The name is China, Sam China

'NEVER FORGOT HIS BEGINNING'

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OUR research has in part being dedicated to turning the numbers that were given to the indentured, into people.

As we stalked the corridors of archives, scanned the newspapers of the time and poured over the reports of commissions, we got a deep sense of their refusal to be simple cogs in the colonial labouring machine, but human beings, with hopes and desires to build a life on African soil.

In this 20-year journey, we have learnt to be patient, to search material with a fine-toothed comb, to follow small details, to accept that there will be dead-ends. But the rewards of what Jacques Derrida called archive fever is to uncover and bring to light incredible stories that would put Bollywood to shame and reduce Crocodile Dundee to tears of awe.

In this column we present the name, Sam China, who, if you were the follower of the game of football, would be as well-known as a Patel's beans bunny in the 1960s. It is a story of a of a man who arrived as an indentured labourer and built a life that would give so much to a people who had so little. We honour Sam China and the legacy he bequeathed.

The name Sam China was inscribed in the memory of many generations as the name of the premier soccer competition in which Indians competed nationally until the 1970s.

As the 1960 tournament brochure described it, the “nameless, magic quality of the Sam China Cup kept pulling them in, in their usual thousands”.

Sam China was 6 when he arrived in Natal in 1863 as Camatchee Seeneevassen, indentured number 1856, on the Earl of Hardinch from the French colony of Pondicherry (now Pudicherry) in September 1863, with his parents Seeneevassen Maurimutoo and Anundoyee, and siblings Peraman, Arjoonenv, Rungasawmy and Veramah.

As a teenager, Sam China worked for William Hartley's Overport Sugar and Coffee Estate, which covered the greater part of present-day Overport and subsequently joined a M Smith, manager of Standard Bank, as a “stable boy”.