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Tours and visas were difficult to arrange. Indian artists had only recently begun their tentative forays out of the country on international tours. South Africa was then persona non grata in the world community and India was still largely a closed economy. At the time South Africans of colour – black Africans, mixed-race descendants (called “coloureds”) and the descendants of Indian migrants – still chafed under restrictive racial laws and so the sheer logistics of attempting to bring one of India’s greatest musicians to our shores was a remarkable feat. The great singer Mohammed Rafi was brought to an adoring South African Indian public in May of that year.Īs we remember the 40th anniversary of Rafi’s death this year, I am reminded of my family’s direct involvement in helping arrange that ground-breaking tour. In the 1970s, some cultural troupes came from India and even Pakistan, but then, in 1978, came a moment that was historic.
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Books, film music, religious material and even other goods like clothes trickled in, brought in by canny traders who knew how to circumvent the system, but what the South Africans wanted was people. They were cut off for generations, after India broke diplomatic relations with South Africa after the introduction of Apartheid in 1947 and craved for direct connections with the mother country.
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The nearly one million Indians had been in the land since the mid 19th century, brought here as indentured labour or migrated as ‘passengers’ of their own volition to explore opportunities. The sea was what had brought us to South Africa, but it is also what separated us from our historic homeland. Denied access to most of the pristine beaches, many of us never learnt to swim.īut perched above the waves as the city is, there was no escaping either the sea in Durban, or the humid fetor it gave off. As children growing up under apartheid next to the sea in Durban, many generations of Indians only reluctantly stepped into its waves.