Suleiman M. Nana. A Biographical and Historical Record of his Life and Times.
SIGNED, Written and compiled by Ahmed Essop, 2002, hardcover, 265 pages, condition: as new.
This book is a glossy production, befitting both its subject and purpose. Commissioned to write it by the Suleiman Nana Memorial Trust, he undertook five years of disciplined, dedicated, and meticulous research, in order to put together a warm, respectful, and extremely dignified volume, on a disciplined, dedicated, and meticulous man.
.. It deals with Suleiman M. Nanas life, and hones in on the latters activities as Secretary of the Transvaal Indian Congress during his period of tenure between 1933 and his untimely death at the age of 38, in 1944. It not only serves as a historical record of the plight of Indians in racist South Africa during the first half of the twentieth century, and the efforts of Mr. Nana to ameliorate their hardships during his eleven years in office as the secretary of the TIC, but it also highlights the genesis of all anti Indian legislation in South Africa, and how what had begun for the purpose of the preservation of White material interests, degenerated (or evolved) into full-blown racial prejudice. 2 Ahmed Essop has provided us in the book, with a list of 64 repressive and discriminatory anti-Indian legislation passed between the years 1885 to 1941, and this was even before the Nationalists had assumed power in 1948! From Law 3 of 1885 (Transvaal) to The Asiatics (Transvaal Land and Trading) Act, 1941, an overwhelming array of racist laws that reveal without doubt that the Indians, like the other Black races in South Africa, were a race equally more sinned against than sinning. The root cause of this systematic attempt to destroy the Indians was an anonymous group of Whites who belonged to the then Chamber of Commerce of South Africa, and who had felt threatened by the indefatigable business prowess of the Indians. It was this anonymous group who had applied to the ruling powers to pass laws to effectively repress Indians, to prevent them from engaging in entrepreneurial opportunities, in the hope that this would thereby remove the threat that they had posed to White economic interests. Like all decent White governments pior to 1994, any request to preserve White interests was seized upon with enthusiastic zeal, and racist laws were passed with an alacrity that defied the imagination, and contributed to the swelling of White pride in no small measure. Suleiman Nana therefore, functioned in an era before Apartheid was institutionalised, when the racist ideology was being creatively developed on an ad hoc basis by testicular teams of tacit Nazis.
