gifts: the riches of culture, history, tradition, memory, family, community, love. To be inheritors is also to be time-travellers, to live simultaneously in the present (here and now); in the past (the places and people we came from), and in the future (the unfolding of what we are becoming, people both old and new).

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Diasporic becoming happens over and over again.

First, leaving the homeland, and second, creating new homes, new ways, new lives, that bind a community in multiple ways, within itself, to its new land and that land’s people and histories, and also to the memory of the homeland. We here are Indian by ethnicity, like one and a half billion people on the planet.

We are South Africans, part of this country’s ethnic and racial mix, sharing the land and the nation, our rights and our futures with black Africans, with so-called coloureds, with whites, both English and Afrikaner, and with new migrants from elsewhere in Africa and Asia. And finally, we are South African Indians, a thin, unique piece, torn from the Indian diaspora’s round roti.

The word “diaspora” means the scattering of peoples like seeds, roots, airborne, and falling to the earth to germinate in new soils. Here in South Africa, we are situated at the continent's tip, where at Cape Point the Atlantic Ocean meets the Indian Ocean, those two great world systems of centuries, for the Indian Ocean world, millennia, of trade.

Well before Western imperialism, the Indian Ocean World was a zone of circulation.

Noun. 1. Movement to and fro or around something, especially that of fluid in a closed system... similar: flow, motion, movement, course, passage.

The noun circulation invites verbs: flowing in a closed circle or circuit, like blood in the body or sap through a sugar cane plant or goods in an economy built on them; encircling, as a border might if the unity it contained was also porosity; pouring, as in something that exceeds the containers that would catch it, like holds that spill forth and things that come in waves - ships, slaves and indentured labourers, migrants, cultures, histories, memories.