South Africa’s High Commissioner to India, Professor Anil Sooklal, has encouraged India and Africa to be more cohesive and reclaim their rightful place on the global stage and amongst the global community of nations.

Sooklal was one of the guest speakers who addressed students at the University of Delhi on Wednesday during a lecture on “From Indenture to Influence: Girmityas and Global Indian Diaspora".

The term Girmityas refers to the descendants of indentured labourers who started leaving India in the 1800s.

Sooklal said Africa was the most marginalised continent and has to deal with its fault lines and become more cohesive.

He said these are common challenges facing India and Africa.

He also explained how the Indians had to face the wrath of the apartheid regime when an Indian lawyer, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who was also an anti-colonial nationalist and political ethicist, left South Africa for England in 1914.

“But, of course, the Indian community could see that their future was tied with the future of the majority community in South Africa. The fact that we were discriminated against and isolated as well made sense that our identity wasn't the identity of the country as a whole.

"And when the Indians came here, they nourished their lives in the absence of contact with India. The university developed over time, and we had to study at universities that were race classifiers,” he said.

“We had no choice in terms of the majority community, all of us. We had to go to institutions created for a specific reason. And they would treat you differently."

He said he is an African, 'born and raised in Africa'.

He said there was a need for a network of the Indian diaspora to be created.

"Efforts should be made with the diaspora in different countries. For example, we have our villages, our brothers and sisters. Why not create a database of our human identity?”

“We should identify which villages and cities in India they came from, where they went and settled, and also recognise how they turned challenges into opportunities. This can be portrayed through books or documentaries, Sooklal said.

“I speak of the diaspora of the global South, the Indian diaspora because of the provenance they have attained in many of the countries, be it Canada, USA, Australia, the European countries.

As of May 2024, the global Indian diaspora numbers approximately 35.42 million, consisting of 15.85 million non-Indian residents and 19.57 million of Indian origin, as reported by the Ministry of External Affairs.

Inaugural speaker, Dr Ajay Dubey, former rector and senior professor for the Centre for African studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, said the worst affected diaspora was South Africa, during the apartheid regime.

manyane.manyane@inl.co.za