Durban, South Africa – When Selvan Naidoo takes visitors on a tour of the 1860 Heritage Centre in Durban, which he directs, he recounts a story about searching archives for information about his ancestors. 

In the KwaZulu-Natal archives, located in the nearby city of Pietermaritzburg, Naidoo discovered evidence that his family had been among the first indentured laborers from India, transported by the British colonial government to South Africa in the 1860s. He found an invoice sent by the British Coolie Agency, dated June 30, 1864, which recorded a single mother named Camachee Camachee as Camachee No. 3279, along with her three children. One of them, a six-year-old boy, was his great-great-grandfather. 

Naidoo said he became very emotional after reading the document in which William Palmer, a farmer, requested the payment of £2 and 8 pence (about $425 today) from the colonial government of Natal for his allotment of  “Coolies.” Coolie is a derogatory term used by the British to refer to indentured laborers. For Naidoo, the invoice “commodified Camachee’s existence.”

The 1860 Heritage Centre, created in 1993 as a cultural and documentation center and a museum in 2012, highlights the history of the approximately 152,000 indentured laborers who lived and worked in South Africa between 1860 and 1911. 

The center’s main exhibit showcases archival documents, photographs and artifacts that tell the history of indenture in the British colony of Natal. The British annexed the Boer Republic of Natalia in 1843, expanding the indentured labor system it implemented a decade earlier on the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and Reunion, and in the Caribbean, as a way to replace enslaved African labor with ‘free’ labor from India.

Now-digitized ship manifests, containing names of these laborers, as well as other historical documents and artifacts that are housed in museums like the 1860 Heritage Centre, tell a complicated, and sometimes painful story, of life for the laborers living under indentured servitude.

“Indenture was started with people from India who were sometimes forced, sometimes willing,” Naidoo said. “Remember the two words, ‘forced’ and ‘willing.’ In the earlier years, it was forced. It was people that were lied to, hijacked, trafficked, and so on.” 

During schools’ winter breaks in June each year, the 1860 Heritage Centre creates programming for elementary and high school students.

 “We try to get children to be more involved and visit the museum at the same time, and that is why we had this museum open day for the kids,” said Yatin Singh, 1860 Heritage Centre administrator, referring to the open day held June 26.   

Among the students attending the event was Azaria Govender, a 10th grader at Durban Girls Secondary School. Azaria said she had recently traced her ancestry and came to the museum to learn more about her ancestors.

“I think it’s important for us all to learn about it because we are supposed to be so grateful for the opportunities that we have today,” Govender said. “I think I take that for granted a lot and I think back about the sacrifices they had to go through.”

Neruna Chetty, a classmate Govender invited along for the visit, said she learned a lot of new things about South African history while there.

“I don’t know a lot about it because at school we don’t really talk about this that much in history,” Chetty said. “So I think learning about it here is very important because everyone can learn, not just specifically school kids.”

Retired health department worker, Yusuf Desai, said he brought his grandchildren to the center so that they could learn about South African history.

“It’s not only the history of Indians,” Desai said. “It is basically to see how people toiled so that we can live better, and how they emerged from a system and flourished. I think it will make them better people.”

Suria Govender, Ph.D., retired professor of higher education and an intercultural dance practitioner, said she attended the open day in part because she is interested in the different ways of understanding identity, especially in the context of the history of indenture in South Africa. 

“I think it’s important for civic duty, and for you to be able to contribute to the development of the country you’ve been born in,” Suria Govender said. “We need changes in the curriculum so that we understand who we are as South Africans, what kinds of things we have to contribute, and to understand where we’re going to go in the future.”