As Indian South Africans celebrate 165 years of their presence in the country, former Gauteng MEC for Roads and Transport, Dr Ismail Vadi, says the community continues to grapple with deep, unresolved questions about identity – questions that stretch back to apartheid and remain relevant in modern South Africa.
Recalling his days as a history teacher under apartheid, Vadi said his Indian learners struggled to identify themselves as Africans, despite being born on the continent. “I would ask them, ‘In which continent were you born?’ They would say, ‘Africa.’ But when I followed with, ‘So you’re African?’ they insisted, ‘No Sir, we’re Indians,’” he said. That contradiction, he explained, “raised profound questions about our identity in apartheid South Africa.”
More than 45 years since that classroom debate, Vadi believes the dilemma persists. “Indian South Africans have not fully grappled with questions of their identity in a rapidly changing society,” he said. This includes how others perceive them – from political leaders like Julius Malema to everyday working-class South Africans.
Vadi emphasised that Indian South Africans came to the country not as settlers seeking privilege, but as labourers and enslaved people. The first Indians arrived at the Cape as captured slaves, brought by Dutch colonists. Later, in the 19th century, thousands arrived as indentured labourers to work on sugarcane plantations, coal mines, railways and in domestic service. Others came as traders, merchants and professionals, hoping to build a life in “Afrika.”
For decades, they endured harsh colonial rule, racial segregation under the Union Government, and full-blown apartheid after 1948. Only in 1994 was their “human dignity and freedom restored. Yet theirs is also a story of resilience. “We were not passive victims of a racially unjust social order,” Vadi wrote.
The community’s resistance history includes:
Gandhi’s satyagraha, which pioneered non-violent resistance in South Africa; Radical Indian unionism, where workers organised against exploitation, Political mobilisation under the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) and the Transvaal Indian Congress (TIC), Heroic leadership from figures such as Dr Yusuf Dadoo and Dr Monty Naicker, who built non-racial alliances and fought apartheid alongside other liberation movements.
Vadi described the community’s heritage as a “pleasing inheritance” of religious, educational, cultural, artistic and business institutions that uplifted generations.
Vadi argued that “Indian identity” in South Africa was largely constructed by apartheid policies. “By being classified as ‘Indian,’ placed in Indian Group Areas, restricted to Indian schools, and even barred from swimming freely in the Indian Ocean, we developed an embroidered consciousness of racial identity,” he said. Today, the community remains diverse – religiously, linguistically, culturally and economically. Class divisions between professionals and the working class have widened, and global conflicts have fuelled inward-looking, sectarian identities. “We are no longer as cohesive a community as we were under apartheid,” Vadi noted.
Vadi believes the path forward requires embracing a multi-layered identity. “Each of us carries more than one dominant identity. An Indian South African can be African, a patriot, culturally Indian, and part of a global community all at once,” he said.
He calls for the community to strengthen its African and South African identities while honouring its Indian cultural inheritance. “We should not pursue a narrow, exclusivist ethnic identity,” he warned.
Instead, he hopes the next generation will proudly embrace a broader sense of belonging. “In the not-too-distant future, our progeny should be able to say: I am an African; a South African patriot with an Indian heritage that holds human value and beauty for all,” Vadi concluded.
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