Maryam, the daughter of Ahmedjee Meer, and set up home next door to his father. It seems that Suleiman, or Halloo as he came to be known, and his new mother never got on. In fact, the hostility between the two was so intense that Sarah Amin is said to have left a testimony that her descendants should never marry in the line of Halloo Meer. Despite this, her granddaughter Ayesha and great granddaughter Zohra married grandsons of Halloo Meer – YC and MC respectively.
Ancestry of my grandfather (Ismail) and his brothers (Mohamed and Chota) who settled in South Africa.
Life for the Meers would have continued in a placid unambitious manner in Surat but for the Motalas who lived across the road.
Ebrahim Motala had emigrated from India and settled in the then British colony of Natal in South Africa, where he had established a lucrative business and was sending large sums of money to his elder brother in Surat, Ismail Motala. Ahmed Asmaljee Meer was influenced by Ismail Motala to send his eldest son, Mohamed, to Natal. He was further encouraged because Mohamed’s uncles, Karodia and Saleh Mall, the husbands of Sarah’s two sisters, were already in Natal. This was a time when the members of their community in Surat and surrounding villages were inspiring each other to migrate to Natal to improve their fortunes.
Ahmed Asmaljee Meer entrusted his son Mohamed to the care of a community member, Dawood Chuptie, who was returning to Natal, and they sailed steerage1 on one of the ships owned by Durban-based shipping magnate Dada Abdulla2, reaching Durban in 1882. As Ma told it, her father Mohamed was seventeen years old, the hair on his face not yet sprouted, when he arrived in Durban.
Ebrahim Motala met Mohamed at the Durban docks and took him under his care. They travelled to the town of Verulam, just north of Durban, where Ebrahim lived with his family and ran his business. Mohamed spent almost a year with the warm-hearted and helpful Motalas. Ebrahim had married a South Indian woman, the daughter of a sirdar who had come to the colony as an indentured labourer.
Ma often quoted an adage:
Seek a marriage partner in the family and if you can’t find one there, then look in the neighbourhood, and if there is none there too, then look in the village. Heaven help you if you are forced to go beyond the village.
Heaven, it seemed, did help Ebrahim Motala, for his wife Goriema was, by all accounts, a wonderful woman.
After spending just under a year with the Motalas, Mohamed began his journey into prosperity as a peddler– armed with a consignment of goods from Ebrahim Motala. Within a short time, he bought a horse and cart and set up his own little shop. Not long after that Mohamed went into partnership with Dada Abdulla, and together they expanded into the wholesale market, branching out to Johannesburg.
Their partnership ended, however, over the issue of canned beef. There was an excellent market for canned beef during the Anglo-Boer War but Mohamed refused to deal in haram meat and withdrew from the partnership. He folded up his business interests in Durban and Johannesburg and moved to Dundee where he opened a shop on the main street, McKenzie Street.
His business prospered, and he soon scouted the surrounding country on horseback to identify additional business spots. The justice of peace of the district, a Mr L. de Jager, had a massive farm in Waschbank – almost eighteen kilometres of the railway line from Glencoe ran through it. The region was rich in coal and thousands of indentured Indians worked in the nearby collieries in Burnside and Wesselsnek. There was no store to serve this vast population which had cash in hand. Mohamed leased land from De Jager, built a shop out of wood and iron in Waschbank, stocked it with groceries, and placed his maternal cousin, Ahmed Karodia, in charge as manager. The store came to be known as Amos, and it proved to be as lucrative as Mohamed had estimated.
In the late 1880s, De Jager cut up his farm and put up plots for sale. Mohamed Meer and Hajee Ebrahim Khan purchased the two highest priced plots at £200 each. These were record prices paid for land in the Colony, higher than prices of prime land even in Durban, but Meer and Khan knew what they were doing. New mines were being opened all the time and the cash-earning population exploded all around them. Their shops consequently became rich mines in themselves, and Mohamed sent handsome money orders to his parents in Surat.
Mohamed Meer is remembered as a softly spoken gentleman who dressed meticulously. He wore a woollen achkan (long coat) over a long silk shirt, fastened alternately with gold and diamond buttons arranged on a gold chain. His shoes in soft leather were Indian in style. He wore a red fez around which he wound a Kashmiri shawl to form a turban. Mohamed was reported to be fair of complexion, handsome and dignified, commanding enormous respect. He participated fully in the social, religious and political aspects of the community and was instrumental in building the Dundee Mosque and overseeing its typically Indian architecture.
By the time of Mahatma Gandhi’s arrival in Natal in 1893, Mohamed was already a well-established businessman in Dundee. Gandhi relied on him to build up a membership for the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) in Northern Natal, and to report to him cases of maltreatment of Indian mineworkers. In a letter to his lifelong friend and confidant Herman Kallenbach, Gandhi makes mention of Mohamed Meer’s assistance at the time of the 1913 strike of indentured mineworkers:
30 October 1913
MY DEAR LOWER HOUSE
I sent you a full message from Ingogo which I hope you received. Mr Mahomed Meer is at Waschbank. He has the ‘phone. It was he who gave the information about the Ramsay Collieries assault. Please inquire further. You know that I telegraphed to the Protector at Durban and the Interior. You may now inquire further through Meer and if there (be) any workers send one to make local investigation.
MK GANDHI3
Mohamed’s brother Moosa left India and joined him in Natal for a time. He was followed by his brother Ismail (my paternal grandfather) who arrived in 1890 to manage a second shop Mohamed had opened in the Talana area of Dundee. The following year Mohamed’s youngest brother, Chota (my husband Ismail’s father), arrived and was placed under the tutelage of the manager of Mohamed’s Waschbank shop.
It is reported that Moosa arrived with a pair of fine bulls, which the brothers presented to the government in Pretoria. It is a family legend that the bulls, used for breeding, were classified genus Meer, but we have never found any evidence of this. Whatever Moosa’s plans for his future, these were prematurely terminated when he drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of Mauritius while on his way back to India.
Mohamed made several trips to Surat and during one of these, in 1894, aged 29, he married Fatima Amin, from his mother’s family in Garah. His brother, Ismail, aged 23, married Khatija Variawa, a granddaughter of Ahmedjee Asmaljee Meer.
Soon after their marriages the brothers returned to Natal. Their wives joined them later with their infant sons, born within months of each other, both named Moosa after their shipwrecked uncle. Fatima settled in Dundee with Mohamed. Khatija settled in Talana with Ismail.
The shop in Waschbank that was established by Mohamed and Chota Meer in 1893.
Once his brother Chota had learnt the business, Mohamed went into partnership with him in the Waschbank shop on a 60/40 basis. Chota proved to be an able businessman. In 1893, two years after his arrival, they built a new shop on the same site – the largest in the area – under the name of CA Meer. The businesses flourished and the two brothers prospered.
My
