Indentured “coolie” labours in South Africa : the Indian and Chinese schemes in comparative perspective

Abstract

In twenty-first century South Africa, the Indian and Chinese populations are both classified as minority groups. However, in British colonial South Africa of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, these two communities comprised key components in the burgeoning agricultural and mining sectors, respectively. This article particularly revisits this period to compare the two systems introduced to import and indenture 1,52,184 Indians into the Colony of Natal between 1860 and 1911 and 63,695 Chinese into the Transvaal Colony between 1904 and 1910. While these two labour schemes did not serve a similar sector and were not directly coterminous, it will be shown that a comparison of their differing features shows how the one predicated the other. Moreover, it will be argued that the disparity between the two schemes partly contributes to an explanation of the different places these two diasporic “Asian” communities ultimately occupied in later South African history.