EXTRACT | Born to Struggle: The Meers arrive in South Africa

Seventeen-year-old Mohamed Ahmed Meer stepped off the steamer at Port Natal, Durban, in September 1882. He had had a long journey, starting with a train from Surat to Bombay on the west coast of India, where he had boarded the ship bound for South Africa. Like his countrymen on the ship, he had come to these unknown shores to start a new life and make his fortune.

The man who would later become Fatima Meer’s grand-uncle was the first Meer to come to this country (although some of his relatives from the Motala and Variawa clans were already here and, by all accounts, doing well). Most of his fellow passengers spoke Tamil and Telugu and he could not communicate with them since his own language was Gujarati. But he gathered that they had been recruited by an Indian agent to work on a Gora Sab’s farms. Mohamed, on the other hand, was planning to start a business.

The Passenger Indians 

While the argument about the supply of indentured labourers continued between the two governments, in 1869, a new type of Indian immigrant arrived in Port Natal. They were not “recruited” by an agent, they were not bound by a contract, and they had paid for their journey — hence the label “passenger Indians”. 

They came from the western state of Gujarat and a vast majority of them were Muslim small traders who had been enticed by stories of an emerging market and new business opportunities across the Indian Ocean. Passenger Indians, in terms of their socioeconomic background, were a mixed bunch.

A few of them were well placed; some held responsible positions in government and a few belonged to the landed gentry. One member of Aboobaker Jhavery’s family was the diwan (prime minister) of Porbandar (now part of Gujarat); another ran a very prosperous shipping company himself; others were descended from famous Muslim missionaries who had migrated to India as early as the 14th century from Persia and Arabia. The majority, however, were impoverished peasant proprietors whose traditional economy had been shattered by the exorbitant land tax levied by their colonial masters. Emigration from Gujarat increased at the turn of the century owing to famine that left the fields bare and desolate. 

Like many young men of Rampura in Surat, young Mohamed Meer had been spurred on by the stories told by men who had returned to India with money made in this new and exciting land. He had heard that Indian people working on farms and mines had to travel long distances to buy rice and other grocery items. Spices were particularly in demand because white shopkeepers did not sell Indian foodstuffs. The opportunities were inviting, and he was not afraid of hard work or new adventures; it ran in the family. Mohamed’s father, Ahmed Meer, was a farmer in Gujarat who became a tailey (oil merchant) and settled in the Rampura area of Surat in 1860 or thereabouts. In the hierarchy of Indian rural life, farmers ranked only second to landowners and in many cases were the owners of the land they worked on. 

Since they provided grain and livelihoods for the whole community, they belonged to the “master” class. Taileys, on the other hand, were considered members of the “service community”, along with potters, shoemakers, weavers and others. So, for a “respectable” farmer to join the ranks of artisans and shopkeepers could only mean that the land was not providing enough and that he had been forced to turn to trade. This seemed to have set a new direction, at least for the next couple of generations, and it was the search for new business opportunities that brought the Meers to South Africa. 

Ahmed Meer had one son, Suleiman, from his first wife Maryam and four from his second wife Sara, who were named Mohamed, Ismail, Moosa and Saleh. Until the present generation of South African Indians, trying to remember the names of Muslim Gujarati family members, especially the men, was like reading One Hundred Years of Solitude and trying to keep track of each generation. The same names, mostly those of the holy prophets, were repeated in every generation. So, pretty much every generation of every family had a Mohamed (with half a dozen different spellings), an Ahmed, an Ebrahim, an Ismail, a Moosa, a Yusuf and so on. As if this was not complex enough, they then repeated the nicknames “Chota” and “Gora” in every generation. “Chota”, in the Gujarati and Urdu languages, means “small” or “the young one”, and “Gora” means “the fair one”. The eldest boy was always called Gora (whatever his complexion), and the younger (or the youngest) was called Chota. For girls, it became “Gori” and “Choti”. So, among the Gujarati Muslims of Durban and Johannesburg, almost every family had a Gora, a Chota, a Gori, and a Choti. Other children in between would probably be known by different nicknames of their own. 

Mohamed Meer, the eldest son of Ahmed from his second wife Sara, was the founder of the Meer kutumb (clan) in South Africa. He had come with very little money, but he was a confident and exceptionally enterprising young man. Like many Indians of his generation, he was determined to succeed. Within a decade, he had established himself as a successful businessman and owned shops in Durban, Dundee, Waschbank, all in Natal, and later further afield in the gold metropolis of Johannesburg in Transvaal. 

Helped by Ebrahim Motala in Verulam, Mohamed started trading as a hawker, carrying his wares in a box, and selling from door to door. After a while, he was able to buy a pony cart which, no doubt, was a big step forward. Most of the Indian businessmen, whether they were passenger Indians or “‘free Indians” — those who came as indentured labourers and had set themselves up as traders after completing the terms of their indenture — began as hawkers.

They would carry vegetables, spices, clothes and small household products in boxes, wicker baskets or sacks, and sell them from street to street and village to village. Those who managed to save enough would set up a small stall and then work towards getting a proper shop one day. Their tenacity and capacity to work hard knew no limits. There was no concept of a private life separate from business, or “fixed working hours”. For this pioneering generation, all hours were working hours. Unlike indentured labourers, “passenger Indians” were free to come and go to India, and when they could afford it, many of them brought their families back with them to South Africa. 

A great number of pioneer Indian traders did well. They had certain advantages over white traders; acclimatised to heat, patient and resilient, they were able to cope better with the rigours of country life. They succeeded through their business acumen, working long hours and offering commodities at a lower price. 

As the Wragg Commission reported: “Rice is the chief food of the 30,000 immigrants now in the colony and these astute traders have so successfully devoted their tact and energy to the supplying of that article, that the price to all consumers fell from 21 shillings per bag in former years to 14 shillings in 1884.”

Zuleikha Mayat, the well-known Durban community leader and writer, grew up in Potchefstroom, some 75 miles southwest of Johannesburg, where her father Mohamed Bismilla’s family ran a successful business until the 1970s. Like Mohamed Meer, her grandfather had arrived as a “passenger” in the early 1880s. Recalling her early childhood in the 1930s, she described how her family and other Indian businesses succeeded: You sold cheaper and there were less overheads. Your own children and wives worked in the shop. And in your expenses, you were very, very frugal. White people would start their shop with a big fanfare but within two to three years they were bankrupt and gone. Anybody coming from India, on the other hand, had the help of the Indian community. You helped them to set up their business; that was the system. The survival of the new arrivals depended on the support of the community. 

Anybody new would work for Indian employers for a year or two, then they would help them start their own business. This way, the entire street of 27 shops in Potchefstroom became Indian. The whites were not going to bother about black customers anyway. The white shopkeeper had no time for a customer who only had this much money and who wanted two yards of this or that and only two candles. But for the Indian, nothing was too small or too big; he would do it. If his shop didn’t have [a] certain thing, he would send one of his assistants to five or six shops and get it, but would not allow the customer to go away empty-handed.

• This is an edited extract from Born to Struggle — a Biography of Fatima Meer by Arjumand Wajid, published by Oxford University Press Karachi.