Indenture and the toolbox that made a home

IN DEATH, my father-in-law’s vibrant family home has metamorphosed into an empty shell that only holds memories for the living.

- SELVAN NAIDOO

In time, all the cherished contents that took a lifetime to gather were dispersed like dandelions to the wind, floating along a new path in search of memory anew.

My wife’s ancestral childhood home in Phoenix, to the north of Durban, is now ready for another family waiting to create memories in the municipal-built house, my father-in-law called home. As the household contents were scattered from the Highveld Johannesburg plains to the former banana plantations of Hillary in Durban, I was strangely bequeathed my father-in-law’s toolbox.

It is a strong, sturdy metal toolbox, well-resourced and neatly arranged with a set of tools that are unlikely to callous my soft hands and will most likely last until my son inherits it.

As I went through the toolbox, trying to make sense of its contents, it dawned on me that it was a metaphor that locked away all my father-in-law’s hopes, dreams and aspirations in crafting opportunities that constantly evaded his working-class ancestry.

In the toolbox, there were the finest tools that evidenced my father-in-law’s intense tenacity to make his municipal house the finest castle his children could call a home. The toolbox foregrounded his resilient, unstinting dedication towards making things beautiful for his family, and to provide what he and his indentured ancestors only dreamt of having.

In a book, titled Bearing Witness: Essays in honour of Brij V Lal, Professor Goolam Vahed pays tribute to one of the world’s finest scholars on indenture, stating that: “History is about people, and the strength of Lal’s work is his ability to put human faces to our pasts, and to present characters with whom his readers can connect. This kind of history gives voice to the perspectives of ordinary men and women who in the past were neglected or suppressed for one reason or other — class, age, gender, race, ethnicity.