What a fiasco the Indian indenture monument is turning out to be, says Imraan Buccus.
This week marks 156 years since Indians came to work in South Africa and what a fiasco the Indian indenture monument is turning out to be! Conceived of in 2010 or thereabouts to mark the 150th anniversary of the oppressive trans-ocean trade in human labour, it seems to be every bit a stillborn project.
It is mind-blowing that so many minds and boodles of political largesse can merge into literally nothing except a diminishing pot of gold.
We are told R10 million was initially generously put up from the public purse. Quite how much was spent and on what exactly would make for an interesting accounting or accountability exercise.
This cynicism is not out of place as we witness the financial shenanigans that dominate our daily papers. I have good reason to be affronted as a descendant of those coolies bonded to the plantations. It is the pride in that history of struggle and survival that compels me to pen this angry missive.
Indenture was a crude exploitation of human beings plucked from their subjugated land to labour in another subjugated land. It would be historically more accurate to locate indenture within the bigger project of colonial and capitalist exploitation that includes slavery, land dispossession, mineral extraction and forced labour.
Is anyone mobilising for a monument to the African mine-worker driven off his ancestral land, wrenched from a family life and forced to chisel 11 long months every year in the bowels of the earth in hazardous conditions to pay colonial taxes?
Or the African women reduced to serfdom in the kitchens and laundries of those higher up the racial or class pecking order. Or indeed the genocide of the Khoisan hunted to the brink of extinction and left with neither land nor language.
There’s a lot that lurks in the nooks and crannies of the ugly history of our country.
The liberation narrative has succeeded in a good bit of spring-cleaning of the starkly uncomfortable bits.
And, of course, elites of whatever persuasion will find deft ways of presenting their interpretation of the malleable truth.
To perpetuate the myth, for instance, that there was something pioneering about those dragooned into indenture is dishonest. So too is the narrative of “settlers” making a new life in a new land. Indenture was not a process of free choice or free will.
Indenture replaced slavery in the British Empire in name but not in form. If the coterie who have appropriated the indenture brand have their merry way, Bell Street on Durban’s Point is likely to have some overpriced, static bronze monstrosity sometime in the next half-century. Any project with the government as the paymaster automatically costs more than it would in the ordinary market.
One wonders if this monument were so critical why it isn’t being funded by public subscription? Surely in these times of austerity and budget cuts scarce state resources could be more prudently directed.
Static monuments serve elite pre-occupations with conjured glories. It would have been a far more fitting recognition of the labours of indentured workers in the building of KwaZulu-Natal if a living monument such as a school, college, creche or clinic were constructed or refurbished in their collective memories. Education in particular was an article of faith for the indentured as it represented a ticket out of poverty for their descendants.
A further word of caution is that monuments to the previously politically favoured like Rhodes, Kruger and Gandhi have received unwelcome attention in recent months. As our political climate becomes more fraught, race-specific monuments in public spaces might not be the most prudent.
The bickering in the committee is perhaps a good sign that this project isn’t going anywhere soon. That, however, is no guarantee that the allocated funds will find their way safely back to the Treasury.
* Buccus is senior research associate at ASRI, research fellow in the School of Social Sciences at UKZN and academic director of a university study abroad programme on political transformation.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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