India en Sudáfrica. De trabajadores en las plantaciones a ciudadanos de la Nación del Arcoíris

In 2010 it was the 150th anniversary of the arrival in South Africa of the first labourers hired from India to harvest sugar cane in large plantations around the city of Durban. Ten years later, Indian traders began to settle, mostly Muslims, called "Indian travellers" to differentiate them from the earlier ones living in conditions akin to slavery.

The story of the South African Indians is little known; with the notable exception of the 20 years that Mahatma Gandhi lived in that country. Gandhi's efforts to improve the lives of South African Indians are documented, but he was by no means the only Indian who fought for the rights of his countrymen.

They have been overshadowed by the figure of Gandhi, but in recent years, once the grim days of apartheid had ended, these stories have emerged, often forgotten, of the Indians who fought for a free and democratic South Africa.

Ignorance of these stories is what encourages a group of researchers from the Department of English and German Philology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona to investigate them and in this session to be held in Casa África seek to highlight some of the more emblematic figures of the history of the Indian diaspora in South Africa and the most important male and female writers of the current South African literary scene.