A history of the Chinese in South Africa to 1912

Abstract

The small Chinese community in South Africa has played an important part in the economic and political life of South Africa. From 1660 to 1912, it reflected the experiences of migrant Chinese who left the mainland during and after centuries of isolation. This thesis therefore examines the Chinese in South Africa in the context of a growing historiography of the overseas Chinese, noting particularly the comparisons with other colonial societies, such as the United States of America and Australia. It is also concerned with tracing the history of the free Chinese at the Cape in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before engaging in a more detailed discussion of the period of indentured Chinese labour on the Witwatersrand gold mines in the early twentieth century. Although the political economy of indenture has been copiously dealt with in recent historical research, the focus here is more on the social and cultural dimensions of Chinese labour, including aspects such as privacy, sexuality and living conditions in the compound system. This cultural history is interpreted against the background of political and legislative developments in South Africa leading to the formation of the Union in 1910. One of the main arguments of the thesis is that the indentured labour scheme had profound repercussions for the racial status of the free Chinese in the late colonial period. The different experiences of the Chinese in the Cape and the Transvaal are given special attention to illustrate regional patterns of social stratification, and explain the vicissitudes of race relations in South Africa up to 1912. In the Cape it led to subjection under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1904, while in the Transvaal it resulted in political involvement in the initial phases of Mahatma Gandhi's "satyagraha". Cultural exclusivity and minority status are at the heart of this· analysis and are indices of how the Chinese were brought under the yoke of segregation, which anticipated the oppression of apartheid after 1948.