BELONGING, a history of Indian South Africans

327pp., illus., maps, paperback, Jonathan Ball, Johannesburg, 2025

ISBN: 9781776193714

This history begins with the arrival of the first boatload of indentured Indians in Natal in 1860. It concludes with a chapter on life in post-apartheid South Africa, and details the struggles of Indian South Africans as they deal with the ever-present threat of repatriation. Weaving together events such as the independence of India, the arrival of apartheid and forced removals under the Group Areas Act with the textures of everyday life, it constantly poses the question: what does it mean to belong?

Ashwin Desai is Professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. He is the author of We are the Poors: Community struggles in post-apartheid South Africa (2002) and co-author with Goolam Vahed of Inside Indian Indenture: A South African story, 1860-1914 (2010); A History of the Present: A biography of Indian South Africans, 1994–2019 (2019), Colour, Class and Community, the Natal Indian Congress, 1971-1994 (2021) and Durban's Casbah, bunny chows, Bolsheviks and bioscopes (2023)

Goolam Vahed is Professor in the Department of History at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Some of his recent books include Chota Motala: A biography of political activism in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands (2018); Schooling Muslims in Natal: State, identity and the Orient Islamic Educational Institute(2015); and Crossing Space and Time in the Indian Ocean: Early Indian traders in Natal – a biographical study (2015).