SciELO - Scientific Electronic Library Online

 
vol.40 issue1Laughing with Sam Sly: the cultural politics of satire and colonial british identity in the Cape Colony, c. 1840-1850'Re la Tsoantso' ('Father of the pictures'): Joseph Denfield's photography, 1944-1965 author indexsubject indexarticles search
Home Pagealphabetic serial listing  

Services on Demand

Article

Indicators

Related links

  • On index processCited by Google
  • On index processSimilars in Google

Share


Kronos

On-line version ISSN 2309-9585
Print version ISSN 0259-0190

Abstract

WAETJEN, Thembisa  and  VAHED, Goolam. Passages of ink: Decoding the Natal indentured records into the Digital Age. Kronos [online]. 2014, vol.40, n.1, pp.45-73. ISSN 2309-9585.

In every British colony that received indentured workers from India, officials recorded personal and social details for identifying the arriving migrants. In Natal, 152,184 migrants were inscribed into such lists between 1860 and 1911. This article traces the history of this set of documents from their mid-nineteenth-century origins as registers of imperial labour control to their twenty-first century digitisation by an amateur historian in a relational database, available online. Against the backdrop of transforming informational technologies, the story of the shipping lists is the story of their changing social and political meanings in relation to the circumstances of the Indian diaspora in South Africa over one hundred and fifty years. Now held at the Durban Archives Repository, these records are regularly drawn upon by South Africans of indentured ancestry to establish family origins for the purposes of applying for the status of 'Person of Indian Origin' or 'Overseas Citizen of India', offered by the Indian government to individuals who can prove Indian ancestry within a number of generations. Thus, the ships' lists are bracketed by very different periods in which the creation of an 'exceptional' political status was legislated to serve economic interests by harnessing linkages of the Global South.

        · text in English     · English ( pdf )

 

Creative Commons License All the contents of this journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License