The railroad of death: Angola and the ticket stamped ‘no return’

It is that time of the year where stories of freedom echo through South Africa. It is a remarkable narrative of a prisoner Nelson Mandela becoming president of a democratic South Africa. But often we get lost in the grand fairy-tales of Struggle and liberation. In this column, we bring to life a story of working-class Indians from Natal, who left to Lobito Bay for a better life. Their stories have largely been forgotten. But it is a bloody reminder of the price people paid to find a home in Africa.

- ASHWIN DESAI GOOLAM VAHED

Abandon all hope, you who enter here. | Dante's Inferno

THE early 1900s saw an intensification of white antipathy towards Indians. Durban had witnessed Mahatma Gandhi being hounded by white racists when he arrived back from India. Anti-Indian legislation multiplied. The main white newspapers railed against the Indian presence, raising a multitude of issues. For whites, Natal had become “a mere dumping ground for the refuse population of India”.

One of the ironies is that one of the charges against Indians was that they were dominating trade and outcompeting whites.

If their competitors were “mere refuse”, then what did that imply about their own capacities? For the white colonists, Indians were here to do their bidding.

As Gandhi's supporter Henry Polak put it: “The Indian labourer is often regarded by his employer as of less account that a good beast, for the latter costs money to replace, whereas the former is a cheap commodity.”

The white colonists also heaped a £3 tax on the indentured to force them to re-indenture or go back to India. It was a way to prevent them from making a life in the city, freed from the shackles of indenture. So callous was the local white colonist that even the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill remarked that Natal was “the hooligan of the British Empire”.

It was in this context that the indentured sought to find ways to escape this mounting threat to their lives and livelihood. In this context, a group left Durban; their destination, Angola. The British were building the Benguela Railway, so that Lobito Bay could be available for minerals mined in Katanga in the Congo.

Starting in 1903, the 1 343km line took a quarter of a century to complete.

Finance and labour were serious problems. Disease and the slave trade had depleted the local African population. Norton Griffiths and Company, contracted to build the railway, turned to Natal’s working-class Indians.