Following a hiatus in the 1960s, the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) in South Africa was revived in 1971. In fascinating detail, Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed bring the inner workings of the NIC to life against the canvas of major political developments in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s, and up to the first democratic elections in 1994.

The NIC was relaunched during the rise of the Black Consciousness Movement, which attracted a following among Indian university students, and whose invocation of Indians as Black led to a major debate about ethnic organisations such as the NIC. This debate persisted in the 1980s with the rise of the United Democratic Front and its commitment to non-racialism. The NIC was central to other major debates of the period, most significantly the lines drawn between boycotting and participating in government-created structures such as the Tri-Cameral Parliament. Despite threats of banning and incarceration, the NIC kept attracting recruits who encouraged the development of community organisations, such as students radicalised by the 1980s education boycotts and civic protests. Colour, Class and Community, The Natal Indian Congress, 1971—1994 details how some members of the NIC played dual roles, as members of a legal organisation and as allies of the African National Congress’ underground armed struggle.

Drawing on varied sources, including oral interviews, newspaper reports, and minutes of organisational meetings, this in-depth study tells a largely untold history, challenging existing narratives around Indian ‘cabalism’, and bringing the African and Indian political story into present debates about race, class and nation.

South Africa's future is increasingly tied up with that of India. While trade and investment between the two countries is intensifying, they share long-standing historical ties and have much in common: apart from cricket, colonialism and Gandhi, both countries are important players in the global South. As India emerges as a major economic power, the need to understand these links becomes ever more pressing. Can the two countries enter balanced forms of exchange? What forms of transnational political community between these two regions have yet to be researched and understood? The first section of South Africa and India traces the range of historical connection between the two countries. The second section explores unconventional comparisons that offer rich ground on which to build original areas of study. This innovative book looks to a post-American world in which the global South will become ever more important. Within this context, the Indian Ocean arena itself and South Africa and India in particular move to the fore. The book's main contribution lies in the approaches and methods offered by its wide range of contributors for thinking about this set of circumstances.

This is the fourth publication originating from the conference Legacy of Slavery and Indentured Labour: Past, Present and Future, which was organised in June 2013 by the Institute of Graduate Studies and Research (IGSR), Anton de Kom University of Suriname. The core of the book is based on a conference panel which focused specifically on the experience of Muslim with indentured migrants and their descendants. This is a significant contribution since the focus of most studies on Indian indenture has been almost exclusively on Hindu religion and culture, even though an estimated seventeen percent of migrants were Muslims. This book thus fills an important gap in the indentured historiography, both to understand that past as well as to make sense of the present, when Muslim identities are undergoing rapid changes in response to both local and global realities. The book includes a chapter on the experiences of Muslim indentured immigrants of Indonesian descent who settled in Suriname. The core questions in the study are as follows: What role did Islam play in the lives of (Indian) Muslim migrants in their new settings during indenture and in the post-indenture period? How did Islam help migrants adapt and acculturate to their new environment? What have been the similarities and differences in practices, traditions and beliefs between Muslim communities in the different countries and between them and the country of origin? How have Islamic practices and Muslim identities transformed over time? What role does Islam play in the Muslims' lives in these countries in the contemporary period? In order to respond to these questions, this book examines the historic place of Islam in migrants' place of origin and provides a series of case studies that focus on the various countries to which the indentured Indians migrated, such as Mauritius, South Africa, Guyana, Trinidad, Suriname and Fiji, to understand the institutionalisation of Islam in these settings and the actual lived experience of Muslims which is culturally and historically specific, bound by the circumstances of individuals' location in time and space. The chapters in this volume also provide a snapshot of the diversity and similarity of lived Muslim experiences.

The history of Muslim education in the east coast region of South Africa is the story of ongoing struggles by an immigrant religious minority under successive, exclusionary forms of state. Schooling Muslims in Natal traces the labours and fortunes of a set of progressive idealists who, mobilising merchant capital, transoceanic networks and informal political influence, established the Orient Islamic educational institute in 1943 to found schools and promote a secular curriculum that could be integrated with Islamic teaching. Through the story of their Durban flagship project - the Orient Islamic school - the book provides a fascinating account of the changing politics of religious identity, education and citizenship in South Africa. Across a century of changing political expectations, as the region transformed from colony to nation-state to multi-racial democracy, concerns for social mobility, civic inclusion and the survival of Islamic identity on the periphery of the Indian ocean world were invested in the education of the young. From the late nineteenth century, Gujarati Muslim merchants settling in Natal built mosques and madressas; their progeny carried on the strong traditions of community patronage and civic leadership. Aligned to Gandhi's congress initiatives for Indian civic recognition, they worked across differences of political strategy, economic class, ethnicity and religious identity to champion modern education for a continually ghettoised diaspora. In common was the threat of a state that, long before the legal formation of apartheid, managed diversity in deference to white racial hysteria over `Indian penetration' and an `Asiatic menace'. This is the story of confrontation, co-operation and compromise by an officially marginalised but still powerful set of `founding fathers', and their centrality in histories of education, urban space and Muslim identity in this region of Africa.

Extraordinary stories can sometimes be found in ordinary letters. This is the discovery that awaits readers of this gentle and beautifully written correspondence between a political prisoner and a self-described housewife during apartheid's last decade. The circumstances of loss prompting Rivonia trialist Ahmed Kathrada to write a letter of sympathy to a former flat-mate Abdulhak "Bis" Bismillah are met with an unexpected reply from Bis's sister. Zuleikha Mayat, a Durban community organiser and editor of the best-selling cookbook Indian Delights, initiates a correspondence with Kathrada that continues until his release ten years later. Virtual strangers, they have in common their small-town Transvaal childhoods in Muslim shops in the early 20th century; and they find much to explore in their different approaches to questions of culture, politics and religion. The letters are written with wit and style, as they discuss both the issues of the day and the sustenance found in memory. These letters tell the story, all the more powerful for its ephemeral character, of a developing epistolary friendship between two people to whom history has brought different gains and losses. The collection is rich not merely in historical content and stylistic interest, but in the experience it offers to the reader of an unfolding conversation, reflecting both the immediate worlds of its authors and a tumultuous period of South African history.

A History of the Present is the first book-length overview of Indian South Africans in the quarter century following the end of apartheid. Based on oral interviews and archival research it threads a narrative of the lives of Indian South Africans that ranges from the working class men and women to the heady heights of the newly minted billionaires; the changes wrought in the fields of religion and gender; opportunities offered on the sporting fields; the search for roots producing local histories that tell of nostalgia, longing and identity; and the links with India and a myriad of transnational organisations. Indians in South Africa appear to be always caught in an infernal contradiction; too traditional, too insular, never fitting in, while also too modern, too mobile. Can we speak of an Indian 'diaspora' in relation to a people divided by migratory experiences, region, religion, language, ethnicity, caste, and economic status? While focusing on Indian South Africans, this study makes critical interventions into several charged political discussions in post-apartheid South Africa, especially the debate over race and identity, while also engaging in discussions of wider intellectual interest, including diaspora, nation, citizenship and race.

This book examines the interregional movement of capital and labour in the Indian Ocean where Indians settled and traded in Natal in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It traces the origins, migration, and settlement of some 200 of Natal's Indian traders from India, Mauritius, and East and southern Africa in what has been described as the `Asian bazaar economy', and `connected histories' that range beyond Natal's borders. The study's main focus, however, is on a cross-section of Natal's Hindu, Muslim, Parsi, and Christian traders. Some established well-capitalised businesses, but most engaged in small trades to facilitate the distribution of goods throughout the colony in service of Indian, African and White clientele. All of them, small and large, contributed substantially to the growth of Natal's economy. In the first part of the book, the authors provide a detailed historical context in which migration occurred, weaving together the local, regional, and the transnational. The second part consists of biographical `micro-histories' that go beyond the conventional Who's Who, since they are based on rich archival sources, the deceased estates of the Master of the Supreme Court, court records, obituaries, newspaper accounts, and interviews. The study offers new insights into Natal's early Indian traders, whose personal and communal histories additionally reflect their lived experiences as they set roots in South Africa. The book will interest scholars, reference librarians, archivists, family historians, as well as general readers.