Ottawa Pioneer Residents

LOVE AND MARRIAGE ACROSS SOCIAL LINES  AND  PIONEER FAMILY HISTORY                    (Budhoo Mungal and  Subadra Sewnarain)   By Subry Govender   Our little village of Ottawa, during the midst of its development from the early 1900s to the 1990s, became well-known for a number of marriages across language, religious and cultural lines. These marriages included Hindi and Tamil language groups and Muslims, Hindus and Christians. There were also marriages between young lovers from what some families believed was unacceptable because of social differences at that time. One such marriage that involved two of the pioneer families was that of Budhoo Mungal, who was part of the Mungal-Jhugroo extended family, and Subadra Sewnarain, who was part of the extended Mehgraj/Maharaj family. Budhoo Mungal and Subadra Sewnarain fell in love in 1959 when they worked at the Flash Clothing factory, which was owned by Mr S S Maharaj, a great humanitarian, community leader who spearheaded the

    (NB: Dhanraj, the eldest son of social and cultural leader and one of the chief architects of school building projects in Ottawa, Mr Sivasanker Badlu, was also a teacher at our local Jhugroo Primary School during his journey as an educationist in KwaZulu-Natal. He wrote the article in November 2015 when the Jhugroo Primary School had celebrated its 75 th anniversary. We are privileged to publish this article in our series on the PIONEERING FAMILIES OF OTTAWA.) ( The pioneers above are Mr Badlu Debi and his wife, Nowrathni Debi, who worked at the Ottawa Sugar Estate as indentured labourers. They are great- grand-parents of Mr Dhanraj Sivasanker) EARLY HISTORY ON THE ARRIVAL OF INDENTURED LABOURERS   The British Colony of Natal in 1860 embarked on the establishment of sugar-cane farming on a large scale, the British Government launched its immigration schemes of importing indentured Indian labourers from India to help in the agriculture of sugarcane. It is now over 150 y

                       (This school photo is one of the historical memories of our village of Ottawa. In this photo are boys and girls from historical families and school teachers who are also from our village. They attended the new Jhugroo Primary School in the Tin Town area of the village. On the left is school principal, Mr S S Maharaj, and in the centre is Mr Dhanraj Sivasanker, who is part of the Sivasanker Badlu historical family of Kissoon Road. The name of the teacher on the right is not known.)   INTRODUCTION This internet site has been created to publish the History and the stories of Pioneer residents of the little village of Ottawa, situated between the towns of Mount Edgecombe and Verulam, on the North Coast of the province of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. The internet site is called Ottawa Pioneer Residents. The articles, stories and photographs of the Ottawa Pioneer Residents will also be published on Facebook and What’s Up sites.

(This article was written with information provided by Rusty Maharaj, who did some research on the history of Ottawa.)                    (Some of the pioneer residents in the Munn Road area of Ottawa seen here celebrating the life of a first generation indentured labourer.) The little village of Ottawa, between Mount Edgecombe and Verulam and about 25km north of the city of Durban in South Africa, is one of the areas where people of Indian-origin had also settled since the late 1890s after they had completed their indentures on nearby sugar estates. Their ancestors had been recruited mainly from the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in North India, and Bengal in the East of India and in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala in the south of India to work as indentured labourers in the sugar plantations of the former Natal Colony. The Natal Colony, along with other regions of South Africa, was under the control of the British colonialists at this time. The British first settled in