Engaging with the Bureaucracy: Indian Immigration Agents and Interpreters in Cape Town, South Africa (1902–16)

Abstract

As part of a global pattern of Asian exclusions, in the early twentieth century, the Cape Colony effectively excluded new Asian immigrants by requiring immigrants to pass a literacy test in a European language. A permit system, employing the technologies of photography and anthropometry, was developed to facilitate transnational travel for those already in the colony who were unable to comply with the literacy test. This article pieces together fragments of the biographies of two Indians who functioned as immigration agents/interpreters to bridge the immigration bureaucracy and the seekers of documents. Its focus is on the bureaucratic implementation of the law, the performative acts of the agents at the immigration offices and docks, and their clients and their opponents. It argues that, deploying attributes of respectability, these agents penetrated the codes of behaviour of officials and developed relationships and spheres of influence. The agents facilitated Indian Ocean mobilities and shaped the functioning of the bureaucracy, rendering it dependent, and its systems of identification fallible.