Durban-Bound: Chinese Miners, Colonial Medicine and the Floating Compounds of the Indian Ocean, 1904–7

The motivations of colonial health regimes have undergone a number of sustained critiques in recent years, each charting the complex part played by bio-medicine, public health policies and medical professionals as intermediaries in the larger project of empire. Taking its cue from these studies, this article begins in the middle of 1904, a month before the first group of Chinese indentured miners were due to arrive in Durban’s well-policed port on chartered steamship. The Chinese were en-route to the Transvaal goldfields at the behest of the Chamber of Mines (COM) and Lord Alfred Milner’s self-consciously modernist administration, in a meticulously planned scheme to salvage an acute labour crisis in the Transvaal. Natal’s settler population, well-versed in an exclusionary politics of race, labour and immigration, took a keen interest as the COM officials prepared the passage of the Chinese across the Indian Ocean and through the self-governing colony. The impending arrival of the Chinese miners was of no small interest to those in Natal, given the social and political implications of Indian indenture to the sugarcane fields which had begun in Natal four decades before. It is to the social history of Indian-ocean indentured labour that this paper seeks to contribute, by making an exploratory investigation of the nexus of labour-discipline with colonial medical preoccupations. In so doing I highlight precocious state intervention in the lived spaces of migration. The spatial focus will, however, shift from Natal itself to the high seas of the Indian Ocean into which Durban’s Bluff extends an admonishing finger.