As this article is being written there is a growing interest in the commemoration of 150 years since the arrival of Indian indentured labourers in South Africa in 1860. The process is already contested with heavily charged debates over who should drive the commemoration and to what ends, given the religious, ethnic, regional, linguistic, and class diversity of the approximately 1.2 million Indian South Africans. What is it that should be remem- bered, celebrated, and commemorated? If comme- moration is to reflect a collective memory, how is this to be stitched together? Can it and should it be a single narrative? How will this honouring of the past avoid ghettoisation? And what does this (ethnic / racial) commemoration mean in a country whose constitution is committed to non-racialism? How should the act of “remembering” tell of the country of origin? These debates are a valuable lens through which to grasp the story of Indian South Africans in the post-apartheid moment and the vexed issues of identity and belonging. © Kamla-Raj 2010 J Soc Sci, 25(1-2-3): 1-12 (2010) Identity and Belonging in Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Case of Indian South Africans Goolam Vahed and Ashwin Desai * Department of Historical Studies, MTB 211, University of KwaZulu-Natal, King George V Ave, Durban, 4000, Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa E-mail: vahedg@ukzn.ac.za * Department of Sociology, Rhodes University, P.O. Box 94, Grahamstown, 6140 South Africa E-mail: conferencesanpad@yahoo.com KEYWORDS Diaspora. Race. Ethnicity. Class. Indians. Affirmative Action ABSTRACT This paper examines Indian identities in the post-apartheid period, focusing in particular on the vexed issues of identity and belonging. The inauguration of Nelson Mandela as President of a non-racial democratic South Africa on 10 May 1994 denoted the de-territorialisation of old apartheid racial identities. Race separateness was no longer codified in law and common citizenship was meant to glue all into a South African “nation”. The process has been far from simple as ‘Indian’ identity has been constructed, deconstructed and re-made over the years. A central dynamic of this process has been the tension between the way the state has tried to define identity. In the post- apartheid period too, there is unraveling of Indian identities in response to external factors such as the rise of the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) in India, the struggle of Tamils in Sri Lanka, and the Global War on Terror, while the state continues to play an interventionist role through its race-based affirmative action policies. All of this underscores tensions among Indians on how best to assert their belonging in Africa. As this article is being written there is a growing interest in the commemoration of 150 years since the arrival of Indian indentured labourers in South Africa in 1860. The present conjuncture opens possibilities to debate issues of identity and belonging. If access to resources continues to be defined exclusively by race then one can expect increasing frustration on the part of the poors who will most likely be susceptible to racial and ethnic overtures. On the other hand, the middle classes, living in the same gated communities and enjoying the same sports like cricket and golf, may witness bonding across racial lines. Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons, but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings (Said 1993: 7). Building on and extending the policy of segregation the National Party institutionalised racial separation through the guiding hand of apartheid from 1948 to 1994, a policy that ‘sliced and diced South Africans, decreeing that they were many peoples, establishing separate institu- tions for the separate peoples, and fighting con- solidation of one people’ (MacDonald 2006: 92). If apartheid had attempted to lock racial identities into sealed compartments then South Africa’s first non-racial election in 1994 signalled that this trajectory was to end. The inauguration of Nelson Mandela on 10 May 1994 denoted at one level the de-territorialisation of old apartheid identities. All South Africans had the right to vote and freedom of movement. Race separateness was no longer codified in law and common citizenship would glue all into a South African “nation”, heralding a vindication of the ANC’s long struggle, in the words of Govan Mbeki, ‘to form one people, to be represented in one parliament in one country ... to forge one nation,