More than two decades elapsed before white colonists in Natal began to question the consequences of
Indian immigration. And even then colonial reaction and attitude to the growing Indian presence was
not uniform. Occupational differences and the existence of three distinct regions within Natal – coastal,
midlands and northern – tended to blur if not retard the coalescing of opinion on the subject. The fact
that it ceased to be a polemical issue by the 1890s was a development which was neither sudden nor
predictable but rather an evolutionary response to the pervasion of the Indian population around the
Colony.