South Africa. -- On my way out of a grocery story, I bumped into a young man that I know from church. I hadn’t seen him and his family in almost two years. So I asked Sammy, “How is everyone?” and added: “What are you doing now that you’re out of high school?” Sammy, lanky and dark as a chocolate bar, smiled. “I’m a marine biologist,” he said. “I’ve just started my studies ... doing mostly book work, theories.”  

Sammy’s answer caught me off guard. He is poor and lives in an Indian township in a semi-rural village on the Indian Ocean side of South Africa. The village has one main road, one traffic light and three factories, two of which are closed. The township is called Ghandinagar. It is built among the rolling hills of KwaZulu-Natal, one of nine provinces in South Africa. All the houses are the size of a matchbox and made of concrete. Each has a living room, kitchen, bathroom and two bedrooms. It costs less than $6,000 to buy one, yet the factory closings have left most residents unemployed, with no money to pay rent, let alone a mortgage.  

I wondered how Sammy got the money to attend a university to study marine biology. His father, Saul, is a gangster-turned-church elder. He is unemployed, but manages to put food on the table by repairing cars. Mary, his mother, is a housewife. Twice I’ve eaten at their home. Each time Mary served beans and potato curry, with a type of hand-made bread called "roti."

I am American. My husband is South African and Indian, like Sammy. We married almost six years ago, and together we lived in South Africa until a few months ago, when we moved to the U.S. My husband grew up not far from Ghandinagar. He, too, was a poor boy, growing up in a place called Bangladesh, the colloquial name for an informal settlement where the poorest of the poor Indians lived. My husband recalls a time when his family lived by grace in a rundown church. They were forced to leave the day the roof collapsed, forced down by the weight of bat guano.  

Few people outside of South Africa know that the country is home to slightly more than one million Indians, perhaps the largest concentration outside of India. Indians from India have lived in South Africa for more than 140 years. Starting in 1860, they came as endentured laborers to cultivate and harvest the fields of British sugar barons, largely because the British failed in their attempts to exploit the indigenous Zulus, whose lives revolved around a culture of cattle. (Also, India was a British colony at the time.) The Truro reached South African shores on Friday the 16th of November 1860, with 340 laborers on board. Five days later the Belvedere followed with 302. The local newspaper “banner” that introduced the laborers read, “The Coolies are Here.”  

My father-in-law, who is 64, started his young life as a laborer on a sugar cane estate called Ellingham. He says he earned nine cents a day. He remained on the estate even after he married and started a family. They lived in what was called the barracks. As best as I can picture in my mind’s eye, based on his description, the barracks were a glorified horse stable. There was no electricity, no tap water (they got their water from the same pond that cows on the estate did), and no floor. As a boy, my husband says he collected cow dung to slap down on the earthen floor of their barracks room to keep the dust from rising.  

Hardly any Indians cut cane today, but most started out this way. And despite the widely held view among South African whites and Africans, many Indians still struggle today. It’s true that South African Indians have made great strides, educationally, politically and economically, but large populations of Indians, including members of my own family by marriage, live on the edge. My Auntie Baby(the sister of my father-in-law) is one example. She worked as a maid for 22 years for the same well-to-do, white family. They immigrated to Australia--white flight from South Africa is common since the country held its first all-race, democratic elections almost nine years ago. As a parting “gift,” they gave her R2,000, which is about $200 US dollars. No pension. No medical aide. And no help finding another  “madam” to cook and clean for. A diabetic, Auntie Baby is in the same boat as many other African, Indian and coloured (mixed-race) South Africans, which is to say, she’s barely making it.  

Since 1994, 500,000 jobs have been lost in South Africa, in spite of some marginal economic growth. Worse, there have been further concentrations of wealth among the wealthiest (white) South Africans and further impoverishment of the majority of the country’s black inhabitants. (Five percent of all South Africans own 88 percent of the country’s wealth.)  

Standing outside of the grocery store, I asked Sammy, “Where are you studying?”

“At home,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of books from the library. Like I said, I’m studying mostly theory now. And I’ve got some (tropical) fish I sell.”  

I smiled. “I wish you all the best,” I told him, as we went our separate ways.  

Sammy stayed on my mind the rest of the day. He really believes that he is training to become a marine biologist, when, in fact, he’s selling fish from a little tank located in a ramshackle shed outside of his house. I feel for him. I am African-American, and I grew up in the segregated American South during the Civil Rights Movement. I know what it’s like to yearn to break free of one’s limited circumstances. Your whole body throbs when you imagine what could be, if only you had a fair chance to get ahead. Unfortunately, in South Africa the gap between the haves and the have-nots remains as wide and deep as the ocean that Sammy dreams he might one day explore as a marine biologist.  

Author's Biography

Sharon F. Doorasamy is a freelance writer living in the U.S. in the state of North Carolina. 

She lived in South Africa for seven years, the first two years as a fellow of the U.S.-based Institute of Current World Affairs, which grants fellowships to young professionals to write about a corner of the world that interests them for a period of two years.

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