109th anniversary: Padavatan brothers remembered for heroism during 1917 Umgeni floods - IOL

Back from left: Sabapathy Periyasamy Govender and Captain Mariemuthoo Padavatan. Front from left: Kuppusamy Naidoo, T Veloo, Gangan Padavatan and Rangasamy Naidoo.

Six Durban seine-netters risked their lives in a banana boat to rescue 176 people from the 1917 Umgeni flood. More than a century later, their largely forgotten act of courage still resonates with families and communities in KwaZulu-Natal, writes Sanjith Hannuman.

On Sunday, October 28, 1917, six fishermen took a banana boat into the Umgeni flood while four more held the rope on the bank. They brought 176 people out. 

The rain began on a Thursday, and by Saturday was falling harder than the ground could take. At about 2am on Sunday morning the Umgeni river reached Springfield Flats, the market-garden settlement known as Tin Town. Debris had jammed the railway bridge beside it, and when the bridge gave way, a wall of water and wreckage struck the houses below.

Most climbed onto their roofs. Between 2,000 and 2,500 people lived there. About 400 died and more than 2,000 were left homeless.

Before the fishermen, others went first. The water police boat nearly capsized. Constable Donovan commandeered a seine-netter’s boat but could not hold it steady. 

Herby Spradbrow took 17 people out in a motor boat, and others housed, fed and ferried survivors. It was not enough. 

As the day wore on, people were still on the roofs, some holding up jewellery as payment to anyone who would come.

The men who could do the next part were seine-netters, heirs to a method brought from the west coast of India and practised in Durban Bay from the 1860s. By 1887 some 204 Indians fished part or full time.

Mariemuthoo Padavatan, 30, chaired the Natal Indian Fishermen’s Association and captained the rescue. His older brother Gangan (1881 to 1945) managed its finances and administration, and had seven children with his wife Ponnama.

Sabapathy Govender was a noted boatbuilder. T. Veloo, a master shrimper, owned a banana boat. There was also Kuppusamy Naidoo, 16, and Rungasamy Naidoo, a fisherman.

On the bank were four more netters: Seaman Doorasamy, Chinathumby Govender, and the brothers Perumal and Rungasamy Pillay.

How a rope turned a flood into a seine net Mariemuthoo tied a trawling rope to a tree on high ground and the other end to the bow and round his waist, leaving his hands free. 

The four on the bank paid it out slowly on the way in and hauled hard on the way back. Four men rowed and two pulled people from the water. The boat had to stay parallel to the current or it could roll, and survivors lay flat to keep the weight low. 

Each crossing carried 30 to 40 people. 

On December 8, 1917, the City of Durban gave each of the six a gold medal, and Mariemuthoo also received a watch and a walking stick.

Money raised in their name went to the flood relief fund. The six said their service was a call from God and sought no payment. The fund met under one per cent of the need. Losses exceeded £30,000, and the Union government declined to call the flood a national disaster and gave nothing.

The river flooded the community again in 1935, 1973, 1976 and 1987, and in 1965 the seine-netters were moved to Chatsworth, 25 km from the sea.

A primary school there carries Mariemuthoo’s name, and Lifesaving Africa is reported to have honoured the six in 2019. A petition to name the river junction after them had stalled by the centenary. No state decoration or monument has been found.

Each of the 176 people was a person with a family, and each is an ancestor of someone alive today. No list of their names appears in anything reviewed, and no one has counted their descendants. Over 109 years, the line runs to four or five generations, so the number is likely to reach the thousands, though that is an inference, not a count. 

Many people owe their existence to a rope tied to a tree and a borrowed boat, and most have never been told.

Sanjith Hannuman is a director at AVIB and an employee benefits consultant. He holds an MBA from UKZN and is a Fellow of the Financial Planning Institute of South Africa.