Page 40 - University of Pretoria Research Review 2017

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Tracing the arrivals of South African Chinese
Karen Harris, Historical and Heritage Studies, and the University Archive
Professor Karen Harris, Head of the Department of Historical and Heritage Studies, and Director of the University Archive, writes that, for the most part, the Chinese have been relegated to the periphery of mainstream South African history, in the interstitial spaces between whites and blacks, both before
and after the new democratic dispensation. Her published studies capture the twisted nature of racial
discrimination evident in this three-century history, with two papers published in 2017, one in the Netherlands Journal of Chinese Overseas, and the other in the South African Fundamina: Journal of Legal History.
The Chinese and China are not newcomers to the African continent. It is believed that China first made an appearance as early as the 1400s with the voyages of Cheng Ho (1405-1433). While there is much conjecture about these encounters, Bushman rock art reflects
this possible encounter, and scientists of the likes of Raymond Dart expounded on China’s pre-colonial African encounter as early as the 1940s. Shortly after the Dutch East India Company’s arrival at the Cape
of Good Hope in the mid-17th Century, a few Chinese arrived as small-scale traders and crafters, while others who had been banished by the Dutch from Batavia as convicts served out their sentences here. Despite their miniscule numbers, already at this time Dutch burghers protested against the Chinese as competitors, and regulations were instituted to contain their trade.
In the mid-19th Century, coinciding with the South African mineral revolution and the global immigration of some two million people from China, a second
wave of Chinese (Namfeechow) arrived in South
Africa. They came as free and independent individuals, to set up small-scale businesses in the burgeoning coastal and inland towns. These immigrants were to be the ancestors of many of today’s South African- born Chinese. The third wave followed at the turn
of the 20th Century with the importation by the gold industry of over 60 000 indentured labourers to work on the Witwatersrand mines. Strictly regulated and proscribed, the scheme lasted a mere half dozen years before it was terminated, with indentured labourers having contributed to the restoration of a profitable mining sector in the post-South African War period. This experiment had, however, serious repercussions for the free Chinese communities living in the South African colonies. The Cape Colony introduced the Chinese Exclusion Act (1904), which made the Chinese one of the first identifiable groups to be singled
out and discriminated against, while the Transvaal Colony introduced the Asiatic Registration Act (1906). Besides the humiliation caused to South African-born Chinese, these legislations effectively put an end to the immigration of the Chinese to South Africa, a situation entrenched by the 1913 immigration legislation that
Piecing together the history of South African Chinese is like the proverbial Chinese puzzle – invisible, intermittent and interstitial. Yet their presence in southern Africa can be traced back some three centuries, if not even earlier.
Cape Archives Depot C1109, n.d.