1917 Durban flood rescue: The Padavatan Six
Days of relentless rain. A river bursting through a sleeping settlement. And a group of civilian volunteers who stepped into the floodwaters to save lives. This is the story of The Padavatan Six, as told in SA Rescue: Out Alive.
Over 109 years ago, in late October, Durban was lashed by days of relentless rain. For Tin Town, a humble but vibrant settlement near the Umgeni River - that had become home for hundreds of former indentured labourers - the storm would become a disaster.
Many residents were asleep when floodwaters tore through the settlement. Homes were overwhelmed, families were trapped, and cries for help rose above the roar of the river.
In Episode 5 of SA Rescue: Out Alive, we revisit the extraordinary civilian-led rescue that followed, and the group of volunteers who would later be remembered as the Padavatan Six.
Legends of the Tide
This historical rescue is told through the lens of local author and filmmaker, Viroshen Chetty, who along with his co-author, the late Dr Neelan Govender, painstakingly researched their preeminent book, Legends of the Tide.
Listen to the full story at the top of this page or just below.
Legends of the Tide is one of the ways the history and legacy of the Durban Seine-netters and the broader community of former Indian indentured labours are kept alive.
It offers a deep dive into the travails of the expert fisherfolk who arrived in Durban from India with seine-netting skills and traces back the roots of Durban’s fishing culture.
Both Chetty and Govender's forebears were part of the collective of seine-netters that helped to build the Indian community in Durban and broader KZN post-indenture.
Dr Govender's father, Sabapathy Periyasamy Govender, was one of the group of civilian volunteers that went into a raging river to save the victims of a major flood in 1917.
Sabapathy Periyasamy's son, Dr Govender, was born in 1929. He became a community builder and later community elder in his own right, serving the residents of Chatsworth and other areas, mostly in the south of Durban.
When Dr Govender was around 50, he was given a daunting task by a fishing community elder. Dr Govender told The Sunday Tribune that the dying wish of the chair of the Seine-Netters Association, Bob Mariemuthoo, was for him to capture the lives and times of the seine-netters. That was in 1980.
Bob was the eldest son of Mariemuthoo Padavan, Perisamy’s fellow rescuer in the 1917 floods. The book started to come together in 2006 when Dr Govender drafted in his co-author, Chetty. And as he described it to the Tribune, it would be an eight-year ‘labour of love’ to the tome’s release.
This episode honours The Padavatan Six and the civilian volunteers who risked their lives to save others during the 1917 Durban floods.
Previously on SA Rescue: Out Alive
Meanwhile, the previous episode of SA Rescue: Out Alive went back to the wildfires of 2007 that ravaged parts of KwaZulu-Natal.
One blaze that broke out on commercial forestry land in Zululand threatened a small rural community. Land and aerial resources are pooled to urgently save lives.
Listen to Episode 4 below:
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SA Rescue: Out Alive is an East Coast Radio Podcast. Find all our episodes below: