page_title: Hinduism in South Africa
section_title: Colonial era, indentured labourers
hierarchical_section_title: Hinduism in South Africa / History / Colonial era, indentured labourers
caption_attribution_description: Map of the Natal Colony/Natal Province in South Africa. Traced by hand in Inkscape from older version of this image, recoloured in the GIMP.
context_page_description: Hinduism is practised throughout South Africa, but primarily in KwaZulu-Natal. Approximately 1.1% of the South African population professed to be Hindu, according to the 2011 census. This is down from the 1.4% based on the 1996 census. The 2016 General Household Survey measured a further decline to 0.9%.
  Nevertheless, the population has been increasing in absolute terms, and by this measure, South Africa has the largest concentration of Hindus in Africa after Mauritius.
  The majority of Hindus in South Africa are descendants of indentured laborers, who were lied to and brought in by the British colonial government, from 1860 to 1919, to work in plantations and the mining operations owned by European settlers. Many came from Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and other states of India. Because of their Indian descent, Hindu settlers in South Africa suffered discrimination, abuse and persecution during the colonial and Apartheid eras.
  The first Hindu temples were in operation in the 1870s. Some South African local governments banned temple building and property ownership by Hindus in 1910s.
context_section_description: Large numbers of Hindus (as well as people of other religions) began arriving into South Africa in the 19th century colonial era, mostly as indentured labor and some on their own as "free" immigrants. After slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire by 1833, British mining companies and European plantation owners throughout the empire were short of cheap or free skilled labour for labor-intensive sugarcane plantations and mining work. The available local labour became difficult to retain for low salary, harsh work, and thus unreliable. The British Empire invented and enforced an indentured labor system which essentially retained all elements of slavery.
  The new system, also called the 'coolie system', was extensively used to bring Hindus to South Africa and other parts of British empire. The system enticed extremely poor people in India to sign a contract wherein they would be promised paid travel and a livelihood in exchange for a binding promise to work for a fixed period of time (four to seven years was common). Any indentured laborer who left before the contract ended was considered a criminal and subject to a prison term.
  When the indentured labor law was designed, it provided the indentured laborer some rights at the end of the contract; the laborer became free, with the legal right to some land and the right to stay in the new land, or demand the company or plantation owner for pre-paid travel back. However, in late 1880s South Africa, new laws were passed that required that the newly freed indentured laborer pay a hefty tax, or sign a new indentured labor contract and escape the tax. About 25% of Hindus returned to India, once their first contract was over. But for most indentured Hindu laborers, they had lost all contact with their country of origin, chose to stay and signed a new indentured contract. It is this system that brought large number of Hindus (and Southeast Asians) into South Africa.
  The first ships carrying indentured Hindu labourers for plantations in British Empire left India in 1836. While some Hindus were recruited legally, many others were kidnapped or "blackbirded" into long-term indentured service in various parts of British Empire, ranging from South Africa to Fiji, Australia and the Caribbean.
  In South Africa, indentured labourers were brought in to work on sugarcane plantations in Natal, in part because sugarcane farming and sugar had its origins in India, the labor did not need to be trained, and Indian Hindus were suffering from waves of famines and extreme poverty while British colonial empire was busy force converting India's fertile farms from the production of food to the production of cash crops such as cotton for British mills, tobacco for Europeans, poppy and opium for China. Today, the Kwa-Zulu Natal province of South Africa has the largest Hindu population in Africa (about 12% of Kwa-Zulu Natal province's total population).
  In the early decades of the migrations, indentured Indians were treated as inhumanely as the enslaved Africans had been. They were confined to their estates and paid a pitiful salary. Any breach of contract brought automatic criminal penalties and imprisonment. Many of these were brought away from their homelands deceptively, from inland regions far from seaports where they were promised jobs but were not told the work they were being hired for, nor that the new job required them to leave their homeland and communities. They were hustled aboard waiting ships, unprepared for the long and arduous four-month sea journey. Abuse, disease and death on these ship, and in plantations of South Africa were common place. The abuse led to a temporary ban on indenture labor hiring in South Africa in early 1870s.
caption: Natal region (orange) of South Africa, where over 100,000 indentured Hindu laborers were first brought in by British colonial empire in the 19th century.
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