Toils of Empire: Medicine, "Malingering," and Indian Indentured Labor in Natal, South Africa, 1860–1910

This poster highlights the results of an on-going research project that examines the encounters of British colonialists and indentured Indian laborers in Natal, South Africa from 1860 to 1910.  Following indentured Indian laborers from their port of departure, on their voyage to Africa, and to their final work sites, this study demonstrates: 1) how struggles over health, medicine, and definitions of illness shaped relations between these two groups; 2) how ‘malingering’ as concept and practice was used as both a form of colonial social control and labor protest in these encounters; and 3) how ‘malingering’ became a biomedical category of illness that gained currency during the period of indenture yet can be traced to earlier complaints by American slave owners and doctors who sought control over another source of un-free labor.

Indentured Indians initially came to serve on the sugar estates of Natal but were also sought after to provide domestic services, build railroads, and mine coal out of this British colony. The state and white employers sought a high return on their investment, and thus paid close attention to the issue of indenture productivity. Much of this concern was translated into struggles over indentured Indians’ health and bodily integrity. Sickness and/or “malingering”—the feigning of illness—by indentured laborers meant a decline in productivity.  In the case of employers whose businesses existed on the margins, any threat to the overall productivity of business could prove catastrophic.   On the other hand, ensuring the health of indentured workers, through providing sanitary living and working conditions, and access to healthy foods and appropriate medical care cost money. Consequently the state of Natal and employers of indentured labor sought to gain control over the bodies of indentured Indians while expending as few funds as possible.  This was done primarily through the use and imposition of biomedical doctors and medicines.  Biomedicine not only provided a means to heal the bodies of indentured laborers, but doctors and hospitals became acceptable and in some cases a preferred means of ensuring some form of social control over this population group. Indians, who joined the ranks of indentured labor in response to various economic and ecological pressures on the subcontinent, were promised specific work conditions abroad that included guaranteed rations and free health care. The reality of indenture, however, meant enduring poor and coercive working conditions.  Feigning and concealing illness were two means by which indentured laborers attempted to maintain their cultural integrity and power over their own bodies and lives in a highly controlled and racist environment.

This work is based on a variety of primary sources to include archival material from South Africa and Britain, government commissions, the Reports of the Protector of Indian Immigrants (1885-1910), and the anthropological field notes of Helen Kuper and her assistants that are housed at UCLA’s Special Collections. A number of charts and diagrams drawn from these sources help to illustrate these struggles over the health of indentured laborers and the some times capricious ways that doctors asserted social control.