The British colony of Natal imported just over 152,000 indentured migrants between 1860 and 1911 to work on its railways, municipalities, coal mines and sugar plantations. The indigenous Zulu population had access to land at mission stations at reserves and through private companies, and resisted absorption into the racist capitalist economy for as long as they could. Therefore, despite the large indigenous Zulu population, white settlers turned to Indian labour. The indentured migrated for a variety of reasons. These ran the gamut from demographic and economic dislocation resulting from British colonialism to being a widow or outcast or perhaps simply possessing a desire to travel. Notwithstanding claims of duping and false representation, the many examples of return migration, (re)migration to different colonies and chain migration suggest that at least some of the indentured were consciously undertaking the journey and had a reasonable idea of what they were getting into.

Colonial societies and their plantations specifically were structured around power. Hobbes is cited in the epigraph because of his emphasis on the centrality of absolute power in human relations, while Marx’s domination–repression conception of power sees power as residing in the bourgeoisie and a process of constant struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The concept of power is highly contested in the social sciences. Broadly speaking, however, there is a difference between those who see power as an ‘exercise of power-over’ and those who define it as a ‘power-to-do’. Max Weber, for example, defines power as ‘the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance’. Foucault has a similar perspective: ‘if we speak of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others’. The power-to-do conception, as Hanna Pitkin explains, means that ‘power is a something’ – anything – which makes or renders somebody able to do, capable of doing something. Power is capacity, potential, ability or wherewithal.

The contribution of the Indian indentured of South Africa to the colonial economy was massive. Despite undertaking back-breaking work, from labouring on sugar plantations to building railways, most of the just over 150,000 migrants chose to stay in South Africa rather than return to India. Their impact was incredible, yet their histories were largely invisible in the public domain and continue to be marginalized. The promise of a memorial for the indentured made by the government in 2010, as Indians commemorated the 150th year of the arrival of the first indentured Indians in South Africa, failed to materialize even a decade later as the 160th anniversary was being marked. There is one indentured migrant, however, Sultan Pillai Kannu, whose name was emblazoned on a technical training college, and in postapartheid South Africa, a street bears his name.

For the ANC, the years immediately following its unbanning were a mixture of excitement, vindication and turmoil. It had to deal with the negotiation process, the re-entry of exiles, and reconnecting with its internal allies and the underground. Alongside this, as elections loomed the organisation had to get on with the complex process of developing party lists.

In doing so, the ANC had to take account of those returning from exile, internal activists, and provincial and ethnic sentiments. It also had to create space for those who had once been part of government structures and had decided to join the ANC. The process was fraught with tension as individuals and groupings lobbied and positioned themselves to gain entry into national and provincial legislatures. The future of the NIC and the position of its leading cadres in the inner workings of the ANC were also thrown into the mix.

A number of NIC members served in the country's first non-racial Parliament, while others claimed to have paid a price for being fingered as part of the cabal within the UDF and NIC. Jerry Coovadia, for example, reflected on this time and his own ostracism in a 2019 interview:

The government had hoped that co-opting coloureds and Indians as junior partners of the apartheid state, as well as facilitating a settled urban African population with access to an industrial relations machinery, would create the conditions for political stability and economic recovery. Instead, the UDF pushed back against state control in many townships and began establishing alternative forms of power.

The government responded by declaring a partial state of emergency covering key areas in the country on 22 July 1985, the first since 1960. On 24 July, two days after the emergency was declared, Oliver Tambo called on South Africans to ‘make apartheid unworkable and the country ungovernable’. The partial state of emergency expired on 7 March 1986, but as resistance continued, the state of emergency was implemented nationwide on 12 June 1986 and would continue in Natal until October 1990.

The state of emergency served as a lightning rod for dissent and confrontation. Protests grew more violent, and consumer boycotts and other grassroots resistance intensified. While the state of emergency acted to escalate the anti-apartheid struggle, it also brought to the surface conflicts with deep roots in the histories of local communities, including racial tensions in Inanda, and led to the arrest of large numbers of activists. Under these circumstances, the NIC found it difficult to maintain the support it had enjoyed among Indians in the first half of the 1980s. Moreover, its internal divisions would become public and its organisational weaknesses exposed.

Violent protests that drew in workers, students and the unemployed erupted throughout South African townships. They were sparked by myriad issues that included low wages, high levels of unemployment and exorbitant transportation costs. Robert Price labels these protests an ‘insurrection’, such was the ferocity of the revolt against apartheid authority. Fatima Meer placed young people at the heart of the ‘ insurrection’ in African townships:

The Soweto rebellion brought to the boil a number of challenges confronting the apartheid state. Internally, political and economic crises were feeding into and off of each other. Externally, a burgeoning anti-apartheid movement was hurting the regime through a disinvestment campaign and a growing sports boycott. The Nationalists attempted to deal with these challenges through a series of reforms. At the core of their effort was a renewed drive to facilitate an urban African middle class, to give greater recognition to trade unions, and to create ‘representative’ bodies for Indians and coloureds.

Alongside these reforms, Bantustans would be encouraged to accept ‘independence’ in the hope that an African middle class centred around civil servants with job security and business people feeding off contracts provided by these ‘governments’ would buy into the NP policy of separate development. Similarly, the state hoped to co-opt Indians and coloureds into the broad apartheid project of complete racial segregation. How would the NIC and the broader Indian community respond to these blandishments? Simply put, the ostensibly settled debate over rejectionist participation was reignited − only this time discussions crossed the oceans, capturing the attention of exiles in the leadership of the Charterist movement.

The SAIC was set up in 1968 as a fully nominated body of 25 members. From 1974 its membership was increased to 30, with half the members appointed by government and half nominated by members of other Indian local government structures, such as LACs. Due to pressure from SAIC members, the government passed legislation in 1978 providing for the election of 40 members and 5 nominated members. The government was concerned that the election would be delegitimised before it even got off the ground if the voter turnout was low. And so the carrot of full elections was accompanied by the stick: a fine would be imposed on those who failed to register. By June 1978, 71 per cent of the 360 000 eligible Indian voters had registered.

The SAIC's failure to get concessions from government on issues such as trading rights and work opportunities led some members to moot a boycott of the organisation at a Council meeting in early November 1978.

Through the 1960s South Africa gained global notoriety for its repression of anti-apartheid organisations and activists. Repression, however, was only one aspect of the state response. The other was to create organs of ‘representation’ for the oppressed within the confines of the apartheid project. Granting citizenship to Indian South Africans was accompanied by the setting up of institutions to deal with matters ‘affecting them’.

Since its beginnings in the mid-1960s, the SAIC had garnered increasing power over what was termed ‘own affairs’ by the early 1970s. As the SAIC clamoured for more jurisdiction over the everyday life of Indians, the NIC had to find ways to respond. It could not simply call for people to boycott ‘own affairs’ offices, for example, because these dealt with pensions and grants and the identity documents needed to negotiate daily life. The power of the state was used to channel people's lives into racially bounded institutions and, over time, to ‘normalise’ these practices.

Participation in the SAIC was an issue that rallied both proponents and opponents within the NIC. This debate over participation persisted through the 1970s and 1980s, and created divides within the broader extra-parliamentary forces, turned comrade against comrade inside the NIC, and reached into the upper echelons of the ANC in exile.

Three positions emerged: boycott, participation and what came to be known as rejectionist participation. Even before the NIC was officially constituted, attorney Ahmed Bhoola, NIC stalwart of the 1950s, expressed a fear that the NIC would spend more time ‘fighting the so-called Indian Council than the real power behind that Council’. He warned against participation:

The position of Steve Biko and the BCM was that Bantustans served only to ‘contain’ the aspirations of black people, restrict what government critics could say, support apartheid tribalisation and maintain the mental subjugation of black people.

NIC secretary Farouk Meer wrote at the beginning of 1989 that whites had been ‘brainwashed, cajoled and bullied into a false sense of fear and apprehension, mistakenly seeking security and privilege with the tenuous protection of security forces, big business and Nationalist politicians’. He was not optimistic that an end to centuries of racist and exploitative rule was imminent. But within months of his statement, the Berlin Wall came crashing down and the international terrain changed dramatically, with major implications for local politics.

Elements within the apartheid regime regarded the changing context as a favourable environment for negotiations. As apartheid spy boss Niël Barnard put it:

What Barnard did not mention was that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the West could no longer be drawn into the argument that apartheid South Africa was a bulwark against communism, thus weakening the Nats’ ability to solicit support internationally. In short, dramatic changes in geopolitics made both the ANC and the NP more amenable to sitting around a table.

Fatima Meer observed acutely in 1987 that P.W. Botha, fearing ‘Afrikaner strife’, had failed to make the ‘necessary intellectual leap to real change’ and continued ‘worshipping the carcass [of apartheid]’. While observers believed that ‘the Afrikaner will never give up’, Meer argued that there was ‘no special mystique about the Afrikaner’, who had long ‘parted company with his tough frontier forebears’. The Afrikaner attitude towards blacks had not changed, but because they had ‘accumulated so many creature comforts’ they would ‘ultimately bargain to save some of them rather than lose all’.

As Barnard observed, the fall of the Soviet Union had an immediate impact on the ANC and the SACP. With the Soviets ‘abandoning the “no win” Cold War’, there was declining support for ‘any further protraction in South Africa's guerrilla warfare’.4 Even before this, the ANC had sensed that it could not defeat the Nats militarily. The ANC had largely evacuated from Mozambique after the Nkomati Accord was signed in 1984, and the civil war in Angola sputtered on. Destabilised by the apartheid regime, the so-called Frontline States – Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe – were encouraging the ANC to continue negotiations.

From its beginnings in the 1960s, the emergent Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) attracted many young Indian university students. Steve Biko, who was the inspiration and driving force behind Black Consciousness (BC), was born in the Eastern Cape and began to study medicine at the University of Natal in 1966. He was frustrated by what he regarded as the paternalistic attitude of the white liberal National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) towards ‘blacks’, which in his expanded definition included Indians and coloureds. He argued that fundamental to the struggle for freedom was the mental liberation of black people, whom he called upon to shun white paternalism and to be in control of their own organisations and destiny.

With its genealogy in the ideas of Anton Lembede in the 1940s and Robert Sobukwe in the 1950s, BC meant more than merely crossing apartheid boundaries. Biko wrote in December 1971 that ‘by describing yourself as Black … you have committed yourself to fight against all forces that seek to use your blackness as a stamp that marks you out as a subservient human being’. He clarified that

In the aftermath of the crushing of the liberation movements by a determinedly repressive apartheid state, BC preaching was an eclectic mix of ideas that held great attraction for the young in particular.

Among the students of Indian ancestry who joined Biko were Asha Rambally, Sam Moodley, Saths Cooper and Strini Moodley. Cooper matriculated from Sastri College in 1967, and proceeded to the University College for Indians on Salisbury Island. He was a member of the South African Students Organisation (SASO), which was formed after Biko led the walkout from NUSAS in 1968. Cooper explained that his generation refused to accept ‘white as a point of reference and describe everything else in the negative … Black Consciousness was a way of identifying subjectively with the conditions we found ourselves in objectively.’

The NIC was revived in a city that was alive with resurgent anti-apartheid activity. Workers started to flex their collective muscle, and white university academics and students played supportive roles in building trade unions. The BCM engaged in discussion groups that drew on the ideological streams of Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, the US Black Power movement, and liberation theology, forming a heady mix of intellectual mutiny and militant bravado. French-educated philosopher Rick Turner sparred with Steve Biko over participatory democracy, race and whiteness. The NIC, drawing on the status of its founder M.K. Gandhi and the path-breaking generation of the 1950s, reignited the passions of Indian communities battered by forced relocations under the Group Areas Act. Those who tried to prod the NIC into dropping the ‘I’ were faced down and BC rebels walked their own path.

Despite concentrated and at times spectacular media coverage, the first years after the revival did not witness the coming of a mass-based organisation. Annual meetings drew fewer than a hundred delegates, while public meetings attracted a few hundred attendees, or perhaps a thousand people for a major current issue, such as the death of Ahmed Timol in 1971 and the Chatsworth transport disputes of 1972.

In the face of fiery internal debates over participation in governmentsponsored organisations, the NIC held together even as it was drawn into legendary battles with those termed collaborators. Intense activism brought exhaustion, but new recruits schooled in classrooms of dissent entered the ranks. In 1980 university students joined the NIC, unions and, most spectacularly, community organisations. As Pravin Gordhan put it:

The unbanning of the ANC raised questions about the future of the NIC/TIC as well as of the UDF. There were murmurings that the UDF would redefine its focus to concentrate on socio-economic issues while the ANC focused on political negotiations. Some put forward the idea that the NIC could become a cultural body. Yunus Mohamed, then regional secretary of the UDF in Natal and a member of the NIC executive, indicated in a 1990 interview that the UDF would ‘restructure’ itself to remain relevant in the changing political context. He lamented in 2002 that ‘it would have been good if the UDF had remained. I argued that position openly, but … there was a climate of suspicion and the decision was to close the organisation.’

Why was the UDF disbanded with such haste?

Some within the ANC saw the UDF as their creation. However, even though its programmes were important in popularising the Freedom Charter, the UDF had gathered its own identity, momentum and homegrown leadership. Those who did not want to see the UDF simply disband were portrayed by some within the ANC as part of a reactionary cabal. In an open letter to Walter Sisulu, Aubrey Mokoena, a key member of the Release Mandela Committee (RMC) and the UDF, who wanted the UDF disbanded, explained: ‘It has always been our understanding that the UDF was a front of organisations and never an organisation in itself. However, certain functionaries of the UDF cherished ambitions and aspirations that … the UDF should exist as a parallel structure to the ANC.’

Writing in 1989, Jerry Coovadia waxed lyrical that a strong heterogeneous internal movement ‘will be the foundation on which democracy will be built in South Africa … because the ANC has made it clear that it is not a government in exile. It has said that it will accept the freely expressed wishes of all the people of South Africa.’ Coovadia's romantic view seemed to be oblivious to the dangers of the ANC's democratic centralism and the UDF's adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1987, factors which created the conditions for ‘the centralisation of the [Mass Democratic Movement] under the national leadership and the reduced concern for accommodating alternative views’.

Once the NIC had settled on boycotting government institutions, it operated like a well-oiled machine. This is clearly demonstrated by the sheer number of pamphlets and letters it distributed within the Indian community to persuade potential voters to boycott the July 1979 LAC elections. Ten thousand personally addressed letters were sent to the residents of Durban warning that LACs were mere advisory bodies whose advice was ‘left on the shelves to collect dust’. This was a trial run for the main event: the campaign to delegitimise the SAIC, particularly by organising a boycott of the upcoming SAIC elections. These were originally scheduled for 26 March 1980 but were subsequently delayed until November 1981.

In July 1979, the Anti-SAIC Committee − consisting of M.J. Naidoo (president), Dr Korshed Ginwala (vice-president), Thumba Pillay and R. Ramesar (joint secretaries), Farouk Meer and Perry Pillay (joint treasurers), as well as A.H. Randeree, D.K. Singh and Marie Subramoney − circulated 9 000 copies of a newsletter named The Call. This name deliberately harked back to times past. The Call for Freedom and Justice newsletter had first been published in the 1940s by Cassim Amra. He was a member of the radical NIC faction that won hegemony under the leadership of Monty Naicker and led the NIC into an alliance with the ANC in the 1950s.

The four-page newsletter contained messages of support from Nokukhanya Luthuli, widow of Chief Albert Luthuli; Dr Nthato Motlana, chairman of the Soweto Committee of Ten; and Hassan Howa, president of the South African Council on Sport (SACOS). It also contained a critique of the SAIC by Dr A.D. Lazarus and, significantly, a contribution by Obed Kunene, editor of the Zulu newspaper Ilanga, which was aligned to Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha movement. This is important, given that relations between the NIC and Inkatha would deteriorate dramatically over the next decade.

The line-up of contributors cut across racial boundaries. Nokukhanya Luthuli, wife of the former ANC president and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who was instrumental in crafting the alliance between the NIC and the ANC, was a revered figure in her own right. Motlana, a medical doctor, had emerged as an influential figure post-1976, while Hassan Howa had galvanised the anti-apartheid sports movement with the slogan ‘No normal sport in an abnormal society’.

Ongoing and intensifying anti-tricameral protests in 1984 prompted the state to marshal its repressive arsenal. Activists across the country were detained in an effort to stem mobilisation. An NIC court application resulted in some of those detained in the lead-up to the elections being released on 12 September 1984, but the state immediately issued orders for their rearrest. Among those released were six senior leaders of the NIC/UDF: Archie Gumede, George Sewpersadh, Mewa Ramgobin, M.J. Naidoo, Billy Nair and Paul David. In a dramatic move these six activists took refuge in the British Consulate in Durban on 13 September 1984. This occupation would span three months, as the last of them only left the Consulate on 13 December 1984.

The immediate aim of the Consulate Six, as they came to be known, was to attract maximum international publicity because P.W. Botha was to be inaugurated as state president on 14 September. Ramgobin's short press conference following the occupation revealed this intention:

While Ramgobin may have overstated the impact of the group's actions on Botha's inauguration, the incident certainly created a buzz in the country and once more dragged the apartheid state's heavy-handedness into the international spotlight.

The occupation proved a masterstroke, as it demonstrated the resilience and unity of purpose of these veteran activists. There also appeared to be smooth coordination between the Consulate Six and their families and fellow activists on the outside, who provided both personal and political support.

A closer look suggests that the plans for occupation were somewhat hastily put together. This is hardly surprising under the circumstances, but it meant that long-term strategies and goals had not been worked out. As we will see, the correspondence in this period between Mewa Ramgobin and Ela Gandhi reveals a complicated and insightful picture of intertwining family strains and bitter recrimination over political ideology and tactics.

The pre-eminent political organisation among Indians in South Africa through the first half of the 20th century was the Natal Indian Congress (NIC), founded by Mohandas K. Gandhi in 1894. In the 1940s a battle for the soul of the NIC was fought between groups dubbed ‘moderates’ and ‘ radicals’. The latter group, under the leadership of Dr Monty Naicker, emerged victorious, with Dr Kesaveloo Goonam, a fellow student of Naicker's at Edinburgh University in the 1930s, becoming vice-president of the NIC, the first woman to hold this position. The NIC entered into an alliance with the African National Congress (ANC) in the 1950s. It was a dramatic move for the NIC, which, for the first half of the twentieth century, had shied away from alliances with Africans. In a series of momentous pioneering moves, the NIC joined with the ANC in the 1952 Defiance Campaign, and rallied behind the Freedom Charter adopted in 1955 at the Congress of the People in Kliptown. Through these actions, NIC leaders were pronouncing that the freedom of Indians was inextricably tied to the liberation of the African majority.

From 1960 the state went on the offensive, banning the ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). Although the NIC had not been declared illegal in this period, it had through the weight of ‘bannings, detentions and imprisonment … virtually folded up’, according to one of its executive members, Thumba Pillay.

Dr Goonam related an incident that vividly illustrates the weakness of the NIC at the time. Emerging from the home of a patient, she encountered a man sitting under a tree:

The NIC was certainly not a tight grouping of activists all reading from the same script. It was criss-crossed − some might say doublecrossed − with leadership splits, personality clashes, and contestations over tactics and strategies, the fallout from which reached into the broader liberation movement. The issue of a cabal within the NIC, with accusations of secret meetings and factions, captured public attention in the mid- 1980s. There are contested narratives as one follows different groupings, ideological streams, and generational- and personality-driven impulses, although it is difficult to pin down exactly who belonged to the different factions and how they operated.

In examining this issue, we took cognisance of Yunus Carrim's contention that there is little to be gained by ‘personalising political events’. He explained:

There were differences over strategy and ideology, but can personality be totally ignored? For example, I.C. Meer shared office space with Mewa Ramgobin in Verulam. Iain Edwards observed that the two ‘spoke, argued, and lunched nearly every day, each on their side of a stable door, the top half open. Yet Meer never mentions Mewa Ramgobin once in his memoir. Are there are lifelong enmities in this observation? What drove it?’ Edwards, who conducted interviews with Ramgobin and with MK soldier and Robben Island prisoner Natoo Babenia, was struck by the deep-seated ‘sectarianism’ within the NIC: