ANIL NAURIYA
First Edition : 2006
Electronic Version
© Anil Nauriya
First Edition (Hard Copy Version) Published by:National Gandhi Museum
In association with:
Gyan Publishing House
New Delhi-110002This book is a richly detailed account of the people and events surrounding Gandhi's experience in Africa and its aftermath. It provides an original narrative of how Gandhi's stance in relation to emancipatory struggles evolved over time, focussing especially on the period since the high noon of his South Africa days. The relationship between Gandhi, Africa and its leaders was mutually productive and symbiotic; a connection which has often been underanalysed.
Through extensive examples and a close reading of documents from the era, the author makes clear the significance of passive or civil resistance as a strategy and traces some of its contours over Gandhi's lifetime. The resulting book opens up fertile new areas of research and presents us with a holistic picture of the salience of Gandhi for Africans and Africa for Gandhi.
ANIL NAURIYA is a New Delhi-based lawyer and writes on contemporary history and politics.
CONTENTS
Foreword
Preface
Author's Note
FOREWORD
Many books have been written on Gandhi's twenty-one years in South Africa, the birth of Satyagraha and the transformation of Gandhi from a lawyer-servant of the Indian community to a Mahatma. But, unfortunately, there is not a single book on the interaction of Gandhi with the African people and their leaders, and on the lasting impact of his life and philosophy on South Africa.
Gandhi himself is largely responsible for this omission. He said little of his discussions with African leaders of his time. He wrote in Harijan (July 1, 1939): "I yield to no one in my regard for the Zulus, the Bantus and the other races of South Africa. I used to enjoy intimate relations with many of them. I had the privilege of often advising them." Who did he advise and what was his advice? We do not know from his writings. It may be that he was concerned that the racist rulers would use any publicity to those discussions to allege a conspiracy against the racist order.
When Gandhi arrived in South Africa, the Africans had been defeated and virtually enslaved. Indian indentured labour had been treated as semi-slaves. The authorities had begun to break the promises made to them about land and freedom after indenture, and to harass the free Indians in order to force all but the workers under contract to leave.
The Europeans, and even many educated and Christian Africans, treated the Zulu masses as barbaric and uncivilized, calling them kaffirs. Little was known of the culture and civilization of the Africans. In countering arguments of the whites that Indians were uncivilized like the Africans and hence not entitled to civic rights, some of the early memoranda by Gandhi contain statements reflecting the current prejudices.
But as he came to know the Africans, he overcame the initial prejudices and developed great love and respect for the Africans. In 1908 he spoke of his vision of a South African nation in which "all the different races commingle and produce a civilization that perhaps the world has not yet seen".
His experiences in South Africa - his awareness of the savagery of the Anglo-Boer War, the heroism of the Boer women and the brutality of the white settlers in Natal during the Bambata rebellion against a poll tax - may well have inspired him to discover satyagraha as much as any books he had read. In turn, African leaders were inspired by the satyagraha in South Africa and the campaigns of civil disobedience in India led by Gandhi.
In 1946-48, when Gandhi was deeply distressed by the communal riots in India, as if his life's work had been in vain, the Indian community in South Africa was engaged in a great passive resistance campaign, with the support and solidarity of the African and Coloured people. He was encouraged that the spirit of satyagraha survived in the land of its birth, and guided the leaders of the resistance, Dr. Yusuf Dadoo and Dr. G. M. Naicker. When white hooligans brutally attacked non-violent resisters, including women, he declared: "I would not shed a single tear if all the satyagrahis in South Africa were wiped out. Thereby they will not only bring deliverance to themselves but point the way to the Negroes and vindicate the honour of India".
Leaders of the African National Congress were impressed by the sacrifices and the organizational ability of the Indians. In 1952, the ANC, in cooperation with the South African Indian Congress, launched the "Campaign of Defiance against Unjust Laws". Within a few years, the African-Americans, under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., began mass non-violent resistance against racism in the United States. These great movements, which drew inspiration from Gandhi, shattered the myth that Africans were incapable of non-violent resistance. Active non-violence spread around the globe in colonial revolutions and the peace movements.
Mandela became a mass leader in 1952 as Volunteer-in-Chief of the Defiance Campaign, with Moulvi I.A. Cachalia, son of a close associate of Gandhi, as his deputy. The South African liberation movement since then has been honoured by Nobel Peace Prizes to three African leaders - Chief Albert Luthuli, Bishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. That provides a fitting reply to those who criticized Gandhi for not venturing to lead the Africans but encouraging them to develop their own leadership.
I believe that Gandhi had an impact not only on the oppressed people of South Africa but also on the whites, and that the legacy of Gandhi was one of the factors which made possible the miracle of reconciliation which helped transform South Africa in the 1990s from a racist state to a non-racial democratic state.
Mr. Nauriya has made a thorough study of the letters, articles and speeches of Gandhi, and other available evidence, to produce this booklet on the evolution of his friendship and love for the African majority in South Africa. It is a valuable contribution for understanding Gandhi.
E. S. Reddy
New York,PREFACE
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi went to South Africa in 1893, as a young barrister on a short-term assignment. Within a few days he experienced a series of racial humiliations, including the well-known incident when he was thrown out of the first class train compartment at the Pietermaritzburg railway station on account of the colour of his skin.
Gandhiji remained in South Africa for 21 years. When he left it finally in 1914, he was already known for his philosophy and practice of nonviolent resistance to racial injustice, oppression and exploitation. This came to be described variously as passive resistance, civil resistance, civil disobedience or Satyagraha. In South Africa Gandhiji evolved and matured from an upper class Indian professional to a political mass leader of Indians cutting across classes in their struggle against racial discrimination. In tandem with this evolution, he also came to envision, by the time of his Johannesburg speech on May 18, 1908, a multi-racial polity and society in South Africa.
Gandhiji's role as a pathfinder in relation to African struggles was combined with an emphasis on non-violence. Although there were variations of technique and method over time and space, the "name of Gandhi has had repercussions" across Africa, to adopt a comment by George Bennett in his essay on "East and Central Africa" [in Peter Judd, (ed.) African Independence, Dell Publishing Co, New York, 1963, p. 402]. That Gandhiji's philosophy and half-a-century long nonviolent and mass-based struggles against racial discrimination in South Africa and against colonial rule in India acted as an inspiration in South Africa and elsewhere in Africa is indicated also by the history of the collapse of colonial rule in various countries in Africa after India attained freedom. African leaders like Nelson Mandela, Kwame Nkrumah, Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, among others, have in some form or another, acknowledged Gandhiji as an inspiration. Even a leader like Joshua Nkomo of Zimbabwe, who found Gandhiji's methods "not appropriate" to the "special national situation" in his country, nevertheless observes that Gandhiji's movements were "an inspiration to us, showing that independence need not remain a dream". [Nkomo (Joshua), The Story of My Life, Methuen, London, 1984, p. 73].
As one writer has put it: "Of all the Asian independence movements, the Indian movement has undoubtedly stirred the imagination of African nationalists the most. And it is not difficult to see why. First, there was the personality of Mahatma Gandhi. The message cabled by the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) on his death expressed the sentiments of all African nationalists, for whom Gandhi was the 'bearer of the torch of liberty of oppressed peoples' and whose life had been 'an inspiration to colonials everywhere'." [George H T Kimble, Tropical Africa, Volume 2: Society & Polity, The Twentieth Century Fund, New York, 1960, p. 285]
Gandhiji's struggle and method inspired and interested African-Americans as well. This became evident as articles relating to him and his activities began to appear in African-American journals at least as early as 1919. Hubert Harrison and Dr W E B DuBois were among the prominent African-American intellectuals who began to write and speak about him at this time. Later Gandhiji's method became a model for the African-American struggle under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., as is well known.
Shri Anil Nauriya, a lawyer practising at the Supreme Court of India, has worked on India's freedom movement. He has also lectured in South Africa on the subject of this essay. The study was undertaken bearing in mind the growing need, with the passage of time, for an understanding of the abiding relationship that Gandhiji came to develop with Africans and their struggle for liberation and how he both contributed to, and learnt from, these struggles and experiences. The study is focussed on, but not confined to, South Africa. It provides also a sense of Gandhiji's live interface with the rest of Africa and the struggles of African-Americans. In conducting the study, Shri Nauriya has sought also to bring together a significant body of material which, though available, seems insufficiently utilized in current scholarship.
The study is a step toward filling a gap in the literature on Gandhiji. It also points the way for further work in this direction. The publication will be especially welcome at this time as it was precisely a century ago that Gandhiji propounded the ideology and technique of Satyagraha with the resolution on the subject being passed before a gathering of Indians in Johannesburg in the Transvaal, South Africa on September 11, 1906. He stressed the need for resistance of the so-called Asiatic Ordinance, or the "Black Act" as it came to be known upon its enactment by the Transvaal legislature, and insisted on a readiness to suffer the consequences of defiance, which could mean prison or worse.
This Museum is grateful to Shri Anil Nauriya for this painstaking and meticulously written thesis on the evolution of Gandhiji.
The Museum is obliged also to Shri E S Reddy for his Foreword. Mr Reddy, has been Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, and was Director of the UN's Centre against Apartheid for a period of more than 20 years. A close friend of many leading figures in African liberation struggles, few are more familiar than he with the history of the South African struggle against racialism and colonialism. In addition, his has been a life-long pursuit of collection of historical records and information on the subject.
Dr. Y. P. Anand
Director
National Gandhi Museum,
Rajghat, New Delhi- 110002
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The electronic version has been prepared to improve access to the materials brought together in this work. I hope it will prove useful to the general reader apart from scholars. Some errors noticed in the printed version have been corrected.
The index is not reproduced here. The spelling of the name of Dr A. Abdurrahman conforms to a spelling often encountered in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CW) published by the Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, New Delhi [1958-1994], i.e., the original or standard edition. Interested readers who have suggestions for further improvement of this work or who come across any error may please write to me at instituteone@gmail.com.
A.N.
October 2006
I
An Overview
(i) "The Indians do not regret that capable Natives can exercise the franchise. They would regret it if it were otherwise. They, however, assert that they too, if capable, should have the right." Gandhi in The Times of Natal, October 26, 1894 (The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, (CW) Volume 1, p. 166).
(ii) "They can use the powerful argument that they are the children of the soil…We can petition the Secretary of State for India, whereas they cannot. They belong largely to the Christian community and can therefore avail themselves of the help of their priests. Such help is not available to us." (Gandhi in Indian Opinion, March 24, 1906, CW, Vol 5, p. 243)
(iii) " We hear nowadays a great deal of the segregation policy, as if it were possible to put people in water-tight compartments." (Gandhi, speaking in Johannesburg, May 18, 1908, CW, Vol 8, p. 243)
(iv) "If we look into the future, is it not a heritage we have to leave to posterity, that all the different races commingle and produce a civilisation that perhaps the world has not yet seen?" (Gandhi in his Johannesburg Speech, May 18, 1908, CW, Vol 8, p. 246)
(v) "Indians have too much in common with the Africans to think of isolating themselves from them. They cannot exist in South Africa for any length of time without the active sympathy and friendship of the Africans. I am not aware of the general body of the Indians having ever adopted an air of superiority towards their African brethren, and it would be a tragedy if any such movement were to gain ground among the Indian settlers of South Africa…. And what is more, the South African whites are able to translate their contempt and prejudice against us into action whereas ours towards the South Africans can only react against ourselves." (Gandhi in Young India, April 5, 1928, CW, Vol 36, p. 190)
(vi) " England has got successful competitors in America, Japan, France, Germany. It has competitors in the handful of mills in India, and as there has been an awakening in India, even so there will be an awakening in South Africa with its vastly richer resources - natural, mineral and human. The mighty English look quite pigmies before the mighty races of Africa. They are noble savages after all, you will say. They are certainly noble, but no savages and in the course of a few years the Western nations may cease to find in Africa a dumping ground for their wares." (Gandhi, speaking at Oxford, October 24, 1931, CW, Vol 48, p.225)
(vii) "You, on the other hand, are the sons of the soil who are being robbed of your inheritance. You are bound to resist that. Yours is a far bigger issue." (Gandhi to Rev S.S. Tema, member of the African National Congress, January 1, 1939, CW, Vol 68, pp 272-273.)
It is usual to record Gandhi's evolution in South Africa and his application of passive resistance or Satyagraha to achieve political objectives. Gandhi's campaigns in South Africa resulted in his being incarcerated at various times in the early twentieth century in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Dundee, Volksrust and Bloemfontein jails. In the end Indian women also participated in these campaigns and filled many prisons. Gandhi's wife Kasturba, along with other Indian women including Valiamma, was imprisoned in Pietermaritzburg jail.
This essay builds upon and incorporates material prepared for a lecture delivered by the author at the Indian Cultural Centre in Durban on June 29, 2004. It attempts to focus not so much on Gandhi's campaigns on behalf of Indians in Africa as to explore the interface between Gandhi and the African struggles. This includes Gandhi's positioning himself in empathy with the educational network then available to Young Africa, his choice of a settlement in Phoenix, next not only to the Inanda center of Isaiah Shembe and of the Inanda Seminary but also to the Ohlange institution established by John Dube who was praised by Gandhi in 1905 and who was in 1912 to be the first President-General of the African National Congress (then called the South African Native National Congress); Gandhi's contact with the Trappists of Mariannhill, who in 1891 had been described by the Umtata Herald as unique "educators for a people who still have to obtain their sustenance by means of agriculture and handwork"; and his support for John Tengo Jabavu's educational initiative at Lovedale.
These were criss-crossing currents: Dube is the author of a book on Shembe, another of Dube's books is published by Mariannhill, and Dube's journal is printed initially at the International Press set up by Madanjit Vyavaharik where Indian Opinion was also printed.
It is probably fair to say that such interactions along with the successively wider nature of the mass struggles led by Gandhi helped expand his own horizons. In a deeply striking way, Gandhi seems to furnish an instance of 'becoming the change that you wish to see'. The young lawyer, not yet 24, had been brought to South Africa by Indian merchant clients and initially shared some of the racial and class prejudices prevalent among those for whom he worked. He tended sometimes to use the term Kaffir, then current among both Europeans and Indians settled in South Africa, to refer to the bulk of the African population. As a subject of the British Empire, as Gandhi then saw himself, he sought non-discrimination by the European but resented the equation of the educated section of Indians with the 'raw native'. If, however, the young Gandhi shared any prejudices towards sections of the population, he outgrew these by around 1908, that is some six years before he left Africa.
E S Reddy has noted that contrary to certain attempts to suggest that Gandhi spoke only for Indian merchants, the fact is that those who followed him in passive resistance in the Transvaal a hundred years ago in 1907 and the thousands who went on strike in Natal in 1913 "were mostly working people from South India and Hindustanis".
As we see Gandhi outgrow class limitations, so too emerges his mature perspective on the future development of Africa; by 1908 we hear him, now in his late thirties, urge "that all the different races commingle and produce a civilisation that perhaps the world has not yet seen". And by 1909 it is Gandhi, still a couple of months short of 40, who commends Thoreau's Civil Disobedience to the Coloured Peoples' leader, Dr Abdurrahman. In the following year, Gandhi welcomes the election of the African leader, Rev Dr Walter Rubusana, (a future Vice President of the yet to be born South African Native National Congress, later to be known as the ANC) to the Cape Provincial Council.
In July 1911 Gandhi's journal, Indian Opinion, notes the activities of (Pixley) Seme towards the formation of the future ANC and in January 1912 welcomes the founding of the organisation in January 1912 with John Dube as President as "an awakening" (Indian Opinion, February 10, 1912). Later in 1912, Gandhi takes the visiting Indian leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale to visit John Dube at the Ohlange Institute.
In the following year, Indian Opinion welcomed and gave prominence to the African Women's struggle in Orange Free State and supported John Dube's criticism of the Natives Land Act.
Working among Indians in South Africa, Gandhi was aware of the wider African implications of his work, many of which had become visible before he left Africa in 1914.
Visiting England in 1931 he was to make it clear of those South African races who "are ground down under exploitation" that: "Our deliverance must mean their deliverance. But, if that cannot come about, I should have no interest in a partnership with Britain, even if it were of benefit to India." (Young India, November 19, 1931, CW, Vol 48, p. 261).
It is this Gandhi, with his mind opened in Africa, as it were, who goes on to lead the struggle in India and, in 1943, to reiterate to the British Government even from behind prison walls that he sought the freedom of India as "an earnest and promise" of similar freedom for "all other subject peoples in Asia and Africa", a statement to which the eminent Nigerian leader, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe was to direct the attention of a British audience some years later.
Growing in empathy with increased experience of South African developments, Gandhi explored scope for co-operation with Africans, although he was for many years cautious about possibilities of an actually amalgamated struggle. But by 1946-47 he endorsed joint struggle as well, while continuing to emphasise non-violence. (CW, Vol 83, p.353 and CW, Vol 87, p. 28).
Gandhi had become, both before and after his assassination in 1948, a source of inspiration in Africa, about which Nelson Mandela has written so eloquently. Various South African movements that followed in 1913, 1919, 1946-48 and 1952 often carried, in diverse ways and degrees, a Gandhi stamp.
There were to be debates within the African National Congress and in Africa as a whole on the subject of non-violent struggle which in some way paralleled similar debates that had taken place continually and particularly in 1934 in the Indian National Congress.
The freedom movements both in India and in Africa were to seek and to find their own answers to the question, but the fact of the debate ensured an element of deliberation which earned a measure of universal respect for freedom movements in both continents.
In a 1956 preface to his autobiography, Kwame Nkrumah wrote: "After months of studying Gandhi's policy, and watching the effect that it had, I began to see that, when backed by a strong political organisation it could be the solution to the colonial problem." (The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah, Thomas Nelson & Sons, Edinburgh, 1959, p. vi).
Inevitably, this influence and interaction of ideas extended not merely to such parts of Africa as were under British rule but also affected attitudes and struggles in other parts of that continent and in the rest of the world.
Dr W E B DuBois, the inspiration behind the Pan-African movement, referred to Gandhi in the context of resolving racial conflict especially in the American South:
"If we …. solve our antithesis; great Gandhi lives again. If we cannot civilise the South, or will not even try, we continue in contradiction and riddle." [W E B DuBois, Will the Great Gandhi Live Again?, National Guardian, February 11, 1957, in David Levering Lewis (ed.), W E B DuBois: A Reader, Henry Holt & Company, New York, 1995, p. 360 ].
He wrote that it may well be that " real human equality and brotherhood in the United States will come only under the leadership of another Gandhi." (W E B DuBois, Gandhi and the American Negroes, Gandhi Marg, Bombay, July 1957, Vol 1, Number 3, p.177).
Around the same time as Nkrumah wrote his Autobiography, Dr Martin Luther King recorded the contribution of the Gandhian method of non-violent resistance towards building in the United States "one of the most potent weapons available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom." (Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1958, p. 85).
In this essay an attempt has been made to examine Gandhi's wider African concerns, within and outside the South African context, and to see how this interaction influenced African struggles as well as Gandhi's own understanding and movements. While Gandhi is known to have inspired generations of African thinkers and leaders, and to have, in turn, been influenced by African struggles, this impact and interaction needs to be the subject of further study.
The present essay is a contribution to the Satyagraha Centenary being observed in 2006. While the first two sections seek to introduce the subject and to place it in its context, sections III to X of the essay run, mainly, along a timeline. The sections are merely for reading convenience and actually form a connected whole along with section XI, the Epilogue.
II
The Context
"Yours is a far bigger issue"
The generations in England, India and South Africa which were witness to Gandhi's struggles by and large understood the complexities of the circumstances under which he lived and worked in the three countries. To have such a "feel" for the times is what may be called a sense of history. It is part of the essential equipment of a historian who would understand the period. Some of Gandhi's earlier remarks regarding Blacks with whom he came into contact, could be seen as dismissive and disparaging regardless of what Gandhi's intention may have been. However, such remarks were, with extended experience, not made after 1908. There was a definite widening in Gandhi's outlook and growth in his understanding. It is that widening that is implicitly celebrated when Gandhi is celebrated.
A consideration of Gandhi's attitude towards the Boer War and the Zulu Rebellion also needs to be informed with the understanding that at this point Gandhi was working for rights within the framework of the British Empire. He felt that rights flowed from duties and as such he offered his nursing and medical assistance to the British. His attitude towards the Great Indian Revolt of 1857 was, at this time, quite similar. (Indian Opinion, July 9, 1903, CW, Vol 3, p. 357).
Another issue concerns the fact that Gandhi did not draw in Blacks into his movements.
The laws governing Africans and Indians in South Africa were different. The provocations for protest were therefore often different. "Their struggles are of different types", Gandhi wrote. (Indian Opinion, July 27, 1907, CW, Vol 7, p. 125) As a random illustration he points out that the Cape Immigration Act caused hardship to the Indian community but had little effect on Africans. (Idem) Of the Africans, he said, "as South Africa is their mother country, they have a better right here than we have" (Idem). Each - the Africans and the Indians - have, in the context of their respective struggles, "some advantages over the other" (Idem). In the Cape there was a limited franchise for Indians and Africans. Gandhi advised: "If the natives and the Indians of the Cape realize the value of the vote, they can still bring about many changes", even though it was "not absolutely necessary" that African and Asian votes "should always be cast on the same side". (Idem).
Although their struggles would not always converge, nevertheless, Gandhi had given thought to the question of mixing the African struggle with the Indian. At the time he considered the matter - in the infant years of the 20th Century -- the issue was posed in the following terms: Indians in South Africa had started a struggle and had to decide whether to involve Africans in their travails. Gandhi decided against doing so not out of a lack of sympathy for the Africans but precisely because of his concern for them. Indians had another country - India - to fall back to. Africans did not. The consequences of the struggle could be different for Africans and Indians. As the one leading the struggle, he had to consider these.
Most Indians at this time were indentured labourers, a system of slavery in another form as Gandhi described it (Indian Opinion, October 3, 1908, CW, Vol 9, pp 82-83; ) or a "state of semi-slavery", as he called it on another occasion (Samalochak, December 1915, CW, Vol 13, p. 146). This system was finally abolished later as a result of public pressure generated largely by the Gandhi-led campaigns in South Africa and India. Agitation by Indians in South Africa could mean hardships, but the Colonialists had possible remedies for most of them: imprisonment or deportation to India or the first followed by the second. The deportation remedy did not exist for the Africans. If the Africans came into the struggle and violence was resorted to there could have been prolonged repression of which the Africans would have had to bear the main brunt. Gandhi had already witnessed the brutality with which the Zulu rebellion was suppressed. We saw later what happened in South Africa in roughly the second half of the twentieth century once the organised African struggle began. That experience appears to have vindicated Gandhi's early decision.
In 1936 Gandhi was asked by an African-American delegation to India: "Did the South African Negro take any part in your movement?" Gandhi replied: "No, I purposely did not invite them. It would have endangered their cause." (CW, Vol 62, p.199).
Reluctant at this stage to call for a common front, he told the Press on July 8, 1939: "Bantus can only damage and complicate their cause by mixing it up with the Indian" (CW, Vol 69, p. 408). He advised against a non-European front. However he added in the same article that his advice "should not deter the Indians from forming a non-European front if they are sure thereby of winning their freedom."
Earlier, speaking on January 1, 1939 to Rev SS Tema of the African National Congress he had expressed his doubts about the advisability of a non-European Front. But, in Gandhi's view, even without a joint front, there could be co-operation. Reminding Rev. Tema that the African issue was "far bigger", Gandhi told him: "The Indians can co-operate with you in a number of ways. They can help you by always acting on the square towards you. They may not put themselves in opposition to your legitimate aspirations, or run you down as 'savages' while exalting themselves as 'cultured' people in order to secure concessions for themselves at your expense." ( Harijan, February 18, 1939, CW, Vol 68, p. 273)
Though cautious at this time about an amalgamated struggle, Gandhi provided a neat formula for mutual understanding. He declared that if Indian rights conflicted with African "vital interests", he would "advise the forgoing of those rights" (Harijan, July 1, 1939, CW, Vol 69, p. 377).
He was in touch with Dr Yusuf Dadoo and Dr G M Naicker who sought in the 1940s to build a joint struggle of Indians, Africans, the Coloured People and the liberal-minded whites. This was with Gandhi's support. Dr Dadoo was a Marxist who in his student days in India at the Aligarh Muslim University had opposed sectarian (or "communal") politics. Like Dr Naicker, he admired Gandhi. (See E S Reddy, Gandhiji's Vision of a Free South Africa, Sanchar Publishing House, New Delhi, 1995, pp. 108-112).
With the changed situation in South Africa, where a new South Africa-born Indian generation had come to the fore, Gandhi endorsed a joint struggle. However he did maintain that it ought to be non-violent. (E S Reddy, Ibid., pp 55-61). A deputation from South Africa led by Sorabji Rustomji came to India in 1946 (CW, Vol 83, pp 352-354). It was protesting against racial legislation in South Africa. A member of the delegation asked Gandhi: "You have said we should associate with Zulus and Bantus. Does it not mean joining them in a common anti-white front? " Gandhi replied: "Yes, I have said that we should associate with the Zulus, Bantus, etc…. It will be good, if you can fire them with the spirit of non-violence". (CW, Vol 83, p 353) Gandhi remarked of the deputationists' cause on May 27, 1946: "The cause is the cause of the honour of India and through her of all the exploited coloured races of the earth, whether they be brown, yellow or black. It is worth all the suffering of which they are capable". (CW, Vol 84, p. 215).
Gandhi's article in the Harijan of September 22, 1946 sums up his attitude:
"News comes from Durban that a group of Indians has sprung up in South Africa who have lost faith in satyagraha. They cherish the dream that they can overthrow the rule of the White man there, only by joining forces with the Negroes, the coloured people, other Asiatics and European sympathizers and adopting violent means. The rumour, if there is any truth in it, is disturbing and a definite fly in the ointment. All, whether they believe in non-violence or not, should realise that Indians in South Africa gained world-wide esteem simply because in spite of being a handful, they showed infinite capacity for suffering and did not, through losing their patience, resort to sabotage and violence. They learnt the wholesome lesson that true well-being springs from suffering and that victory lies in unity. From my own experience, my firm advice to Indians in South Africa is that they should, on no account, be lured away into throwing aside the matchless weapon of satyagraha.
This does not, however, imply that they are not to accept the help of the coloured people, Negroes and any other sympathizers or that they will not help them in their need, should occasion arise. The only condition is that satyagraha should be their one and only weapon." (CW, Vol 85, pp. 297-298).
In August 1946 tens of thousands of African mine workers had gone on strike for an increase in their miserable wages and working conditions. They were brutally suppressed and several were killed by the police. The Indian Passive Resistance Councils of Natal and Transvaal, in the midst of their own struggle, helped the Africans. Dr. Dadoo was charged with incitement of the strike, tried while he was already in prison for defying the Ghetto Act, but later acquitted. Some Whites, Africans, and Coloured People had also participated at this time in passive resistance in solidarity with the Indians and had also gone to prison . This unity is here being endorsed by Gandhi (see Section X below). The number was small and symbolic as the issue was Indian rights but it heralded a wider unity.
The same number of the journal Harijan ( September 22, 1946) carried a statement by Jawaharlal Nehru: "The issue raised in South Africa is something more than an Indian issue. It is an issue which affects all Asians and, of course, all Africans. Therefore, this co-operation is necessary between all those affected. But the co-operation can only be effective and succeed on the basis of peaceful methods and it would be folly to indulge in violence."
While in South Africa, Gandhi reached out to Africans like John Dube who was later to be the first President-General of the African National Congress. Dube who, like Gandhi, admired Booker T Washington, ran an industrial school, the Ohlange Institute, in Inanda near Phoenix. "There was frequent social contact between the inmates of the Phoenix settlement and the Ohlange Institute" (See E S Reddy, Gandhiji's Vision of a Free South Africa, op. cit. p.49). Reddy writes that John Dube's paper Ilange lase Natal, ("Sun of Natal"), an African weekly in English and Zulu, used to be printed in the Indian Opinion press until the Ohlange Institute acquired a press of its own. Gandhi commended Dube's work as he did that of Tengo Jabavu to set up a college for Africans. (See also CW, Vol 5, p. 55). There appear to have been some early African-American contacts as well. With Dube's education in America, African-Americans had a close association with Ohlange. According to one account, an African-American woman, Miss Blackburn, was Superintendent of the Students' hostel at Ohlange and she "often came to Phoenix". (Sushila Nayar, Mahatma Gandhi: Satyagraha at Work, Volume IV, Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, 1989, p. 714).
During his major struggles in South Africa and after his return to India in 1915 Gandhi remained conscious that when he worked for Indian rights or for Indian freedom back in India, it would be of benefit to other oppressed peoples. Gandhi said on July 12, 1944: "Today there is no hope for the Negroes, but Indian freedom will fill them with hope" (CW, Vol 77, p.351) . He knew that his struggles were based on and advanced the principle of racial equality regardless of who immediately suffered for that cause by direct participation in movements connected with it.
III
The Widening Horizon
" I witnessed some
of the horrors…."
On the franchise question in Natal, soon after the founding of the Natal Indian Congress, Gandhi who had turned 25 years old a bare three weeks earlier, declared: "The Indians do not regret that capable Natives can exercise the franchise. They would regret it if it were otherwise. They, however, assert that they too, if capable, should have the right." (The Times of Natal, October 26, 1894, CW, Vol 1, p. 166).
Soon after Gandhi's arrival in South Africa, he came into contact with Trappists, a Catholic order of largely German Monks who had settled in South Africa. It was initially for their vegetarianism, about which he had read in England, that he sought them out in Mariannhill, near Pinetown, a village "16 miles by rail from Durban". He was pleasantly surprised by what he found and praised them for their good treatment of Africans: "They believe in no colour distinctions. These Natives are accorded the same treatment as the whites. They are mostly children. They get the same food as the brothers, and are dressed as well as they themselves are." (The Vegetarian, May 18, 1895, CW, Vol 1, p.226). Gandhi noted that the Trappists "love and respect, and are in turn loved and respected by, the Natives living in their neighbourhood who, as a rule, supply them with the converts." (Idem).
The Order at Mariannhill, was founded by Francis Pfanner. "Red Wendell", as the Abbot has been called with reference to the name given to him by his parents, was perhaps too radical not only for the Church of Rome but also for the Trappists themselves. Ultimately, on the Abbot's death in 1909, Mariannhill was constituted into a separate Order. Among those who may have been there when Gandhi visited Mariannhill for the first time in 1895 were the second Abbot (Abbot Amandus Schoelzig) and a young Polish woman, Mary Lassak who, according to the official history of Mariannhill, " took charge of the girls and taught them". The emphasis on handwork and the various workshops - "blacksmiths', tinsmiths', carpenters', shoemakers', tanners' ", the oil machine and the printing department - had impressed Gandhi as had the convent and the skills taught there. A photograph suggests that sandal-making was also among the various vocations taught, a skill Gandhi was later to introduce into his own settlement. He found the quarters for the African inmates (there were 1,200 Africans living on the Mission) somewhat stuffy and cramped but on the whole he came back satisfied that the Trappists believed in no colour distinctions.
Certain features of Mariannhill, including the dignity of labour and the African presence that Gandhi noticed there, were to be introduced also in the settlements which Gandhi established in South Africa.
In India on a brief visit in the following year, Gandhi received news from South Africa leading him to protest in print on learning that African and Indian boys were used as targets and shot in their faces by a picnic party of European children in Natal. (The Times of India, October 20, 1896, CW, Vol 2, p. 87).
On returning in January 1897, Gandhi found that he was now even more unwelcome than before and he was in fact assaulted and nearly lynched by European gangs in the course of anti-Indian demonstrations in Durban.
When the Boer War broke out two years later, Gandhi found that: "The Volunteers who have gone to the front to fight for the Queen's cause are mostly those who took the most prominent part in the now notorious anti-Indian demonstration of 1897 in Durban". [The Times of India (Weekly edition), December 9, 1899, CW, Vol 3, p. 119]. He decided that as the Indians "were British subjects, and as such demanded rights, they ought to forget their domestic differences, and irrespective of their opinion on the justice of the war, render some service, no matter how humble, on the battlefield during the crisis, even if it were to act as bearers of the wounded in the Volunteer camp." (Idem). He thus served along with some other Indians as part of the Ambulance Corps.
In October 1901 Gandhi sailed for India, having promised to return within a year if required by the Indian community. At the end of the following year, in December 1902, he was back in Durban.
It is now that a new phase in his evolution starts, in which he begins to see himself as more than a mere passer-by in South Africa.
A few months after his return to South Africa, Gandhi criticised the Bloemfontein Municipal Ordinance of the Orange River Colony under which "Natives" and "Coloured persons" could be "removed like criminals or cattle from one place to another at the sweet will of the Corporation" (Indian Opinion, August 6, 1903, CW, Vol 3, p. 399).
The Johannesburg Town Council earned a sharp rebuke from Gandhi for the proposal that "every Native holding a cycle permit and riding a cycle within the municipal area, should wear on his left arm, in a conspicuous position, a numbered badge which shall be issued to him together with his permit". Gandhi referred to this as "persecution" and praised the minority in the Council who "did not hesitate to defend the Native against unnecessary and wanton indignity." (Indian Opinion, February 4, 1905, CW, Vol 4, p. 347).
A few months later Gandhi raises his voice again against the report of the Native Commission under which the Coloured community in the Transvaal, even if already enfranchised, would retain the franchise only in provincial elections but lose it "in the event of elections for a Federal Parliament" (CW, Vol 4, p. 351). He deplored this as "being much at one with the general attitude adopted by the white population of South Africa towards the non-white. In matters of Colour prejudice, it is, unfortunately, almost impossible to convince by logical argument. Where blind prejudice rules, justice goes by the board. We are afraid that the Coloured community of the Transvaal will have to wait long before they succeed in securing the recognition of what we conceive to be their just rights. We trust that they will continue to protest against ill-considered treatment and to urge the inherent justice of their demands." (Indian Opinion, February 11, 1905, CW, Vol 4, p. 351). Gandhi declared: "We can only say that the Coloured community has our fullest sympathy in its endeavour to escape from political oblivion." (Idem)
In 1905 there was a move in the Transvaal to deprive and restrict African rights in land. Gandhi protested strongly against such a measure (Indian Opinion, August 12, 1905, CW, Vol 5, pp 39-40). He records that before the Boer War Africans had at least been free to own land in the Transvaal. In his writings he repeatedly points out that one of the justifications offered for the Boer War had been the treatment meted out to the Coloured races by the Dutch. It had therefore been presented as a "war of emancipation" (Ibid., p. 39). Yet, Gandhi cites statements in support of the view that "the treatment the Coloured races have been receiving in the Transvaal since British occupation is worse than before." (Idem)
He puts Lord Selborne, the Governor of the Transvaal, on test by holding the administrator to his assertion that: "If in any respect the British administration is unjust to the Native, civilised or uncivilised, it is a blot and a stain on our administration, and one which I feel personally as an implication of disgrace." (Indian Opinion, August 12, 1905, CW, Vol 5, pp 39-40). Adds Gandhi: "May His Excellency have sufficient courage and strength to initiate the policy he has thus boldly enunciated!". (Ibid., p. 40).
A few weeks later Gandhi quoted appreciatively a "very impressive" speech by John Dube in Natal. The Natal-born Dube, who was later to be the first President of the African National Congress, was a couple of years younger to Gandhi. In the course of what Gandhi described as an "eloquent speech", Dube argued that for the Africans "there was no country other than South Africa; and to deprive them of their rights over lands, etc., was like banishing them from their home." (Indian Opinion, September 2, 1905, CW, Vol 5, p. 55). Gandhi hailed Dube as an African "of whom one should know" (Idem). He referred appreciatively to Dube who "imparts education to his brethren, teaching them various trades and crafts and preparing them for the battle of life." (Idem). Gandhi remained impressed with and close to Dube.
An event that took place seven years later may be mentioned at this point. When the South African Native National Congress (later renamed African National Congress) was formed in January 1912 it was Dube who was chosen its first President-General. The formation of the great African party was hailed by Gandhi's Indian Opinion as an "awakening" (Indian Opinion, February 10, 1912). And in November 1912 took place the historic meeting, which is referred to below, between Gandhi, John Dube, and the Indian statesman Gopal Krishna Gokhale who was then visiting South Africa.
Nelson Mandela was to observe more than 80 years later: "M.K Gandhi and John Dube, first President of the African National Congress were neighbours in Inanda, and each influenced the other, for both men established, at about the same time, two monuments to human development within a stone's throw of each other, the Ohlange Institute and the Phoenix Settlement. Both institutions suffer today the trauma of the violence that has overtaken that region; hopefully, both will rise again, phoenix-like, to lead us to undreamed heights."[Nelson Mandela, Gandhi The Prisoner: A Comparison, in B. R Nanda (ed.), Mahatma Gandhi : 125 Years, Indian Council of Cultural Relations, New Delhi, 1995, p. 8].
Gandhi praised the efforts of the African educationist, John Tengo Jabavu, Editor of Imvo Zabantsundu ("Native Opinion"), to establish "an Inter-State Native College with the present Lovedale Institute as its nucleus." (Indian Opinion, March 17, 1906, CW, Vol 5, pp. 234). Of the plans for this now famous institution at Fort Hare, Gandhi wrote:
"It is proposed to develop the work to be undertaken by the new College on the same lines of industrial training" as at the Tuskegee Institute started by Booker T. Washington in America, and concluded: "All this can do nothing but good, and it is not to be wondered at that an awakening people, like the great Native races of South Africa, are moved by something that has been described as being very much akin to religious fervour. To them undoubtedly the work must be sanctified and hallowed, for it opens up a means to advancement of thought and gives a great impetus to spiritual development." (Ibid, pp 234-235).
In the same article Gandhi cited this as an example worthy of emulation by the Indian community. Incidentally, Imvo Zabantsundu which Jabavu edited was the first Bantu political paper. Jabavu, ten years Gandhi's senior, and the first African in the country to matriculate, is later understood to have also developed a Quaker connection.
Sometimes, as Gandhi pointed out, in spite of some common grievances the particular claims of the various communities had to be urged from different points of view. In spite of this "wise policy", Gandhi felt that "each can give strength to the other in urging their common rights." (CW, Vol 5, pp. 242). Gandhi wrote in the Indian Opinion of March 24, 1906 that " though the hardships suffered by those people and the Indians are almost of the same kind, the remedies are not identical. It is therefore proper that the two should fight out their cases, each in their own appropriate way." He praised a petition prepared by Coloured People in support of their rights in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony and welcomed their move to send Dr Abdurrahman to England to canvas support. (CW, Vol 5, pp. 243-4). 11
In April 1906 Africans in Natal had revolted against the poll tax. Two policemen were killed in the revolt. In response some Africans "were prosecuted under the martial law, and twelve of them were condemned to death and blown up at the mouth of a cannon". (Indian Opinion, April 7, 1906, CW, Vol 5, p. 266). Gandhi's wry comment was " Twelve lives have been taken for two." (Ibid., p. 267). He praised William Morcum who pointed out at a meeting in Maritzburg that as the two policemen had been killed before martial law was declared, the Africans "ought to have been tried by the Supreme Court.", that is, not under martial law. (Idem). Gandhi commended Morcum for holding his own even though "the whole meeting was against him, and though they hissed and hooted at him". (Idem).
It is around this time that Gandhi offered and raised a Stretcher-Bearer Corps in the Zulu Rebellion. This experience offered fresh perspectives to Gandhi. His position in this context may be compared with that of Charles Bradlaugh who served in the British Army in Ireland but came to sympathize with the Irish cause.
The same year, in September 1906, Indians in South Africa decided upon passive resistance against the Asiatic Registration Ordinance, which was directed against Asian residence in Transvaal. Gandhi went on a deputation to London and the ordinance was not approved by the British government. Soon after Gandhi returned from London, Britain granted self-government to the Transvaal. The Transvaal Asiatic Registration Act, 1907 was then enacted. The Indian defiance and jail-going campaign against this measure started in the second half of 1907. Gandhi was arrested in December 1907.
The satyagraha lasted for several years and more than 2,000 people in the small Indian community courted imprisonment, some more than once.
As Edward Roux describes the events: "Gandhi and other satyagrahis were arrested and sentenced to imprisonment with hard labour. The gaols were soon full of them. The captive Gandhi was marched through the street, handcuffed and in prison clothes." (Edward Roux, Time Longer Than Rope: A History of the Black Man's Struggle for Freedom in South Africa, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1964, p. 105).
Reflecting on the 1906 events some 30 months after, and in implicit recognition of the legitimacy of their cause, Gandhi was soon to recommend passive resistance to the Africans. In an interview to The Natal Mercury Gandhi said, referring to fears that the Asian passive resisters could lead to a similar movement among Africans: "…if the natives were to adopt our methods, and replace physical violence by passive resistance, it would be a positive gain to South Africa. Passive resisters, when they are in the wrong, do mischief only to themselves. When they are in the right, they succeed in spite of any odds. It is not difficult to see in Natal, that, if Bambata, instead of murdering Inspector Hunt, had simply taken up passive resistance, because he felt that the imposition of the poll-tax was unjustifiable, much bloodshed would have been avoided…." (The Natal Mercury, January 6, 1909, CW, Vol 9, p.127).
The caveat against killing foreshadowed the Gandhian position in both the African struggle and in the struggle yet to come in India under his leadership.
Of the experiences he had at this time, Gandhi was to write later in Satyagraha in South Africa: "We found that the wounded Zulus would have been left uncared for, if we had not attended to them. No European would help to dress their wounds. Dr Savage, who was in charge of the ambulance, was himself a very humane person. It was no part of our duty to nurse the wounded after we had taken them to hospital. But we had joined the war with a desire to do all we could, no matter whether it did or did not fall within the scope of our work. The good Doctor told us that he could not induce Europeans to nurse the Zulus, that it was beyond his power to compel them and that he would feel obliged if we undertook this mission of mercy. We were only too glad to do this. We had to cleanse the wounds of several Zulus which had not been attended to for as many as five or six days and were therefore stinking horribly. We liked the work. The Zulus could not talk to us, but from their gestures and expression of their eyes they seemed to feel as if God had sent us to their succour." (CW, Vol 29, pp. 82-83). More than two decades after the rebellion Gandhi was to recall to Rev. S S Tema, a member of the African National Congress: "I witnessed some of the horrors that were perpetrated on the Zulus during the Zulu Rebellion. Because one man, Bambatta, their chief, had refused to pay his tax, the whole race was made to suffer. I was in charge of an ambulance corps. I shall never forget the lacerated backs of Zulus who had received stripes and were brought to us for nursing because no white nurse was prepared to look after them. And yet those who perpetrated all those cruelties called themselves Christians. They were 'educated', better dressed than the Zulus, but not their moral superiors." (January 1, 1939, CW, Vol 68, pp 273-274).
Gandhi saw and condemned the racial discrimination built into the legal systems prevailing in South Africa and the manner in which it operated against the Africans. In 1907 an African, Mtonga, who had been assaulted by some persons was himself found guilty by a jury. In his article entitled Juries On Trial, Gandhi wrote of the "abortion of justice" in this case, saying that Natal was no exception and that: "We believe that what happened in Natal is likely to happen, under similar circumstances, in any part of South Africa, or in any country conditioned as South Africa is." (Indian Opinion, June 1, 1907, CW, Vol 7, p. 1). He criticised the prevalent jury system: "In a place like South Africa, where there is no leisured class and where people of all nationalities congregate, the jury system is about the worst that could be devised in connection with the administration of justice. The inherent condition of success of trial by jury is that the accused is tried by his equals. It is an insult to man's intelligence to contend that there is any such trial in South Africa, when the question is as between whites and blacks." (Ibid., p. 1).
Natal laws and regulations were sharply criticised by Gandhi for their racist content. For instance, about the jail regulations in the Natal, Gandhi wrote in a passage that deserves attentive reading: "From the Natal Government Gazette we gather that there are four classes of prisoners in Natal: white, Coloured, Indian and Kaffir. If any work is taken from the white or the Coloured prisoners, the Government will give them some reward. But the Indian or the Kaffir prisoners who do any work will get nothing. Moreover, the white and the Coloured prisoners are given a towel each, while the Indian and the Kaffir are not given even this as if they do not need it at all. The Government have, in this manner, created classes even among prisoners." (Indian Opinion, June 22, 1907, CW, Vol 7, p. 50).
Gandhi criticised a proposed Natal law under which Indians cultivating their own lands, who let them to Africans or other Indians, would be required to "pay on those lands double the tax that the Europeans pay" (Indian Opinion, July 6, 1907, CW, Vol 7, p. 74). His wry comment was: " Only the Europeans of South Africa are capable of such justice! But it has always been the way of the world to add humiliation to defeat." (Idem).
Of the two major political parties in the Cape - the (Dutch) Afrikaner Bond and the (British) Progressive Party, Gandhi wrote: "We must admit that just now these two parties are in the condition of the pot calling the kettle black. They are both tarred with the same brush. Neither of them overflows with love for the blacks." (Indian Opinion, July 27, 1907, CW, Vol 7, p.125).
IV
Passive Resistance
"that all the different races commingle…."
A week later, Thoreau was again quoted appreciatively by Gandhi and the following passage among others, from Thoreau, was reproduced in the Gujarati language: "I know this well that even if only one honest man in this State of Massachusetts refuses to pay taxes in order to oppose slavery, and is locked up in gaol therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America." (Indian Opinion, September 14, 1907, CW, Vol 7, p. 230).
Gandhi paid warm tributes to Egypt's leader Mustafa Kamal Pasha who died in February 1908 in Cairo. (Indian Opinion, March 28, April 4, April 11, April 18, 1908, CW, Vol 8, pp. 166-167, pp. 174-176 pp 187-188, and p. 199). In the tribute published on April 4, 1908, Gandhi observed: "The occupation of the Sudan by the British and other similar events dealt a cruel blow to [the hopes of] Egyptian independence. But the Pasha remained undaunted" (CW, Vol 8, p. 175).
If Gandhi's movements were centred upon the Indians resident in South Africa, it was often alleged and feared, especially in Colonial circles, that his Passive Resistance and Satyagraha campaigns were giving ideas to the Africans or Kaffirs, the term then current. Gandhi's Indian Opinion in a cryptic response to the fear apparently shared by General Smuts reproduced a comment by the Transvaal Leader: " General Smuts seems to fear the effect upon the Kaffirs of the success of a campaign of passive resistance. But how is it that laws were modified before? And, after all, is it not something to the good that Kaffirs should feel that, in any differences with the white race, there are milder arguments than the rifle and assegai?" (Indian Opinion, January 11, 1908, CW, Vol 8, p. 30). The fear of being swamped by passive resistance on a wider scale appears to have been a continual one among the ruling minority in South Africa. Gandhi was to refer to it again nearly four years later: " Others again declared that to yield to passive resistance was to court trouble with the Natives." (Indian Opinion, October 7, 1911, CW, Vol 11, p. 164).
Gandhi's moral indignation is discernible in his recording of the diverse facets of racial discrimination against Africans. Writing about his experiences in prison, Gandhi points out that "the vegetables served to the Kaffir prisoners consist mostly of the left-overs and peelings from the vegetables cooked for the whites." (Indian Opinion, March 21, 1908, CW, Vol 8, p. 152)
In April 1908 Gandhi warmly welcomed a Supreme Court judgement in favour of African settlement rights in Sophiatown. The Africans in question had been prosecuted by the Municipality for living outside a specified "Location." Gandhi wrote: "In the course of his judgement, Justice Wessels condemned the action of the municipality as tyrannical and stated that in a civilized country vested rights ought not to be disturbed. It is a happy thought that the Supreme Court has always dispensed perfect justice, as it has on this occasion." (Indian Opinion, April 4, 1908, CW, Vol 8, p. 177).
Within two weeks, the Johannesburg Town Council comes in for severe condemnation once again. Gandhi describes as "shameless', the Council's proposals for "the introduction of such measures as may secure the enforcement of regulations having the object of preventing Natives and Coloured persons from occupying premises in localities other than those approved by the Council; of prohibiting the acquisition by lease, purchase or otherwise by Natives and Coloured persons of property in localities other than such as may be approved by the Council; and the regulation of the use of streets and sidewalks by Natives." (Indian Opinion, April 18, 1908, CW, Vol 8, pp. 194-195).
The African races, Gandhi told a meeting of the Young Men's Christian Association in Johannesburg on May 18, 1908, "are entitled to justice, a fair field and no favour. Immediately you give that to them, you will find no difficulty." (CW, Vol 8, p. 245). South Africa, he declared, "would probably be a howling wilderness without the Africans" (Ibid., p. 242). He continued, expressly using the term "Coloured People" so as " to include the Coloured people proper - the Africans and the Asiatics", to declare that: "The majority of people in South Africa, the majority of people in most of the Colonies, have become impatient of colour, and it behoves every right-minded man and woman to think twice before he or she jumps to the conclusion that the Coloured people are a menace and that, therefore, they ought to be got rid of with the greatest possible despatch." (Ibid., pp 242-243).
And further: "We hear nowadays a great deal of the segregation policy, as if it were possible to put people in water-tight compartments." (Ibid. p. 243).
It is in this memorable speech that Gandhi puts forth his vision for the future South Africa: "If we look into the future, is it not a heritage we have to leave to posterity, that all the different races commingle and produce a civilisation that perhaps the world has not yet seen?" (CW, Vol 8, p. 246).
By August 1908 the question of "Closer Union" of the South African colonies had begun to present itself. The Transvaal Leader reported that Gandhi, addressed the "Transvaal Closer Union Society" in Johannesburg on August 20, 1908. This was in the course of a discussion of a study by Mr Alfred Barker on "The Asiatic Question In Relation to Closer Union". Gandhi made a significant speech presaging a vision for the emerging South African nation. He said: "The people who had settled in South Africa had laid down certain conditions under which the nation that was now forming had to live. Was it possible then to eradicate from one's mind the problem of Asiatic residence? It was a very interesting and instructive study; but it passed his comprehension that in all the papers he had read from the pens of those who had made South Africa their home they had never taken into consideration what the feelings of the Asiatics or of the Natives themselves might be. What would they have to say to any solution that was suggested for their acceptance? Was it suggested that the Asiatics or the Coloured races must perforce accept any solution which was found for their treatment by the predominant race - the European race? He ventured to suggest that if they ever adopted that policy it was doomed to failure. It was possible, perhaps, for one, two, or three years to follow a policy of that nature; but he was certain they would find that both the Asiatics and the Natives would demand to be consulted with reference to their disposition. It was impossible to conceive that those races would ever allow the predominant race to dispose of them just as they chose." (The Transvaal Leader, August 21, 1908, CW, Vol 8, p. 466).
In a sense Gandhi may be said to have noticed both the emerging scaffolding of the apartheid regime and foretold its unworkability, if not collapse.
Speaking in Durban on September 30, 1908, Gandhi made some perceptive and prescient remarks on the unification of South Africa. The Natal Mercury of October 1, 1908 reported his statement: "This was a question he had answered before a meeting of the Closer Union Society that had been formed in Johannesburg. He there stated that a United South Africa meant for British Indians greater restriction of their liberty, unless a unified South Africa meant unification not only of the white races, but of all British subjects , whether Coloured or white, who had chosen South Africa as their permanent home." (CW, Vol 9, p. 78). Incidentally, this seems almost to anticipate the famous words of the Freedom Charter adopted nearly half a century later by the Congress of the People, Kliptown, Johannesburg, June 25-26, 1955: "That South Africa belongs to all who live in it…"
According to The Natal Mercury's report, Gandhi added in his Durban speech on September 30, 1908: " He could not conceive how the Imperial Government could possibly look with approval upon a scheme of unification which would mean the reduction of Asiatics and Natives to a state practically of slavery." (CW, Vol 9, p. 78). This apprehension was also, unfortunately, to be borne out by history.
An article by the writer Olive Schreiner in 1908 in The Transvaal Leader arguing against racial prejudice and envisaging a non-racist South Africa, was reprinted with some editorial appreciation in Gandhi's journal. Schreiner wrote: "We cannot hope ultimately to equal the men of our own race living in more wholly enlightened and humanised communities, if our existence is passed among millions of non-free subjected peoples." ('Olive Schreiner' on Colour, Indian Opinion, January 2, 1909).
Gandhi's tendency to integrate observation and opinion with personal conduct meant that the one marched in step with the other. Early in the year 1909, Gandhi referred to the need for avoidance as far as possible of tea, coffee and cocoa, which "are produced through the labour of men who work more or less in conditions of slavery". Cocoa, he observed, was produced in the Congo where indentured Africans were "made to work beyond all limits of endurance". (From Gujarati Indian Opinion, January 9, 1909, CW, Vol 9, p. 136). This was a theme to which he was to return.
In the midst of the passive resistance campaign, the Rand Daily Mail voiced the fear: "Let it be seen that passive resistance can carry the day, and there will spring up men among the coloured people and the natives eager to achieve the success of Mr Gandhi." (Reproduced in Indian Opinion, January 30, 1909). In its next issue Gandhi's journal reported on the formation of the Transvaal Native Union in 1909. (Indian Opinion, February 6, 1909). A few months later the appearance of a "new journalistic compeer", A.P.O., the organ of the African Political Organisation, established to voice the concerns of the Coloured people, was welcomed by Indian Opinion. (Indian Opinion, May 29, 1909). The African Political Organisation later came to be known as the African People's Organisation.
The question of the Passive Resistance campaigns affecting the Africans evidently arose repeatedly and Gandhi dealt with it again in a speech at Germiston on June 7, 1909: "The Colonists would, therefore, see that no exception could be taken to Indians making use of this force in order to obtain a redress of their grievances. Nor could such a weapon, if used by the Natives, do the slightest harm. On the contrary, if the Natives could rise so high as to understand and utilize this force, there would probably be no native question left to be solved." (Indian Opinion, June 12, 1909, CW, Vol 9, p. 244). Four years after this, African women in the Orange Free State did in fact take to passive resistance.
By 1909, the Indian interaction with the Africans was open and for all to see, though usually not overtly political. Indian Opinion reported of John Dube's institution in June 1909: "The Ohlange Industrial School, Phoenix, provided on Saturday last a musical treat of no mean order. Boys hailing from the coastal districts were competing for musical honours contested by those coming from the up-country districts, including Basutoland, and far away Matabeleland. The initiative displayed by the scholars was remarkable" (Native Scholars' Initiative, Indian Opinion, June 19, 1909). A second section of the same report was about another African institution in the neighbourhood of Phoenix: "On Thursday last the Inanda Mission for native girls provided an instance of perfect training in vocal music. This is a very old institution, the Principal, Mrs Edwards, having been connected with the Mission for over forty years. Mrs Hitchcock, one of the teaching staff, had trained a hundred girls to a high state of efficiency…".2 (Idem)
A couple of months after the Germiston speech, Gandhi pursued the passive resistance theme with Dr Abdurrahman, the leader of the Coloured people, when the two were together lobbying support in Britain. He wrote to Dr Abdurrahman, who had in South Africa formed the African People's Organisation (APO), of the "inherent justice" of Dr Abdurrahman's cause. Gandhi's letter to Dr Abdurrahman, a grandson of a freed slave, was a call to passive resistance:
"…you expected something from the Parliament or the British public, but why should you expect anything from them, if you expect nothing from yourself.
I promised to send you Thoreau's Duty of Civil Disobedience. I have not been able to procure it; I am writing for it today and hope to send it before you are off.
All I can add is a prayer that you may have the strength for it and ability to continue the work in South Africa along internal reform, and, therefore, passive resistance, even though, in the beginning, you may be only a handful." (August 23, 1909, CW, Vol 9, pp. 365-6).
V
Against Segregation
"If South Africans are to
become a real nation…."
New Year's Day, 1910 dawned with Gandhi's denunciation of the treatment meted out to an African boy by the Pretoria Town Council. The boy was earlier seated with other boys in the Town Hall during their examination. The Council was enraged by the seating arrangement and told the examiners that the hall would not be provided to them in future. The examiners then sought a separate room for the African. The Council refused this as well. Gandhi records in Indian Opinion that a resolution was passed by the Council that no African "or any other Coloured person should ever be allowed to use the Town Hall or any of its rooms". The atmosphere of the time may be gauged from the fact that according to Gandhi: "The whites who passed this resolution are counted very respectable and well-educated men." (Indian Opinion, January 1, 1910, CW, Vol 10, p. 113). "In a country like this", he continued, "the Coloured people are placed in an extremely difficult position. We think there is no way out of this except satyagraha. Such instances of injustice are a natural consequence of the whites' refusal to treat the Coloured people as their equals. It is in order to put an end to this state of affairs that we have been fighting in the Transvaal, and it is not surprising that the fight against a people with such deep prejudice should take a long time [to bear fruit]." (Idem).
Later the same month Gandhi quoted appreciatively G.K Chesterton's protest against an incident in Egypt where, in Chesterton's words, a "few harmless peasants at Denshawai3 objected to the looting of their property; they were tortured and hanged." (Indian Opinion, January 22, 1910, CW, Vol 10, p.134). In this article, Gandhi criticised the system "in which a few men capture power in the name of the people and abuse it. The people are deceived because it is under cover of their name that these men act." (Ibid, p.135).
In the same year the Coloured people in the Cape, who had earlier had the franchise, faced effective disfranchisement by the South Africa Act. (Indian Opinion, February 26, 1910, CW, Vol 10, p. 165) Coloured people were effectively excluded from the Parliament of the Union and could only elect whites to represent them. When the leader of the Coloured people, Dr Abdurrahman, therefore made a protest on the occasion of the visit of the Prince of Wales to Cape Town in 1910, Gandhi fully supported the protest. Dr Abdurrahman said: "No Coloured man, I hope, will sing 'God Save the King' on that day. I know I won't. No Coloured man will see the Prince of Wales coming through the streets on that day and feel happy; for he will know it is the consummation of the robbing him of something he has had for 50 years." (Quoted in Indian Opinion, February 26, 1910, CW, Vol 10, p. 167). Complimenting Dr Abdurrahman, Gandhi wrote:
"These words of Dr Abdurrahman, though bitter, are justified. The proposal was, of course, passed, but his words will be remembered for ever. If the other Coloured people were to follow in his footsteps, they would win redress of their grievances soon enough. We see no disloyalty in the Doctor's remarks. True loyalty may be bitter sometimes. It is not loyalty to say 'yes' to everything. True loyalty consists in expressing only what is in one's mind and acting accordingly." (Indian Opinion, February 26, 1910, CW, Vol 10, p. 167).
"Our struggle", wrote Gandhi a few days later, "is producing a profound effect on the Coloured people. Dr Abdurrahman has commented on it in his journal at great length and has held up the example of the Indian community to every Coloured person. Some of them have also passed a resolution in Johannesburg to defy the laws of the Government and take to satyagraha." (Indian Opinion, March 5, 1910, CW, Vol 10, p. 173)
In April 1910 Gandhi protested against the removal of Indian and African employees from the Johannesburg municipality. Calling it a "War Against Colour", Gandhi wrote: "The Johannesburg Municipality is being goaded into removing every Indian and Native employee, no matter how faithful his services may be and no matter what their length. That the Municipality or any other Department may not take a fresh supply of Coloured or Asiatic servants is a position against which not much can be said, but a summary dismissal of those who are already in its employ can do credit neither to the Municipality nor to those who force its hands." (Indian Opinion, April 2, 1910, CW, Vol 10, p. 200). He continued: "There can be no doubt that a ruthless removal of Asiatic and more especially Native servants will only end in disaster, but it behoves British Indians and other Asiatics, as also the Natives, to learn the needful lesson from the present activity against Asiatic and Coloured races. The latter must not rely upon the white Colonists finding work for them or giving it to them. They will have to find independent means of earning a livelihood, and once a few leaders set themselves towards solving the problem, it will be found exceedingly easy." (Idem).
This presaged the emphasis on economic self-reliance and non-dependence that he was to place in the course of the freedom struggle in India.
Colour prejudice manifested itself again later the same month in Pretoria, inducing Gandhi's reproach: "This notorious municipality keeps up its reputation for waging war against Colour. A private Bill introduced during the last session of the Transvaal Parliament seeks to perpetuate the Town Regulations of the Boer regime which prevent the use of footpaths by Natives, Coloured people and Asiatics. The British Indian Association of the Transvaal has done well in formally protesting against the Bill. It contains, as it ought to, a clause to the effect that it will not come into force unless and until His Majesty4 has expressed his pleasure not to disallow it. Lord Crewe5 has now an opportunity of showing that he is ready to protect the unrepresented classes in South Africa from insult and molestation. But the ultimate court of appeal is and must be the people themselves who are affected by hostile legislation." (Indian Opinion, April 30, 1910, CW, Vol 10, p. 237).
In the midst of all this the Union of South Africa came into being on June 1, 1910.
As Gandhi pondered this development, he aired his concerns: "What is this Union? Whom does it unite? What does it unite? Or is it a Union against the Indian and other Coloured races inhabiting South Africa? (Indian Opinion, June 4, 1910, CW, Vol 10, p. 265).
Earlier, the Zulu chief Dinuzulu had been tried and convicted on various counts of high treason. He was defended by W P Schreiner, a famous lawyer based in the Cape whose sister, the writer Olive Schreiner, became a deeply valued friend of Gandhi. In 1909 Gandhi had complimented W. P. Schreiner, when both were on a visit to London, for his "noble and self-sacrificing work in connection with the welfare of the coloured races of South Africa under the Draft South Africa Act" [Letter to W P Schreiner, July 24,1909, CW, Vol 95, (Supplementary Volume V), p. 5]. Dinuzulu, who was serving a term in prison was discharged soon after the formation of the Union of South Africa.
John Dube and Martin Luthuli, both to be among the founders of the South African Native National Congress (later African National Congress) , had close links with Dinuzulu. Martin Luthuli had been Dinuzulu's secretary. (See Freda Troup, South Africa: An Historical Introduction, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1975, p. 208). And Dube was, as recorded in the John Dube Museum at Ohlange in Inanda, also close to the family.
Welcoming the discharge of Dinuzulu, Gandhi wrote: " It was no doubt right and proper that the birth of the Union should have been signalised for the Natives of South Africa by the clemency of the Crown towards Dinuzulu. Dinuzulu's discharge will naturally fire the imagination of the South African Natives. Will it not be equally proper to enable the Asiatics in South Africa to feel that there is a new and benignant spirit abroad in South Africa by conceding their demands, which are held, I make bold to say, to be intrinsically just by nine out of every ten intelligent Europeans in this Continent?" (Indian Opinion, June 11, 1910, CW, Vol 10, p. 263).
A little later the African leader, Rev. Dr Walter Rubusana, (who was later to be a Vice President of the ANC or the South African Native National Congress, as it was initially known, in January 1912) was elected to the Cape Provincial Council. Gandhi warmly welcomed his election to the Provincial Council. Anomalously, however, the colour provisions of the latest Union legislation had made Dr Rubusana ineligible to sit in the Union Parliament.
Gandhi warned against such legislative anomalies on which the Colonialists were seeking to build the South African nation; he said such provisions would prevent South Africa from becoming a "real nation":
"The election of the Rev. Dr Rubusana as a member of the Cape Provincial Council for Tembuland by a majority of 25 over his two opponents is an event of great importance. The election is really a challenge to the Union Parliament with reference to the colour clause. That Dr Rubusana can sit in the Provincial Council but not in the Union Parliament is a glaring anomaly which must disappear if South Africans are to become a real nation in the near future. We congratulate Dr Rubusana and the Coloured races on his victory and trust that his career in the Council will do credit to him and those he represents." (Indian Opinion, September 24, 1910, CW, Vol 10, p. 325).
Dr Rubusana, eleven years Gandhi's senior, had been educated at Lovedale to which reference was made above. Earlier, in 1909, Dr Rubusana, Dr Abdurrahman, Tengo Jabavu, Gandhi and others had been together in the gallery of the House of Lords in London on July 27, 1909 when the draft South Africa Act was debated. (See ES Reddy, Gandhiji's Vision of a Free South Africa, Sanchar Publishing House, New Delhi, 1995, p. 74, note 71).
Sometime later yet another form of discrimination attracted Gandhi's notice. Indian traders were forbidden by the Government in the Cape from entering the African areas. A report from Karreedouw indicated that only white traders are allowed to enter African districts like Transkei, "which are under the jurisdiction of the Cape" and that these traders "rob the Kaffirs". Gandhi advised the Cape Indians to inquire into the matter, write to the Government about it, ask for the ground on which entry is prohibited and that the "matter should not be left there". (Indian Opinion, November 5, 1910, CW, Vol 10, p. 345).
By March 1911 a new Immigration Bill was before Parliament. The campaigns had, it seemed, made some dent and the fear of the passive resistance idea spreading was ever present. Gandhi was able to record that a legislator "who at one time used to hold out threats against us, now says that General Smuts would do well to satisfy the Asiatics. The gentleman is afraid lest satyagraha spread to the whole of South Africa". (Indian Opinion, March 18, 1911, CW, Vol 10, p. 472).
The Gandhi-inspired British Indian Association in the Transvaal protested on May 1, 1911 against laws which would have the effect of bringing about what they described as "effectual compulsory segregation". (CW, Vol 11. p. 53). Legislation enacted in 1908 in the Transvaal had prohibited Europeans in what were described as "proclaimed areas" from " subletting any rights to Coloured persons and the acquisition of any rights whatsoever by the latter in such areas" (See CW, Vol 11, p. 54n). The effect of this legislation came to be manifested in 1911 when certain notices began to be issued to European owners who had sublet their property in Klerksdorp.
Among the various achievements of Satyagraha Gandhi noted in the Indian Opinion of June 3, 1911, was that: "The Railway regulations which were promulgated in the Transvaal, making distinctions between whites and Coloureds, were repealed and substituted by regulations of general application." (CW, Vol 11, p. 101).
Gandhi underlined a plain fact of production relations in South Africa:
"We all live upon the great industry of the Natives and Indians engaged in useful occupations in this country. In this sense they are more civilised than any of us, not excluding European non-producers, inhabiting this continent. Every speculator may leave the country; every lawyer may shut down his office, every merchant may wind up his business; and yet we should live comfortably on this land endowed by nature with a beneficent climate. But if the great Native races were to stop work for a week, we should probably be starving. It must, then, be a privilege for us to be able to copy their productive industry and their ability as masters of useful handicraft." (Indian Opinion, July 15, 1911, CW, Vol 11, pp. 124-125)
The same issue of Indian Opinion, referred also to the situation in Latin America where "it is more than probable that at least one-third of the Brazilian whites have negro blood in their veins." Nilo Pecanha who had attained the office of President in Brazil, was described as "a very swarthy man with curly hair… believed to be a coloured man". It was noted that "the coloured element" in Brazil, according to Harry Johnston, "enters all careers, serves in all trades, professions and employments in Brazil, from the humblest to nearly the highest….At least, it is said, that more than one of the chief magistrates of the 'United States of Brazil' has had a drop of Ethiopia in his veins". (Indian Opinion, July 15, 1911).
Meanwhile, preparations leading up to the birth of the African National Congress had begun. Pixley Seme, who had returned from his studies abroad to start law practice in Johannesburg, supplied the new energy that was needed.
Later that month, Gandhi's Indian Opinion informed its readers, relying on a Mercury telegram: "Preliminary arrangements have been completed…for the union of the various native associations throughout South Africa and a congress of the new organisation will be held next month." (A Native Union: The Lessons of the Passive Resistance Movement, Indian Opinion, July 29, 1911) It was expected at this stage that Dr Rubusana was to be the President of the new organisation.
Indian Opinion referred to "Seme, a young Zulu attorney practising at Johannesburg", as the "hon. Treasurer of the new society." (Idem) Seme was quoted as saying: "We will discuss questions affecting the status of natives as a whole, such as the Pass Law." (Idem).
July 1911 was also significant for the First Universal Races Congress held in London. Indian Opinion had in its columns been mentioning plans for such a conference since as early as 1909 (as, for example in Indian Opinion, June 12, 1909 and April 16, 1910). Dr W E B DuBois, who was later known as the pioneering force behind the Pan-African movement, was among the participants as were Dr Rubusana, John Tengo Jabavu and Gandhi's mentor in India, the statesman Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Gandhi's associate, Henry Polak. One contribution to the deliberations was from M. Jean Finot of France whose work, "Race Prejudice", Gandhi apparently recommended to another earlier in the year, in April, and would refer to again in India.
In the following month, Indian Opinion published a note signed "Observer", perhaps from Polak or from Ms A A Smith who wrote with that pseudonym: "I had the pleasure of hearing Dr Du Bois…. He is the gifted author of the Souls of Black Folk …. and everyone will rejoice that the negroes have so able and far-seeing a representative; his spirit is co-operation and conciliation" (Indian Opinion, August 5, 1911).
Elsewhere, Dr DuBois wrote in an article published on August 24, 1911 that "there is good reason to affirm with Finot in the brochure which he gave to the congress: 'The conception of races as of so many watertight compartments into which human beings can be crammed as if they were so many breeds of horses or cattle, has had its day.' " [W E B DuBois, The First Universal Races Congress, in Eric J. Sundquist (ed.), The Oxford W E B DuBois Reader Oxford University Press, New York, 1996, p. 59]. Gandhi expected only indirect benefit for India from the conference. (Letter dated August 25, 1911, CW, Vol 11, p. 152). Even so, Gandhi's Indian Opinion on its front page hailed the "Great Universal Races Congress held in London", referring to it as "A Parliament of Man". (Indian Opinion, August 26, 1911). It referred again to DuBois as "one of the best known authorities on the negro problem". Dr DuBois's interview to the Manchester Guardian was quoted at great length. He had said, inter alia: "Further the American people find a justification for their treatment of the Negro in the attitude of England and Germany to the dark races in their colonies. They quote England as holding the opinion that the dark races must be kept in a condition of eternal tutelage, and they point to the political subservience of the Indian races under your government " (Idem).
A full page report of Polak's speech at the Universal Races Congress, in which he referred also to the passive resistance struggle of "the Transvaal Asiatics", was published on the front page of Indian Opinion, September 9, 1911. The Indian Opinion issues of September 2, and September 9, 1911 also carried long reports of the proceedings by A Chessel Piquet. And in the September 9, 1911 report the contributions of Tengo Jabavu and Dr Rubusana and of Dr DuBois were highly praised. The latter report noted: "Dr Du Bois is not only a great man amongst negroes, but also a great man amongst the world's great men".
Chessel Piquet's report in Indian Opinion stressed the larger long-term implications of the Congress as the reason for the discouragement it received from British officialdom: "Indians were compelled to realise that the British Government - a 'Liberal' government - did not officially recognise the Congress (though its Vice Presidents included both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition) almost entirely because of the objections raised by the reactionary elements of the India Office, who, not unnaturally, felt that, if the British Government formally accepted the conclusions which it was known the Congress would be called upon to formulate, the whole fabric of modern Imperialism and all that it connotes would be rent asunder". (A Chessel Piquet, The First Universal Races Congress, Indian Opinion, September 2, 1911)
The Indian Opinion issue of October 21, 1911 carried extracts from an article, "The Coloured Man in Art and Letters", by Duse Mahomed, the famous author of "In the Land of the Pharoahs". Duse Mahomed had referred to many authors of mixed blood, saying that "a race capable of producing a Poushkin, a Dumas, and a Dunbar in letters, and a Coleridge Taylor and a Marion Cook in music, can neither be lacking in high intellect and artistic temperament nor devoid of that dash of creative genius without which literature is debased to the level of nonsensical drivel and music degraded to a flaccid medley of conventional sounds." Duse Mahomed was an Egyptian of Sudanese origin.
As Indian Opinion noted of the personalities mentioned, all had African blood in them. Paul Dunbar, the famous African-American author, "was of pure African lineage" while the others were of mixed blood. According to information culled from Duse Mahomed, Alexander Dumas was said to have "descended from an African grandmother in Haiti", Alexander Pushkin "had an Ethiopian grandmother", Samuel Coleridge Taylor was "the son of a West African doctor", and Will Marion Cook had "both maternal and paternal African forbears".
A headline in the same issue of Indian Opinion described as "A Notable Conference" a meeting of African women that had taken place in Potchefstroom. The week-long conference, which had been attended by at least 150 women from various parts of South Africa, had been "assembled under the auspices of the Native Women's Christian Union (of which Mrs Amos Burnet is president)". The object was "to consult over matters affecting the future well-being of their class."
There were some African workers on the Tolstoy Farm settlement for the passive resisters, which Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach had established not far from Lawley Station. Gandhi observed to Kallenbach that the Africans on the Farm should "feel that here they may depend upon the fairest treatment. And I have no doubt that if it proceeds from the heart and is uniform, continuous and not from affectation, it will bless both the parties." [Letter to Kallenbach, November 6, 1911, CW, Vol 96, (Supplementary Vol VI), p. 89]
The South African Native National Congress (later renamed the African National Congress) was founded in January 1912.
Gandhi's Indian Opinion welcomed the event as "The Awakening of the Natives" and wrote: "Our friend and neighbour, the Rev. John L. Dube, Principal of the Ohlange Native Industrial School, has received the high honour of being elected the first President of the newly-inaugurated Inter-State Native Congress." (Indian Opinion, February 10, 1912). The journal expressed appreciation of the manifesto issued by John Dube "to his countrymen" and published extracts from it. The extracts from Dube's manifesto concluded: "We have been distinguished by the world as a race of born gentlemen - a truly glorious title, bestowed on few other peoples - and by the gentleness of our manners (poor though we may be, unlettered and ill-clad), and by the nobility of our character shall we break down the adamantine wall of colour prejudice and force even our enemies to be our admirers and our friend." (Idem).
The formation of such an organisation had already been presaged in the report, referred to above, that Indian Opinion had carried more than five months earlier (Indian Opinion, July 29, 1911).
Gandhi criticised the racist policies bearing on public health which had "meant death and destruction to the Native people of this country." (Indian Opinion, April 6, 1912, CW, Vol 11, p. 254). He cited the evidence before the Tuberculosis Commission given by Dr Thornton, the Medical Officer of Health for the Cape Province. In this article Gandhi noted: "Anyone who has visited a Location, whether Native or Indian, must be impressed with the utter hopelessness of such places. The shameful neglect of the roadways, the utter absence of proper drainage, and the wretched condition of the buildings, all show at once that this is a Location - a place where Coloured people are condemned to spend their days as outcasts." (Ibid. p. 255). He opposed the Johannesburg Town Council's proposed policy under which Africans "who are at present living where they please are to be rounded up into a huge compound, where they will be compelled to live, whether they like it or not. A fence is to be erected around the Location, and the 'inmates' (suggestive term) are to enter through the gateway, which will be under police guard. At a certain hour the gates will be closed, and opened again in time to allow the Natives to get to work for their European masters". (Idem).
Gandhi continues his criticism of the proposed segregation with a sarcasm not often found in his writings: "A well-known Johannesburg citizen gave it as his opinion that the scheme would be a great success, not only from a public-health point of view, but also from a police point of view. Now, as for the public health point of view, we are quite certain that the public referred to is the white public and not the public which is to receive the special advantage of living in this municipal compound; and we think that Dr Thornton will agree with us. And what, pray, is the 'police point of view'? We think we can guess, but, as there can be no certainty about it, we will content ourselves by merely suggesting that, by segregating all the blacks, it will then be an easy matter to keep a watchful eye upon the white criminal class which is known to congregate in the cities." (Indian Opinion, April 6, 1912, CW, Vol 11, pp. 236).
In August 1912 there was a smallpox epidemic in Johannesburg. Gandhi's first reaction was to warn the Indian community that "even if the epidemic did not originate this time with the Indians and though only a few cases appear to have occurred among them, they should not be any the less careful in the matter." (Indian Opinion, August 17, 1912, CW, Vol 11, p. 305). He warned that there would, in this context, be demands for segregation of the various communities, which would be difficult to resist and asked Indians to cooperate fully with the medical authorities. (Idem).
But a week later Gandhi spoke out against segregation even in the context of the small pox outbreak. He told The Transvaal Leader: "Segregation would in any case be totally ineffective. Even if you kept the Indians in one district, the Eurafricans in another, you could not prevent them intermixing outside in the ordinary course of their business.
Segregation would not remove the danger of infection." (The Transvaal Leader, August 23, 1912, CW, Vol 11, p. 306). "The proper way", he continued, " of dealing with all classes of the community, European, Asiatic, Eurafrican and Native, is to allow them freedom of movement, subject to a strict supervision as regards health conditions." (Ibid., pp 306-7). He reiterated his repeated opposition to class legislation: "In any case, I am convinced that the Imperial Government would not sanction any class legislation such as a policy of segregation would entail." (Ibid., p. 307; see also Ibid., p. 290n).
The eminent Indian leader, Gopal Krishna Gokhale visited South Africa in October- November 1912. Gandhi acted as the main organiser of the tour and Gokhale's escort in the course of it. The historic confluence between John Dube, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Gandhi, to which reference has already been made, took place in November 1912. Gandhi had praised Dube in print in 1905 and his journal had welcomed the choice of Dube as the President-General of the South African Native National Congress (later renamed African National Congress) established in January 1912. On November 11, 1912, Gokhale was taken by Gandhi to meet John Dube at the Ohlange Institute near Phoenix and discuss the "Native question". (See E S Reddy, Gandhiji's Vision of a Free South Africa, op. cit., p. 22). Gokhale received a warm welcome from the staff and students of Dube's school. The occasion is surcharged with historical significance. Eight decades before the complete liberation of South Africa, a past and a future President of the Indian National Congress, (Gokhale had been President of the Congress in 1905; Gandhi became President in 1924), were calling on the leader of the African National Congress.
Indian Opinion reported: "Mr Gokhale then paid a visit to the Natal Industrial School at Ohlange and spent some time discussing the Native question with the Rev. John Dube, Principal of the School, and President of the Native Congress. The students sang a couple of Zulu songs and the band played popular music". (Indian Opinion, November 23, 1912).
Earlier, W P Schreiner and Dr Abdurrahman, among others, welcomed Gokhale in Cape Town. A meeting with Olive Schreiner took place en route to Kimberley (CW, Vol 11, p. 612). Her novel, "The Story of an African Farm", was among the books sold at Phoenix (See, for example, Indian Opinion, June 17, 1914).
Among those who welcomed Gokhale in Kimberley was Isaac Joshua, Chairman of the local branch of the African Political Association6. Joshua said that "the coloured people of South Africa laboured under great disabilities, and they sympathised with the Indians. Their fight was our fight, because they laboured under the same obnoxious laws as they (the coloureds) laboured under, and he only trusted that the Indians might receive better treatment in future through the visit of Mr Gokhale, and that following that, the coloured people in South Africa would also receive fair and just treatment, as they should under British rule." [Indian Opinion, Souvenir of the Hon. Gopal Krishna Gokhale's Tour in South Africa, October 22nd - November 18, (1912) pp. 8-9].
The condition of plantation workers in Africa continued to receive Gandhi's attention. He wrote: "In cocoa plantations, Negro workers are subjected to such inhuman treatment that if we witnessed it with our own eyes we would have no desire to drink cocoa. Volumes have been written on the tortures inflicted in these plantations." (Indian Opinion, March 8, 1913, CW, Vol 11, p. 483). A couple of years earlier he had complained to his associate, H S L Polak, about "the abominable chocolate", calling it "that cursed product of devilish slave labour." [August 26, 1911, CW, Vol 96 (Supplementary Vol VI), p. 71].
At another place he had written during a voyage to England: " I also avoid tea and coffee as far as possible, since they are the produce of slave labour." (Indian Opinion, August 7, 1909, CW, Vol 9, pp. 277-8)
Indian Opinion gave prominence to a strong critique made by Senhore de Carvalho, a former Curator (official Protector of Africans) in Principe, Portuguese Africa, of Portugal's conduct and attitude towards the African population. In a leaflet issued by the Anti-Slavery Society, Senhore de Carvalho, who had resigned his position after investigating the facts, wrote alleging the existence of slavery in the colony: "….I speak of the labourers born in Angola. They are actual slaves. Caught in the interior, or sold to Europeans by their chiefs, they come down to the coast like any other sort of merchandise." ("Slavery in West Africa", Indian Opinion, April 26, 1913).
Indian Opinion noted that The Spectator, where the report was first published, had observed that de Carvalho's work appeared to "bear the stamp of genuineness" and also that it was "as regards the main fact of slavery, fully borne out by the first-hand evidence of Mr Nevinson, Mr Burtt, and Mr Harris."(Idem).
The African women's Anti-Pass struggles in the Orange Free State and the events leading to Indian women going to jail as part of Indian passive resistance both had their origin in the first and second quarters of 1913 and the cross-fertilisation of ideas they represent are dealt with in the next section.
In the midst of these events, Gandhi's friend, associate and first biographer, Joseph J. Doke passed away in August 1913. Writing about him, Gandhi made a piercing social comment: "He died whilst finding further fields for his loving activity. And as he loved, so is his death today mourned by not only his European congregation, not only by Englishmen, but also by many of his Native, Chinese and Indian friends. In a place where even men of religion are not free from the local prejudice against colour, Mr Doke was among the few who know no distinction of race, colour or creed." (Indian Opinion, August 23, 1913), CW, Vol 12, p. 168).
In the week following, Indian Opinion supported John Dube's criticism of the Natives Land Act passed by the Union Parliament. The Act sought to fortify White property rights. Indian Opinion commented: "The Natives Land Act of the Union Parliament has created consternation among the Natives. Indeed, every other question, not excluding the Indian question, pales into insignificance before the great Native question. This land is theirs by birth and this Act of confiscation - for such it is - is likely to give rise to serious consequences unless the Government take care." (Indian Opinion, August 30, 1913). The Act provided the basis for evictions and other hardships faced by the African population and set the tone for much of what followed in South Africa by defining "African reserves" and making precarious the rights of Africans on other lands in the country.
John Dube's appeal to the British public against the Act was carried also by Indian Opinion. Dube had said "We ask for freedom to purchase land wherever opportunities occur and our sparse means permit. We ask that we may be permitted to build for ourselves a home wheresoever a landlord is agreeable. Who can affirm that our requests are unreasonable or impossible? …. You must know that every one of us has been born in this land, and we have no other. You must know that for untold generations this land was solely ours - long before your fathers had put a foot on our shores." (Idem)
Later in the year Solomon T Plaatje, who was General Secretary of the SANNC (later renamed ANC), wrote in the Lovedale journal, Christian Express, describing the Act as "a carefully prepared, deliberate and premeditated scheme to compass the partial enslavement of the Natives." (quoted in Maureen Rall, Peaceable Warrior : The Life and Times of Sol T. Plaatje, Sol Plaatje Educational Trust, Kimberley, 2003, p. 125).
VI
Cross-Fertilisation of Ideas in South Africa
"womenfolk will join the struggle"
Gandhi's activities influenced and were in turn influenced by African opinion and politics. His own ideas on Africa and Africans evolved and expanded with extended experience in Africa.
The South African Native National Congress (later ANC) was, as noted above, founded in January 1912, an impetus having been provided also by the creation of the Union. As Albert Luthuli was to put it half a century later, the setting up of the Union meant that by "ganging up together, Boer and Briton had achieved their coup. It took us very little time to recognise that only by working for our own unity could we hope to withstand the effects, upon us and within us, of being treated like cattle…" (Albert Luthuli, Let My People Go: An Autobiography, Collins, London, 1962, p. 89).
Incidentally, the SANNC Constitution drawn up later, in 1919, had a clause (Clause 13 in Chapter IV) which emphasised "passive action" (Referred to by E S Reddy in Gandhiji's Vision of A Free South Africa, p. 75, note 85). It is of some interest to note that Richard W. Msimang (1884-1933) , who "often served as the legal adviser" of the South African Native National Congress, is reputed to have been "primarily responsible" for drafting the Constitution of the SANNC in 1919 ( vide Timothy Keegan's introduction to a re-publication, circa 1996, of R. W. Msimang's rare booklet on the Natives Land Act 1913: Specific Cases of Evictions and Hardships, etc, first published soon after the enactment). Msimang was among the first students at John Dube's Ohlange Institute and was perhaps there when Gandhi set up camp right across at Phoenix. From 1910 Msimang, having meanwhile qualified as a lawyer in England, set up a legal practice in Johannesburg, where incidentally Gandhi had meanwhile moved.
While individual factors and threads may be points for further research, there appears to have been a general consensus within the organised African leadership in South Africa by this time that unity and peaceful action was the way to go forward.
The African Womens' Passive Resistance in the Orange Free State from June 1913 onwards is an example of an early cross-fertilisation of ideas between Gandhi and Africa.
Gandhi's journal foregrounded its support for the African women's struggle in the Orange Free State with a full page article on the front page emblazoned with the banner heading "Native Women's Brave Stand" in capital letters (Indian Opinion, August 2, 1913), relying for its facts on the African newspaper Abantu. Indian Opinion had referred earlier to "Native Women Passive Resisters" noting, with the African Political Organisation, that one of the "most iniquitous" laws "is that of the Orange Free State which compels coloured and Native females over the age of sixteen to carry passes. It has led to respectable Coloured women being locked up, and young native girls being dragged from their homes and cruelly outraged by policemen. It is not surprising therefore, to learn that the women of those municipalities where the Pass laws are enforced against them have decided to resist the law, and refuse to carry passes." (Native Women Passive Resisters, Indian Opinion, July 5, 1913).
The question of passes required for African and Coloured women in the Orange Free State had come to a boil after the formation of the Union. Representations were of no avail. Julia Wells writes: "When these efforts brought no satisfactory result, the topic of passes for women quickly became a rallying point for the newly formed South African Natives National Congress (SANNC). Meeting in Bloemfontein in February 1912, the SANNC called on the Union Government to withdraw all provisions for passes for women. As if foreshadowing events to come, it also stressed the significance of the passive resistance campaign being successfully carried on by Mahatma Gandhi in the nearby Transvaal province. The African Political Organisation, representing the local Coloured population, also took up the issue of passes for women". [Julia Wells, "Passes and Bypasses: Freedom of Movement for African Women under the Urban Areas Act of South Africa" in Margaret Hay and Marcia Wright (eds) African Women and the Law: Historical Perspectives, Boston University Papers on Africa - VII, 1982, p. 130]
In relation to the Anti-Pass Campaign in the Orange Free State, 1913-20, Cherryl Walker writes of the campaign by African women provoked by an incident on June 6, 1913 when some women in Bloemfontein were arrested for not having passes: " This incident was the beginning of a widespread campaign of passive resistance, which spread to all the major Free State towns and involved hundreds of women. There is no indication that the Bloemfontein protesters had worked out a careful campaign beforehand, but once the first arrests had been made, there were definite attempts to turn a spontaneous outburst of feeling into a more co-ordinated demonstration of popular opposition. The women turned to the tactics of passive resistance and civil disobedience which the South African Indian Congress [SAIC] leader, M K Gandhi, had already pioneered in South Africa." (Cherryl Walker, Women and Resistance in South Africa, Second Edition; David Philip: Cape Town & Johannesburg/ Monthly Review Press, New York, 1982, p. 27).
Gandhi himself is said to have in turn been influenced by this struggle in focussing still further on involvement of women in the next round of his movement in South Africa. The movement was resumed in 1913 as the authorities failed to honour their commitment to repeal the tax on members of former indentured Indians' families and failed also to resolve the fresh issues which had arisen about the validity and recognition of Indian marriages. This followed upon Justice Searle's judgement in the Cape Supreme Court on March 14, 1913 in Bai Miriam's case. The judgement directly concerned Indian women as the status of most Indian marriages became questionable under the immigration law. Sixty years later, the anti-apartheid activist lawyer Albie Sachs, a future judge of the Constitutional Court in free South Africa, summed up the effect of this judgement: "that customary Indian marriages were legally invalid because they were potentially if not actually polygamous". (Albie Sachs, Justice In South Africa, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1973, p. 207). On March 30, 1913, a few weeks after the judgement, a mass meeting was held in Johannesburg to consider the effect of the Bai Miriam case. As Gandhi's wife Kasturba and others saw it, the judgement meant that all the married couples coming within its sweep were living in sin and all their children suddenly became illegitimate. On April 15, 1913 Gandhi asked for an amendment to Union law to legalise non-Christian marriages.
Sometime before April 19, 1913 Kasturba Gandhi decided to join the struggle and court arrest (see the chronology in CW, Volume 12, 1966 edition, pp. 646-8). On April 19 Gandhi informed the Indian statesman Gokhale of the decision:
"Most of the settlers here including the womenfolk will join the struggle. The latter feel that they can no longer refrain from facing gaol no matter what it may mean in a place like this. Mrs Gandhi made the offer on her own initiative and I do not want to debar her." (CW, Vol 12, p. 41). Ultimately Kasturba Gandhi, Valiamma and other Indian women were imprisoned in this movement. Indian women courted arrest from September 1913, after the African women in Orange Free State. Interestingly, Gandhi himself ended up in Bloemfontein prison, Orange Free State at the end of 1913. (Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, Chapters 45 and 46).
At the end of September 1913, Dr Abdurrahman, in his presidential address to the annual conference of the African Political Organisation held at Kimberley, drew attention to the Indian struggle. In remarks that bring to mind the pointed suggestion Gandhi had made to him in August 1909, Dr Abdurrahman remarked that the method of passive resistance might usefully be emulated by (other) "coloured races".
Extracts from Dr Abdurrahman's speech were published by Indian Opinion around the time Gandhi was in Bloemfontein prison. In his speech Dr Abdurrahman had said: "If a handful of Indians, in a matter of conscience, can so firmly resist what they consider injustice, what could the coloured races not do if they were to adopt this practice of passive resistance?" (Indian Opinion, December 3, 1913).
Indian Opinion published also Dr Abdurrahman's remarks applauding the African women's struggle in the Orange Free State. (Idem). Sol T. Plaatje, General Secretary of the African National Congress, was also to include Dr Abdurrahman's Kimberley speech in Chapter 10 of his well-known work Native Life in South Africa, which was published some months later.
Gandhi was released from prison on December 18, 1913 and spoke three days later at a Durban meeting dressed as an indentured labourer. The Indian women, including his wife Kasturba began to be released soon thereafter.
Passive resistance, as reflected in the struggles of the African women in the Orange Free State and in the Indian struggles, had emerged in South Africa. Sheridan Johns III writes of the struggle led by the African National Congress in 1919 in the Transvaal: "Following the example of the women (and perhaps also that of the Indians led by Gandhi) the Transvaal section of the Congress called its first passive resistance campaign in March-April 1919. Upon the Witwatersrand, several thousand Africans defied the pass laws by turning in their required documents." [Thomas Karis and Gwendolen M. Carter (eds.) From Protest To Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa 1882- 1964; Volume 1: Protest And Hope 1882-1934 by Sheridan Johns III, Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, Stanford, 1972, p. 65].
Another scholar describes the African passive resistance in the Transvaal in 1919 thus:
"After the war, Witwatersrand branches of the Congress, taking a leaf out of Gandhi's book, organised the collection of passes in sacks and persuaded thousands, without the use of picketing or physical force, to hand themselves over to the police for disobeying the law." (T R H Davenport, South Africa: A Modern History, Macmillan Press, London, 1977, p. 179). The 1919 movement was to be suppressed rather brutally and it was some time before passive resistance re-emerged in South Africa.
On July 18, 1914, in a "farewell letter" on his final departure from South Africa after a stay of more than two decades, Gandhi endorsed what he described as the "theory" of the British Constitution "that there should be no legal racial inequality between different subjects of the Crown, no matter how much practice may vary according to local circumstance." (Indian Opinion, July 29, 1914, CW, Vol 12, p. 502).
Having set sail for England before returning to India, Gandhi wrote from his ship on July 23, 1914 recalling the fond farewells he and his party had received at several places: "The white people, too, made an excellent demonstration of their affection. During the final days, we drank the cup of their love also full to the brim. Occasions such as these prove that there is no bar or permanent division as between the whites and Coloureds and that, if both the sides make the required effort, the evil in South Africa can be overcome." (Indian Opinion, August 26, 1914, CW, Vol 12, p. 508).
Gandhi's concerns against oppression were, of course, not limited to Indians and Africans. Even within South Africa, they extend to the rights of Chinese miners (CW, Volume 5, pp 60-61), seeking equal protection for Chinese passive resisters as for Indian passive resisters in 1911 (CW, Vol 11, p. 49) and speaking out against the invidious distinction made in Transvaal legislation between Turkish Muslims and Christians (CW, Vol 7, p. 104).
Gandhi left something permanent behind him in South Africa - and what he left behind was for all South Africans. A decade after Gandhi's return to India in 1915, Sarojini Naidu, the famous Indian freedom fighter who later headed the Indian National Congress, visited South Africa. On February 29, 1924 she wrote to Gandhi from Johannesburg: " I cannot sleep in South Africa and it is all your fault. You haunt the land and its soil is impregnated with the memory of your wonderful struggle, sacrifice and triumph. I am so deeply moved, so deeply aware all the time that here was the cradle of satyagraha -- do you wonder that I have been able to move thousands of men and women in the last two days to tears under the influence and stimulus of your inspiration? …. I have seen your legion of old friends and followers - white, brown and black - the whole gamut of the polychromatic scale of humanity in this land - all send you their love…." [See Mrinalini Sarabhai (Ed) The Mahatma And The Poetess, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Mumbai and Sarvodaya International Trust, Bangalore, 1998, pp. 37-38]
VII
After Return from Africa
No justice for Indians "if none is rendered to natives of the soil"
After his return to India, Gandhi remained in touch with African struggles and the state of civil liberties in Africa. In October 1920 he was in the midst of a struggle in India. But we find him commenting in Young India: "Look at the trial of an English officer and the farcical punishment he received for having deliberately tortured inoffensive Negroes at Nairobi." (CW, Vol 18, p 321).
Gandhi drew inspiration not only from his experiences in South Africa but also from his reading of the history of Africa as a whole. On one occasion in 1920, when asked to explain his movement for non-cooperation with British rule, he cited the example of Somaliland (Somalia) from the interior areas of which the British had evacuated in 1909-10. In an interview to The Times of India, reproduced in the journal Young India under the title "Swaraj in Nine Months", Gandhi said: "This movement is an endeavour to purge the present Government of the selfishness and greed which determine almost everyone of their activities. Suppose that we have made it impossible by dissociation from them to feed their greed. They might not wish to remain in India, as happened in the case of Somaliland, where, the moment its administration ceased to be a paying proposition they evacuated it." (Young India, December 29, 1920, CW, Vol 19,169).
In 1921 Gandhi wrote feelingly against "insolence, pride of race, religion or colour." (Young India, June 1, 1921, CW, Vol 20, p.159).
African- American interest in Gandhi's movements had also been aroused. In March -April 1919 Gandhi had called for a protest in India against the Rowlatt legislation sought to be introduced by the colonial regime. The legislation which envisaged arbitrary detention, and trials without effective legal assistance, cutting off pleadings and appeals, was a serious assault on democratic rights. The protest was followed on April 13, 1919 by the infamous Jallianwala Bagh Massacre in which an unarmed crowd in Amritsar, in northern India, was fired upon by British-led troops. In September 1919, the African-American political activist Hubert Harrison, considered the Father of Harlem Radicalism, writing in the New Negro under a pseudonym, condemned the Rowlatt legislation and described it elsewhere as "the rottenest legal terrorism that the modern world has yet seen". [Jeffrey B. Perry, (ed.) A Hubert Harrison Reader, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 2001, p. 213].
In October 1921, a few days after Gandhi issued a manifesto for his movement of non-cooperation with the British regime, Harrison wrote that Gandhi, "stands out among men of all colours today as the greatest, most unselfish and powerful leader of the modern world." [Jeffrey B. Perry, (ed.) op. cit. p. 314]
In the same year, in an address in South Africa, Rev Zaccheus R. Mahabane, President of the Cape Province National Congress, expressly contemplated the possibility of Gandhian resistance. Mahabane warned: "… let no race or class or creed be driven to such a condition of despair as it might be compelled to adopt the Gandhian policy of 'non-co-operation' - taxation without representation leads to this." [Thomas Karis and Gwendolen Carter (eds.) op. cit.; Volume 1, p.296].
Mahabane was later, in 1924 and again in 1937-40, to be President General of the African National Congress. He was also the president of the Non-European Unity movement activated in 1943.
The urge to explore the possibilities of Gandhi-type methods was expressed regionally as well. In 1924 the eclectic James Thaele, a Lovedale product, who had later graduated in the United States, became, shortly after returning to South Africa, the President of the Western Cape Congress. "Periodically he argued for non-co-operation with the authorities and also referred to the Gandhian example of passive resistance." (Peter Walshe, The Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa: The African National Congress 1912-1952, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1971, p. 166).
Gandhi was in personal contact with leading African-American personalities like Dr W E B DuBois, the pioneer of the Pan-African movement, who was to spend his last days in Ghana. Dr DuBois had been repeatedly referred to in Gandhi's Indian Opinion in South Africa. In 1911 Indian Opinion had carried laudatory references to Dr DuBois and his role. Gandhi, for his part, had been referred to in the pages of Dr DuBois' journal, Crisis, since at least the early nineteen twenties. Crisis, a monthly journal from New York, was the organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In March 1922, the month