The revenge of history: Indian indenture and its afterlife in South Africa

The aftermath of the 150th anniversary in 2010 of the arrival of the first indentured migrants in Natal saw an explosion of family and community histories. While some academic historians question the credibility of such histories, carefully sifted and cross-referenced, they can provide a wealth of new information, allowing for deeper insights into indentured migration and Indian settlement in South Africa. Family histories help in building intergenerational histories that go beyond indenture. This expansion of the historical archive provides a fuller story of Indians who, for a large part of their existence, were written out of the history books or written in as a festering sore to be lanced from the South African body politic through mass repatriation. While digging deeper into individual family histories, the story is situated within the broader context of racist exclusion, showing how these boundaries were reinforced as much as they were challenged and trespassed.