by E. S. Reddy
(Lecture at a meeting of the Nehru Centre, London, on August 13, 1992. chaired by Archbishop Trevor Huddleston)
I hope you will excuse me if I do not deal with the current developments, or with the sad record of betrayals by successive British Governments of their solemn undertakings to Africans and Indians in South Africa, but confine my remarks mainly to certain historical aspects of the shared destiny of Britain, India and South Africa.
My main purpose today is to pay tribute to the anti-apartheid Britain which has inspired me and helped me to do whatever I have been able to do in the United Nations against apartheid for over two decades. I am proud to have been associated for many years with Father Huddleston who is a national of Britain but has such close family connections with India that he is one of us, and who spent the best years of his life in South Africa and in the vanguard of the struggle against apartheid.
I wish to pay tribute to those - sometimes far too few in this country - who recognised long ago that Africans in South Africa are human; to hundreds of thousands who marched in demonstrations against racism; to the thousands who were imprisoned; to the hundreds who risked broken limbs or ruined careers to demonstrate human solidarity in the great anti-apartheid movement which was one of the greatest international passive resistance campaigns in support of those in South Africa who could not carry on that form of struggle in the face of unparalleled repression against non-violent defiance of unjust laws.
I think of the Reverend C. F. Andrews - a great Englishman and a great Indian - who went as an envoy to South Africa in 1914 to assist M. K. Gandhi and on several later occasions to help the Indian community in distress - and who warned the Indian merchants, on behalf of Rabindranath Tagore and himself, that they have no future in South Africa and deserve no future, unless they respected the rights of the African people.
I think of Fenner Brockway, born in India and an early advocate of Indian freedom, who took up the cause of the South African people in 1919 when he met Sol Plaatje and tirelessly fought for their freedom for almost seven decades.
I think of E. M. Forster, the writer, who sold out his South African stocks in the 1920s because he detested the oppression of the African miners.
I think of the Reverend Michael Scott who served in India before moving to South Africa and received his baptism of fire in 1946.
He felt he could not stand idly by when Indian passive resisters in Durban were being attacked by white ruffians with bicycle chains and other lethal instruments - the police refused to intervene - when several men and women fell unconscious from the blows and one Indian, an off-duty detective, even died.
He stood in the resistance plot with a young Indian woman, a medical student, somewhat in fear as he was jostled. His companion was bleeding, but told him, "Father, forgive them, they know not what they are doing".
There he learnt a new dimension of the Bible from the Muslim girl - and proceeded to start a crusade against racism in South Africa and Namibia.
I am glad we have here that teacher of Michael Scott, now a doctor in London, Zainab Asvat, the daughter of a close associate of Gandhiji.
I think of V.K. Krishna Menon - an Indian and an Englishman - who, as Chairman of the India League, set up the South Africa Committee, perhaps the first committee to campaign in Britain for freedom in South Africa for Indians and Africans alike. It was headed by Mr. Silverman, M.P., a great friend of India.
And more recently, we have had numerous other campaigners for freedom in South Africa: to limit myself only to a few Churchmen - Father Huddleston, Canon L. John Collins, Bishop Ambrose Reeves, Dean Gonville fFrench-Beytagh and Archbishop Joost de Blanc of Cape Town. I have no time to mention many others deserving of recognition and respect, but I must make two exceptions.
In India and South Africa, we think not only of individual freedom fighters but of families and generations. Here too you have a few.
I had the privilege of working with the late Sir Hugh Foot in the United Nations Expert Committee on South Africa in 1964. He was so passionate, so crusading against apartheid that he seemed to be ahead of brothers, Dingle and Michael who is here - and he made a significant contribution to United Nations action against apartheid.
I cannot forget the late Dr. Yusuf Dadoo, buried here in London, opposite the grave of Karl Marx in Highgate.
He was educated in India and went to prison first in the cause of Indian freedom in a demonstration against the Simon Commission in London in 1929. He spent thirty years of his life in Britain, as a student and later as an exile, went on hunger marches of the Independent Labour Party and later marched in numerous anti-apartheid demonstrations. He was one of the most effective organisers of the anti-apartheid and solidarity movement in Britain and abroad.
But let us not claim him as Indian or British for, in his own homeland, South Africa, he is hailed as one of the "giants" of the liberation movement.
What I have said, I suppose, brings out the triangular relationship of Britain, India and South Africa - ever since the navigators bumped into the Cape on the way to the riches of India and the gold, not knowing that far more gold was buried under the African soil.
Both Britain and India have long-standing relations with South Africa. We cannot speak of the anti-apartheid struggle in India in isolation from that in Britain or in South Africa itself - and I refer to apartheid in its essence and not merely as the official policy since 1948. Many Indians were among the activists of the British anti-apartheid movement and many British public leaders supported India in its efforts to defend the dignity of Indians in South Africa.
Both Britain and India are ancestral homelands of the people of South Africa.
Both Britain and India have been involved in the institution of slavery in South Africa - soon after the Dutch set up a settlement in the Cape in 1652.
To me, slavery was the origin of apartheid though there was no segregation, and no prohibition of inter-racial marriages or sexual relations, in the days before slavery was abolished by the British administration in South Africa. The resistance and revolts of the slaves are, so far as we know, the beginning of the struggle for freedom in South Africa.
It is little known that an Indian woman from Bengal - given a Christian name "Mary" - was taken as a slave to the Cape in 1653, a year after Jan van Riebeeck settled there. For the next century or more, thousands of Indians from Bengal, Coromandel Coast and Kerala were taken to South Africa and sold into slavery - mostly in Dutch ships, but some in Danish and British ships.
Some were bought in India from slave traders, especially the Portuguese; some were children bought from their helpless parents during famines in Tamil Nadu; some were servants who were cheated and sold as slaves; and some were kidnapped. Many of these were perhaps more literate and more skilled than their Dutch masters.
According to some scholars on slavery in South Africa, the number of slaves from India exceeded those from Indonesia or Africa.
The Dutch settlers married some Indian women. There was extensive miscegenation and many settlers, in their old age, formally married their mistresses and baptised their children. As a result, numerous Afrikaner families can trace their ancestry to Indians and perhaps half the Coloured people have Indian ancestry.
And the Indians were also the most prominent in the slave resistance and revolts.
So, when some people in Britain used to refer to their "kith and kin" in South Africa in opposing the anti-apartheid movement, I was tempted to tell them that I have more kith and kin than the British, perhaps three or four million descendants of Indians, as against two million descendants of the British.
Last September, on a visit to South Africa, I went up Signal Hill in Cape Town, the first stop of runaway slaves, where there are several graves of the slave martyrs, carefully preserved by the Cape Muslim community as shrines. I could see the harbour where my people were brought and sold as chattel, the mountains where the runaway slaves had their hideouts, and Robben Island.
Centuries before Nelson Mandela was incarcerated there, Robben Island was the home of Indonesian and Indian prisoners. One of them had been kidnapped in his childhood from the beach in Surat - and imprisoned for resisting slavery.
I said in Cape Town that the Afrikaners had been cursed for rejecting their ancestors and inventing the false mythology of apartheid in the 19th and 20th centuries. That is sad because researchers have now proved that Afrikaners with black ancestry include even Paul Kruger and General Louis Botha, not to mention some curremt right-wing politicians. I hope that the Afrikaners will rediscover their history so that we in India can establish fruitful relations with them.
I must leave this history aside and jump to the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 as that is where I would trace the ancestry of the anti-apartheid movement.
You may remember it as a disastrous and dirty war into which Britain was dragged by Joseph Chamberlain. One of the proclaimed causes of the war was the oppression of Indians and Africans by the Boers.
Britain sent from India over 10,000 British troops, 10,000 Indian auxiliaries and thousands of horses. Almost ten thousand Boer prisoners of war were held in camps all over India and many are buried there. And all the costs were charged to the Indian exchequer, to be paid by our starving peasants.
The war was brutal and British opinion was outraged, especially by the burning of Boer farms and the herding of Boer women and children into concentration camps where tens of thousands perished.
No one bothered, however, about the hundred thousand Africans who were confined in concentration camps.
There was a courageous anti-war movement in Britain, led by Emily Hobhouse, W. T. Stead and others. The government was defeated at the next elections and the war was brought to a close. That anti-war movement has many parallels with the anti-apartheid movement of our time.
It was during that war, and because of that war, that the first Pan African Conference was held in London - and proclaimed, in the words of Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line.
When the war was over, the British administration - and later the Boer-British alliance promoted by the British Liberals - proceeded to streamline and tighten the oppression of the Africans, Coloured people and Indians.
And Gandhi, who had led an ambulance corps during the Boer War, felt compelled to lead a satyagraha from 1907 to 1914, when all Indians - merchants and labourers, Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Parsis - defied the unjust laws and went to prison.
I must make a special mention of Parsis as they were a very small community and contributed greatly, and we have several Parsis in the audience today.
The Parsis were rather privileged. I heard that a Parsi was even an attorney-general in the Transvaal; his grandson is now a leader of trade unions. It was rumourd that Paul Kruger had an affair with a Parsi woman.
But several Parsis went to prison in the satyagraha. Parsee Rustomjee, a rich merchant, was one of the closest colleagues of Gandhiji, and suffered badly in prison on more than one occasion. Sorabji Shapurji Adajania went many times to prison.
A Parsi Member of British Parliament, Sir Muncherjee Bhownaggree, was active in the support committee in Britain. (Dadabhai Naoroji, who had guided Gandhiji, had left Britain for India on election as President of the Indian National Congress). And Ratan Tata, a Parsi in India, made by far the most generous contribution to help the satyagrahis.
Henry Polak, a Englishman articled to Gandhiji, became a loyal colleague - and was later a great friend of India in Britain until he died in the 1950s.
Many of those who opposed the Boer War - the "pro-Boers" - helped Gandhiji and the Indians in that struggle.
I must make special mention of several women.
They were all socialists, feminists and pacifists - closely related to leaders of government and public life in South Africa - and they all spent many years in Britain.
I wish there were more research on these great women and their opposition to racism in South Africa.
Gandhiji promoted the establishment of a solidarity committee in Britain under the chairmanship of Lord Ampthill, a former Governor of Madras, and it helped greatly until the Smuts-Gandhi settlement of 1914.
Yet, unfortunately there was little sensitivity in Britain to the oppression of the Africans - but only eagerness to get along with General Smuts and mine the gold and diamonds.
In 1919, when the Africans in the Transvaal launched passive resistance against pass laws, some whites on mounted horses trampled on them and indiscriminately shot at an African crowd. But there was hardly a whisper of protest in Britain.
In 1946-47 when India raised the South African problem in the United Nations, and when General Smuts massacred African miners on strike, the Labour Government even arranged a Royal visit to give a certificate to South Africa.
India, for its part, became the victim of tremendous hostility in the West for daring to oppose colonialism and racism.
There had to be patient, determined and prolonged effort to educate British public opinion.
Many of you are veterans of that struggle, and I will not try to tell you what you know better. Let me, however, leave this part of my remarks with one thought.
When I hear that the British Anti-Apartheid Movement may wind up or change its character, I have an urge to say: "Please, wait, and give us, the people of India and South Africa, a chance to build a monument for this great and glorious movement of human solidarity.
I will be very brief in my final remarks on the present and the future.
There is a difficult period of transition ahead in South Africa - and a democratic government will face immense challenges in overcoming the legacy of racism and apartheid. It will have to deal with economic stagnation, immense unemployment, and great disparities in income and wealth. Moreover, the enormous social problems it will inherit, especially among the Africans, the results of enforced segregation on racial lines, and the fragmentation of communities will not be easy to solve even if financial resources were available. And South Africa has become a crime-ridden and violent society - comparable only to the ghettos in the United States and much worse.
There are naturally great expectations among the South African people.
And there are great expectations among those of us in the anti-apartheid movement who have come to respect the liberation movement as one of the most moral and progressive in our memory.
I am afraid we will need to lower our expectations and do all we can to help.
Britain and India, with their historic relationships with South Africa and their great experience, can do much to help.
As for India, I believe our experience with constitution-making, affirmative action, planning for a mixed economy, the problem of national languages, ethnic problems and so on, can be valuable for South Africa. I refer not only to our successes, but to our failures.
I look forward to the day when India, the new South Africa and anti-apartheid Britain can draw inspiration from the past and work together as friends and allies in the cause of justice.