Deputy Speaker, comrades and colleagues, the following text is a salute to all women who fought valiantly in our struggle for liberation, and to celebrate the outstanding freedom fighters, especially women of Indian ancestry, who have inspired us with their bravery and commitment in the fight for justice and peace.
Today commemorates the 150-year anniversary of Indians' arriving on South African soil. The first Indians from Madras arrived on the ship the SS Truro on 16 November 1860. On 4 October 1860, the ship SS Belvedere had left Calcutta with 310 passengers. Great Britain had introduced a new system of slavery in the form of indenture to serve the needs of its developing colonial economies. Famine in the north-western province of India contributed to 17 899 people emigrating from Calcutta. On account of severe famine in South India, 428 000 people left from Madras. Between 1860 and 1911, some 152 184 indentured labourers from across India came to South Africa.
The Indians signed a ludicrous statement of contract. It said:
We, the undersigned male immigrants, do hereby agree to serve the employer to whom we may respectively be allotted by the national government under the Natal Act No 14 of 1859, and we all understand the terms under which we are engaged, wages for the first year to be 10 shillings, ... -
not 10 ... [Interjections.] ... it was 10 shillings ... [Interjections.] ... it was 10 shillings per year for the first year
... concluding with 14 shillings for the fifth year.
Many died on board the ships due to harsh, unsatisfactory conditions, and those who arrived worked as cheap labour and lived in inhumane conditions completely controlled by their employers.
Later, in the 1870s, the free Indians or so-called "passenger Indians" who paid their own passage to Natal, the majority of whom came from Gujarat as traders, artisans and workers, arrived.
For Indians, the laws treated them as migrants, and it was the intention of the law to discourage them from staying longer in South Africa. One measure was that the colonial government did not provide any schooling for Indian children.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi - the Mahatma - a young lawyer educated in India and England, arrived in 1893 to start work in Pretoria on a lawsuit. During his journey from Durban to Pretoria, a white passenger complained about sharing a compartment with an Indian. He was asked to go to the third-class compartment. He refused to do so and was forcibly and unceremoniously thrown out of the train in Pietermaritzburg.
In 1894, a year after Gandhi arrived in South Africa, the Natal Indian Congress, NIC, was founded. Numerous discriminatory laws, harsh taxation and unbearable conditions experienced by both free and indentured Indians continued. The NIC's aim of satyagraha was to improve the rights of Indians in South Africa and to end the practice of indentured labour. The Transvaal Indian Congress, TIC, and Cape Indian Congress, CIC, were later formed. Three years later, in 1919, the South African Indian Congress was born.
The British government rushed the Franchise Bill through Parliament in 1898, followed by two more Bills aimed at passenger Indians, the Immigration Restriction Bill and the Dealers' Licences Bill, curbing migration and trading. The white community obviously saw them as a threat. In 1906, the Transvaal government passed a law making it compulsory for Indians over 8 years of age, children, to carry a pass bearing their thumbprint. This caused outrage among the Indian population. By the end of January 1908, 2 000 Asians had been arrested for failing to register. Eventually Gandhi and the leader of the Chinese population in South Africa, a Mr Leung Quinn, reached an agreement with Jan Smuts, the Transvaal Colonial Secretary, whereby the Act would be repealed if everyone registered voluntarily, but Smuts denied any promises made to Gandhi and, on his way to the Registration Office, was duly assaulted.
Gandhi and members of the NIC and TIC were in and out of prison on an ongoing basis as they led campaigns against unjust laws. In less than a month, 300 Hindus, Muslims, Parsis and Christians became members. Sohrab Rustomjee, Ahmed Cachalia, Ebrahim Asvat, Mohamed Nagdee, Mr P K Naidoo and numerous other leaders were imprisoned. In 1913, Thumbi Naidoo succeeded in mobilising about 5 000 miners to down tools to protest against the ?3 tax imposed on them.
Unfortunately I have only four minutes left and I would like to recognise the role of Indian women. I would quickly like to say that little is known of their role in the Indian resistance movements, for example, as they fought alongside the men to change the course of history. Only recently did the Indian government honour a young 16-year-old martyr, Valliammai Munuswamy Mudliar for her role as a first-generation freedom fighter alongside Gandhiji, as Mr Lekota, who has left, has said.
Although Indian women have always played an important role in social and communal life, much of their work in households and in their families, supporting their men and children, was unrecognised. It was Gandhi who fought for this dramatic change in the role and status of women in South Africa and India when, at his request, they came out in large numbers from the shelter of their homes. Indian women first embraced the struggle in 1913 by way of an open invitation from the satyagraha association to join men in retaliation for the Searle Judgment which invalidated all non- Christian marriages. All Hindu, Muslim and Zoroastrian marriages were declared null and void. This meant that all Indian married women in South Africa were reduced to the status of concubines while the children were classified illegitimate and deprived of all rights of inheritance, property assets and legal claims.
This was a hugely emotive cause; the very honour of Indian womanhood had been insulted. By engaging in these activities, women broke out of their traditional boundaries and challenged the images of the passive and docile Indian woman and other issues such as the onerous permit system and immigration laws, that is, prohibition of Indians' moving from province to province. It was not so long ago that Indians were not allowed to stay over in the Orange Free State. I remember Chief Justice Ismail Mohammed of the Constitutional Court was not allowed to sleep over while working on a judgement in Bloemfontein.
In the 1920s and 1930s Indian women confined their work to culture and charitable work, but by the beginning of the 1940s, confronted by changing social and economic conditions, Indian women became politically motivated. Both professional and working-class women began to take an active interest in politics. A comparative assessment by the government's Social and Economic Council revealed that 70,6% of Indians, 38,2% of coloureds, 24,8% of Africans and 5,2% of white families were living below the poverty line. That means that 70,6% of Indians as compared to 5,2% of white families lived below the poverty line.
A large number of working-class households were dependent on female breadwinners. During the war, the Communist Party of South Africa, CPSA, sought to mobilise women around food supplies. In 1946, 1 000 Indian demonstrators led by the CPSA engaged in protest marches against food controllers and black marketeers in Durban. Trade union activity also served as a polarising agent as Indian women, especially Hindu and Tamil women, were mainly employed in the clothing, textile and food industries. For example, Rahima Moosa and Fatima Seedat entered politics through their jobs with the food and canning industry. Dr Goonam and Ms H Naidoo, together with NIC members, mediated with management and contracted concessions for Indian workers.
The struggle in India resulted in the imprisonment of Kasturba Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and Meera Ben. These women served as role models for activists such as Zainab Asvat, Dr Goonam, Zohra Bhyat, Manuben Sita, Mrs Amina Pahad, Mrs Zubeida Patel, Ms Badat, Mrs R Jinn, Mrs Chella Chetty, Mrs Pillay, Mrs Pather, Mrs Nair, and the list goes on.
The Passive Resistance Campaign 1946 to 1948 involved women from different socioeconomic, religious and linguistic groups. The women who assumed leadership roles in most instances were educated and wealthy, came from politically active families and were victims of racial and gender discrimination. They were in the main predominantly Gujarati-speaking Hindus and Muslims. In Natal, the majority of resisters were Tamil and Telugu-speaking Hindus, mainly descendents of indentured labourers.
Mrs Rathamoney Padayachee was elected the secretary for the 1946 Women's Action Committee ... Thank you. [Time expired.] [Applause.]