Indentured Memories: The Old Tea Factory at Kearsney, Natal - Written and Narrated by Betty Govinden
Channel: Roots and Routes: A Living Archive
Date: 2023-01-14

This poem has been written and narrated by Devarakshanam Govinden (popularly known as Aunt Betty), former Dean of the Faculty of Education, University of Durban-Westville, and a prominent South African academic, researcher, author, and poet. This poem was narrated on 14th January 2023 and it talks about her family roots (Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu) as shared by her grandmother and the childhood memories of her grandmother before she came to Natal (South Africa) as an indentured laborer to work in sugarcane plantations. 

In the poem, the childhood memories of Betty's grandmother are interwoven with the inhuman hardships that her grandmother and other indentured laborers from India have to experience in the sugarcane plantations of Natal in the 60s and 70s. 

Poetry is one of the many ways (art, music, food, memories, etc.) through which the South African Indians preserve their histories, cultures, and memories today.

THE POEM: 

THE OLD TEA FACTORY AT KEARSNEY, NATAL

The light streams through the cracks
Haunting lines
Spectres
shards of memory
dancing patches on the crumbling walls
sunlight on a broken column4
derelict and silent
Stone-bodies
on the coolie lines
A sad lonely mango tree
A neglected hibiscus
Marigolds under the thicket
Choking

And Pride of India
In need of pruning
Only the eternal
Bees and butterflies
Your sari hitched to your waist
You toil from morning till sunset
The open spaces of the hills and dales
your allotted prison
under the African sky
nimble fingers
picking leaf
by leaf
by leaf
You become lettered in the ways of the fields
Reading the hills and dales
Writing your name in the wind
Wafting it across the seas
The lush green hills of leaves
hoisted up
Spread out to dry
on shelves lined with hessian
you turn the leaves
hour
by hour
by
hour
to catch the rays of the African sun
you work for a shilling a month
you look wistfully
at the rows of wooden boxes
filled with leaves
dried
drained
to begin their journey
across the billowy seas
to the soil of your heart
your hearth
your home
the leaves
the leaves
you see your fingers
fingering the leaves
the African sun sealed within
your hands reach out
to the boxes
the boxes
The light streams through the cracks
Spectres
shards of memory
moving patches on the crumbling walls
sunlight on a broken column
All is derelict and silent
Stone-bodies
on the coolie lines
A long shadow
Is cast
Over the hills and valleys of Kearsney
Abandoned by history
Across the kala pani
To the hills of Bezawada
In Andhra Pradesh
the River Krishna flowing old and languid
catches images
fleeting
of the Old Tea Factory
under the African sun
Dancing on the waters
Over hills and valleys
windswept with longing
my spirit
forever
entwined with yours
I have come in search of your
Dreams
Growing in your garden
Submerged in air
Under the African sky

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