COVER STORY

MY AJA LANDED IN SOUTH AFRICA 10 YEARS BEFORE GANDHI

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in South Africa. Image credit: AMAZON.COM.

By DR VICKI BISMILLA

My Aja (grandfather) Amir Sing was born in Muzaffarnagar, India, in 1861. He was recruited by the British Raj as an indentured labourer and arrived in Durban on the John Davie 1 on June 30, 1883.

That was ten years before Mahatma Gandhi arrived there.

Aja spoke reverently to his family about Aapravasi Ghat which he glimpsed briefly when the ship docked in Mauritius, likely for a mail stop.

Even at that time, though just a small harbour, the unnamed ghat was to remain in the minds and hearts of indentured labourers as an inspiration.

Aja first worked for the Acutt Sugar Estate in Inanda (today Phoenix) on the north coast of Natal, earning ten shillings a month as a girmitiya.

He married Bhogaruthy, the locally-born daughter of an earlier indentured labourer and subsequent landowner.

He was transferred to the Effingham Sugar Estate (later the Natal Sugar Estate) which was located on Mill Road in Avoca and he and his young bride moved to indenture barracks in Avoca. 

It was here that he was promoted to Sirdar.

The recruiter in India had promised labourers that they would be given land at the end of their five-year contract. However, as Aja and others painfully discovered, this was not the case.

He worked here until 1893, carefully saving from his meagre wages to buy land.

Aja acquired swaths of land on the rolling hills between Avoca Road and Bailey Road spanning over a narrow footpath, now Bhamo Avenue.

He tilled the fallow land and was soon growing lush crops of blue agapanthus, red hot pokers and red cluster roses. He supplied flower stalls at the Durban Central Railway Station as well as florists in the city.

He also delivered flowers by ox cart to white memsahibs in Red Hill. He was key in the transformation of Avoca into a phoolwa gaon (flower village).

Aja’s first home, a wood and tin structure, was built on his land under a large fig tree in a valley close to Avoca Road.

He and our grandmother Bhogaruthy had nine children and they raised them here.

The three oldest and three youngest were daughters and, as was customary at the time, the daughters were married as teenagers.

Aja’s indentured document shows that he landed in South Africa 10 years before Gandhi.

My father Dalip Sing was born here in the year 1900. He worked alongside his father from a very early age. He and his younger brother Ranjit Sing helped with the flower farming.

It was from this house that Amir Sing witnessed the massive, often violent strikes by Indian workers on the Natal Sugar Estate where he previously worked. The strikes grew out of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s work on behalf of Indians in South Africa, although Gandhi had repeatedly pleaded for non-violent means of protest.

When my father was thirteen he joined Gandhi’s satyagraha walk from Phoenix along the Umgeni River but work prevented him from devoting more time to activism; that baton was later picked up by his younger brother Debi Sing who became a teacher and joined the South African Indian Congress where he served as secretary.

He worked alongside great South African political icons like Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Yusuf Dadoo and Monty Naicker and, in the years after Aja’s death, was repeatedly imprisoned for his anti-apartheid activism.

My father Dalip Sing was promised in marriage to my mother Jaso when she was an eight-year-old child.

They married seven years later when she was fifteen.

Her story is one that echoes that of many other children at the time.

Her mother, Bachni, was a very young widow in a small village near Meerut in India.

As a widow she was severely abused by her mother-in-law and when her daughter Jaso was three-and-a-half, Bachni escaped with the help of women friends who whisked mother and child away by ox-cart to the last indenture ship leaving for Durban from Calcutta in 1911.

The women, also indentured, convinced a depot nurse to admit Bachni as an indentured domestic. She arrived in Durban in June 1911 and served as a domestic servant in a home in Red Hill.

She married the gardener Maharaj and this is where Amir was delivering flowers when he met Maharaj and his young family.

The two families became friends leading to my father’s marriage to Jaso in 1922.

Their first child, Soorsuthy, my oldest sister, was born in March 1923, the same year as Amir’s youngest child Anjani was born.

I have been fortunate to have had my oldest sister Soorsuthy as a valuable resource of oral family history. She died in 2016 aged ninety-three. 

Our grandfather Amir Sing lived in the small house under the fig tree for many years raising many of his oldest children there.

By 1919, he and Bhogaruthy had saved enough money to build a larger house facing Avoca Road. It was there that many of his grandchildren, including me, were born.

A7 Avoca Road, Durban. Aja lived here for many years.

That house stood for eighty years and my siblings and I have fond memories of this large, comfortable wood and iron house with a huge botanical garden like space surrounding it created by my grandmother and later by my mother Jaso.

Amir Sing was a devoted Hindu. When he lived under the fig tree he prayed near the stream that flowed through his land under a huge umdoni tree which I remember playing under many years later.

There was a small temple at the foot of Avoca Road near the Umghlangane River and prayers were conducted there in the first twenty years of the century as more and more indenture families settled in Avoca.

Once his larger house was built Aja turned his attention to building a sturdier temple for the community.

In 1920, together with his friends Jhugga, Bhogal, Ragubeer and others, they fund-raised and built a modest temple which has grown over the decades and today it proudly stands as the beautiful Shree Luxmi Narayan Temple.

Once my father Dalip Sing took over the cultivation of the flower farm and the business, Amir Sing spent his later years on long walks.

He would visit with friends at the temple but much of his time was spent walking the rolling hills of his flower farm and sitting on the banks of the Umghlangane River.

My sister Soorsuthy vividly remembers Aja and the pristine pugris that he wore. She remembers, too, that he suffered severe, piercing headaches that were blinding and debilitating.

She was ten when Aja passed away, on November 27, 1933, at the age of seventy-two. He was found at the edge of his beloved river.

His death certificate reads, “The deceased was found dead in a river at Avoca”.

Soorsuthy recalled that this strong, charitable, dignified man suffered his last blinding headache at the edge of the Umghlangane River and drowned. He was buried near the border of his cherished flower farm under his pear trees.

My extended conversations with Soorsuthy form the basis of my book, Indentured! A Labourer’s Journey, tracing my grandfather’s life.

My grandfather’s determination and work ethic has lived on among his descendants.

His nine children, now deceased, were farmers and businesswomen and in Debi Sing’s case, a teacher and human rights activist.

In keeping with Amir Sing’s charitable nature, my father Dalip Sing donated a piece of his land on which stands Avoca Secondary School.

And, like the descendants of the nearly two million indentured Indians around the world, Aja’s grandchildren, great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren took his legacy further, to distant shores.

Several of his grandchildren and great grandchildren migrated overseas to Canada, Australia and New Zealand where they and their children are hard-working, respected professionals.

Among his descendants are doctors, lawyers, legal assistants, engineers, computer experts, professors, teachers, business folk, consultants and by God’s will he is blessed with beautiful great-great-great grandchildren.

The Bismilla family in Toronto. Standing, from left: Vicki, Yusuf, Zeyd and his wife Jessica. Seated: Stephen, Aidan (11), Ella (9), Liam (3) and Zia (Stephen’s wife).

In my case, I met my husband Yusuf Bismilla at university on Durban’s Salisbury Island.

We married in 1970 and immigrated to Canada where we both served as public school teachers.

I went on to serve as Principal and Superintendent of Schools in two large school boards; then was headhunted to be Vice-President Academic and Chief Learning Officer of Centennial College in Toronto.

Our daughter Zia is a senior pediatrician at Toronto’s Sick Children’s Hospital, one of the largest children’s hospitals in Canada, and Professor at the University of Toronto’s Medical School.

Our son Zeyd followed in my footsteps and after I retired from Centennial he was hired as Professor of Liberal Arts.

We, Amir Sing’s descendants, owe him so much.

He suffered the harsh slave-like conditions in the bottom hold of the indenture ship; the whips of cruel overseers on the sugar plantation; the dishonesty of the British Raj promises and the bleeding wounds of hard physical labour in order to give his family and us, his descendants, a bright future.

His incredible journey paved the way for our journeys. Thank you, Aja.

Editor’s note: A long-time Desi News columnist, Dr Vicki Bismilla was inducted into the Scarborough Walk of Fame in 2011 for her work as an academic and role model for others in the community. 

• This article first appeared in Aapravasi Ghat Magazine, Mauritius.  Indentured! A Labourer’s Journey by Dr Vicki Bismilla was published by Tamarind Tree Books. Forbidden/Verbotten, by Dr Vicki Bismilla was published by In Our Words Inc.