From memory to hope: history is about the future

'WHERE CAN WE GO?'

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RIGHT: Dr Kesaveloo Goonam, left, with Fatima Meer at the Currie's Fountain Stadium. LEFT: Indentured migrants had a close attachment to agriculture from the earliest days of settlement in Natal. RIGHT: Tyla Seethal with her parents, Sharleen and Sherwin Seethal.

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THIS weekend saw the outpouring of histories of the past. Marches, seminars and unveilings of monuments that commemorate 165 years since the arrival of the very first indentured labourers took place. And so it should be, for this is a remarkable African epic. But every generation is confronted with new challenges and it is crucial that nostalgia does not drown the need to develop the practical tools to respond to the present political conjuncture in South Africa.

Of course, we do not come to this as a tabula rasa but draw on a history of innovation, courage and resistance. There are many caged in the present, who want to just go along with wherever the tide takes them. But the long 20th century of Indian South African history shows, without the struggle against repatriation and the insistence to belong, there would have been no commemoration.

As we wrote in our book Inside Indian Indenture, “journeys like Shiva’s dance are unending”.

One of the most challenging issues we face in South Africa is the endurance of apartheid race classifications in defining life opportunities even as South Africa fractures into class apartheid. But ... at the edges, South Africans are challenging the watertight classificatory definitions of the past that were carried over into the present.