History – Media Diversified

Jan van Riebeeck

Slavery in South Africa began at the same time as colonisation in 1652, when Jan van Riebeeck, the representative of the Dutch East India Company (the VOC), arrived in Cape Town to set up a refreshment station. Van Riebeeck arrived with two slave girls from “Abyssinia” (Ethiopia). But Van Riebeeck’s arrival did not signal the “coming of the white man” as colonialism is often characterised. South Africa had a presence of white European and Asian people living there long before the first colonists. There were numerous shipwrecks along the coast, and white people and Asians and Africans enslaved on the ships were often stranded in South Africa for long periods of time before being rescued. A number of Asian people and whites joined the local Xhosa communities permanently and along the coastal areas where Xhosa and Khoi people lived, intermarriage with the local population resulted in a number of clans and large family groupings. (This history is almost unknown in South Africa, as is much of its history of slavery.) In a number of cases white Europeans refused to return to the colonial outpost in Cape Town or to Europe when rescue ships were sent for them.

Rounding the Cape Town area was crucial to Europe for the sea route to Asia, but shipwrecks happened often. The seas around South Africa’s southern tip are treacherous and its proximity to Antarctica greatly influences the winter weather, often resulting in severe winter storms. The southern tip of Africa also has numerous false bays, thereby making it a very dangerous sea crossing¹.

The country’s south, particularly around Cape Town, also served as an informal postal system where European ships left messages for other carriers who came by and before colonisation some indigenous Khoi people spoke some French as a result of their contact and trade with the European sailors.

Indian Ocean trade routes

In the early years, 80% of slaves to South Africa came from India (this included Sri Lanka). Slaves would continue to be brought from India, but over the years other regions of the world also gained importance. Over the period of slavery, enslaved people came from four main regions:

Africa (including Mozambique and East Africa): 26.4%
Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands (Mauritius, Réunion and Rodrigues): 25.1%
The Indian sub-continent and Sri Lanka (Ceylon): 25.9%
The Indonesian archipelago: 22.7%

These percentages, however, do not reflect the full range of where enslaved people in South Africa originated from. Records indicate slaves as also originating from West and Central Africa, with places of origin often collectively referred to as the Guinea coast, but specifically including the Cape Verde Islands, Burkina Faso, Benin, Congo, Angola, and also Zanzibar and Ethiopia (Abyssinia). Outside of Africa slaves were from: Siam (Thailand), Persia (Iran), Arabia (north Africa and the Arabian Peninsula), Brazil, Burma, China, Japan, Borneo, Timor and Vietnam, amongst other origins. There are also mentions of Tagal, possibly pointing to Filipinos who spoke Tagalog.

In addition, there were also significant numbers of Asian political exiles and political prisoners, convicts and Free Blacks (ex-slaves, artisans and convicts who had served their sentence) in South Africa, and west African mariners and sailors. Liberian Kru men who worked on British ships eventually made their home in Cape Town and their descendants continue to live in South Africa, although often unaware of their lineage.

FACTBOX

In a long stretch of history, immigrants and indentured labour from the Asian, African and European countries involved in the slave trade would continue to come to South Africa post-slavery, including up to present day. This includes Filipino patriots who fled the Philippines during its war of independence and whose descendants are still located at the Cape. Chinese prisoners and slaves arrived during early colonisation, followed by a second wave of Chinese miners in the early 1900s as well as immigrants after that. Indians who came as slaves and who sometimes freed themselves by joining the black groups were followed by large-scale Indian indentured labourers as well as immigrants. South Africa’s economy has for centuries been built by African slaves and Prize Negroes (Africans freed by the British from slaving ships and resettled), migrant labour from across southern Africa and the current wave of African immigrants.

It is not hard to notice that modern South Africa looks very similar in composition to South Africa at the start of colonialism: made up of indigenous groups, supplemented with significant populations of Indian and Chinese people, a strong Muslim presence, and Africans from West, Central and East Africa and also a significant presence of the progeny of these groups mixing. Since the start of slavery until the present day, there is a widely documented history of white revolutionaries who joined the oppressed black masses to overthrow slavery, then colonialism, and after that apartheid.² During slavery/colonisation there were consistent reports of white men who left the colonial system and went to live with the indigenous people. During slavery, there are also numerous instances of white rebels being part of slave rebellions, or taking to the hills to join maroon or indigenous communities.

Greenmarket Square, Cape Town. By Johannes Rach, 1764

Slaves were renamed by enslavers at the Cape, with their name reflecting their port of origins — for example, Achmet from Arabia, Louis of Bengalen and David Casta from China³. There was also, for example, Anthony, Moor of Japan, although this does not determine whether the word “moor” refers to him being an African or Arab who was enslaved in Japan, or a Japanese man, or possibly part of the black-skinned aboriginal people found throughout south-east Asia. Some slaves that were “from Japan” were sometimes born in Indonesia, sent to Japan and then imported into South Africa. Aje of Clumpong is mentioned as one of the famous multi-lingual translators in Cape Town, who spoke 11 languages. Klumpong is a modern-day popular surname in Thailand. During Aje’s time there was a class of interpreters whose mothers were from “Siam” (Thailand) and who had Portuguese fathers.

A madrassa run (likely) by an Indonesian or south-east Asian or Arab in the 1800s in Cape Town

Reading these annotations has a particular resonance for me, since I have lived in many of the areas where Cape slaves originated from. The records of origin mention largely major ports and not inland areas, which would possibly indicate the port from which they were shipped to South Africa, and not their actual country of origin. Even given the centuries that have passed, I still find gaps: the records (and some historians) assume that Chinese people were almost exclusively confined to China, outside of the distinct Batavian Chinese mentioned, and ignore the long Chinese heritage across south-east Asia, or, for that matter, the minority Shia Hazara people of Afghanistan or Uzbeks who could have been mistaken for Chinese people during slavery⁴. Similarly, “Persian” is assumed to be Iranian, but in practice it could also refer to an Afghan. Persian speakers, similarly, include people from Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The historical Persian port Gamron, which is present-day Bandar Abbas, could also be a port servicing land-locked Afghanistan, central Asia, parts of modern Pakistan, and it is also very close to the Arabian Peninsula. Even today, southern Iran has distinct African-Iranian communities who are descendants of slaves, as well as of African mariners and traders. The question remains whether the Persians at the Cape were Persian slaves, African, Indian or Arab slaves bought in Persia, or slaves from non-Persian communities in the Indian sub-continent.

South African historians discount any significant presence – or even any presence at all — of slaves from Malaysia. At the same time, slaves to the Cape are said to originate from every area of south-east Asia around Malaysia. Are we to assume that miraculously Malaysia was spared? I do question how there could have been a movement of slaves from Thailand and the areas of Ayutthaya and Bangkok, and then across Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and the inland areas of the sub-continent including Burma, which somehow passed over neighbouring former Malaysian regions like Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat. Furthermore, it has always struck me just how Kaaps (like the Cape) Malaysia is. There is also no clarity on whether specific groups or minorities in Asia were enslaved such as Tamils, Christians, Hindus, animists or aboriginal people.

Historian Robert Shell notes that the most common languages of imported slaves in South Africa were Buginese, Chinese (there is no indication whether this refers to Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, etc), Dutch, Javanese, Malagasy, Malay and Portuguese. Shell writes that, “No purely African languages were ever translated in the Cape during this (early) period”, but he does say that by 1660, every major language group in the world was represented in South Africa because of slavery. The Archives in Cape Town still have texts written in Buginese and Afrikaans has a significant number of common Malay and Bahasa Indonesian words including klapper (coconut) and piesang (banana). A friend⁵ who spent time in Aceh noted that the Afrikaans word babelaas – hungover – was also used in Indonesia. Muslims in Cape Town still use Malay words as part of everyday speech, including terima kasih (thank you) and puasa (the Muslim fast/Ramadan).

Indian Ocean Slave Routes – Credit: Iziko Museums

Shell writes that between 1652 and 1808 about 63,000 slaves were imported into South Africa. This figure does not reflect the number of people born into slavery once their parents were at the Cape (the children of slave mothers were automatically enslaved themselves), nor of the ambiguous matter of indigenous people captured. After the British abolition of the slave trade in 1808 (the mercantile transactions, but not the institution itself), there were decades when “Prize Negroes” came to the Cape. These were slaves from ships that the British intercepted as part of its anti-slavery campaign. The British sent many Prize Negroes to British colonies to provide labour as part of a system of “apprenticeship”.

It is hard to believe that this fertile, extensive history is buried in South Africa; in many ways the country’s people still largely look at themselves through the lens left by colonisation and apartheid. And, just as people across the developing world continue to challenge Europe and north America to acknowledge the long history of African and Asian people on their shores, so too, there is a political challenge for the global south to interrogate just how we came to be. In South Africa, and in many other places, the scrutiny of history has the power to not only redefine the country’s identity in revolutionary ways, but it can also provide facts and truth of how the country was shaped over hundreds of years and how history has been lived with complexity and contradiction and not with the easy lull of slogans.

Sources:

Up From Slavery – R.E. van der Ross (Ampersand Press)

Children of Bondage – Robert C.-H. Shell, Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg

1Also mentioned in South Africa: Slavery & Creolisation in Cape Town.

2 A similar point is made by Tariq Patric Mellet on his blog South Africa: Slavery & Creolisation in Cape Town.

3 All names mentioned are actual names of enslaved people.

4 A famous painting of a Cape madrassa in the 1800s, for example, has the imam wearing a distinctive chapan, a coat worn by Afghan men. The colours of the garment, though, could also make it Turkic, Uzbek or central Asian.

5 Conversation with Fiona Lloyd.

All work published on Media Diversified is the intellectual property of its writers. Please do not reproduce, republish or repost any content from this site without express written permission from Media Diversified. For further information, please see our reposting guidelines.

Karen Williams works in media and human rights across Africa and Asia. She was part of the democratic gay rights movement that fought against apartheid in South Africa. She has worked in conflict areas and civil wars across the world and has written extensively on the position of women as victims and perpetrators in the west African and northern Ugandan civil wars.

Indian Ocean Slavery is a series of articles by Karen Williams on the slave trade across the Indian Ocean and its historical and current effects on global populations. Commissioned for our Academic Space, this series sheds light on a little-known but extremely significant period of international history.

This article was commissioned for our academic experimental space for long form writing edited and curated by Yasmin Gunaratnam . A space for provocative and engaging writing from any academic discipline.

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by Karen Williams Follow @redrustin

Diplomat, soldier, admiral and eunuch. Possibly, also, the model for Sinbad the Sailor[1]. Chinese admiral Zheng He mapped the Indian Ocean from Japan to Kenya and conducted seven epic voyages across the “Western Seas” to cement centuries of Chinese dominance in trade and seafaring across the Indian Ocean. Surprisingly, it is only in recent years that Zheng’s explorations have received attention, and even now, he is relatively unknown in his own country.

When I first read about him around a decade ago, Zheng was a figure of curiosity and a scholarly legend: part of the disjointed tales of heroism and correction that I read to counter the decimation of local histories by colonialism. It is only recently, writing about my own history and the history of the Indian Ocean and its slavery, that I’ve been able to place Zheng in a bigger historical narrative. Now, Zheng is no longer a context-less corrective to the audacity of colonisation: he is, instead, a crucial part of the puzzle that has bound people at various parts of the Indian Ocean for centuries, through diplomacy and trade, intermarriage, the trade in enslaved people and more recently, the anti- and post-colonial worlds.

Admiral Zheng was a Muslim eunuch who rose to prominence in the Ming Court and set sail across a large part of the world, and whose paths others would follow. In later centuries, the trade and enslaving pre-eminence of the Portuguese, Dutch and other European countries in Asia would retrace many of his routes, revisiting his areas of contact. Their colonial history would form the basis of almost all future contact between peoples of the Indian Ocean; and yet his story would be lost.

Zheng’s voyages and mapping of his expeditions happened before Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama had even started his explorations. This was about a century before the Dutch established their Indian Ocean trade routes and also a century before Christopher Columbus began his voyages to what would become the Americas.

Born in China’s southern Yunnan province in 1371, Zheng’s parents were from central Asia and had settled in the area generations before. His grandfather and father were known as hajji, indicating that they had completed the pilgrimage to Mecca, and researchers say that his forebears were either Mongol or Persian. (His name at birth was Ma He, indicative of his Hui Muslim origins, as “Ma” is the Chinese equivalent of Muhammed.)

Politically, China was changing rapidly at the end of the 1300s and the new homegrown Ming dynasty eventually launched a bid to overthrow the occupying Mongols and drive them out. Zheng was captured by Ming troops during a raid when he was ten years old and he was castrated, as was the custom.

His rise as a eunuch was rapid through the Ming court, which he joined as a soldier and an adviser to the prince, serving in Beijing. Throughout China’s history, eunuchs have wielded considerable political power in imperial courts. Zheng distinguished himself in the battle for the capital Nanjing, and when the prince took power, his eunuch adviser became one of his closest aides.

As part of the consolidation of power and growth of the Ming Dynasty, Zheng was tasked with exploring the Western Seas, essentially the Indian Ocean region. By all accounts, not only was the scale of his seven voyages impressive, but the size of the Chinese ships dwarfed anything that had been seen before – and it would take centuries before they would be matched. National Geographic writes, “All the ships of Columbus and da Gama combined could have been stored on a single deck of a single vessel in the fleet that set sail under Zheng He”.[2]
Even more staggering are the details of his armada. One historian has noted that the size of his fleet would not be matched until after World War Two. A BBC report states that Zheng’s first voyage in 1405 had a fleet larger than the combined fleets of all of Europe.[3]

Not only were the ships larger than any before them – they were better-equipped, including being outfitted with magnetised compasses and watertight bulkhead compartments. It would be hundreds of years before European ships would carry similar technology. Reports also noted that the fleet had its own vegetable patches onboard.

Statue of Zheng He in the Quanzhou Maritime Museum

Zheng He’s tomb in Nanjing, China, although he is believed to be buried at sea

Monument to Zheng He at Stadthuys, Melaka, Malaysia

Author Paul Lunde has noted: “The figures given for the size of Zheng He’s first fleet seem incredible, but there is no doubting them. There were 317 ships of different sizes, 62 of them “treasure ships” loaded with silks, porcelains and other precious things as gifts for rulers and to trade for the exotic products of the Indian Ocean. The ships were staffed by a total of 27,870 men, including soldiers, merchants, civilians and clerks —equivalent to the population of a large town.

“Perhaps most astonishing are the dimensions given in later Chinese sources for the treasure ships: They were said to be some 140 meters (450′) long by 57 meters (185′) wide, carrying nine masts. This is twice the length of the first transatlantic steamer, which then lay four centuries in the future! Admitting the impossibility of these dimensions, it still seems certain that these were very big ships. Marco Polo voyaged to India in 1292 in a junk with a crew of 300, and Nicolòdei Conti mentions five-masted junks of perhaps 2000 tons.”[4]

Indonesian stamp commemorating the 600th Anniversary of Admiral Zheng He’s Voyage

At the time China was the richest country in the world, and was in a similar position as it is today, with reportedly the world’s largest economy[5], while also engaging in global diplomatic and trade expansion. In the centuries preceding the Ming empire (when Zheng was sailing), China had been increasing its commercial and maritime activities.

Kenneth Nebenzahl writes, “For three centuries the Chinese had increased their sea power in support of maritime commerce. In the early Ming period, ship-building and navigational skills advanced rapidly. When the Yung-lo Emperor decided to expand trade and Chinese influence, he selected Zheng as commander-in-chief of a great fleet for the ‘Western Seas’”.[6]

Zheng’s first three voyages were concentrated in Asia, stopping at Sumatra, Java, Sri Lanka, Aceh, Vietnam, India and other ports in the region. Later, he would branch out to the further regions of the Indian Ocean, including visiting Hormuz, Aden, Mecca, Somalia and Kenya.

The Chinese were already master shipbuilders during the Song (Sung) Dynasty (960-1229), with watertight bulkheads which improved buoyancy and ships big enough to hold hundreds of crew.

Researchers at Columbia University have noted that during the Song Dynasty, the perfecting of the compass was vital to expeditions. “The way a magnetic needle would point north-south had been known for some time, but in Song times the needle was reduced in size and attached to a fixed stem (rather than floating in water). In some cases it was put in a small protective case with a glass top, making it suitable for sea travel. The first reports of a compass used in this way date to 1119.”[7]

The Song dynasty also did a vigorous sea trade from Japan to east Africa, including up to Somalia.

“Chinese ships were seen all throughout the Indian Ocean and began to displace Indian and Arab merchants in the South Seas,” the researchers at Columbia University write. “Shards of Song Chinese porcelain have been found as far away as eastern Africa.”

In fact, Song porcelain has been discovered as far south as South Africa, at excavations of the Mapungubwe kingdom.

Archeologist Kris Hirst describes how trade goods excavated at Mapungubwe in South Africa’s north included, “Chinese celadon ceramics dated to the Song (1127-1279 AD), Yuan (1279-1368 AD) or early Ming (1368-1644 AD) dynasties of China were recovered from the site”.

She writes that, “Reanalysis of beads and celadon pottery found at Mapungubwe and the related site of K2…suggests that some of them date to the early Ming Dynasty, suggesting that Mapungubwe cannot have been abandoned until the 14th or early 15th centuries AD, opening up the possibility that these reflect contact via the travels of the Chinese explorer Zheng He.”[8]

Ming porcelain has also been excavated at Great Zimbabwe, which was established after Mapungubwe. Researchers believe that the two kingdoms were among the gold and ivory suppliers to China (and the Silk Road trade route), and that the African kingdoms imported cotton, ceramics, glass beads and silk cloth from Asia and Europe. Historians point to trade between southern Africa and the Swahili east African coast, stretching from Sofala in Mozambique to Kenya and linked via traders to Europe and the Silk Road as the possible conduit to China. Mapungubwe’s excavations have also revealed goods from Persia (present-day Iran), India, Sri Lanka, Germany, the former Czechoslavakia, Egypt and Venice attesting to the scale of its international trade.

During a number of his voyages, Zheng battled pirates, and also returned with local rulers back to China. Some researchers have said that the leaders came to China to pay tribute, sometimes making the journey under duress. Records mention that about 37 countries and principalities sent representatives to pay tribute in China, during the period of the armada’s seven journeys

Bengalis presenting Ming Court with Giraffe as tribute

“On returning from the third expedition Zheng built a fortified post at Malacca, and on the fifth voyage he arrived back at Nanking with princes and family members from seventeen countries, in addition to ostriches, zebras, and giraffes. On his final expedition, with more than twenty-six-thousand soldiers, sailors, cooks, doctors, and carpenters, he returned to the Yangtze with ambassadors from ten countries around the Indian Ocean,” writes Kenneth Nebenzahl.[9]

The details of Zheng’s later voyages were recorded by three of his officers and some of the main information was left by his Chinese Muslim translator, Ma Huan, who spoke Arabic, and possibly also Persian.[10]

In the 1620s, the navigational charts and maps from Zheng’s voyages were published. Nebenzahl describes how, “Unfolded, the entire chart measures nearly seven meters. It depicts the sea route from Nanjing, down the Yangtze, across the China Sea and Indian Ocean to East Africa, passing the mouth of the Persian Gulf and Red Sea.”[11]

But in the later years, Zheng’s voyages became increasingly unpopular with court officials, who balked at the costs and wanted to consolidate their domestic power. By the time of Zheng’s sixth voyage, the Chinese army was also smarting from a defeat in Vietnam[12], and eventually China would turn increasingly inward.

“Zheng, the Chinese-Muslim-eunuch-admiral-diplomat, is one of history’s most interesting characters. His emperor died in 1424 and was succeeded by a conservative regime controlled by Confucian mandarins who focused on domestic policy and condemned expansionism. Had its politics been otherwise, China may have built a fortified network of trading posts and changed the progress of the nascent European age of exploration,” writes Nebenzahl.[13]

Although Zheng has a modest tomb outside Nanjing, he is believed to have died at sea, off the coast of India, on the return leg of his seventh voyage. It is hard to believe that even in his home country, he is still largely unknown. Zheng is more than a hero or legend: by standing in such contrast to all the centuries of enslavement that took place across the Indian Ocean, he emerges as the towering commander of his beloved Western Seas.

References:

Mapping the Silk Road and Beyond: 2,000 Years of Exploring the East – Kenneth Nebenzahl, Phaidon Press, 2005

The Song Dynasty in China

China’s Great Armarda

African Iron Age Polity in South Africa

China hails legacy of great adventurer

Zheng He, Ming China’s Great Admiral

The Admiral Zheng He

Sidebar: Zheng He’s voyages

1405-1407: Champa (present-day Vietnam), Java ,Palembang, (Indonesia, on Sumatra)

Malacca^,Aru, (group of islands in Indonesia),Samudera, Lambri, Ceylon, Qulion (Kollam) , Kollam, Cochin, Calicut (now known as Kozhikode in Kerala) (317 ships)

1407-1409:Champa, Java, Siam, Cochin, Ceylon, Calicut (249 ships)

1409-1411:Champa, Java, Malacca, Semudera, Ceylon, Quilon, Cochin, Calicut, Siam, Lambri, Kayal, Coimbatore, Puttanpur (48 ships)

1413-1415:Champa, Kelantan, Pahang, Java, Palembang, Malacca, Semudera, Lambri, Ceylon, Cochin, Calicut, Kayal, Hormuz, Maldives, Mogadishu, Barawa (Somalia), Malindi, Aden, Muscat, Dhofar (Oman) (63 ships)

1417-1419:Ryukyu (islands just off Japan), Champa, Pahang (Malaysia), Java, Malacca, Samudera, Lambri, Bengal, Ceylon, Sharwayn (Yemen), Cochin, Calicut, Hormuz, Maldives, Mogadishu, Barawa, Malindi, Aden

1421-1422:Champa, Bengal, Ceylon, Calicut, Cochin, Maldives, Hormuz, Djofar (Oman), Aden, Mogadishu, Brava

1430-1433:Champa, Java, Palembang, Malacca, Semudera, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Bengal, Ceylon, Calicut, Hormuz, Aden, Ganbali (possibly Coimbatore), Bengal, Laccadive and Maldive Islands, Djofar, Lasa, Aden, Mecca, Mogadishu, Brava

(100 ships)

Source

[1] He was also called San Bao, meaning Three Jewels

[2] Voyages of Zheng He

[3]

[4] The Admiral Zheng He

[5] Estimates vary on whether China currently has the largest or second largest economy in the world.

[6] Nebenzahl, K. Mapping the Silk Road and Beyond, Phaidon Press, London 2011, p.42

[7] Technological Advances During the Song

[8] African Iron Age Polity in South Africa

[9] Nebenzahl, p42.

[10] Persian refers to the common language spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

[11] Ibid

[12] Lunde

[13] Nebenzahl, p.42

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by Priya Atwal Follow @priyaatwal

‘Project Hope’ should be the right and proper name of the Brexit campaign, says Michael Gove. The British Justice Secretary made this declaration on Friday night during a live TV interview on Sky News, in which he also lambasted the Remain campaign for belittling Britons and telling them that their country is “too small, too poor and too stupid” to stand alone outside of the European Union.

Gove and other prominent Leave campaigners, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, have long been arguing that Britain will be better off if freed from the “shackles” of the EU, and that the country can only venture towards becoming great again if that happens. In a speech given in April this year, Gove even argued that a British exit from the EU could become an “inspirational example to the world” and spark a “democratic liberation of the whole Continent”. He likened the EU to past failed empires: citing the models of the Habsburgs, Romans, Ottomans and Russians, yet curiously failing to mention the British empire at all.

A lack of awareness, or even delusion, about the role of British imperialism in shaping British history is something that strongly pervades the EU referendum campaign. Let’s get one thing straight though: Britain has not truly stood alone for a very long time, one could argue for several centuries, ever since it had a global empire to lean on.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries especially, it actively drew huge amounts of manpower and resources from its subjugated territories in order to protect and expand British global power, largely regardless of the wishes of its colonised subjects. India alone sent over one million men to fight for the British in the First World War, and double that number fought in the Second. By 1945, Britain was actually in debt to India to the tune of several million pounds – a drain on the Indian economy that left rampant inflation and famine in its wake. Yet when it came to answering Indian calls for political freedom in return for all this support; Winston Churchill, Britain’s great war hero and champion of the right to ‘national self-determination’, was not interested in the slightest.

British people are, however, rarely encouraged by their national curriculum to think critically about a long and shameful history of invading, colonising and disrupting the cultures of many other peoples from around the world; not least since Gove, as Education Secretary in the previous government, was instrumental in changing the History curriculum to adopt a more triumphalist and celebratory view of the ‘achievements’ of British imperialism, rather than of recognising and understanding the perspectives of those who suffered under it. It is not surprising then that such a worldview fails to acknowledge the sad irony that is apparent in mounting complaints and bitterness against the number of migrants living and working in Britain.

In the second half of the twentieth century, former subjects of empire came to British aid once again, when workers from across the Commonwealth were called over to Britain by its government, to help rebuild the country’s post-war economy and to develop the newly-founded National Health Service. Yet these families faced huge amounts of racism and hardship, mainly because the governments of the day had ill provided for their arrival and accommodation into local communities.

Today we see many of the same problems rearing their heads across the country, as austerity measures imposed by the Conservative government weaken the ability of social services and local councils to cope with growing demands on hospitals and housing. Clearly therefore, little heed is being paid to the lessons of our past; an approach which could well be highly detrimental for Britain as a nation, not least as recent research suggests that migrants coming from the EU actually make a positive net contribution to the UK economy. Instead of engaging with such economic and historic insight thoughtfully, the right-wing media and pro-Brexit politicians arrogantly brush aside the research and voices of specialists critical to their arguments (as Gove classically stated in his Sky News interview, “people in this country have had enough of experts”) and increasingly rely on dog-whistle tactics to demonise migrants as potential terrorists or rapists.

"People in this country have had enough of experts," claims Michael Gove. #InOrOut pic.twitter.com/aJTYY9Fgon

— BuzzFeed UK Politics (@BuzzFeedUKPol) June 3, 2016

The espousal of such uncritical and misleading views about the history of British imperialism and migration is a truly toxic feature of the EU referendum campaign, and it constitutes a huge disservice to the British electorate on the part of its political representatives. The EU is definitely not perfect, it desperately needs reforming, especially if it is to tackle one of history’s greatest migration crises effectively – but by storming off in a misguided fit of arrogance and xenophobia, Britain is highly unlikely to achieve much.

Britain is no longer (thankfully) a country with an empire to fall back on, but is instead one that has plenty to give and to gain from being a part of a broader European world. The sooner British voters reject Gove’s delusions of imperial grandeur, the better.

Priya Atwal is a doctoral student in History at the University of Oxford, and is currently working on a research project about the evolution of Anglo-Indian royal relations during the nineteenth century. Hailing from a British Sikh background, Priya has long been interested in exploring the history of the British Raj and the British Asian community, and is committed to making historical research more accessible and engaging for the public. Find her on Twitter: @priyaatwal

Don’t Believe Brexiters: The Battle to Save the NHS Starts Now

by Karen Williams Follow @redrustin

In 1705 a gang of Chinese slaves were caught robbing the burghers at night. When interrogated, it was discovered that they escaped from the (Slave) Lodge by forming a human pyramid in the courtyard to escape over the roof. – The Dutch East Indian Company’s Slave Lodge at the Cape, by Helene Vollgraaff, p12

The Chinese in 18^th and 19^th century South Africa are recorded as historical and statistical footnotes: mentioned in passing in prison inventories, court cases and notices of enslavement and exile. But everywhere you read closer, their personalities, that individual who lived and loved, as well as their complex social realities, keeps breaking through. Ongkonko, the most prominent Chinese man in Cape Town in the 1700s, exiled to South Africa after being found guilty of high treason in Asia. His love, Thisgingnio, the only Chinese woman convict recorded at the Cape. Lemuko, who insisted on very clear manumission papers for every slave he bought and freed. And then, even the anonymous ones: the gang who formed a human pyramid to escape out of prison; the prosperous bakers with slave runners who incurred the ire of white competitors; and the Chinese men the records disapprovingly say bought women out of slavery and married them because they were polygamists.

The DEIC used the Cape as a dumping place for political and civilian troublemakers in the East Indies from 1658 to 1795. A number of Singhalese and Javanese, but mostly Batavian Chinese convicts were sent to the Cape. By 1706 there was a significant Chinese community at the Cape. The convicts worked in the quarries, built fortifications and collected salt and lime. They worked and were housed together with the slaves. – Helene Vollgraaff, p22

Chinese convicts in Batavia escaping by forming a human pyramid, 1705

Chinese convicts in Batavia escaping by forming a human pyramid in 1705. Credit: From Diaspora to Diorama: Robert Shell (compiler).

The Chinese footprint in South Africa is nearly a millennium old. Carbon-dated shards of Chinese porcelain in the collection of colonist Cecil John Rhodes dating from the 1100s and also later, were found at Mapungubwe, an early site of civilization in South Africa’s north and also at the Great Zimbabwe Ruins, giving credence to historical writings that southern Africa was one of the main gold suppliers to the Ming Dynasty. Stories of pre-colonial shipwrecks mention enslaved Chinese children stranded in South Africa. The contact continued in various waves throughout the past five hundred years, and in the 20^th century, South Africa was the only country on the continent’s mainland that had local Chinese citizens, born in the country and representing fourth- and fifth-generations of South African Chinese. (Under apartheid they were classified as “non-whites” like all of the country’s black population, and were more specifically classified as “coloured” under apartheid’s racial classification laws.)

But between the Ming trade links and the twentieth century families, Chinese people were already a significant part of the population three hundred years before the current population of local South African Chinese.

Most of the Chinese in Cape Town in the 1600 and 1700s came from the Dutch “prize colony” of Batavia (present-day Jakarta), and consisted mostly of criminals exiled to South Africa’s coastal Cape region. Some of the convicts were sentenced to wear chains once in South Africa, and groups of Chinese were regularly imprisoned at Robben Island, the penal colony that has housed revolutionaries, political prisoners, lepers and criminals for hundreds of years before Nelson Mandela and anti-apartheid fighters were imprisoned there from the 1960s onwards.

Xin Xiao, a researcher at the Confucius Institute at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University, says that Chinese people were already in South Africa in the 17^th Century:

A Chinese bride in Batavia (circa 1800s)

“The Chinese who came to South Africa in the eighteenth century were not businessmen, although some people were. Some people committed crimes in China. In the 19^th century the Dutch East India Company controlled much of the area and the VOC did not know how to develop agriculture. They needed people to develop the agriculture sector and (cultivate) rice, wheat and corn in the Cape.”

In the 1820s the VOC imported 80 Chinese from Indonesia (Batavia),” said Xiao, and they joined hundreds of others already at the Cape. At the time, China’s Qing dynasty forbade its citizens from travelling abroad. Xiao believes that the Batavian Chinese had immigrated to Indonesia illegally, thereby making them vulnerable to be captured by the Dutch. Historian Robert Shell has noted that hundreds of Chinese were sent to South Africa yearly. The Chinese at the Cape spoke mainly Cantonese and came largely from Guangdong and Fujian provinces in the south.

By the early 1700s South Africa’s Chinese population was so numerous in Cape Town and its surrounding areas, that they made up a specific sub-section of the population, with their own cemetery very close to the most sacred Muslim burial ground in the city.⁴

The convicts were forced to work the quarries, building fortifications and collecting lime and salt. Chinese men were particularly targeted to do some of the most backbreaking work in Cape Town, including building the breakwaters around the city, a labour in which many died.

A prisoner list, dispatched to Holland 5 September 1686, shows that although the prisoners had been given sentences of a given number of years, the records of their sentences were conveniently mislaid. In a note appended to Jacob van (from) Macassar’s name appeared these words: “the length of his banishment and his crimes are not to be found.” Next to Arie van Bengal’s name was the legend: “not found in the Company books.” These records disclose that sentences of convicts were quite commonly “mislaid”.

To be blended in with the slaves and then forgotten was clearly part of the punishment for convicts sent to the Cape. Jannas of Tagal wrote indignantly to the Council of Policy that he had been “now nineteen years in banishment here, while his sentence was 10 years.” Ripa Nagara wrote that he had arrived in the Company ship the Herstelling in 1723, “having been sent away by his brother from India to remain away as long as the latter lived, his brother is already dead sixteen years, but as yet he has not received back his liberty.” Slavery was also part of the punishment for these prisoners; many, whose records were “lost”, became slaves for life. – Robert Shell¹, p197

Front of Slave Lodge, Cape Town, South Africa

The VOC records list many of the Chinese as Company prisoners, but in effect, they were often enslaved the moment they arrived at the Cape. Some were released after serving their sentence, and some returned to Asia, but many of the men would never be freed until they died. The fact that a lot of them lived in the Slave Lodge in central Cape Town already designated their status as enslaved people and they were blended with the slave population.

“In the Cape archives there are lots of Chinese who are freemen, rather than Company slaves,” Xiao explained. “The VOC had asked the Chinese government for skilled workers and they imported the skilled (Chinese) workers. But after they arrived in South Africa, their contracts were changed: even if they were freemen, they now became slaves.”

The Chinese were part of the country’s Free Black community from the 1600s onward, which encompassed manumitted slaves, Asian political prisoners and royalty, exiled criminals who had served their sentence as well as Asian and African traders and artisans. Along with the other Free Blacks at the Cape, the Chinese mainly engaged in waged labour that included baking, petty trading, shopkeeping and ships’ provisioning.

Some male Chinese “free blacks”… practice polygamy and obtain their wives by the purchase of female slaves, but one must also record that the Chinese were scrupulous in obtaining a formal manumission after such slave purchases. The following astonishingly candid manumission request submitted in 1768 illustrates this perfectly: “Liminionko, Chinaman, banished on Robben Island, and Lemuko, a countryman, holding his power-of-attorney, prays that his (Liminionko’s) slave, Dina, and the two children whom he has procreated by her, might be manumitted (the previous sale transfer from a patrician slave trader attached to the request.)” – Shell, p119

The Free Blacks had a distinct history in freeing enslaved people in South Africa.

Chinese shops at Kali Besar in Batavia’s Chinese district (circa 1910-1920)

Historian Robert Shell notes that Cape Town’s Chinese community had the monopoly over the chandlery concerns. Other free blacks ran fishing syndicates in the port as well as haberdashery shops and restaurants, which Shell says “were profitable enough to generate capital to pay for, and informally free, many slaves”.

Even if one counts only formal manumission requests, one had to conclude that, considered proportionally, free blacks bought and freed many more slaves through the domestic market than any other group of slave owners from 1658 through emancipation,” Shell writes.

Apart from the few chandlery, fishing, and restaurant enterprises owned by free blacks and ex-convicts, it is difficult to say how free blacks generated the capital for so many slave transfers and manumissions. Their sacrifice in using their savings to free others can only be regarded as dazzling. This sacrifice nudged many into an honorable, but binding, poverty,” wrote Shell.²

Cape Town slaves plan to steal flour from one of their owners and to sell it to an exiled Chinese person in the town. They are caught red-handed by the nightwatchmen and apprehended. The case gives a glimpse of the Chinese bandieten (convicts) exiled to the Cape from Batavia, some of whom, such as Limoeijko³, had served their sentences and were “free Chinese”. The authorities suspected the Chinese community in Cape Town of being actively involved in the smuggling and the handling of stolen goods. Certainly these slaves knew where to bring their flour, and Limoeijko’s claims of innocence were not believed and he was punished along with the slaves.

Salaoos [ed: one of the accused] was displayed standing under the gallows with a rope around his neck, and was then, with the other three, whipped and branded. The three slaves were sent back to their owners, while Limoeijko was sentenced to labour in chains on the Company’s public works for life. – Trials of Slavery, Salaoos van Sambouwa, 1749, p270

Chinese man in Batavia (Date unknown)

Liminionko, mentioned above (aka Limoeijko), survives in the convict records after being accused of planning to buy stolen flour from a group of enslaved men. He protested his innocence throughout, particularly as the records are not clear that he ever received the stolen goods. Liminionko freed his wife, Dina, and children as a final act of defiance against the authorities that had exiled him to Cape Town, enslaved his wife and children, and then imprisoned him for life for a crime for which he protested his innocence. It was one thing for his wife and children to live as quasi-free people with Liminionko while the law regarded them as still enslaved. But, by freeing them in law, Dina and Liminionko assured that every one of the children born from that generation would no longer be enslaved.

And from Dina and Liminionko’s children, there would be generation upon generation of Chinese people making their lives in South Africa: as traders and immigrants, as gold miners in the early 1900s, as “coloureds” and “Asiatics” under apartheid, and now, as free South Africans. But looking at the early history of the enslaved Chinese, it was Dina and Liminionko, Lemuko, Ongkonko and Thisgingnio, who directed my hand past the statistics and disapproving court papers, to find the people no longer unnamed, no longer lost, who left traces of themselves on Africa’s southern tip where they joined to become part of the ancestors of this land.

1 Shell, p197.

2 Shell: Children of Bondage, pp119-120.

3 Records also refer to Limoeijko as Liminionko (he is referred by both names in the quotes in this article).

4 Historian Achmat Davids found the earliest written mention of a Chinese burial ground in 1772.

Sources

All Under Heaven: The Story of a Chinese Family in South Africa, Darryl Accone, Cape Town: David Philip, 2004.

The History of the Tana Baru, Achmat Davids, Cape Town: Committee for Preservation of Tana Baru, 1985.

A Matter of Honour:Being Chinese in South Africa, Yoon Jung Park, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009.

Children of Bondage, Robert Shell, Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1994.

The Dutch East India Company’s Slave Lodge at the Cape, Helene Vollgraaff, Cape Town: SA Cultural History Museum, 1997.

Trials of Slavery, ed. by Nigel Worden and Gerald Groenewald, Van Riebeeck Society for the Publication of South African Historical Documents, Cape Town, 2005.

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by Karen Williams Follow @redrustin

Although Chinese men made up the main contingent of prisoners that the Dutch East India Company (the VOC) held in South Africa, one Chinese woman prisoner has been documented. Thisgingnio¹ was from Cirebon in Indonesia and she arrived in Cape Town on 9 April 1747. There is no information on her crime or reason for exile, but she was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment at the Slave Lodge in Cape Town. The Slave Lodge housed mostly slaves including enslaved children, but it also held some convicts (and a few ‘mentally insane’ white men).

The Lodge building still exists in Cape Town and is now the Slave Lodge museum. For a woman it not only meant enslavement, but also the probability and possibility of being raped every day. Part of the Lodge routine was that at 8pm every night, the male slaves would be sent out of the Lodge (often to do work like empty the city’s slop), and the European men stationed at the Cape would have access to the women housed in the Lodge for an hour, until doors were locked at 9pm. (There is no information on whether the children would leave, too, or whether rape access to the women meant permission to rape the children as well.)

Historians regularly refer to the Lodge as a “brothel”², but it was a rape camp. Cape histories sometimes hint at the African and Asian family roots of white South Africans, many of whose ancestors were light enough to eventually pass into white society during colonialism. Yet few ask how that lightening was possible and consistent over a series of generations – even with a degree of intermarriage.Historians accept the validity of the Armenian genocide and the Herero genocide as well as the genocidal aim of the mass rapes in Rwanda 1994, applying contemporary language to historical atrocities. If we consider the experience of women at the Lodge, but also in all places where dark women have been enslaved and colonised, the historical question needs to be asked as to whether a large swathe of dark female ancestors within our own families individually experienced the practice of possible genocide through rape, by generation after generation being raped so that their dark bloodlines were eventually wiped out.

The VOC executing Chinese prisoners

Besides her imprisonment at the Lodge, Thisgingnio also survived the perilous sea passage of 1747 from Indonesia to South Africa, where numerous prisoners and slaves died both on-board and after arrival at the Cape, particularly during the harsh Cape Town winter months of June-August. She also survived the 1755 smallpox outbreak when 196 VOC convicts and slaves died, also during the Cape winter. The Cape’s Free Black community and the indigenous KhoiKhoi and San populations were also severely impacted by the smallpox epidemics.

After she left the Lodge, Thisgingnio had six years of freedom before she too died a sudden death.

After her release, Thisgingnio twinned her life with the most prosperous Chinese man in Cape Town, Ongkonko, also exiled to the Cape in 1747 as a result of being convicted of high treason.

Armstrong writes, “In 1757 he (Ongkonko) sold a slave to the prominent Cape burgher, Joachim Von Dessin, and is described as a free Chinese. By 1706 he was listed on the opgaaf rolls, owning six slaves. In 1761 he rented two houses, one large and one small, from Hermanus Keeve, a former senior surgeon of the VOC. His will of 1761… left Rxdrs. 200 to his sister Insaaij in Batavia, and the remainder to the free Chinese woman, Tjojingjo, known in the Company’s books as Thisgingnio”. It is noteworthy that Thisgingnio is not described as his wife in his testament. As non-Christians they could of course not legally marry at the Cape.

The constant trauma and exile, unsurprisingly, took its toll on Thisgingnio and after Ongkonko’s death, despair increasingly took over. A lodger at her home had reported that she started staying out most nights and started drinking heavily, often returning home drunk. (The lodger himself is very interesting: Said Alowie (sayyid³ ‘Alwi), a leading Muslim figure in Cape Town, was a Yemeni who was an important advisor to the court of the Javanese ruler, the Susuhunan, based at Kartasura in Indonesia. Eventually he was exiled to South Africa in chains as a political prisoner, where he was also imprisoned on Robben Island, centuries before Nelson Mandela would be imprisoned there too as a political prisoner.)

Thisgingnio died on the night of 3-4 July 1763, and was found by Said Alowie and her slaves. A surgeon concluded that alcohol abuse had killed her.

Source:

Information for this section came from the article “The estate of a Chinese woman in the mid-eighteenth century at the Cape of Good Hope” by James C. Armstrong, in Contingent Lives: Social Identity and Material Culture in the VOC World, ed. Nigel Worden, published by the Historical Studies Department, University of Cape Town, 2007.

1 Other spellings of her name in records include Tigignio, Theongingon van Cheribon and Tjojingjo.

2Shanaaz Galant from the Iziko Slave Lodge first mentioned this in conversation.

3 The title Sayyid/Sayid refers to somebody who is a descendant of Prophet Mohammed.

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by Karen Williams Follow @redrustin

Coolie connotes somebody who performs thankless, backbreaking physical labour. The word is often explained as being part of the indentured labour system that followed the abolition of slavery in the 1800s, particularly gaining popularity in the mid- to late-1800s. It is often almost exclusively used in relation to Asian labourers, especially Indian and Chinese people.

Workers and manager of a tea estate, eastern Himalayas, 1880s

In South Africa (and parts of the Caribbean and the Pacific islands) the word is laden with history and is a racially pejorative term to refer to an Indian person. Yet, a number of western academics of Indian descent (often living in the West) have used the term coolie as a descriptive term denuded of history and racial value. This includes suggestions by academics that “coolitude” needs to be celebrated and reclaimed. Since ‘coolie’ is completely associated with Asian indenture, it has historically provided the line between the enslaved African and the indentured (and by implication, un-enslavable) Asian.

For academics and many others it is an archaic, slightly insulting word; in the places where there were ‘coolies’, it is a term of hatred and denigration. Years ago I stopped short when reading an interview with scholar Edward Said, where he said that a group of people were ‘basically coolies’, wanting to signify that the people in question were exploited.[1]

Yet I have come across no source where Indian and Chinese people who were indentured have used the word as the preferred term for themselves – at the time of indenture. Even more than a century after the start of large-scale Asian indenture, the original pejorative context and value of the word remains.

‘Coolie’ is associated with use in the English language, derived from the particular period of British empire-building and colonial entrenchment. Theories to its origins vary. One suggestion is that ‘coolie’ entered into popular lexicon to describe largely Indian (but also Chinese) indentured labourers who were contracted in areas where enslaved people had recently been emancipated, particularly in the British colonies but also encompassing the Caribbean and the United States. The Asian labourers were usually contracted for specific periods of time to replace the free labour that was previously provided by enslaved people in those areas.

This in itself does not give a complete picture of the last years of slavery, particularly in the British colonies. From the date of emancipation (1834), enslaved people still had to serve a four-year apprenticeship to the people who had previously owned them. When Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807 (i.e the transnational shipping of slaves and open markets), British ships would often raid other European, Arab and Middle Eastern slave vessels to free the slaves onboard. The captives, known as Prize Negroes, were sent to the British colonies, where they were “apprenticed” for periods of up to fourteen years. The apprenticeships mirrored the geographical areas and industries that were developed through unpaid labour. Historian Richard Gott notes the scores of people sent to Cuba under this system of apprenticeship, remarking that the “indenture” was a way to essentially prolong their enslavement and to provide free labour.[2]

Indian indentured woolwashers in South Africa, 1800s

The arrival of Indians in South Africa by boat

Arrival of indentured labourers in South Africa

Yet the use of the word goes back much further in history, and coolie is not only used in English. Theories to the word’s etymology included it as possibly being derived from the Turkish words for slave, köle as well as qul/kul.[3]There is also speculation that the word is derived from a (peasant) group in western India, the Kolis,[4] or that it originates from the Tamil word for wages, kuli.[5]

The most benign definition of the word is that it refers to a hired labourer[6], or a porter, and during South African slavery (1652-1838), coolie was also used to mean a porter or stevedore.

Although it has fallen out of common, everyday use, the word is also present in both German[7] and Dutch. In Dutch, koelie (with the same pronunciation as in English) refers to labour that is backbreaking, humiliating and monotonous.[8] The Wikipedia entry for the word also mentions that the word originates with very low-skilled Asian labour, dating from slavery. Kuli is also present in Danish, meaning backbreaking, very low-paid work.

Even in the United States, for more than a century it has been a derogatory word for south and east Asian people, and had been used to refer to low-wage, immigrant labourers. The term was still in used in the American military during the Vietnam war, when ‘coolie’ referred to Asian farmers and labourers working in the American areas.[9] American designers also used coolie as a designation for Asian-inspired clothing, including terms like coolie pajamas, coolie hats and coolie coats.[10] In the 1950s, American baseball manager, Branch Rickey (who hired Jackie Robinson as the first black player in Major League baseball), was accused of paying players “coolie wages”[11].

This is crucial in tracing the history of ‘coolie’: although associated with indentured labour, in fact the word already had common currency centuries before and was widely used during slavery. The Dutch, German and Danish connections are critical since all of these nations had long histories as enslaving and slave trading nations: by the 1600s, all three these countries already had very extensive slavery concerns in Africa.[12]

Chinese workers in America building the Central Pacific Railroad (sketch), 1870

Furthermore, the word had other applications during South African slavery. “Koeliegeld” (coolie money) was the money that enslaved people were allowed to earn by working for people other than their enslavers. A portion of the money went to the owners – and it was often a way for enslavers to make a profit out of owning other people. (In the film, 12 Years a Slave, Solomon Northup is regularly hired out in a similar arrangement.)

The institution of coolie money was critical in South Africa for enslaved people, and there are numerous instances of enslaved people being able to buy their freedom from the coolie money.

In 1799, a Persian traveller Abu Talib ibn Muhammed Khan[13] (also known as Mirza Abu Taleb Khan), gave a valuable account of the use of coolie money in South African slavery. He is also very interesting because he was fêted by the upper echelons of white South African society while there, but being Muslim and not white, he comfortably crossed to the Free Black side as well, and he went to live with a Muslim landlord in Cape Town (probably a Free Black man).

“If a slave understands any trade, they permit him to work for other people, but oblige him to pay from one to four (Rix)dollars a day, according to his abilities, for such indulgence. The daughters of these slaves who are handsome they keep for their own use, but the ugly ones are either sold, or obliged to work with their fathers. Should a slave perchance save sufficient money to purchase his freedom, they cause him to pay a great price for it, and throw many other obstacles in his way.

I saw a tailor, who was married, and had four children; he was then forty years of age, and had, by great industry and economy, purchased the freedom of himself and his wife; but the children still continued as slaves[14]. One of them, a fine youth, was sold to another master, and carried away to some distant land: the eldest girl was in the service of her master; and the two youngest were suffered to remain with their parents until they should gain sufficient strength to be employed.[15]

The word comes up again after the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) with the settlement of Afrikaner families from South Africa in Kenya and Tanzania in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Accounts of the settlers regularly refer to Indian people in east Africa as “koelies”, with the local currency, the rupee, referred to as “koeliegeld” (coolie money)[16].

In the United States, in particular, it is telling how the term was not only descriptive of Asian labour, but was the impetus for highly racialised legislation. President Abraham Lincoln signed “anti-coolie” legislation in 1862 that banned American citizens from owning ships transporting the bonded labour. This was during the American civil war, and still well within the ambit of slavery. In 1862 California introduced what was colloquially termed an “anti-coolie tax” called the Chinese Police Tax[17], reportedly to “protect free white labor(sic) against competition with Chinese coolie labor(sic), and to discourage the immigration of the Chinese into the State of California”. It also levied a tax on Chinese people.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese workers from the United States and California also enacted anti-Asian legislation in its own ‘anti-coolie’ laws. American trades union leaders wanted barriers to large-scale working class Asian immigration. In 1906, after debate, President Theodore Roosevelt allowed Asian workers to construct the Panama Canal, a year after he had talked about the “coolie class” in his State of the Union address. Asian indentured labourers worked on Hawaii’s sugar plantations in 1920, despite strong trade union opposition to Asian workers.[18]

Indian indentured labourers, Trinidad and Tobago

In the Caribbean, indentured labour did not start with the Asian labourers. In the 17^th century, Europeans were the first wave of indentured servants to the Caribbean, representing what Trinidad’s independence leader, Eric Williams, terms white immigration and labour that “was not free but involuntary”[19]. The conditions surrounding white labour in the Caribbean are important: too often the fact of white labour has been used to spur historical untruths, particularly about “Irish enslavement”.

White indentured servants usually served a period of three years, but it could be for as long as five years. White servants were free after their stipulated time, and were generally granted a plot of land. The system was open to abuse, and bad treatment and kidnap (especially from Bristol) was not unheard of.

Williams mentions that between 1838-1924, an estimated half a million Indian indentured workers came to the Caribbean, along with Chinese workers and other Asian people.[20]

“The Asian labourer was not a slave. He was a freeman, and he came to the Caribbean on contract, generally for five years. Thus the Caribbean, which had in the seventeenth century sought in the white indentured servant a substitute for the indigenous Amerindian, turned in the nineteenth to indentured Asians as a substitute for the African slave who had supplanted the white indentured servant.”[21]

The long-term consequences of slavery and indenture have irrevocably shaped the societies in which it took place. Guyanese political scholar Walter Rodney cited that, “Indenture, unlike slavery, was constantly producing free citizens in large numbers”. Rodney had identified the indentured labour system as one of the common practices of exploitation that African and Indian Guyanese fought against, until it ended.

The conception of change which the Guyanese workers entertained during the war was by no means restricted to the exploration of the interior. On a number of vital fronts they were prepared to wage a struggle against the forces of oppression. One of their most crucial battles was for an end to indentured immigration, and subsequently for the prevention of exploitation of the same ilk.

The first page of the US Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882

Part of the emotive force of the word coolie is that it evokes (Indian) degradation, coupled with silent passivity. Rodney locates indenture as a site of political struggle and part of a larger fight for freedom. The political resistance to indenture is also invoked by the thousands of Chinese labourers brought in to work on Cuba’s sugar estates, working alongside the enslaved Africans. The Chinese indentured labourers were also seen as the backbone of various independence movements and supporters of freedom struggles on the islands – and not passive toilers under indenture.

At the same time, indenture was no guarantee for social and economic advancement: one of the more instructive lessons of my childhood was taking shortcuts through the sugar plantations on South Africa’s east coast, and deep inside the farms finding tiny chalkwhite stone houses housing multiple generations of (usually Tamil) Indian workers in the dark airless hovels. These families had likely lived there since their indentured ancestors arrived more than a century before, and it was very unlikely that their next generation would get off that plantation anytime soon.

In a final historical twist, the push for sugar production and its need for labour in the 1800s might have been the consequences of the defeat of slavery in Haiti. Saint-Domingue (as pre-independence Haiti was called) was the major global sugar producer, accounting for a major share of European sugar markets. World markets were affected by the overthrow of slavery on the island during the 1791-1804 revolution. Besides being the world’s largest sugar producer, Haiti also supplied smaller amounts of coffee, indigo, cotton and other goods to the world market. In the early 1700s, Saint-Domingue had wiped out the British competition and was well on the way to taking over world markets through the quality and cheapness of its product.[22] The Haitian revolution fundamentally changed the supply of sugar to world, providing the impetus for increased production in other parts of the world to fill the gap.

References

Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience: Ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ,Civitas Books 1999

Children of Bondage – Robert C.-H. Shell, Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg

Collins – Pocket Turkish Dictionary: Harper Collins Publishers (First Edition), 2011, Glasgow, Great Britain

Cuba: A new history – Richard Gott, Yale Nota Bene/Yale University Press (New Haven and London) 2005

Echoes of Slavery – Jackie Loos, David Phillips Publishers

Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his struggle with India, Josef Lelyveld, Vintage Books, (April) 2012, New York

The Boers in East Africa: Ethnicity and Identity – Brian M. du Toit, Praeger Publishers

From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean: Eric Williams, Andre Deutsch (London) 2003

Masses in Action – Walter Rodney (first accessed 25/06/16)

California’s Anti-Coolie Tax

[1]It will be interesting to look at whether the word is used mainly by people who live and work in fairly privileged settings in Europe and north America, as opposed to those academic descendants who live and work in the Third World – and where the real value of the word still retains its resonance.

[2] Gott p.60

[3]Collins Pocket Turkish Dictionary

[4] Lelyveld p. 9

[5] Ibid

[6]Gandhi, L: A History Of Indentured Labor Gives ‘Coolie’ Its Sting, November 25, 2013

[7] Discussions with Ulli Klecz 09 May 2015, Cape Town

[8] Koelie Koelieordonnantie

[9] A history of indentured labor gives coolie its sting

[10] Ibid

[11]

[12]While the Dutch, through its Dutch East India and Dutch West India companies are well documented, the early German enslaving history through its Brandenburg African Company. Accounts of slavery on Africa’s east coast and in South Africa regularly mention Danish slaving ships.

[13] He is referred to as Persian (born in India) even though his name is Arabic.

[14] All children born to enslaved mothers would automatically be enslaved at birth.

[15] Loos, p. 6

[16] Du Toit p.90

[17]

[18] Ibid

[19] Williams pp 95-6

[20] Williams p. 348

[21] Williams p.351

[22] Williams p.133

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by Karen Williams Follow @redrustin

The condition of being a ‘coolie’ found its greatest and most enduring expression in the movement that led to India’s independence and the spiritual-political leader most closely associated with it. If we want to trace the impact and meaning of being a ‘coolie’, look no further than the political evolution of a buttoned-up young lawyer, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

It’s hard to believe now, but Gandhi’s political life (so closely intertwined with his spiritual practice and philosophy) was not something at which he arrived fully-formed: like all major political actors, his political life was a constantly evolving self-education and response to external events, challenging who he was.

Gandhi as a young lawyer in South Africa, 1906

Mahatma Gandhi at his law office in Johannesburg, South Africa, 1905

Gandhi’s biographer, Joseph Lelyveld, notes how the word ‘coolie’ shaped Gandhi’s world as soon as he left Britain and arrived in the English colony of South Africa. Gandhi was a ‘coolie’ as soon as he stepped into South Africa, first as a “coolie lawyer” and then leading Indian struggles against racial oppression.

From his first months in South Africa, the young Mohandas Gandhi was acutely sensitive to the casual racism that dripped and oozed from the epithet “coolie”. Never could he get over the shock of seeing the word used as a synonym for “Indian” in official documents or courtroom proceedings; making that translation in reverse – defining himself on behalf of the whole community as an Indian rather than as a Hindu, Gujarati, or Bania – was his first nationalist impulse. Years later he could be freshly affronted by the memory of having been called a “coolie lawyer”. Yet it took him more than fifteen years to learn that the word “kaffir” had similar connotations for the people he occasionally recognized (sic) as the original owners of the land, the “natives”, as he otherwise called them, or Africans, or blacks.[1]

‘Coolie’ would never lose its pejorative sting in South Africa, and it was still common racist currency in the years that I was growing up. In 1894 Gandhi formed the Natal Indian Congress in South Africa to fight discrimination against Indian traders[2]. Subsequently, various other Indian congresses would be formed across South Africa, and eventually, as the leadership radicalised, the Indian congresses became a significant political force in the fight against oppression[3].

Gandhi in Johannesburg, 1908

The years Gandhi spent in South Africa (1893-1914) were the laboratory for his political evolution, thereby giving the impression that he stepped fully-formed into Indian politics. His political practice of satyagraha started in South Africa as a response to racial segregation, particularly the lived reality of Indians being designated ‘coolies’.

Passive resistance would also be used by Chinese South Africans who joined Gandhi’s campaigns, as well as by successive black and Indian South African political leaders, even if they disagreed with some of Gandhi’s political stances. This is particularly clear with Gandhi’s long evolution with regards to political cooperation with black South Africans – a stance contradicted by the position that Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi took in their common cause with black South African rights, as well as the position taken by Gandhi’s son Manilal. In 1927 Nehru called for political cooperation between black and Indian South Africans. This was a consistent message out of India, and in 1941 Indira Nehru (later to be Gandhi) delivered a personal message in Durban, South Africa’s eastern port city, with a large Indian population.

“Indians and Africans must act together,” she said. “Common oppression must be met with the united and organized power of all the exploited people.” That night, according to one reminiscence, Gandhi’s son Manilal[4] endorsed “a united front of all non-Europeans” for the first time in his life.[5]

It would not only be Gandhi’s son Manilal who would consistently be part of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, but Manilal’s descendants as well. (Parts of Gandhi’s family stayed in South Africa and continued to play a significant role in the anti-apartheid fight in South Africa, including Manilal’s daughter and Gandhi’s granddaughter Ela who served as a parliamentarian in Nelson Mandela’s cabinet.)

Gandhi as a satyagrahi in South Africa, circa 1913

Gandhi addressing a farewell rally in Durban, South African, 1914

Satyagraha was started in South Africa by Gandhi as a way to challenge oppressive laws, particularly targeting Indian people. His passive resistance campaigns also drew in Chinese political leaders in South Africa.

“The Transvaal Chinese Association formed the core of political activity in the Transvaal during the early part of the 1900s. Its members took part in the passive resistance campaigns with the Indian resisters during the ‘five years between 1906 and 1911 (which) marked the most turbulent times in the history of the community.’ Led by Mahatma Gandhi during his sojourn in South Africa, the ‘free’ Transvaal Chinese together with the local Indian community committed themselves to opposing the new ‘fingerprint’ Asiatic registration law of the Transvaal. Many willingly went to jail, forfeiting their means of livelihood and risking deportation to give effect to this opposition.[6]”

Chinese South African passive resistance leaders, circa 1906

In one piece of correspondence, Gandhi writes that, “It is clear the Indian is the most proper word for both the classes. No Indian is a coolie by birth.”[7]

It is only now, two years after reading Lelyveld’s book and while writing this piece, that the significance of Mahatma Gandhi’s quote above strikes me. The quote is the first – and really, the only – time that I have ever seen somebody who was called a “coolie” and lived in the time when it had international currency, talk back to the word.

Being a ‘coolie’ was the defining experience for the British subject who turned into one of its greatest independence leaders. Gandhi’s changing political ideas and practices virtually all took place in working against the grain of being called a ‘coolie’, as well as living as one every day of his life.

Satyagraha started in South Africa as Gandhi, and the rest of the Indian community, pushed back against what it meant to be a ‘coolie’ as a lived experience. Then, as that gained momentum, suit-and-tie Mohandas Gandhi, “coolie lawyer”, returned to India, to the likely origin of that word, where he led one of the biggest, most iconic liberation struggles in modern history.

Gandhi and fellow protestors outside prison, South Africa, 1908

References

Joseph Lelyveld, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his struggle with India, New York: Vintage Books, 2012.

Manilal Gandh

South African History Archive, The Natal Indian Congress (NIC) Collection, 1971-1990

A Matter of Honour: Being Chinese in South Africa – Yoon Jung Park, Jacana

[1] Lelyveld, p. 53

[2] South African History Archive, The Natal Indian Congress (NIC) Collection, 1971-1990.

[3] Dr Monty Naicker, elected to the leadership of the South African Indian Congress in 1945, was one of its most radical and iconic leaders.

[4] Manilal was Gandhi’s second son, and he lived in South Africa, seemingly making these comments in South Africa, where he continued to resist racially oppressive laws, and getting arrested. Manilal’s daughter, Ela Gandhi, still lives in South Africa and was elected as an MP in the first post-apartheid parliament. For background on Manilal, see: http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/manilal-gandhi.

[5] Lelyveld, pp74-5. The relationship between India and South Africa was not only about the personalities of its leaders: India would impose stringent sanctions against apartheid South Africa long before other countries and would remain a staunch and vocal supporter of the anti-apartheid movement throughout.

[6] Park, p.26

[7] Lelyveld, p.8

by Karen Williams Follow @redrustin

I found the story of the Africans and Asians in Australia’s history as a loose thread, buried in a throwaway sentence about an enslaved South African woman, Rachel of the Cape¹, who had been sentenced to seven years’ banishment from South Africa. She was convicted in a theft case in August 1830, along with another enslaved woman and a free black woman. In March 1831, in mitigation of sentence, Rachel “… forwarded her own petition from Robben Island, begging not to be sent to New South Wales on account of her poor health, needy children and the ‘aged’ mistress who depended on her for an income.”²

This startling snippet of information, mentioned without context, in turn opened the door to practices that were common in the years before the abolition of slavery across the British empire, and to a history of dark people in Australia.

The book, The Australian People, says that under the British, transportation to Australia was applied mainly to black South Africans (including indigenous people, Asian and African slaves and Free Blacks), as well as slaves sent from Madagascar and Mauritius, who were originally imprisoned in South Africa. Until the start of transportation to Australia, enslaved people from Mauritius, Madagascar and other islands around South Africa were imprisoned on Robben Island, the penal colony where Nelson Mandela spent most of his imprisonment. Occasionally white soldiers and colonists were also sent to Australia.³

The historians Ian Duffield and Cassandra Pybus each give estimates for the numbers of African and Asian people transported and black settlers to Australia. Duffield estimating around 800, while Pybus, a prominent Australian historian, has identified more than a thousand people from the African diaspora who came to Australia as prisoners or as free settlers and immigrants. These included at least a dozen black people on the First Fleet, which brought the first colonial transportation of prisoners.

The African and Asian people who were exiled to Australia (and some who settled willingly) are often identified by having the appellation “black” attached to their name. Like the Aboriginal men written about in political and judicial records, these men survive for posterity with names meant to demean them, and with their identity obscured through the derogatory renaming. For Aboriginals, the injury was more egregious, with insulting and demeaning names⁴ given to them by colonisers, often the only way in which they are identified, even to this day.

The First Fleet. Painting by William Bradley (1802)

Australia’s First Fleet landed in Sydney in January 1788, carrying at least a dozen black men.⁵ Australia’s colonisation started as key areas of the British Empire were rapidly changing in the United Kingdom, Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean. Britain lost the American war of independence in 1783, thereby losing its most lucrative colony, just before the colonisation of Australia. America had also been one of the places where the British had transported people to. In Ireland, armed resistance was increasing and in South Africa, the British were meeting fierce resistance in their attempts to expand the colonial frontier.

The war and loss of the American prize colony had a significant impact on Britain’s economy. It also led to a large influx of black people into Britain, particularly those who had previously fought with the British against the Americans as a way of freeing themselves.

London’s black population was increased at the end of the American civil war, with the arrival of black people from Nova Scotia in Canada. These were made up largely of enslaved black men who joined the British side, against the Americans, and who were evacuated to Nova Scotia when the British retreated. The British had rescinded their status as slaves during the war, and many slaves flocked to join the fight against the Americans. The black soldiers who made it to London often found themselves among the poor masses, but faced even greater impoverishment as they did not qualify for the basic social grants available. Poverty often forced them into petty crimes, or acts of need: many were given harsh sentences with long jail terms or banishment to Australia. One of the more common crimes was stealing items of clothing.

Enslaved African-Americans who joined the British army against the Americans provide an interesting snapshot: future American presidents James Madison, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson all had significant numbers of slaves who liberated themselves by joining the English army. Washington, the first president of the United States, is believed to have lost 35 slaves this way.⁶ There are records, too, of America’s founding fathers petitioning to get their slaves back, including trying to recapture the men who were evacuated with the British ships to Novia Scotia.⁷

Around the same period, Britain clamped down on the slave trade (the commercial transactions, as opposed to the institution), particularly on the high seas. In 1838 slavery as an institution was abolished across the British colonies, but not in areas under other European, Arab, Persian or Ottoman control, nor in the areas where African groups were enslaving compatriots and selling them onto the international markets. British abolition occurred in 1834, but slaves had to serve a four-year apprenticeship before being finally freed in 1838, often working for their enslavers during that time.

Map depicting the route of the First Fleet to Australia.

In addition to the arrival of Africans and Asians in Australia, there was also a second generation of dark-skinned non-Aboriginal Australians, namely the children born as a result of the relationships between white, African, American and Asian transportees. Biracial, African and Asian people would through the centuries continue to partner with Aboriginal people. Their descendants have, in turn, assumed that they were Aboriginal, with no knowledge of their other ancestry, since Australia’s history posits that Aboriginal people were the only dark residents in its history.⁸

Australians revere Irish Ned Kelly as a bushranger (a runaway convict who lived by his wits, often through robbery), and the white outlaws were iconic figures in Australia’s colonisation. Yet the country’s first bushranger was a black American man called John Caesar, known in Australia as Black Caesar. Historians believe him to possibly have originated from Madagascar, which was a major source of enslaved people for the Indian Ocean trade.⁹ Caesar and Scipio were common ways to rename enslaved men: being renamed after Roman generals was seen as a further way to denigrate the enslaved. Caesar escaped into the bush for the first time in 1790, taking along a musket and joining a group of other escaped prisoners. He would continue to escape, until he was shot¹⁰.

Caesar was one of many black bushrangers in the history of Australian colonisation. One of the other iconic bushrangers was an indigenous South African Khoisan man. Peter Haley (also named as Caley), from Cape Town, joined a notorious group of bushrangers in Van Diemen’s Land in the early 1800s and he lives in the records as “Black Peter”.¹¹ Centuries later, I found myself cheering for Australia’s Asian and Africa black vagabonds and rebels: as if Tonto had suddenly become the centre of the story, and the story was now being told by Tonto’s descendants.

Most of the exile, banishment and transportation of Asian and African slaves and free people occurred mainly from 1834. Besides it being the year of the British Emancipation Proclamation, it was also the year when Van Diemen’s Land (present-day Tasmania) opened as a colony. This was also the year that slavery was abolished in the British territories, including in South Africa, although enslaved people were still bound for another four years as “apprentices” before they were finally freed in 1838.

Black people in Australia included formerly enslaved people and freemen, some of whom still bore ritual scarification marks from their childhood in Africa. There are also frequent references to Mohammedans, a dated reference to Muslims.

Enslaved Asians and labourers who were originally transported to Mauritius were also often re-transported to Australia, including Anglo-Sinhalese coin forger, John Hermaan Maas, and Sheik Adam, originally from Bombay.¹² Adam was a notorious hustler from Bombay, who was originally transported to Mauritius in 1834. In Mauritius, he constantly escaped, and he had a tally of crimes against him. He frequently drugged and then robbed people. As a result of his life of crime, he was transported to Australia.¹³

List of convicts on the transport ship, Friendship, 1787. The Friendship was part of the First Fleet to Australia.

Southern Africa was also a source of transportees to Australia: Asian and African slaves and convicts were transported largely from South Africa, but also from Mauritius and Madagascar. People transported from Mauritius have been recorded as “Afro-Mauritian”, slaves, former slaves serving apprenticeships, Chinese slaves, convicts and Indian convicts.¹⁴ This included women as well as men. Before people were banished to Australia in the 1800s, Mauritian convicts and slaves were sent to the Robben Island penal island off Cape Town’s coast. Before Australia, Asian convicts (particularly from Batavia, present-day Jakarta) were exiled to South Africa and at times enslaved there, while transportation and exile to penal colonies was also popularly used in Asia.

The discovery of gold in New South Wales in 1851 increased the activity of bushrangers, many of whom would rob prospectors of gold receipts and cheques when they were leaving the mines.

The colonial government introduced black trackers in 1852 to counter the scourge of bushranging, as well as police the gold digs and escort the bullion to Melbourne. The trackers were disbanded in 1853, despite reportedly being popular, as well as effective.¹⁵ There is no clarity on who comprised the black trackers – but accounts abound in Australian history of Aboriginal men being used as a border force, who were often joined by South African indigenous Khoi men, particularly the former soldiers exiled to Australia as political prisoners.

The lawlessness associated with the early gold mining spawned its own Asian bushranger, “Black” Douglas, identified as a “mulatto Indian” who operated with his gang between Melbourne and Bendigo.

Black Douglas’s headquarters were three miles from the Alma goldfield near Maryborough, and his gang’s method was to rob the diggers’ empty tents during the day and the shops at night. Black Douglas and his gang were captured when the diggers, fed up with the thieving, surrounded their tents and burnt them to the ground. Douglas was overpowered only after he was wounded. He was carted to Maryborough with an escort of more than 200 miners.”¹⁶

FACTBOX
The Australian People also includes sailors and crew sentenced to transportation, frequently for disciplinary infractions while on British ships, or for criminal conduct while in a British colonial port. The black crewmen sent to Australia include:

Daniel Williams, an American sailor (1817);
John Bellevue and John Lavapeur were boatmen from Dominica (1837);
Henry Corrie was a ship’s cook, born in Bermuda but transported from Trinidad (1837);
and Antonio Pedro Antoons, of ‘dark complexion’, was a seaman sentenced to transportation by the Bombay Supreme Court in 1830.
Abraham Sampson, a black sailor, found guilty of piracy on the island of St Christopher in the Caribbean (1836).
Ahalt, a “Mohammedan” found guilty of wounding with intent in London and transported on the Stag in 1855.
Caetane, a Mozambiquan fisherman found guilty of arson in Madagascar in 1839.¹⁷

But like the Irish, Canadians and African and Asian South Africans sent to Australia, even resistance in the Caribbean had its reaches in Australia, with at least ten Jamaican men reported banished to Australia after the Montego Bay slave uprising of 1831-32.¹⁸

Often historical accounts have painted Australia’s settlers as male convicts, or at a minority, poor British women. But black women were also banished to Australia.

The first person transported from Mauritius was a slave woman named Sophie, after she was convicted in 1823 of stealing cash and setting fire to a barn on her enslaver’s property.

When she was banished to New South Wales in 1825, there were no records of her travelling with her baby boy, who was born in early 1823. Sophie’s enslaver was compensated for her by the state, and the compensation included a fee for Sophie’s son.¹⁹

Ticket of leave documents issued to convicts from the New South Wales Colonial
government

A Malagasy woman, Thérésia, was initially sentenced to death and this was then commuted to transportation to New South Wales after she was found guilty of hitting her enslaver’s daughter. Thérésia had up to then lodged a number of complaints of abuse against her owner, who was placed under police surveillance, and forbidden from punishing his slaves, unless he had permission.²⁰ Her enslaver was also compensated for losing her, when she was sent to Australia in 1831.

The other notorious case that has survived the records is the case of “two female slaves” — the cousins Elizabeth Verloppe and Constance Couronne, accused of a botched plot to poison a woman they had been hired out to. They were accused of trying to poison her tea with arsenic, but had added the wrong substance. However, there are also other accounts that they were being blamed for somebody else’s botched poisoning attempt. They were supposed to be sent to South Africa’s Robben Island, but eventually were transported for life to New South Wales in 1834. At the time of their trial Elizabeth was twelve years old and Constance was eight.²¹

The story of the girl cousins is significant for Australia’s history, and they were not the only children transported. A British woman named Mary Wade is seen as one of modern Australia’s founding mothers, and is a forebear of former Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. She was transported when she was 11 years old, after being convicted for robbery after stealing and pawning clothes from another child. Her death sentence was commuted to transportation. Mary Wade is often named as the youngest prisoner ever transported to Australia.

But the example of Verloppe and Couronne shows how much history alters once it no longer focuses almost solely on white protagonists, and Couronne being transported at eight years old adds a more nuanced dimension to child transportation — but especially the fate of enslaved children.²²

The history of African and Asian people in Australia’s colonial history expands our understanding of slavery and exile across the Indian Ocean. Their transportation was not random, but part of a deeper story of Australia, its colonial history and its unwillingness to remember or acknowledge the country’s full history.

References

The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, Its People, and Their Origins, ed. James Jupp.

Echoes of Slavery: Voices from South Africa’s past: Jackie Loos, David Philip Publishers (New Africa Books), Cape Town 2004

Unfree labour and its discontents: transportation from Mauritius to Australia, 1825-1845, Clare Anderson, University of Leicester

Khoikhoi and the Question of Convict Transportation from the Cape Colony 1820-1842 – V.C. Malherbe

Aboriginal Convicts: Australian, Khoisan and Maori Exiles – Kristyn Harman, UNSW Press, 2012

A Touch of the Tar: African settlers in colonial Australia and the implications for issues of Aboriginality – Cassandra Pybus (London Papers in Australia Studies, No. 3)

Early Australian Bushrangers (First accessed 04/06/2016)

1 “Of the cape” indicates that Rachel was an enslaved woman who was born at the Cape, as opposed to being imported from either the rest of Africa or from Asia. By 1830, many slaves would have been born as enslaved people in South Africa, with enslavement starting at the Cape from the arrival of the first Dutch colonist in 1652.

2Loos, p. 15.

3 The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, Its People and Their Origins.

4 Names like Muscle, Mickey Mickey, Bulldog, Musquito, Blind-Eyed Alic and Sorethighed Jemm are the only records left of prominent Aboriginal men.

5 Pybus.

6 Pybus p.8

7 Novia Scotia still plays a significant role in the lives of descendants of the freed slaves: in the settlement of Sierra Leone were largely people from Novia Scotia, and even today, Krio Sierra Leoneans can still proudly trace their ancestry back to Novia Scotia.

8 While the history of dark-skinned arrivals has been buried in Australia, the country has not disavowed the language of enslavement: it is astonishing when listening to a progressive television programmes in Australia, or speaking to a leftist white Australian, to hear them unthinkingly use the words “half-caste, quadroon or octoroon” or similar terms when talking about Aboriginal people or about the Stolen Generation.

9 Pybus, p.7.

10 Early Australian Bushrangers. First accessed 04/06/2016.

11 Harman.

12 Anderson, p.12

13 Anderson.

14Anderson, p.3

15 Early Australian Bushrangers.

16 Ibid.

17 The Australian People, pp. 22-24.

18 The Australian People, p. 24.

19 Clare Anderson, Unfree labour and its discontents: transportation from Mauritius to Australia, 1825-1845, University of Leicester.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22Southern African slave history abounds with enslaved children – either as slave arrivals at the Cape, or as shipwreck survivors in the period before colonisation.

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by Karen Williams Follow @redrustin

One of the African-Americans who endures in Australian history is William Blue.

Blue was born in New York and said that he served with the English in the American War of Independence. By 1796 he was living in London, working as a chocolate-maker and a labourer on the River Thames. He was sentenced to seven years transportation after being convicted of stealing raw sugar and he landed in Australia in 1801.

Blue worked as a ferryman in Sydney Harbour and he owned property in the city. He was also known to a number of prominent Australian colonial political figures. Several Sydney streets are named after him and Sydney’s Blues Point was the site of the ferry service which he ran in the 1800s.

***

Journalist and newspaper editor Gilbert Robertson, was the son of a West Indian enslaver and plantation owner. Robertson’s father enslaved his mother, and Robertson was educated in Scotland where his paternal grandfather lived. He edited the Concord newspaper in Van Diemen’s Land (present-day Tasmania) where he first arrived in 1822. After multiple imprisonments for libel, he moved to Norfolk Island penal colony where he worked as the agricultural superintendent. At the time of his death, Robertson worked as a newspaper editor in Victoria.¹

Robertson’s political life is significant. There are various accounts that he led reconciliation efforts with Aboriginal groups on behalf of the colonial authorities. One of the more famous accounts of his political reconciliation work is with Eumarrah, an Aboriginal leader born in Campbell Town in Van Diemen’s Land. Eumarrah (c.1798-1832) was leader of the Stoney Creek (Tyerer-note-panner) people, who launched a staunch resistance against European colonialism in his area. Robertson captured Eumarrah and his wife Laoninneloonner in late 1828, when Robertson was working as part of the Governor George Arthur’s “roving parties”².

Accounts note that Eumarrah was saved from being hanged after Robertson designated him as a prisoner of war³.

After a year in Richmond gaol, the Aboriginal leader joined G. A. Robinson’s ‘friendly mission’ through the south-west in early 1830. Eumarrah impressed Robinson, but never subordinated himself, and in May he decamped. Showing mighty bushcraft (and an island-wide reach), he trekked from near Trial Harbour to his homeland region. In October he presented himself to the Launceston authorities and, at Arthur’s request, immediately joined the ‘Black Line’ operation, as it sought to corral the remaining Aborigines. To Arthur’s chagrin, Eumarrah soon left the line and began harassing settlers in the Tamar and Esk valleys and in the north-east.”⁴

In 1831 Robinson and Eumarrah met again as part of Robinson’s efforts to find a political solution to war with the Aboriginal people and his attempts to negotiate some détente, and the relationship continued until Eumarrah’s death in 1832.

***

William Cuffay

Born as the son of a former slave from St Kitts, William Cuffay was a key organiser and leader of the Chartist movement in Britain, often credited as the first mass popular political movement in Britain, which included campaigning for the right to vote. He worked as a tailor in London and was transported as a political prisoner to Van Diemen’s Land aged 60 for allegedly planning a mass uprising against the British government. He lost his job in 1834 after the new tailors’ union went on strike.

His campaign for universal suffrage was driven by his belief that workers needed representation in the British parliament.

The BBC writes that,

“In 1839, he helped to form the Metropolitan Tailors’ Charter Association and soon became an important figure in the Chartist movement in London. He was elected to the national executive of the National Charter Association in 1842 and later that year voted president of the London Chartists.”⁵

Cuffay was arrested in 1848 and on the evidence of a government spy was convicted for planning to set fire to buildings as a signal for an uprising. He was subsequently sentenced to 21 years transportation to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania).

“Three years later all political prisoners in Tasmania were pardoned but Cuffay decided to remain, carrying on his trade as a tailor and again becoming involved in radical politics and trade union issues. He played an important role in persuading the authorities to amend the Master and Servant Law in the colony, before dying in poverty in July 1870.”⁶

At his death, four newspapers in three Australian states published obituaries of him. His grave disappeared under a basketball court – along with the graves of thousands of other prisoners⁷.

***

Two black men, John Joseph and James McFie Campbell, also played a key role in the Eureka rebellion of 1854. Campbell was from Kingston, Jamaica and Joseph is recorded as a “black American from New York City or Baltimore, United States.”⁸ They were part of the 13 men who stood trial for the Eureka Stockade, charged with high treason, and all of whom were acquitted.

It was a key moment in the establishment of Australian governance, when goldfield miners opposed the government’s mining license fee scheme. The rebellion was eventually put down, although the event is iconic in Australian history.⁹

References

Blue William Billy, Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Gilbert Robertson, The Companion to Tasmanian History.

Eumarrah, Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Eumarrah, The Companion to Tasmanian History.

William Cuffay, BBC History. First accessed 19/06/2016.

The Isle of Denial: William Cuffay in Van Diemen’s Land. First accessed 19/06/2016.

Eureka Rebellion. First accessed 05/07/2016.

Eureka Stockade, Australian Government. First accessed 06/04/2016.

1 Gilbert Robertson, The Companion to Tasmanian History.

2 Eumarrah, Australian Dictionary of Biography.

3 Eumarrah, The Companion to Tasmanian History.

4 Eumarrah, Australian Dictionary of Biography.

5 William Cuffay, BBC History. First accessed 19/06/2016.

6 Ibid.

7 The Isle of Denial: William Cuffay in Van Diemen’s Land. First accessed 19/06/2016.

8 Eureka Rebellion . First accessed 05/07/2016.

9 Eureka Stockade, Australian Government. First accessed 06/04/2016.

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by Karen Williams Follow @redrustin

The last man executed for sodomy in Australia in 1863 was an indigenous black South African soldier. He was one of hundreds of mainly African and Asian indigenous and enslaved people transported from Africa’s south and its surrounding islands to the new settlement in New South Wales and Tasmania. Also in Australia was his compatriot, a renowned indigenous South African political leader, David Stuurman, who led a fierce resistance against the British and whose remains were buried in what is now Sydney’s main railway terminal.¹ It may seem an improbable tale, yet each of their distinct stories broaden our understanding of Australia’s colonial settlement, and their histories live on through their descendants who now form part of both white and Aboriginal communities, even as Australia still tightly clings to the myth of white founders.

Most of the black South African soldiers who were banished to Australia came from an army regiment that included indigenous Khoi and “Bastaard” men. The soldiers included a group who were part of the anti-colonial resistance in South Africa, who killed their ensign in a mutiny. Hendrik Uithaalder, who was hanged for the sodomy conviction, came from this group.

FACTBOX

First council of the Rehoboth Basters, 1872, one of many mixed-race communities in South Africa.

Bastaards, also Basters, was the Dutch term for various mixed-race people in South Africa, whose numbers were so numerous, and whose parentage was so diverse, that by the 1800s there were numerous social groups and communities recognised as “tribes” across the country, made up of largely mixed-race people. The Basters were one distinct grouping amongst many differently named mixed-race people. The colonial references to them as “tribes” also noted that each of the groupings had distinct and very different heritages, encompassing South Africa’s indigenous communities, Asian slaves and slaves from across Africa.

Immigration and enslavement in South Africa meant that heritage was truly mixed, as opposed to being biracial. This included descendants of indigenous South Africans along with people from the rest of Africa, white Europeans, Middle Eastern people – including Arabs, Persians and Central Asians – and Asian people stretching from India, Sri Lanka, Timor, to the Philippines and China. In various modern studies on DNA and genetic inheritances, black descendants in South Africa’s south are recognised to be the most genetically mixed in the world – and often to a much larger degree than found in studies conducted in other places.

The issue of complex heritage holds true in the Americas and the Caribbean as well, but the complexity and diversity is to a much greater degree in South Africa because its slave history is much more diverse. This includes social groupings that emerged from mixed-race people fleeing slavery in the country’s south and heading inland to freedom. They also escaped to Namibia, where their descendants continue to live. Colonial and then apartheid governments classified them as “coloured”, meaning they were a “non-European, non-African ‘race’” – as opposed to being seen as an indigenous ethnicity, or more accurately, different ethnicities. Even today, people classified “coloured” have very distinct regional cultures which are often alien to each other.

Across the records and in writings by historians, Hendrick Uitnaalder / Witnaalder’s name has been recorded in different ways: as Henrik or Hendrick; Witnalder or Witnaalder; and in some writings his surname is given as Uitnaalder. I will follow the spelling of historian V.C. Malherbe who has written on Uithaalder and has standardised the spelling of his name to Hendrik Uithaalder when writing about him.

Two Khoi soldiers, 1800s

Uithaalder was an indigenous Khoi man from South Africa’s south, who was sent to Australia in 1840 as a prisoner on the transportation ship Pekoe, with a group of other Khoi soldiers who had mutinied and fired into the officers’ mess, killing an ensign. He was part of a group of Khoi soldiers who staged a mutiny in Grahamstown, in the country’s east, during a period when rebellion against British colonial expansion had reached a critical period. Besides the South Africans, the Pekoe was also carrying 190 Irish male convicts², in one of several instances where South African and Irish political history intersects.

Uithaalder and his comrades were sentenced to death, which was then commuted to transportation, and he landed up in the colony of Van Diemen’s Land, present-day Tasmania.

Historian V.C. Malherbe also mentions that during his time in Australia he and a fellow South African, Stuurman Jantjes, were sent to present-day Brisbane (then named Moreton Bay) and drafted into the Border Police.³ Part of their job in the police force was fighting the Aboriginal people who were mounting an increasingly fierce resistance against colonisation and land dispossession. In Australia and later under South Africa’s white minority security forces, the descendants of Khoisan and other aboriginal people in South Africa were prized for their tracking skills and knowledge of the bushveld. In the 1980s they were used as trackers by the apartheid government to find liberation fighters in remote areas. Malherbe writes that,

“Jantjes was about 1.55m tall, twenty years of age, married, illiterate, and marked with a number of blue dots and scars. Uithaalder was twenty-eight, also married, illiterate and, at just over 1.4m., was so short that he could neither saddle nor mount a horse unaided. They were put to work chasing runaways, tracing stray horses, escorting prisoners, keeping aborigines (sic) at bay, serving notices, and carrying letters.”⁴

Uithaalder formed part of a group of black men and women sent from South Africa to Australia. These include enslaved African and Asian people, including those from surrounding areas like Madagascar and Mauritius, as well as soldiers and civilians, classified as Khoi, San, slaves, Free Blacks and coloured, according to colonial records.

Uithaalder escaped a death sentence for the second time while in Australia. This was during a dispute with a farmer for whom he was working and Uithaalder was convicted of raping the farmer’s wife. He subsequently turned up in Van Diemen’s Land, present-day Tasmania.

After that he becomes a figure of local colour and renown across Hobart, where he was repeatedly arrested for being “disruptive”. This was a common charge against political prisoners and the formerly enslaved who were traumatised and exiled.

Uithaalder’s role in political resistance and his part in gay history, however, does not preclude him from being a problematic historical figure, nor does it diminish his rape conviction, or the circumstances around his sodomy conviction.

He did not escape being sentenced to death for the third time in his life when he was hanged in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in 1863, becoming the last man hanged for sodomy in Australia. The controversy of his life followed Uithaalder to his death, as a 14-year-old boy was charged alongside him, but the teenager was eventually freed. The diminutive⁵ Uithaalder was eventually executed with weights tied to his feet, as his body was too slight to break his neck.

But Uithaalder was not the only indigenous South African who left behind an iconic, if politically ambivalent, legacy in Australia. Captain David Stuurman makes for a more traditionally heroic story: a major anti-colonial resistance figure of his time, he was banished and escaped from Robben Island twice before being sent to Australia (possibly to prevent him from orchestrating another escape from the South African penal island).

Stuurman was also a political leader, with the title of a captain. He is recognised by historians as one of the most significant resistance leaders fighting colonialism in South Africa’s south during that time period, and also one who formed alliances with different indigenous communities, thereby broadening and strengthening local resistance.

Early painting of mounted KhoiKhoi man

Stuurman was sentenced in South Africa in 1820, and deported to Australia in 1823 with other prisoners, including another indigenous Khoikhoi man, Jantje Piet,⁶ on the transportation ship, the Brampton.⁷ The ship was almost exclusively carrying Irish men, including a number of men convicted for acts associated with being Whiteboys, a term generally applied to “a secret Irish agrarian organisation in 18th-century Ireland” which used various tactics to defend tenant farmer land rights for subsistence farming.⁸

Stuurman was spared the death penalty in South Africa because he saved the life of a European sailor during his last escape. After his exile to Australia, Stuurman’s family launched a high-profile, vigorous campaign to have him freed and returned to South Africa. The campaign drew in support from British journalists and other figures, but ultimately they were unsuccessful.

Stuurman died in Sydney on 20 February 1830. Where he is currently buried is not clear, and the South African government has been in talks to repatriate and rebury his remains in his homeland. His remains were likely boxed together with those of others when his burial ground was turned into the Sydney Terminal.

It is only when researching the history of the Indian Ocean slave trade that I came across Stuurman’s story: centuries of racist policies that deliberately distorted history have wiped his name from memory and public record, particularly in South Africa, where he is generally not known, except by a handful of people.

A Khoi woman, 1790

The power of the Khoi history is augmented because in South Africa, it is widely believed that the Khoi people have died out: the popular history is that they were wiped out by smallpox epidemics introduced by European colonizers in the 1700 and 1800s. While Khoi people suffered heavily during the smallpox epidemics, along with South Africa’s Free Black and enslaved populations, it is only in recent years that small pockets of people are recognising their Khoi heritage. Successive colonial governments started classifying Khoi people under the term “coloured”, which was then continued under apartheid. Sara Baartman, who was displayed across Europe, was Khoi, and in South Africa today, it is not unusual to see women who have similar facial features to hers. Nelson Mandela was found to have significant Khoi mitochondrial DNA, as that was his mother’s heritage. The power of the Khoi people in Australia is that we have complex stories, of named individuals, belonging to a people who are erroneously believed to be “extinct”.

The Khoi Australian history extends to the lore of Australian bushrangers. Historian Kristyn Harman writes about Peter Haley (also named as Caley), a South African Khoisan man who worked as a groom in Sydney from about 1839. Records show him as being from Symonds Bay – more likely Simons Bay or Simonstown – in Cape Town. She refers to him as arriving “free” in Sydney, although there are little other details. Haley became a notorious horse thief in South Australia, nicknamed “Wolf” or “Heddy” and was eventually sentenced to Van Diemen’s Land, where he had constant run-ins with the law, including for instances of being drunk. Eventually he took to the bush and joined a group of bushrangers, where he survives in records as “Black Peter”. The gang became notorious and were active in Van Diemen’s Land for many years before eventually being caught. The lore of the bushrangers is a particular Australian source of pride, often closely associated with “convict” history: Ned Kelly’s notoriety as a vagabond is firmly enshrined in Australian history, and the gang that Haley belonged to enjoyed a degree of notoriety. Haley was hanged in Tasmania with his comrades on 16 February 1859, and was eventually buried at Campbell Street burial ground.⁹

The names of South African Khoi men in Australia are numerous, including Arnoldus Jantje and Scipio Africanus who gained notoriety not only for their brushes with the law, but also because they teamed up and went to live in the bush, where they lived by their wits. Scipio is interesting because historians write about him as a Khoi man, but his name “Scipio” was usually given to a slave in South Africa and elsewhere, thereby raising the possibility that he was not Khoi at all, but possibly a slave from somewhere else in Africa. He arrived in Sydney in June 1837. Scipio was small in stature and his age was initially recorded as ten years old, although at a later court appearance he is said to have given his age as 19. Scipio showed a particular disdain for the colonial system through his constant brushes with the law and throughout his life in Australia, he resisted and absconded from the colonial system.

There are no reports on whether any of the Khoi people in Australia left behind children. A number of the men mentioned died destitute. Like colonial Australia’s Aboriginal prisoners, exile and banishment were a de facto death sentence for them. At the same time, the reason why the Khoi men survive in the records and that so many of them can be traced is because they resisted colonialism throughout: from their banishment from South Africa, many of them kept fighting throughout their lives in Australia. As with Uithaalder, at times that resistance was problematic. But where historians see men mentioned in court records, charged with being outside without permission, being rowdy, absconding, for taking to the bush and refusing to engage with the colonial order and violence, I see fighters and resisters who stood up right to the end.

REFERENCES

Irish Convicts to New South Wales

Wikipedia entry on Whiteboys

V.C. Malherbe, Khoikhoi and the Question of Convict Transportation from the Cape Colony, 1820-1842.

Kristyn Harman, Aboriginal Convicts: Australian, Khoisan and Maori Exiles, New South Publishing, UNSW Press, 2012.

A Brief History of Homosexuality in Australia

1Stuurman’s remains are believed to have been moved when the station was built and is now believed to be buried elsewhere in an unmarked mass grave in Sydney.

2 Irish Convicts to New South Wales.

3 Malherbe p.33.

4Malherbe p.33.

5 He was reported to be about 1.42m tall.

6Malherbe p.22.

7 Malherbe p. 19.

8^{Wikipedia entry on Whiteboys}

9 Harman.

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by Karen Williams Follow @redrustin

While little attention is paid to black and Asian prisoners transported during the colonisation of Australia, there is even less information about local Aboriginal people and the neighbouring Maori fighters who were exiled to or within Australia. Their exile happened as part of their wider experiences of organised resistance against colonisation and the theft of Aboriginal land. The colonisation of Australia meant that the original inhabitants of the island were brought into the colonial judicial system as outsiders. Exile and banishment also happened alongside their other experiences of judicial punishment, which included imprisonment and at times the death penalty.

In Aotearoa/New Zealand, there is constant reference made to the fact that the country recognises the Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840 between colonial authorities and various Maori groups. This, along with the insistence that Maori land was bought according to contracts by the New Zealand Company, dismisses the fact and legacy of any colonial settlement of Aotearoa/New Zealand, and works to obfuscate the social and political situation of Maori people, which is comparable to other dark people in previously-colonised societies elsewhere.

The Maori and Aboriginal colonial experience made them not citizens under the settler order, but subjects of a foreign government. This becomes apparent when considering the fact that they were criminalised and at times sentenced to death for insisting on their natural rights within their own countries.

It is important to remember that the colonial settlement of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand was in fact an invasion of two countries with the resultant destruction of various societies and communities.

Historical accounts of various Aboriginal groups paint a picture of varied distinct and independent societies, existing within their own territories, as well as a people whose fierce resistance scared the colonists. This is in direct contradiction to the current image of Aboriginals as groups which are undifferentiated from each other, largely invisible and confined to the Northern Territories. In addition, as communities in a sovereign country, Aboriginal groups were at times in conflict with each other – and colonisation impacted on those internal politics. Colonisation in practice also meant lack of access to traditional food and drinking sources, which in turn impacted on indigenous livelihoods. Social trauma was compounded in both countries with the kidnap of indigenous children for colonial schools.

The fight against the European invasion resulted in a number of Aboriginal leaders being imprisoned.

Portrait of Hohepa Te Umuroa, a Maori anti-colonial fighter who was exiled to Australia. This portrait was one, along with those of four other Maori political prisoners, in Hobart Penitentiary on 16 and 17 November 1846. (Sketch: John Skinner Prout)

Te Kumete, a Maori anti-colonial fighter and political prisoner (Sketch: John Skinner Prout)

Maori political prisoner, Te Waretiti (Portrait: John Skinner Prout, 1846)

The fight of Aboriginal societies against the colonial settlers escalated, particularly as the settlers became more violent towards the island’s indigenous inhabitants. At the same time, there are consistent accounts that the Aboriginals very often left the colonists alone in certain areas and retaliated when violence was perpetrated against them.

But, the Aboriginal communities also provided an alternative to the colonial experience, particularly for prisoners who were sent to Australia. There are consistent historical reports of white convicts who escaped the penal colony and found shelter amongst various Aboriginal groups. This echoes what happened in South Africa, where some white men ran away from the colonial system and took shelter with maroon and indigenous communities, particularly those living on Table Mountain in Cape Town.

Historical records do not only document skirmishes between Aboriginal groups and the settlers (who comprised colonial authorities, convicts, political exiles and immigrants). Contact between the Aboriginal and settler camps also included political engagement by Aboriginal societies. One of the key political contacts was led by an immigrant black journalist and newspaper editor, Gilbert Robertson, who led what were termed “reconciliation efforts” with Aboriginal groups on behalf of the colonial authorities. One of the more famous accounts of his political reconciliation work is with Eumarrah, an Aboriginal leader of the Stoney Creek (Tyerer-note-panner) people. Eumarrah was born in Campbell Town in Van Diemen’s Land (present-day Tasmania) in around 1798, and he launched a staunch resistance against European colonialism in his area.

But the anti-colonial war also had a gendered impact on both sides of the society, although in historical research little attention is paid to violence against women. While there are court records mentioning white women at times being raped during attacks on homesteads by Aboriginal fighters, historians allude to sexual abuse against Aboriginal women in oblique comments mentioning complaints that settlers “misused” Aboriginal women. The historical allusions, however, appear to point to a more concerted pattern of organised attacks against Aboriginal women, including references that appear to indicate either consistent kidnapping and/or rape of groups of indigenous women from targetted communities. These references are scattered but consistent, and more research needs to be done to see whether sustained sexual violence against Aboriginal women was planned, coordinated and effectively amounted to colonial policy – and was therefore a crucial part of the colonisation of Australia.

When the indigenous fighters were punished within the colonial court system, they joined Irish, African and Asian political prisoners who were exiled to Australia, as well as other prisoners sentenced by the British to the penal colonies.

But there were differences in indigenous Australians’ experiences of the judiciary with often disproportionately more severe punishments meted out to Aboriginal people. They are also rendered invisible as people when the judicial records and historians’ writing often only refers to Aboriginal people by the names that the colonists gave them. Demeaning and insulting names like Blind-Eyed Alic, Jacky Jacky, Old Man Billy Billy, Tallboy and Sorethighed Jemmy is how they are still recorded in the history being written today.

Gamareagal warrior, Musquito

Aboriginal fighters Bulldog and Musquito (as the records call them), were sent to Norfolk Island and Van Diemen’s Land respectively for their resistance in New South Wales[1]. They were the first Aboriginal men sentenced as convicts in 1805, but scores of other Aboriginal men would be similarly sentenced and exiled throughout the period of colonization.[2]

Musquito led the Gamaregal resistance in the Hawkesbury, and was first exiled to Norfolk Island and then Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) and he never returned home.[3] Accounts say that Bulldog probably returned to mainland Australia.

The two reportedly planned to burn down the jail they were being held in upon arrest, but their plan was discovered. Musquito’s brother also petitioned for his release and return to Sydney, but Musquito died in exile. Like the indigenous South African Khoi men, Musquito was used as a tracker during his imprisonment. Eventually, while in Van Diemen’s Land, Musquito rejoined local Aboriginal groups and he started participating in their warfare against the colonial settlers. He was eventually caught and hanged in Hobart.

Exile and de facto banishment also extracted a psychological toll on Aboriginal prisoners, and many of them died fairly early on while serving their sentences. This contrasts significantly with the experience of other European, Asian and African prisoners sent to Australia.

Aboriginal people entered the courts system as anti-colonial fighters as well as people who were seen to transgress British law. Banishment and exile from their homeland also came about when death sentences for Aboriginal prisoners were commuted to transportation.[4] The death sentence was not uncommon, and often Aboriginal prisoners or local Aboriginal groups were forced to watch the hangings of their compatriots and kin.

Even though they were regarded as colonial subjects by the British, they were not expected to take the oath in law courts, since they were seen as pagans, and they therefore could not act as witnesses or interpreters.[5]

Historian Kristyn Harman writes that,

“Roberts and Warrigal were two of at least sixty Aboriginal men from New South Wales who were incorporated into the convict system in the Australian colonies during the first half of the nineteenth century. Transported to places as diverse as Van Diemen’s Land, Norfolk Island, and the Port Jackson penal islands of Goat Island and Cockatoo Island, Aboriginal convicts were put to work alongside other convicts clearing land, breaking rocks, and building roads. They laboured to help build the infrastructure of the colonial society that contained them. For the most part, Aboriginal convicts were treated the same as the majority of other convicts whilst in captivity. They were expected to participate in the government labour force, to receive the same rations from the government stores as other convict workers, and to be punished in the same way for any acts considered to be offences. It was their different pathways into captivity, their different understandings of and responses to imprisonment, and the different rationale informing the punishment meted out to them that set them apart from other convicts.”[6]

There were also other ways in which the Aboriginal communities came into contact with the colonial system. As was common practice in other colonial settings, the British deployed Aboriginal police (under white command) against other Aboriginal communities not their own. The colonial practice extended to the Border Police system, where many indigenous prisoners from Africa and Asia served as trackers, law enforcement officers and troops used to fight the Aboriginal resistance fighters.

But this should not obscure the anti-colonial impetus of Aboriginal communities across Australia. Similarly to the numerous reports of them leaving the colonists alone and retaliating when threatened or attacked, so too, it is important to document the sustained resistance and war waged by different Aboriginal communities and the fear that they engendered in the colonialists. It wasn’t simply singular communities that resisted colonisation: an attack by a confederation of Aboriginal groups in the 1830s also resulted in the death sentence being meted out to the resisters.

When the three hundred colonists living in the Brisbane Water District came under attack from a confederation of Aboriginal tribes in the early 1830s, eighteen Aboriginal captives eventually stood trial in Sydney. Because of difficulties in correctly identifying some of them, not all were found guilty. However, one man known as Mickey was sentenced to be hanged. Nine of his compatriots being held in gaol pending their transfer to be worked as convicts on Cockatoo Island were made to watch his execution. Threlkeld, who was present at the event, described the Aboriginal onlookers as having “pale visages”. Their “trembling muscles”, he said, “indicated the nervous excitement under which they laboured at the melancholy sight”. Biraban, who had accompanied Threlkeld, exclaimed, “When the drop fell, I thought he should shed his skin!” (like a snake) Threlkeld suggested to the colonial authorities that any Aborigines under confinement when executions were being carried out ought to be made to watch. It was considered that such an example would be a deterrent to Aboriginal men who were otherwise intent on resisting the colonial intrusion onto their lands.[7]

In neighbouring Aotearoa/New Zealand, resistance to colonisation was just as fierce and a group of Maori fighters were imprisoned in Australia. The colonial frontier expanded across Aotearoa/New Zealand often through violent conflict, collectively known as the New Zealand wars that were fought between Maori groups and the British in the 1800s.[8] The Hutt Valley campaign of 1846 brought a number of Maori men into the British judicial system and resulted in transportation to Australia.

Among the most prominent cases of Maori political prisoners exiled to Australia were five Maori men who were sentenced as convicts to Australia[9]. The most prominent among the group was a Wanganui Maori fighter, Hohepa Te Umuroa. He was among a group of political prisoners exiled for life to Maria Island off Tasmania.[10] He had joined the war of Wanganui Maori under the leadership of Te Rangiheata against colonialists in Aotearoa/New Zealand’s Hutt Valley.[11] Similarly to a number of captured Aboriginal men, the Maoris were captured by a rival Maori community and handed to the colonial authorities.

Portrait of Maori anti-colonial fighter and political prisoner, Hohepa Te Umoroa. (Portrait: William Duke, circa 1846)

Maori leader Te Rangiheata who led the resistance against colonialists in Aotearoa/New Zealand’s Hutt Valley.

Te Umuroa and the six other Wanganui Maori who were captured with him (Te Waretiti, Matiu Tikiaki, Te Kumete, Topi, Matai-umu and Te Rahui) were “convicted of rebellion against the Queen, aiding Te Rangihaeata and possession of one of Her Majesty’s firearms”[12] on 12 October 1846 and sentenced to be transported for the rest of their lives.

Hohepa Te Umuroa died in exile in 1847. Te Ara: The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand writes that,

In mid April 1847 Te Umuroa fell seriously ill with tuberculosis. His health deteriorated through the winter. On 19 July 1847 the prison foreman, J. J. Imrie, wrote in his diary: ‘At 4 am visited the Maoris. Found Hohepa very nearly gone. At 5 am he breathed his last without a struggle.’ Te Umuroa was buried the next morning, in the small public cemetery on the island, on a bleak hillside, rather than in the convict cemetery. The funeral service was read in Maori by Imrie at the graveside. An anonymous benefactor later erected a headstone over the grave.

Te Umuroa’s death prompted the Australian authorities to action. Both La Trobe and the Colonial Office queried the legality of the court martial and transportation. Eventually the four remaining prisoners were released and returned to Auckland in March 1848.[13]

It would take Te Umuroa a little longer to return home. More than 140 years after his death, there was a campaign to return him home. After protracted negotiations between the Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand governments, his remains were returned to Aotearoa/New Zealand, fetched by the elders of Te Umuroa’s community, and in August 1988 he was eventually reburied in his homeland with a full Maori funeral.[14]

This was not a symbolic return. The return of remains of political prisoners and people banished from their homelands during colonisation is a key demand for dignity and restitution. Te Umoroa made it back to Aotearoa/New Zealand, but still buried in Australia are the remains of scores of anti-colonial resisters who never made it back home.

References

[1] Aboriginal Convicts: Australian, Khoisan, and Maori Exiles – Kristyn Harman

[2]Hyman

[3] Indigenous convicts: Khoisan, Maori and Aboriginal exiles

[4] Harman, K: ‘The Same Measure of Justice’: Aboriginal Convicts in the Australian Penal Colonies, pp.11-12

[5]Harman, K: ‘The Same Measure of Justice’: Aboriginal Convicts in the Australian Penal Colonies

[6] Harman, K: pp.7

[7] Harman, p. 14.

[8] Hutt Valley Campaign

[9] New Zealand’s Governor at the time, George Grey, was also posted to Cape Town in South Africa. He was also the colonial governor of Australia, meaning that he was key in the historical links between the three countries and the history of transportation between them. Auckland and Cape Town house extensive Grey historical collections: in South Africa on medieval and Renaissance literature, and on slavery and Cape history, and on Maori history in New Zealand. Grey was also Governor of South Australia. (Collections information from a conversation with Melanie Geustyn, National Library of South Africa.)

[10] Indigenous convicts: Khoisan, Maori and Aboriginal exiles

[11]Ibid

[12] Te Umuroa, Hohepa

[13]Ibid

[14] Ibid

This article was commissioned for our academic experimental space for long form writing curated by Yasmin Gunaratnam . A space for provocative and engaging writing from any academic discipline.

by Karen Williams Follow @redrustin

In 1657, five years after the start of Dutch colonialism in South Africa, an indigenous¹ man, Doman, was sent to the Dutch “prize colony” of Batavia, present-day Jakarta. The Dutch colonisers who had landed in South Africa wanted to acquaint him with Dutch culture as well as help him to improve his Dutch-language skills.

Doman was a Khoi man and his Khoi name is believed to be Nommoa. Until then the Dutch had used him as an interpreter and believed him to be completely friendly with the Dutch and supportive of their colonialist aims.²

In Indonesia Nommoa/Doman received an education: but it stretched much further than improving his language skills. This included Nommoa/Doman acquiring a knowledge of firearms while in Batavia.

The city of Batavia had been recently established and the Dutch could only have a foothold in Indonesia as a colonising power at war with the country. The city’s lifeblood was the slaves brought from across Asia, as well as the Chinese merchants, whom historians regularly portray as an apolitical trader class.

Nommoa/Doman believed that he would die in Batavia, or that he would be killed and would never return home. As a ploy, he told the Dutch that he would serve them faithfully when he returned to South Africa and that he wanted to become a Christian and would renounce his fellow Khoikhoi and go to live with the Dutch. But the political impact of Nommoa/Doman’s stay in Batavia was unmistakable and would serve him well when he returned to South Africa, where the first war with the Dutch was about to break out.

In Batavia Doman would likewise have been aware of the raiding, arson and destruction of houses, gardens, plantations and sugar mills immediately outside the city walls. The Javanese inhabitants were expelled on account of the potential threat they formed, and the Dutch position was further undermined by slaves absconding from the city and joining the Bantamese forces on the outskirts.³

Nommoa/Doman’s return to South Africa a year later in 1658 came at a time of great social and political upheaval. The KhoiKhoi’s fight against the recently-arrived colonialists would soon intensify, resulting in the first Khoi-Dutch war in 1659. Nommoa/Doman would grow into a key resistance leader, now well-schooled in the guerilla hit-and-run tactics of the Javanese and having seen the weaknesses and façade of Dutch colonial enterprise, which the Indonesian resistance laid bare.

Unlike many other examples of colonial resistance, Nommoa/Doman’s fight against the Dutch was different: his stay in Indonesia had given him an internationalist experience of colonialism, particularly since the historical arc of colonialism had gone on for much longer than the recently-established station in South Africa. War broke out between the Dutch and Bantam in Indonesia in 1656, just before Nommoa/Doman was due to arrive in Batavia.⁴ Nommoa/Doman rose to prominence in the anti-colonialism fight in South Africa largely because during his Indonesian stay he was able to witness the guerilla warfare waged by the Indonesians against the Dutch. When he returned to South Africa, he applied what he saw in Indonesia in a new front against Dutch colonialism.

Jayakarta, in 1605, before Batavia was established on its ruins.

Batavia was recently established by the Dutch in 1621 and it came about after the Dutch military razed the existing city of Jayakarta/Jacatra. The Dutch destroyed the official residence of the Sundanese king, known as the kabupaten, as well as the mosque. These two buildings had served as the twin centres of power under Sundanese rule. Batavia was built on the ruins of the destroyed Indonesian city, and a wall was erected around the Dutch town, which aimed to work in isolation from the rest of Indonesia, and with the local population largely expelled to outside of the city walls.⁵ The slave market established in the colonial city has been referred to as a “Batavian institution”.⁶

The war with the kingdoms that made up the Indonesian archipelago would continue for centuries, including wars against the people of Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan, Bali, Lombok and Aceh.⁷ The resistance to the Dutch is also seen in the number of Indonesian royal households who were exiled to South Africa.

Nommoa/Doman was a significant figure in the forging of historical links across the Indian Ocean between Indonesia and South Africa. From the arrival of the Dutch, this would increase, as South Africa became the place of exile and banishment for the various Indonesian royal houses, and Indonesian slaves formed a core part of the colony’s enslaved population, with their descendants still a significant part of the population today. Chinese Batavian prisoners and exiles would also form some of the earliest Chinese citizens of South Africa. Crucially, these exiles and slaves would lay the foundations for the establishment of Islam in South Africa. The link would continue into the 20^th century and set a trend, where Nelson Mandela’s signature patterned “Madiba shirts” that he loved wearing were batik shirts made for him in Indonesia, and one of the ways in which he wanted to honour the links between South Africa and Indonesia (that is, besides liking the fashion after decades of prison clothes).

Nommoa/Doman would not be the only African in Indonesia at the time. Africana: The Encyclopaedia of the African and African-American Experience writes that,

Founded in 1602, the Dutch East India Company brought slaves from the Dutch holding in Elmina, in present-day Ghana, and several other Dutch posts on the west coast of Africa, to the Dutch holdings in the Cape Colony (today part of South Africa) and Indonesia.⁸

The Encyclopedia also notes that much like the transport of Africans to places like India, Africans were also recruited into the colonial military and police in Indonesia.

Blacks served in the East Indian Army in Indonesia from the early nineteenth century to the twentieth century. Noting that these West Africans and West Indian blacks were Europeanized and Christianized, local Indonesians called them Blanda Itam, meaning Black Hollanders. In Dutch colonial societies these black servicemen formed a community separate from both the white Dutch, who gave them lower pay and fewer benefits than white soldiers, and from the peoples whom they policed. Still, in Suriname and Indonesia, these soldiers often took local wives and settled after their retirement from service.⁹

In turn, the first known groups of Muslims who arrived in Cape Town in 1658 were “the Mardyckers of Amboya in the East Indies, who were brought as solders to support the Dutch in the face of Khoisan resistance. However, it was as slaves that the vast majority of Muslims were deployed in the colony.”¹⁰

Batavia, the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company, circa 1780

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) was headquartered in Batavia, and the administration there was also responsible for VOC operations across Asia as well as South Africa. The reach of the administration in Batavia also extended to laws and after 1642 Batavian laws were implemented at all VOC outposts.¹¹

The Javanese people were prohibited from living within the city walls, so great was the Dutch fear of their rebellion. This in turn led to their guerilla attacks from the outer reaches of the city.

Chinese people were a prominent feature of Batavian society and were often traders and merchants. They are often represented as an industrious merchant class. However, most of the Chinese prisoners, exiles and slaves to South Africa in the 1700s came from the Chinese in Batavia. This includes Chinese prisoners like Ongkongko, who was sent in chains to South Africa in 1747 after being convicted of high treason in Batavia and who lived to become the richest Chinese person in the South African colony after his release. This in turn would point to the possibility that the Chinese were not as apolitical as is often portrayed.

Depiction of the Batavia Massacre of 1740, where at least ten thousand Chinese people were massacred (illustrator unknown)

The Chinese were also represented in the poorer sections of society. In 1740 an estimated ten thousand Chinese people were killed within the walls of Batavia in an anti-Chinese pogrom known as the Batavia Massacre. It followed an uprising by Chinese sugar mill workers in which they killed 50 Dutch soldiers. During that time, the authorities had also issued a decree to deport “suspicious” Chinese to Ceylon/Sri Lanka. In the ensuing violence the Dutch troops killed thousands of Chinese. After rumours were spread that the Chinese would commit atrocities against some of the other Asian groups in the city, they also retaliated against the Chinese.¹² Chinese survivors of the 1740 Batavia Massacre escaped from Batavia to join the Javanese resistance. The Java War (also known as the Chinese War) took place between 1741-1743 when joint Chinese and Javanese anti-colonial fighters launched attacks against the Dutch in Indonesia.¹³

But the power of the Indonesian archipelago was not contingent on the Dutch presence: it had for years been the centre of learning, trade and civilisation. The Indonesian archipelago was also the centre of commerce, with centuries of trade recorded with Australia’s northern coastal Aboriginal communities, particularly around the Aboriginal pearling industry. Sulawesi in Indonesia was a primary point of the pearl trade for Aboriginal groups for more than 500 years.

Asian slaves were critical to the functioning of Batavia, and the mixed-race women who partnered the Dutch men have passed into colonial legend, being characterised as vicious, lascivious, indolent and spoilt. Soldiers’ ballads and letters from that time constantly refer insultingly to availability of “black women” (the enslaved Asian women) in Batavia. Enslaved Asian women were used largely within the colonial households, meaning that they were vulnerable to almost unfettered rape by their enslavers¹⁴. As a measure against “lasciviousness”, the early Batavian governments had at times tried to limit the number of women slaves per household, particularly of unmarried Dutch men. What was understood, but not stated, in this context, was the premise that the women were sexually enslaved.

An enslaved Balinese woman in Batavia. The Dutch brought in slaves and traders from
outside Indonesia as a way to reduce the chance of revolt. (Artist: Cornelis de Bruyn)

Lower-ranking officers and soldiers generally partnered with Asian and Eurasian women (although that did not mean that the women returned with the Dutch men to Europe.) Their children would often be absorbed into their mother’s society in colonial Batavia: the male children as soldiers and the young women at times partnering with other Dutch and European men.

From the beginning there was the freest intercourse with slave women. Most were household slaves, and there were already upwards of eighty slaves of both sexes in the Jacatra fort recorded in the 1618 roll call. One man who survived the long siege has left a journal noting nightly orgies within the Dutch compound and marriages rowdily celebrated between Company servants and “black women”…¹⁵

FACTBOX

The fear that Indonesians engendered in the Dutch cannot be overstated. Whether as citizens in Indonesia, or as enslaved people, the Dutch often drew up laws to deal specifically with what they perceived as the threat simply from having Indonesians near them.

In Dutch policies in south-east Asia and in South Africa, there is a constant fear of slaves going “amok”. There are numerous South African court records of Indonesian (and at times other Asian) slaves who went “amok”, usually killing or injuring anybody who was near them, usually with knives.

In South Africa and in Batavia, there were policies and practices to deal with the Dutch fear of slaves going “amok” and it was this fear too that led to some changing patterns in importing male slaves from Indonesia to South Africa.

Batavian merchant Pieter Cnoll, his family and the family’s slave

In Batavia, no Makassarese or Balinese male slave child older than twelve were brought into Batavia after 1685,¹⁶ as these two groups of male slaves were deemed as particularly troublesome. In South Africa, the Indonesian male slaves in general were seen as a “discipline problem”. Researcher Joline Young remarked that the view of Indonesian slaves at the time was: “If you slapped an Indonesian slave, he would slap you back.”

It is interesting for me to read the history on how often “going amok” is mentioned within south-east Asian slave narratives, and in describing Asian slaves in South Africa. Historians focus on it as a violent act, but I see it as a moment of transcendence and escape, and within the context of enslavement, a very physical act of transcendence and escape.

One of the consequences of the long resistance to Dutch colonialism in Indonesia, and the transportation of Indonesian slaves to South Africa, was the impact on South African culture, including in south-east Asian rituals practiced till today.

Ratiep is an extraordinarily spiritual ceremony performed by Muslim descendants of Indonesian and Asian slaves and political prisoners brought to South Africa from the 1600s onwards and who continue to live in the country. Through an incredibly fast beat of a small drum with accompanying music, participants enter such a deep trance that they can be pierced and lanced with knives and metal objects. There is no blood; no injury and there are no marks left afterwards on the participant.

The Indonesian spiritual heritage in South Africa is also possibly reflected in the history of the ceremonial kris/keris dagger, mentioned in slave narratives. In Indonesia it has for centuries been both a weapon as well as a spiritual object.¹⁷ Across the Indonesian archipelago, and into Thailand and Malaysia, there are various practices associated with knives, and I’ve wondered how much of that south-east Asian cultural layover has been absorbed in the knife culture of Cape Town gangs, who are descended partly from the Asian slaves.¹⁸

Indonesia was also the source of a number of notable exiles to South Africa, besides the Batavian Chinese prisoners who were sent to South Africa and who became a key part of life in Cape Town. Historian Robert Shell writes,

The geographically isolated Cape was a perfect exile for overthrown political leaders from the Eastern possessions. At the top of the prisoner-slavery hierarchy, for example, were a few important ex-sultans. Some were give the right to live quietly at the Cape with large retinues of slaves to attend to their creature comforts, and they were never sent to Robben Island or to the Lodge. The lives of the prisoner-slaves were grim. An important status distinction was whether the slave was wearing chains or not.¹⁹

There were numerous Indonesian nobles, princes, kings and political figures exiled to South Africa. There were also key spiritual figures, who would entrench Islam in South Africa.

The Rajah of Tambora was exiled by the government in Batavia in 1697 for fighting the Dutch.²⁰ The Rajah cut an enigmatic figure and he reputedly spent most of his time transcribing the Koran from memory, which he presented to the Governor, Willem Adriaan van der Stel²¹. (Other accounts have him translating the Koran into Dutch.²²) The modern-day location of the Rajah’s handwritten Koran has not been found.

The first exiles from Makassar/Macassar in Indonesia arrived in 1670 and Makassarese royalty were also sent to South Africa, as well as some of its leading spiritual figures. Cape Town still has a suburb called Macassar.

The exiled royalty were often allowed to keep their retinue and they cut a sharp contrast to the Indonesian slaves in the city.

One of the most enigmatic cases of exile at the Cape is that of Cakraningrat IV, the deposed ruler of Madura. Sent into exile by the VOC high Government in Batavia, he arrived at the Cape in December 1746…It is not clear whether local Company officials realised that he was one of the most prominent enemies of the Company. Governor Hendrik Swellengrebel decided that for security purposes Cakraningrat should remain a prisoner at the Castle rather than being sent to Robben Island or into the countryside, as had been the fate of some of the other exiles from the region.

It is not recorded exactly where in the Castle the Madurese royal – known at the Cape as Raden Djoerit – was housed. He was, however, spared the indignity of public labour and was served by two of his male slaves, Datan van Aroe and Njasrie van Madura.”²³

The exile of Indonesian noblemen and their advisors had a lasting impact not only on the culture of South Africa, but they would also help forge a new language, and with it, a new identity. The resistance which started in the 1600s would culminate in the independence of Indonesia centuries later, as well as the start of a liberation fight by descendants of Indonesian slaves and exiles in South Africa.

FACTBOX

Other notables exiled from Indonesia included (but were not limited to):

Daeng Mangale, a prince from Makassar
The Javanese princes (Pangerans) Selongingpasar and Dipanagara, who also lived with their retinue and slaves
Pangeran Wargo Digma, Raden Satja Dinata and Raden Soera Dierapa from Bantam²⁴
Sheikh Abdurahman Matebe Shah, who arrived in chains in Cape Town in 1667. He was the last Malaccan Sultan and his forebears had established the Malaccan Sultanate.²⁵ He was a key Islamic figure in the Cape and established relationships with the local slave community.
Sayed Mahmud, a spiritual leader from the Malaccan Sultanate²⁶
Sayed Alowie a leading Muslim figure in Cape Town, was a Yemeni who was an important advisor to the court of the Javanese ruler, the Susuhunan, based at Kartasura in Indonesia. Eventually he was exiled to South Africa in chains as a political prisoner, where he was also imprisoned on Robben Island, centuries before Nelson Mandela would be imprisoned there too as a political prisoner.

References:

South African History Online: Doman. First accessed 21 August 2016.

Robert C-H Shell, Children of Bondage, Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg, 2012.

Kerry Ward, in Cape Town between East and West: Social Identities in a Dutch Colonial Town, ed. Nigel Worden, Jacana Media, Johannesburg, 2012.

Ross and Schrikker, in Cape Town between East and West: Social Identities in a Dutch Colonial Town.

Africana: The Encyclopaedia of the African and African-American Experience.

South Africa’s Stamouers: Van Tambora, Rajah. Accessed 21 August 2016.

RootsWeb: Rajah of Tamborah & Rustenburgh Estate, the governors’ residency. Accessed 21 August 2016.

Gabeba Baderoon, Regarding Muslims: from slavery to post-apartheid, Wits University Press, 2014.

Karel Schoeman, Seven Khoi Lives: Cape biographies of the seventeenth century, Protea Book House, Pretoria, 2009.

Hein Willemse, The Hidden Histories of Afrikaans.

Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: Europeans and Eurasian in Colonial Indonesia, University of Wisconsin Press (2^nd Ed), 2009.

1740 Batavia massacre (Wikipedia). Accessed 22 August 2016.

Indonesian Kris. Accessed 22 August 2016.

Kramat of Sayed Mahmud. Accessed 22 August 2016.

Kramats – Cape Mazaars. Accessed 22 August 2016.

Dutch East Indies (Wikipedia). Accessed 24 August 2016.

Java War (1741-43) (Wikipedia). Accessed 24 August 2016.

South African History Online: 1700-1799. Accessed 24 August 2016.

1 Doman was a Goring-haiqua Khoikhoi man.

2 Schoeman, p.43.

3 Schoeman, p.52.

4 Ibid.

5 Taylor, p.19.

6 Taylor, p.70.

7 Dutch East Indies (Wikipedia). Accessed 24 August 2016.

8 Africana: The Encyclopaedia of the African and African-American Experience, p. 1414.

9 Ibid.

10 Baderoon, p.8.

11 Ross and Schrikker, pp.28-9.

12 1740 Batavia massacre (Wikipedia). Accessed 22 August 2016.

13 Java War (1741-43) (Wikipedia). Accessed 24 August 2016.

14 The vulnerability of enslaved women in households is critical, particularly given the misogynistic, ahistorical “house/field” trope originating from the United States.

15 Taylor, p.15.

16 Taylor, p.18.

17 Indonesian Kris. Accessed 22/08/2016.

18 Recently I also read an anecdote of a South African academic singing a Afrikaner folksong, Suikerbossie (Sugarbush), to friends while in Germany. An Indonesian man apparently took umbrage, saying that it was actually an Indonesian folk song.

19 Shell, p. 197,

20 South Africa’s Stamouers: Van Tambora, Rajah. Accessed 21 August 2016.

21 William Adriaan van der Stel was the son of the iconic governor of the Cape, Simon van der Stel, a black man whose father was Dutch and whose mother and grandmother were enslaved Indian women.

22 RootsWeb: Rajah of Tamborah & Rustenburgh Estate, the governors’ residency. Accessed 21 August 2016.

23 Ward, pp. 87-8.

24 Ward, pp.89-90.

25 Kramats – Cape Mazaars. Accessed 22 August 2016.

26 Kramat of Sayed Mahmud. Accessed 22 August 2016.

This article was commissioned for our academic experimental space for long form writing curated by Yasmin Gunaratnam . A space for provocative and engaging writing from any academic discipline.

by Karen Williams Follow @redrustin

The 17^th century history of Indonesia and its anti-colonial figures brought Islam into the cultural life of South Africa, particularly for poor non-Muslims who lived together with Muslim communities. Growing up, I had a belief that Islam was the religion of freedom, without knowing why this was such a core belief of mine. Intrinsic to that experience is that Islam did not arrive in South Africa as a coloniser’s faith and its establishment and growth was rooted in the fight for freedom of enslaved people in South Africa. This contrasts directly with areas in Africa where Islam was a colonising, enslaving or hegemonic political and cultural force imposed from the outside. This would include for example, formerly enslaved Ethiopians (including children), and other Africans, who came to South Africa after being freed by the British from Arab slaving dhows.¹

The tomb/kramat of Sheikh Yusuf in Macassar, Cape Town

In Cape Town, Islam first established itself through the teachings of mainly exiled Indonesian scholars and royalty and was spread through the practices of the enslaved. In the poor, working class areas where the descendants of the enslaved continue to stay, there is an enduring belief that the city is protected by a number of kramats (shrines/burial places) of Muslim leaders who arrived as part of the exile and enslavement. The kramats form the “circle of Islam” that many believe protects the city. This is a guiding belief among the descendants of the slaves. There are particular legends that the kramats on the mountains are always unscathed whenever the city experiences its numerous summer mountain fires.

Sheikh Yusuf established the first Muslim community in Cape Town

Two figures are key to the establishment of Islam in South Africa, namely, Sheikh Yusuf and Tuan Guru. Sheikh Yusuf was of royal lineage from Macassar and the place where he was exiled to in South Africa is popularly still known as Macassar. He was part of the anti-Dutch resistance and when he was exiled to South Africa, he became a key figure among slaves. The Dutch tried to house him far from Cape Town in order to reduce his influence among the slaves, but he was still a focal point for South Africa’s enslaved community. He often provided refuge for runaway slaves and the Dutch regularly accused him of encouraging the slaves’ bids for freedom. He is seen as the figure who established the first Muslim community at the Colony in the 1690s.

Imam ‘Abdullah ibn Kadi Abdus Salaam, known as Tuan Guru, was a prince from Tidore in Indonesia’s Trinate Islands who arrived as a prisoner in Cape Town in 1780. He served twelve years of his sentence and after being released he helped establish the first madrassa in 1793 and the first mosque in 1795.²

He authored one of the early Islamic texts during his incarceration:

A fragment from an early Islamic text used in madrassas in South Africa. It is written in Arabic script, but reads as Cape Dutch. Source: Hein Willemse, The Hidden Histories of Afrikaans

While imprisoned on Robben Island, Imam ‘Abdullah [Tuan Guru], being a hafiz al-Qur‘an, wrote several copies of the holy Qur’dn (sic) from memory. He also authored Ma‘rifatul Islami wa‘ Imani, a work on Islamic jurisprudence, which also deals with ‘ilm al-kalam [Asharite principles of theology] which he completed in 1781. The manuscripts on Islamic jurisprudence, in the Malayu tongue and in Arabic, became the primary reference work of the Cape Muslims during the 19th century, and is at present in the possession of his descendants in Cape Town. His handwritten copy of the holy Qu‘ran has been preserved and is presently in the possession of one of his descendants, Sheikh Cassiem Abduraouf of Cape Town. Later, when printed copies of the holy Qu‘ran were imported, it was found that Tuan Guru‘s hand-written copy contained very few errors.³

In terms of language, Melayu and Bugis were used informally as (written and spoken) languages in South Africa in the 17^th and 18^th century.⁴ Islam would continue to be a driving force for intellectual production in South Africa: besides the Rajah of Tamboer’s Koran and letters written in Bugis, the first book ever published in Afrikaans in South Africa is believed to be a Muslim religious text, Bayan al-Din, written in Arabic script but read in the local slave dialect of Afrikaans, then known as Cape Dutch. It was published by the Kurdish religious leader, Abubaker Effendi, originally from Erbil in Iraq but who was a major religious figure in South Africa. The text was published in Constantinople (Istanbul). However, much earlier, madrassas provided education to slave children and prayers and incantations were captured in the emerging slave language of Cape Dutch/Afrikaans.

The Auwal Mosque was the first and oldest mosque in South Africa. Tuan Guru is believed
to be the first imam at the mosque. It was opened in 1794.

The royal Indonesian courts and advisors who were exiled to South Africa are not a historical curiosity. The implication of having highly literate scholars stationed at the Cape meant that early literacy and written intellectual production was driven not by the largely-unschooled white society and enslavers, but by the Asian (and at times Arab) captives. Some of the prisoners enslaved upon arrival in South Africa were also literate. The Indonesians brought not only Islam to South Africa, but madrassas which served as early schools. The study of Islam helped the development of the creole language that came about with the intermingling of South Africa’s indigenous African languages, with the Asian, African and European languages spoken at the Cape. Colloquially, the language was initially called Cape Dutch and historians have found texts used in the madrassas where early forms of the language were written down.⁵ In its early stages, the language developed in two main ways: through the close proximity of indigenous and enslaved South Africans who lived and partnered with each other; and through being spoken by the intersection of indigenous Khoi people, their mixed-race descendants and enslaved South Africans. Later on, in order to cement a claim to the country, Cape Dutch would be sanitised and co-opted as Afrikaans, even though today the majority of speakers continue to be the descendants of indigenous and formerly enslaved people.

References:

South African History Online: Doman. First accessed 21 August 2016.

Robert C-H Shell, Children of Bondage, Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg, 2012.

Kerry Ward, in Cape Town between East and West: Social Identities in a Dutch Colonial Town, ed. Nigel Worden, Jacana Media, Johannesburg, 2012.

Ross and Schrikker, in Cape Town between East and West: Social Identities in a Dutch Colonial Town.

Africana: The Encyclopaedia of the African and African-American Experience.

South Africa’s Stamouers: Van Tambora, Rajah. Accessed 21 August 2016.

RootsWeb: Rajah of Tamborah & Rustenburgh Estate, the governors’ residency. Accessed 21 August 2016.

Gabeba Baderoon, Regarding Muslims: from slavery to post-apartheid, Wits University Press, 2014.

Karel Schoeman, Seven Khoi Lives: Cape biographies of the seventeenth century, Protea Book House, Pretoria, 2009.

Hein Willemse, The Hidden Histories of Afrikaans.

Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: Europeans and Eurasian in Colonial Indonesia, University of Wisconsin Press (2^nd Ed), 2009.

1740 Batavia massacre (Wikipedia). Accessed 22 August 2016.

Kramat of Sayed Mahmud. Accessed 22 August 2016.

Kramats – Cape Mazaars. Accessed 22 August 2016.

Dutch East Indies (Wikipedia). Accessed 24 August 2016.

Java War (1741-43) (Wikipedia). Accessed 24 August 2016.

South African History Online: 1700-1799. Accessed 24 August 2016.

1The South African academic Neville Alexander found out late in life that his grandmother was formerly enslaved, and from Ethiopia.

2Kramats – Cape Mazaars. Accessed 22 August 2016.

3South African History Online: 1700-1799. Accessed 24 August 2016.

4Ward p.86

5Willemse

This article was commissioned for our academic experimental space for long form writing curated by Yasmin Gunaratnam . A space for provocative and engaging writing from any academic discipline.

by Tanzil Chowdhury Follow @tchowdhury88

The new Justice Secretary Liz Truss, and the third non-lawyer in a row to be appointed for the position, recently gave evidence to the House of Common’s Justice Committee pledging her government’s commitment to scrap the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) and replace it with a ‘British Bill of Rights’ (BBoR). However, many of the claims that critics of the HRA make fundamentally misunderstand how it works and why it is essential in a democratic society, and evade any serious discussion about what a British Bill of Rights would look like.

The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) was put together in response to the European Holocaust and the Third Reich’s expansionist wars and was intended to prevent government excesses. It provided a basic set of rights for citizens, not based on their nationality, race, gender or religion, but simply by virtue of the fact that they were human. The articles of the treaty, known as ‘convention rights’, included the right to life, the prohibition of torture or slavery, free speech, the right to protest or practice your religion, the right to a fair trial and many other essential liberties. Some of the key architects of convention were in fact, like Liz Truss, Conservatives. Former Prime Minister Winston Churchill spearheaded the political momentum behind it across Europe, whilst David Maxwell-Fyfe, a lawyer and Tory MP, helped draft the document.

The Human Rights Act 1998 sought to ‘bring rights home’ by incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights into our domestic legal system. This meant that for the first time in the UK, if people felt that their human rights had been violated, they were able to bring actions before a domestic court rather than the costly route of going to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg. This was nothing short of a human rights revolution.

The HRA requires UK judges to interpret, as far as is possible, domestic law in a manner that protects these convention rights (and they have gone to admirable lengths to do so). If they are unable to do so, a judge can issue a declaration of incompatibility which places political pressure on MPs to change the offending law. Indeed, the HRA provides an accelerated mechanism to remedy domestic law that is not compliant. However, perhaps the most important impact that the HRA has had is that it imposes strict obligations, save some exceptions, upon all public bodies to act in a way that is compliant with human rights.

There are notable nationalistic undertones that characterise many of the criticisms levelled at the Human Rights Act. It has been called an ‘undemocratic fetter on a sovereign British state and its Parliament’, a law that binds our courts with ‘foreign judgments’ and gives too much freedom to societies ‘undesirables’. All of these are simply incorrect.

Many of the convention articles can in fact be (and perhaps too often are) lawfully limited subject to certain conditions obtaining- and though public bodies are by default bound by human rights, our Parliament can still create laws that are contrary to the convention articles (though politically it would be unwise to do so).

Further, decisions of the ECtHR do not bind our UK courts. The HRA only requires UK courts to take into consideration the decisions of the ECtHR and thus, the relationship between the two is in fact much more reciprocal. Decisions of the court bind our government, not the courts, and so the critics who claim that repealing the HRA would allow us to ignore ECtHR, such as the decision that declared the UK’s blanket ban on prisoner’s voting unlawful, are mistaken. To do that, we’d have to leave the European Convention of Human Rights and that’s not going to happen, if at all, anytime soon.

All we know about the proposed ‘British Bill of Rights’ is the immigrant-baiting rhetoric that it will allow the UK to ‘deport foreign terrorists’. But successive Justice Ministers have maintained a line of ambiguity. One of either two things is certain; such a bill will either change very little (though at considerable tax payer expense) or it will compromise the convention rights that were afforded to all citizens as a protection against governmental tyranny.

For all its faults and ignoring the fact that Churchill was no angel, the HRA helps to keep families together, holds the police to account for deaths in custody, allows people to wear religious symbols at work and limits the government’s spying powers among many the things. They bind public authorities and our government, but not, as the government claim, our courts or Parliament. So what’s the problem? The problem is that there is no problem- just fiction and misnomer. Repealing the HRA could instead result in a devastating retreat back to the atrocities that blighted Europe back in the 1930s and 40s.

Liberty are campaigning to Save Our Human Rights Act, more info here

Tanzil Chowdhury recently completed his PhD in 2016. He works as a development worker for the Greater Manchester Law Centre and lectures at the School of Law, University of Manchester. You can follow him on @tchowdhury88

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by Rahila Gupta Follow @RahilaG

There has been widespread disappointment that the UN missed a trick in not electing a woman as its new secretary general. Given the scandals that have dogged it, general scepticism about its relevance today, and its inefficacy in the face of the many crises facing the world, perhaps it would have been a poisoned chalice.

However in a little known area of UN history, women did get an opportunity to shine at the helm and shine they did. As far back as 1953, the UN appointed Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (VLP), who was not only a woman but a woman from the ‘Third World’ at that – the newly independent country of India. This was in the days when the presidency mattered. The loss of stature of the President is partly to do with the gradual decline in importance of the General Assembly of the UN, according to historian Manu Bhagavan, which has become a ‘forum for grandstanding’ rather than a place for real negotiations of important matters and co-equal to the Security Council as it was in the early days. When the newly independent colonies became members of an expanded UN, the world powers saw to it that real power migrated to the Security Council.

Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit

The fact that Madam Pandit, as she was popularly known, had a substantial media profile also suggests that the President’s role was more important than it is today. For who knows the name of the President of the UN today? In an archival filmed interview, VLP lays out her agenda as President of the UN: peace in Korea; racial conflict (she wouldn’t be drawn on whether she was referring to South Africa); and economic issues and aid. Interestingly, even in 1953, the interviewer wondered if people were justified in becoming pessimistic about the UN as an instrument of peace. VLP expressed her ‘great faith in the UN… It has done a great deal towards keeping peace in the world’, giving the unfortunate example of ‘Palestine where the fighting has stopped’ and the rather more successful example of the Korean armistice.

The story of how India came to be considered for the presidency of the UN is told by Bhagavan in India and the Quest for One World: The Peacemakers. Under Nehru and his policy of non-alignment with either of the superpowers in the Cold War, India won the respect of both as well as the Commonwealth countries, because it emerged as an ‘honest broker’ in negotiating an armistice in the ongoing Korean War. The story of how Madam Pandit got the job, as related by her, is simply, ‘I was just told (by my government) to pack up my bags and come here’.

This humility belies her achievements: she was the first woman Cabinet minister under partial self-government in British India; the first woman ambassador to Moscow and Washington and the first Indian woman to lead a delegation to the UN. She was well-known in the circles that mattered, she was, ‘charming when she wishes’ and let’s not forget, says Bhagavan, that ‘she knew how to throw a good party’, an achievement that is sometimes underrated. She forged excellent relations with everyone, even the British who had been wary of her anti-colonial speeches prior to Indian independence in 1947 and blocked her US visa when she planned to travel there in 1944. Later, as India’s ambassador to Britain, Pandit recalled her first meeting with Churchill who cautioned her against ‘putting ideas in women’s heads…Just because I have accepted you doesn’t mean that my views on women have changed’. He didn’t want women in high places, they should be social ornaments, is how she explained it.

Bhagavan, who is working on a forthcoming biography, Woman of the World: Madam Pandit, India, and the Global Stage, explains enthusiastically how VLP shed the halo of Nehru, her brother and PM of India, and Mahatma Gandhi and earned her own halo. Here was a woman with no formal education (she was taught by governesses at home) facing men trained in the debating halls of Eton and Oxbridge. Her grasp of technical legal arguments and her ability to demolish an opponent in debate were legendary. Bhagavan recounts the turning point in her international stature when she appeared on a popular radio programme in the US, ‘Town Meeting of the Air’ in which she annihilated Robert Boothby, British Conservative MP at the time, on the question of whether empires are good for peace. The audience started off undecided but ended up greeting every statement of hers with a thunderous applause.

At the founding conference of the UN in 1945, VLP battled it out with the British delegation who, under instructions from Churchill, were keen to ensure that the UN charter was worded in such a way that colonialism could continue unhindered: whatever lofty principles on world peace, fundamental freedoms, and human rights for all may have been enunciated, Article 2 (7) states ‘Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorise the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state’. In other words, colonial territories were to be excluded from UN scrutiny. To her dismay, VLP lost the argument; it would be the basis of the first challenge she would face when she led the Indian team to the UN in 1946 and was instructed to fight South Africa’s new law, the Asian Land Tenure Act, also known as the Ghetto Act which deprived people of Indian descent of a number of rights, including the restriction of ownership and occupation of land to certain clearly defined areas of towns. In its defence, South Africa used Article 2(7) on non-interference in its domestic jurisdiction to get the UN off its back.

The Indian team that VLP headed gave long legal reasons as to why Article 2(7) should be reinterpreted. VLP decided that legalistic arguments were too complicated to sway the Assembly and made a landmark speech arguing that this clause did not and should not protect states from internal human rights abuses. She reminded the General Assembly that ‘We are the trustees of the future, architects of the new world and it’s only on the foundation of justice that we can erect a new world order. Mine is an appeal to the conscience, the conscience of the world which this assembly is’. She won the vote by a two-thirds majority. This victory was significant – not only did it authorise the UN to condemn South Africa for its actions but it became the justification for interventionism and for the UN to uphold human rights in its member states. A year later, in 1947, Assistant Secretary-General for Social Affairs Henri Laugier said in his opening remarks to the Human Rights Commission: “The action taken in the case of South Africa established a precedent of fundamental significance in the field of international action…[for] out of these debates the general impression had risen up that no violation of human rights should be covered up by the principle of state sovereignty.” With this kind of role on the world stage, it is no wonder that VLP slipped so easily into the mantle of UN president in 1953.

What would it have been like for a woman operating in a man’s world in the middle of the twentieth century? I caught up with Gita Sahgal, granddaughter of VLP, to get a personal perspective on the question. VLP undoubtedly came from an illustrious, privileged background – the Nehrus – but, for Gita, the key point is that it was a liberal family. VLP’s father had fought caste prejudice and had caused outrage by bucking religious superstition. At the age of 17, VLP ran away briefly with a Muslim lover, for which she might well have paid with her life in a more orthodox set-up. Gita believes that the movement for Indian independence also acted as ‘a motor force propelling women into the public space’. She faced police batons and at least three spells in jail in British India. ‘Pandit was a product of the struggle between imperialism and nationalism, in which both sides sought legitimacy through their claim to emancipate Indian women‘, says Rosalind Parr on her Dangerous women website. VLP was only 44 when her husband died intestate, which meant that financial reasons also necessitated her continued presence in public life. As a widow with three daughters and no male heir, she was ‘legitimately’ deprived of an inheritance by her in laws, a clause in the Hindu law that was overturned by Nehru in his first term of office.

Despite her extraordinary achievements, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit was written out of history, occupying only secondary status as Nehru’s sister. Some things never change.

This article was comissioned for our academic experimental space and was edited by Xavia Warren. A space for provocative and engaging writing from any academic discipline.

Rahila Gupta is a writer and journalist. Her last book, Enslaved: The New British Slavery, explores the role of immigration controls in enslaving people with no formal status here. @RahilaG

by Jendella Benson Follow @JENDELLA

Deciding that it is never too early to take the task of cultural reproduction seriously (see David Osa Amadasun’s article, “‘Black people don’t go to galleries’ – The reproduction of taste and cultural values”), I took my fourteen month old son to the National Portrait Gallery one brisk November afternoon.

The exhibition that I had wanted to see was not yet open to the public, so we instead wandered around the permanent collection. At some point I released my restless child from his pushchair and let him waddle up and down the darkened corridors while visitors exchanged bemused looks and staff hovered over his inquisitive finger.

Watching my son toddle down the procession of white marble busts in the Statesmen’s Gallery felt surreal. When he eventually stopped to peer into a floor-to-ceiling portrait of King George V and family sitting stiffly in the shadowed grandeur of Buckingham Palace, I realised why my stomach was turning. While freely open to the general public, the National Portrait Gallery was not built for the likes of us. This impressive building was without a doubt funded by the blood of our ancestors, but we were never its intended audience.

As a student portrait photographer, I often wandered the halls of the National Portrait Gallery making notes on lighting and composition, but in the years that had passed since, I forgot how white it all was. If your history lessons at school reflect the monochromatic displays in our National Galleries, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Great Britain was made “Great” by the simple virtues of visionary white men. But, wait! Actually, that’s exactly what our history lessons taught us. Black and brown faces were absent from everything, unless we were bound naked to the decks of slave ships or serving tea to genteel men during the era of “The British Raj”.

The dense tapestries of our histories have been reduced to our ancestors as child-like subjects of a benevolent empire that graciously civilised and educated them. When confronted with racist narratives many of us did not have a counter-narrative to guard our already fractured sense of self. At ten years old, I attempted to write my first novel. It was about a black girl from Birmingham who escapes her racist bullies and returns to Africa. There she discovers that she’s actually an African Princess, and, of course, it was imaginatively titled ‘The African Princess’. But I know I’m not the only one that told ambitious tales of being descended from imagined African kings to try and save face when bombarded with insults patterned after decades of poverty-porn charity drives.

During my conversation with Sharon Dodua Otoo we spoke briefly about how art is at the heart of nation-building. It is through art – literature, paintings, music – that the myths of nations are built and transmitted. The stories and ideas that are immortalised in libraries, galleries and the hallowed halls of “canon” are chosen deliberately. History is curated, censored, moulded and reformed. Then it is taught from textbooks, shaping the way that generations see themselves and interact with the world at large.

When the “bronze heads” of Ife were unearthed in south-western Nigeria in 1938, the beauty and skill displayed in these sculptures challenged the narrative of the backward and culturally underdeveloped Africans that the British Empire had to save from themselves. So much so, Western ethnologists and archaeologists came to the conclusion that these heads were in fact the product of the fabled Greek city of Atlantis. The narrative of the superiority of Western culture was so precious that they were willing to bring a fictional city from the allegories of Plato to life, rather than believe that Africans were capable of such “high art”.

Eighty years later and as a culture we have not progressed so far as to leave the logic of white supremacy behind. When students at SOAS suggested that the philosophers they study actually reflect the fact that they are meant to be the School of Oriental and African Studies, of course the backlash was hysterical. Tabloid newspapers screamed that the “snowflake students” wanted to put a ban on “history’s greatest philosophers” and Twitter eggs suggested that this was somehow dumbing down the curriculum. The assumed superiority of whiteness rang loud and clear.

We’ve fought hard for representation, and we are seeing the fruits of that in the shape of films like the critically acclaimed ‘Moonlight’ and shows like Michaela Coel’s award-winning ‘Chewing Gum’. But we don’t just need media that reflects our contemporary lives and experiences, we need galleries, libraries and curricula that reflect our historical one. It is great that the amount of black and brown faces that our kids can relate to is growing, and I hope the numbers continue to rise. But we do them a great injustice if we allow them – intentionally or not – to believe that their cultural heritage and ethnic histories are too insignificant, unimportant, or unimpressive to be hallowed and revered like the old white men they will one day grow tired of reading about.

The Western world is built on the foundation of white supremacy – that is an undisputable fact. It is also an undisputable fact that we are out here reshaping and recolouring the future through our literature, filmmaking, art, and media. However, to truly break this old world apart we need to dismantle the centuries of half-truths and outright lies that allowed this house of cards to stand. Only then will we finally be able to retell history in absolute truth and technicolour glory.

Jendella Benson is a photographer, writer and filmmaker based in London. She writes about issues of faith, race, identity, feminism and the arts for various publications online and offline, and is also an occasional public speaker and workshop facilitator. She tweets regularly from @JENDELLA and more of her work can be found at www.jendella.co.uk.

You’re Doing It Wrong is a bi-monthly column by Jendella Benson on parenting, relationships, and the kaleidoscope of small victories, anxiety and unsolicited advice that is modern family life.

by Robert Kazandjian Follow @RKazandjian

The identity I was constructing for myself collapsed around my L.A-Gear-clad feet when I was six or seven.

My friend Kirilos arrived from Sudan, and joined our school. The teacher, encouraged by my proud declarations of Egyptian heritage, told me to speak ‘your language’ with him. ‘Parev, inch’pes es?’ (Hello, how are you?) I asked. Kirilos smiled and shook his head. The

teacher suggested I was speaking the fantastical language of some playground game. Her ignorance was a green light for the collective ridicule I then suffered. I blamed my dad.

Genocide scattered my people across the globe like sunflower seeds across an Istanbul patio. We have grown and blossomed but the violent dislocation from our homeland, followed by the systematic denial of this shameful history, has cultivated endless burdens and complexities amongst the Armenian diaspora. Intergenerational trauma bloodies our dreams. The responsibility to have our ancestors’ suffering finally recognised weighs heavily upon our shoulders. I have often felt confused and rootless. Where is home?

My brother and I were raised with the stories and symbols of Egypt, my dad’s birthplace. He proudly recalled his own father’s response to the Suez crisis; my grandfather

My brother and I

prepared to defend their block with a humble rifle while invaders’ heavy artillery strafed above the rooftops. He described horseback rides around the Pyramids of Giza and how the Nile turned to liquid gold at sunset. When my dad called us ‘hokis’ (my soul), and when we tentatively repeated phrases he had taught us into the telephone to my precious grandmother in Cairo, I imagined this beautiful language belonged to the Egypt of Suez, Giza and liquid gold rivers.

And so, when Kirilos and my teacher unwittingly unraveled my Egyptian heritage I was hurt. I needed answers. I began to understand that my dad was Armenian. His parents were born in Cairo, like him, and they were Armenian. His grandparents were born in Turkey, and they were Armenian. My dad explained that when his grandparents were children, nearly all Armenians lived in Turkey. As my dad sketched our family history, his mouth shaped a smile but his eyes were clouded with a sadness unfamiliar to me. I was happy. I told him this. I had lots of Turkish friends at school. I saw his face reflected in the proud men who collected Bahar, Celal, Gurkan and Muesser from the gates at the end of every day. I felt a natural affinity with my Turkish friends, as though we belonged to the same place. The sadness in my dad’s eyes thickened.

We would often go to meet a large group of my dad’s friends. Conversations swirled noisily above plates of Cacik and Dolma, with people from Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iran,

My father when he arrived in the UK from Lebanon

Iraq, Egypt and Palestine. Kevork was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. All of these warm, wonderful people had met at school in Cyprus. And they were all Armenian. The geographic gymnastics was bewildering. Descriptions of home were strange. Searching empty coffee cups and cigarette-smoke clouds for memories, while describing Aleppo and Beirut and Baghdad, it was as though images of a different place altogether were being conjured, a place now lost. Mouths shaped smiles. Sadness clouded eyes.

The reality of the Armenian Genocide crashed into my consciousness during Easter of 1995. I remember the exact year because when my dad arrived from the Armenian church and began unwrapping the Lahmacun he always returned with, I asked about the badge pinned to the lapel of his jacket. Black background, the number 80 in blood red, words ‘never forget’ beneath it. Now confronted by the unavoidable duty to share our people’s tragedy with his child, my dad quietly described the events that unfolded in 1915. Detail was spared, particularly regarding my own family. I was told only that my Grandfather’s parents fled their home in Istanbul while my Grandmother’s family escaped from Urfa. My dad is a mathematician; he emphasised the number of Armenians who survived, avoiding the hideous manner in which approximately 1,000,000 of my people were slaughtered.

The burning sense of betrayal I felt was mixed with sheer disbelief. Could the great grandparents of children I saw so much of myself in have my ancestors’ blood on their hands? Why were Armenians marked for death by the Ottoman Turkish government? What unspeakable things must we have done to justify such cruelty?

Compelled to be proud of my family’s survival, I announced my Armenian heritage at

My Great Grandparents – who escaped the genocide

school to anyone who would listen. The blank, unimpressed responses crushed me. Teachers told me I must actually mean Albanian, or perhaps even American. Teachers told me Armenia was, in fact, a city in Russia. I was angry and humiliated. Yet again I felt my identity collapsing around me. I tried to relay what my dad had explained to me about the genocide. Outright dismissals often followed. How could something so terrible have happened if nobody knew about it? I wondered if my dad had lied to me like he would lie about how long he’d be in the betting shop.

As I grew, reading helped me develop my understanding of the genocide independently. Conversations with my family were stunted. Details of the horror that swallowed my ancestors were being concealed. I was tortured by my own imagination, trying to sketch pictures of the suffering they endured. A generational passing of the responsibility to have this suffering recognised stood out. I began to feel this burden and it exacerbated the anger which had already taken root within me. This anger mixed with shame. I responded to tedious questions about my ethnicity with lies. I would be told confidently by acquaintances and strangers alike that I ‘must’ be Cypriot. I ‘must’ be Greek or Turkish, Arab or Iranian. I would agree. I felt unable to declare my Armenian heritage without referencing the genocide, I understood it as my duty. And when referencing the genocide, I couldn’t manage the feeling of dejection when it didn’t elicit the response I needed. I believed I was exercising self-care but what I was doing was destructive. And my own denial was tied to the denial which began with the father of the modern Turkish republic.

From Ataturk to Erdogan, successive Turkish governments have followed a policy of vehemently denying the Armenian Genocide. In 1919, Ataturk himself directed forces against the Armenian populations of Marash and Hadjin (who had only just repatriated their shattered cities under the promise of Allied protection). Slaughter followed. He then had the temerity to refute that large Armenian communities had ever existed in Turkey. Propaganda depicted Armenians as rebellious, violent insurgents and attributed deaths to internal conflict. This has been the Turkish governmental line of argument ever since. And it is the vehement denial of history, more so than the monumental crime itself, that keeps century-old wounds festering.

Imagine being told forthrightly at the dinner table by a man you respect, the father of a good friend, that your people tell lies and were not victims of genocide. Imagine letting that friendship wither and die like Tulips in autumn. Denial of truth fractured my ability to maintain authentic relationships with the people with whom I feel an innate kinship. Denial of truth nourished a quiet shame within me for feeling that kinship in the first place. Denial of truth renders my people’s suffering as obscure, unknown and up for debate; the destructive lies I told about my ethnicity were a misguided act of self-preservation.

Thankfully, my weary spirit was lifted by precious moments of genuine acknowledgment.

A minicab driver from our local firm picked me up and immediately began speaking to me in Turkish. Despite feeling uncomfortable, I explained that my dad was Armenian. He carefully pulled the car over to the side of the road, beckoned me to sit in the front with him, looked me in my eyes, shook his head and said ‘sorry’ once. He then proceeded to describe his family and their home in Adana; as I absorbed the images shaped by his words, I felt a beautiful, fleeting connection to a homeland we could share.

My boxing coach represented Turkey with distinction in international competition. He then went on to train members of the Turkish Olympic Boxing team. He hails from Gaziantep. The city’s stunning Liberation Mosque was once the Holy Mother of God cathedral for the Armenian population. Approximately 32,000 Armenians were expelled from Gaziantep in 1915, the majority were then murdered in the Syrian desert.

One afternoon, in the midst of a grueling session, my coach asked me if my surname was Armenian. I silenced the familiar anxiety rising in my chest and said yes. He told me he joined 100,000 mourners in 2007, flooding Istanbul’s streets with outrage at Hrant Dink’s assassination. Dink was a prominent Turkish-Armenian intellectual and journalist. He understood that Armenians and Turks were culturally and historically inseparable. Dink argued that full genocide recognition was crucial, not to cast shame upon Turkish people today but to carve a path to true reconciliation. Hrant Dink was charged with insulting Turkishness by the state and ultimately gunned down in the street by an ultra-nationalist. The mourners at his funeral chanted ‘We are all Hrant Dink. We are all Armenian’. Knowing my coach added his voice to the defiant chorus forged our brotherhood.

And it is these moments of genuine acknowledgment that reiterate precisely why there

My father, my grandmother, my great grandmother and my uncle

can be no reconciliation without recognition. Too often has Armenian Genocide recognition been kicked around like a football by powerful states, engaged in political spats with Turkish governments; this is not the acknowledgment I seek. It is the recognition of Turkish people that drives me now. Centuries of cultural exchange means we share so much, yet while there remains an unspeakable void between us, we cannot truly explore any idea of a shared pain. Without recognition we cannot truly stand together as equals and resist the spectre of autocracy that now confronts our homeland.

Robert Kazandjian is an educator and writer. He works with vulnerable children in North London. His writing seeks to challenge inequality, in all its guises. He has previously written for Ceasefire Magazine on racism in Israel, gender politics and hip hop music, and the necessity of Armenian Genocide recognition. He blogs poetry at makemymark.tumblr.com. He cites Douglas Dunn, Pablo Neruda, James Baldwin and Nas as major influences. He tweets from @RKazandjian

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By Ciaran Thapar

When I was seven, during a game of playground football in Claygate, a small town in Surrey, I fell over and bashed my knee; “P*ki, are you okay?” one of my teammates asked, his bony face peering down at me. He went to get a tissue so I could wipe the blood off my leg, the scar from that fall can still be seen today.

He had called me ‘p*ki’ a few times that week, I assumed the word was related to Pakistan, a country which I knew played cricket because I had recently watched a televised match between them and India at my grandparents’ house in Southall, the heartland of London’s Punjabi diaspora. It was a Saturday; my grandmother cooked pakora and my grandfather recounted stories of being a spin-bowler in Kenya.

Image: Jordan Randhawa

The following day I had visited my other grandparents’ house in Farnborough, Hampshire. My grandmother wore her trademark smile and talked about the birds nesting in the garden, as we ate roast lamb. There I always had to be careful not to knock my gramps’ copy of the Daily Mail off its perch on the back of the sofa.

Back to the day of my fall, I sat on the grass and stared at the blood trickling down my leg. I thought to myself, I am half-Indian, and India is not the same as Pakistan. A knot formed in my stomach, not because of my injury, but because when I looked around the playground at the groups of white faces, I feared nobody would understand my confusion. I walked away to be alone, deep in thought. On the way home I to spoke to my mum about what had happened, yet I felt that because she has white skin, she would not understand.

I have never stopped trying to find a way of making sense of what happened that day, my first experience of racism, combined with the struggle to articulate the injustice of it.

The word ‘p*ki’ has since arisen throughout my life, ebbing and flowing on the shores of my moral world.

Classic (1) In my teens, I attended a boys’ grammar school in Kingston-Upon-Thames, south-west London, where roughly 50% of students were of Asian origin: Indian, Sri Lankan, Korean and Chinese, among others. The other half of students were largely white (British and continental European). I felt at home there; I could slide freely back-and-forth across the spectrum of my hybrid identity and the racial blend of the school environment that mirrored it.

On rare occasions during those early years of high school would a white student use the word ‘p*ki’, and if they did they would be shunned by the rest of the year group. Between particular south Asian friends, the word ‘p*ki’ became a term of comic endearment, of brotherhood. Indian, Sri Lankan and Pakistani boys would use it loosely, in reference to one another, or specifically to describe Pakistani people. In general it was regarded as acceptable because of an unspoken system of trust and mutual understanding that developed organically – one based on being conscious, united members of a diaspora. Whilst this colloquial trend might not have been absolute in its political correctness, in my eyes, under the conditions of liberal, multicultural suburbia, the word took on a lighter significance. In any case, by the time we left school, it seemed to me that everyone – no matter what race – had received at least a basic education in, and gained a decent understanding of, Euro-Asian cultural and social intermixing.

University of Bristol (Bristol.ac.uk)

Then I went to university in Bristol, where the student body was overwhelmingly white and upper-middle-class. In the first fortnight I was asked, amongst other things: “so you were born in India, right?” and “I went to India on my gap year, does that mean I’ve spent more time in your home country than you have?” I was repeatedly mistaken for the only other relatively short, slightly Indian looking male student in my halls-of-residence (who I still share jokes with about our shared experience). Overall, however, despite finding them uncomfortable, I accepted these interactions as part of adapting and assimilating into a new social scene.

Soon, the knot in my stomach returned. How could it not?

“I’m going to the ‘p*ki’ shop to get some beers, you want anything?” Nah.

“We got in a fight with a bunch of ‘p*kis’ last night.” Really?

“Did you hear? So-and-so got with a p*ki!” Good for them.

A not-insignificant number of people around me, all white, male and admittedly not always sober, would employ language like this. It completely subverted the comfortable cosmopolitan framework that I had become used to at school. The way I saw it, the individuals using the slur must have been so deeply embedded within a closed, mono-cultural echo chamber that they did not realise they had no right to use the word, or that its use might offend others around them.

Once again I was deep in thought; why did some people think it was okay to say it in front of me, specifically? Had they started regarding me as white, or white enough, and thus assumed I wouldn’t have a problem? Maybe they saw me as not-white, but still thought it was somehow okay?

I jumped from theory to theory but could justify none because ultimately the usage of the word always seemed to involve generalising, demeaning or patronising the people being described. This was what made it so disturbing. A couple of times I responded angrily to hearing the slur being spoken, but I was dismissed as emotional and political. “I don’t mean you, mate”, I’d be told, with a pat on the back.

One afternoon during my third year, two male students I was with were discussing a fellow pupil; “She’s got a boyfriend and guess what? He’s a ‘p*ki’!” one of them scoffed in disbelief, before glancing at me. His face went red with embarrassment. I stared down at the floor, muted by the knot in my stomach, before getting up to leave. Later that day he messaged me on Facebook to apologise “I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but I PROMISE you I am not a racist.”

I’d had enough.

BuddhaOfSuburbia I turned inward and reduced the size of my social circle, I stopped going clubbing and started boxing. I would go to the gym every night to hit the punch-bag, alone. I sat in my room reading books written by mixed-race British writers, like Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, trying to find parallels in their fictional worlds that might mirror my own very real one; intellectual tools with which to unpick the knot that had returned after being dormant for so long. Often I would go for walks with my half-Pakistani girlfriend, or for a Guinness with my Nigerian flatmate, and talk cathartically with them about existing as an ethnic minority in exclusively white spaces. Unlike me, they had attended rural boarding schools before university, and could thus offer more weathered perspectives. Not coincidentally, I wrote my final dissertation defending multiculturalism in 21st century Britain. I graduated, and moved on.

Three years later at a discussion group I co-founded at Marcus Lipton Community Centre in Brixton, South London, one boy asked “Aren’t there loads of ‘p*kis’ in East London?” Born to Ghanaian parents, Philip was participating in a session where we had pinned a map of London on the wall and were challenging the boys (most of those frequenting the centre are from the Jamaican diaspora) on what they knew about different parts of the city.

“Fam, you can’t say that,” Darrell, another member of the group, rebutted. “That’s racist.”

“I just mean Pakistanis though – ‘p*kis’ – what’s wrong with that?” said Philip.

Racist Graffiti (Google)

“It’s not just about the word, it’s about how the word has been used in the past,” responded Darrell, firmly. He was usually quiet and distracted during discussions, but now, perhaps summoned by the baffled look on my face, he had assumed the role of a linguistics teacher. The others laughed awkwardly and looked at me.

When I had first started volunteering at the centre, about one year before this exchange, many of the boys who frequent its space suspected that my co-founder and I were undercover policemen. This was down to a number of factors relating to our perceived appearance, character and social background – the main one being that we were both understood to be white.

Over time I got to know various community members, other youth workers and the group of loyal teenage boys who attended our sessions. Every Friday night we sat around a coffee table talking, often about topics relating to race, such as stereotyping in the media and their widely-held distrust of the local police force. In such discussions, I would sometimes refer to being half-Indian and the boys would react in different ways. Sometimes they would make comments about how they thought I looked like I could be half-Caribbean; at other times I received raised eyebrows when I used the phrase ‘mixed-race’ to describe myself, which for them tended to be equated exclusively with meaning half-black – not half-Asian. “You call yourself mixed-race!?” one boy asked me, adding: “would you call yourself a ‘lightie’ then, too?”

So it was after all of this that I was stood trying to absorb the initial shock of hearing what Philip had said. I sensed his confusion and sadness at having offended me and accepted his immediate apology. I praised Darrell for his response. Then I told some of the very stories I have outlined in this essay, and explained how I feel when confronted with the word ‘p*ki’.

For the remainder of the session we talked about racial slurs, touching on the etymology of words which are rooted in the context of post-imperial Britain.

Group of men from the Caribbean arriving in the UK for the first time (Alamy Stock)

We discussed how, after hundreds of years of exploitation and subordination, Indians like my grandparents, like many of the boys’ own grandparents (though obviously differential in specific history, form and magnitude) left their countries-of-origin in search of a better life in London: a place they had been led to view as the capital of the world.

Atlantikwall, Soldaten der Legion "Freies Indien"

Troops of the Indische Legion guarding the Atlantic Wall in France in March 1944. (Wikipedia)

How people from the colonies were invited to England in the 1950s, 60s and 70s to help rebuild the country after Europe’s two great wars (over 2.5 million Indian volunteers fought for the British in World War II) only to often be met with small-mindedness and intolerance from people using words like ‘p&ki’, ‘darkie’, ‘wog’ and ‘n*****’ to actively demean and exclude new arrivals.

We talked of how members of the African, Caribbean, Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, Afghan communities, along with many others ought to be seen as legitimate components of the modern British experience and how any use of the word ‘p*ki’ undermines this reality.

We picked apart that word, seeing how it lives on in the English language, representing the insidious way racism trickles down through generations, from that of my Irish great-grandfather, who forbid my dad from entering his home on invitation to my parents’ wedding (“blacks should be with blacks”), and who, on his deathbed, refused to see my mum, or meet his recently-born half-Indian great-grandson.

I left the community centre that evening feeling drained yet refreshed.

I had not only found the words to articulate what had troubled me about the word ‘p*ki’ for years, I had also communicated it to a group of curious young people. Boys I trusted, and who trusted me, and who were willing to listen and learn about my experiences as a mixed-race Anglo-Indian, just as I was interested in listening to their experiences as young black men growing up in south London.

The knot I first felt as a seven-year-old unravelled. And the next time the word ‘p*ki’ was used by a participant in one of my youth groups, I knew exactly how to respond.

Ciaran Thapar is a youth worker and writer based in south London. He works full-time at Ark Globe Academy in Elephant and Castle as an educational support worker, focusing on improving student independence and progression into higher education. He is also the founder of ‘Hero’s Journey‘ – a discussion and critical thinking programme for disengaged teenage boys – which he runs at the school and as a volunteer at Marcus Lipton Community Centre in Brixton. He holds a MSc Political Theory from the LSE and typically writes about British society, education and youth culture.

by Mo Saqib Follow @mo_saqib

I spent an evening with 31-year-old Ahmed Hrustanovic, an imam at Srebrenica’s main mosque. We sat with our iced teas on the balcony of Hotel Alic next door, with a lovely view of the surrounding hills and overlooking the town. Ahmed had earlier that day received a phone call from a friend.”They found my brother’s hand and my other brother’s skull. Should I bury them or wait a few more years until more body parts are found?” The remains had just been identified by authorities still working to find every victim of the Srebrenica genocide twenty-two years after it took place. Ahmed’s friend decided not to bury them in the end, and to wait until more had been found. How many years this will take is anyone’s guess.

The massacre may have taken place in July 1995 but for the families who were affected, the trauma continues, as they seek the remains of those who were killed. On hearing that a peace agreement might be reached to end the conflict, what became the Dayton Accords signed in November 1995, Serb forces tried to cover up what had happened by relocating many bodies. Known locally as “secondary graves”, this has meant that parts of the same body can be found over many different sites. In one case, parts from the same body were identified in two sites that were 30km apart. But due to being moved, many secondary graves have still not been found. Of the 8,372 Muslim men and boys killed by pro-Serb forces, the local memorial has 6,504 graves. Nearly 2,000 bodies have yet to be found or identified. Until this happens, there will be no closure or peace for these families in particular. People who have spent every day of 22 years wondering, when will they find my loved one’s body? Will it be within my lifetime? How did they die and where does their body rest?

Due to the pioneering work of the International Commission on Missing Persons, set up by then US President Bill Clinton following the Bosnian war, and the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the remains of the victims continue to be found and identified every year. Burials take place annually on 11th July, the date Srebrenica fell to the Bosnian Serb Army and now regarded as the anniversary of the genocide. On 11 July this year, 70 more bodies are being buried. But for the relatives of some 1,800 victims, the wait will stretch into a 23rd year at least.

The genocide is not over for the town’s residents who have grown up without a father, mother, or both. Ahmed was a boy when he lost his father Rifat Hrustanovic, and uncles Hajrudin and Hazim. All three were part of what’s known as “the column”. Between twelve and fifteen thousand men and boys realised they would risk capture by Bosnian Serb forces if they left Srebrenica for the Dutch UN compound three miles north in Potocari. They decided instead to head through the steep, forested hills and march to the free territory of Tuzla, about 55 miles north-west of Srebrenica. When the Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic learnt about the column, he ordered shells be fired at the men. Due to this shelling, exhaustion, ambushes, and Serb forces wearing UN uniforms to entice the men out, only about 5,000 men and boys made it to Tuzla after five days of non-stop walking. Rifat, Hajrudin and Hazim sadly did not. Rifat’s wife would later give birth to a son, Ahmed’s younger brother, who has never known his father. Ahmed is now married with three young children who will never meet their grandfather.

It is easy to forget but crucial to remember that many Bosnian Serbs still live in Srebrenica. This includes those who collaborated in the genocide and also those who choose to deny the genocide (despite the 6,504 graves up the road). Srebrenica is a tiny town, where everyone knows everyone. How must it feel to walk past someone on the street who you know either took part in what happened or denies it? Or to walk past them in the local supermarket? Yet collaborators and denialists live their lives as normal. Such denialism has also been legitimised by the government in neighbouring Serbia, which has stopped short of using the word “genocide” to refer to the Srebrenica massacre.

For locals like Ahmed, the legacy of the genocide will continue once their children start going to schools. How will Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Serb children mix? What will be said in the playground and what questions will the children come home with? How will Ahmed answer those questions? How, if at all, will teachers discuss the genocide in classrooms?

Every year at genocide commemorations, whether the Holocaust, Srebrenica or other mass killings, we are used to seeing politicians and others say “never again”. Yet with anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim attacks on the rise, being legitimised by a US President instigating a Muslim ban, and other politicians including ours in the UK who refuse to see the danger of this rhetoric we are reminded of how we must work for this “never again”, it will not come to us easily.

Mo Saqib is a former parliamentary researcher and now works in the field of zero emission technologies. He tweets on @mo_saqib and instagrams his travels on mo.saqib2016

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