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DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA, February 14, 2004: After 25 years of compiling information, Joy Brain, a veteran researcher, has produced a CD where South Africa’s 1.2 million Indians will be able to trace their roots back to India. The article explains that South Africa’s Indian community are descendents of indentured laborers who came to South Africa in 1860 to work on sugar plantations. They were recruited back in India by administrators working for the British colonial territory of Natal. Brain talks about her work, “We were not allowed to photocopy the original documents because of their fragility. The details (of the early immigrants) were recorded in books that are now very delicate and falling to pieces in the archives of Durban. It took so long because we had to copy everything by hand. There was no other way of doing it from the books that are up to six feet long, with often difficult handwriting legibility.” Since the dissolution of apartheid in South Africa ten years ago, many Indians have become interested in tracing their ancestry. Brian also hopes that her work will dispel myths about the early Indian settlers. She says, “Some of these distress me a lot. The descendants of those early Indians need to be proud of what their ancestors did, rather than constantly moan and groan about how they were ill-treated (by their colonial masters).” Brain elaborates by pointing out that state registers confirm that families were kept together and not separated once they reached South Africa, and that the vast majority of Indian women selected to make the boat trip were virtuous, not of easy virtue as suggested by some myths. In the future Brain wants to continue her research in the land of India to find out how the caste system may have affected the recruitment process and why certain areas of India were more amenable to going to South Africa.

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