History
The British empire was hungry for sugar, and its new colony in Fiji had the soil and climate for bumper sugarcane yields. All it wanted was cheap labour, and so the ‘girmitiya’ system of bonded labour was born. It was a brutal system that sold many thousands of poor Indian men and women into undeclared slavery between 1879 and 1916. This episode is based on a first-person account by one of them