Anil Nauriya: The making of Gandhi in South Africa and after
As the Black Lives Matter protests have spread, statues of
prominent figures have been defaced or brought down for their racist pasts. It
is unfortunate that amidst this, some have also pointed fingers at M K Gandhi. Anil Nauriya charts the evolution of Gandhi’s attitude
on the race question as well as his views on the African struggle for rights
during the latter's stay in South Africa that spanned 21 years.
It was in 1893 that M K Gandhi (1869-1948) went from India
to Natal in South Africa as a young lawyer, not even 24 years of age. He was
not yet 45 when he left in July 1914. Except for a few interludes, mainly in
India and England, Gandhi's stay in
South Africa spanned 21 years. The widening of Gandhi’s outlook on racial
matters goes back to his South Africa years and was not merely a later
occurrence as is sometimes erroneously assumed.
The purpose of the struggle against racism is to get
people to shed any ethnic or related prejudices they might have. Gandhi is an
example of a person who not only shed his earlier ethnocentric ideas but
went on to become an inspiration for African struggles and, as stated by the
National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons on his assassination in
1948, became during his lifetime "the bearer of the torch of liberty
of oppressed peoples."
As a subject of the British Empire, as the young Gandhi
then saw himself, he sought non-discrimination by the European but resented the
reduction in Indian rights whereby educated sections of Indians were clubbed
with the ‘raw native’. But with increased interaction with
Africans, Gandhi's concern for African causes became increasingly visible.
Though Gandhi’s struggles in South Africa were organised around the Asian
causes that more immediately affected Indians, his long-term vision for a
non-racial South Africa was by now clear enough, as evidenced by his speech in
May 1908, referred to below.
By 1910, Gandhi took voluntarily to third class travel. One
of the reasons for this, according to him was that he “shuddered to read the
account of the hardships” faced by Africans in the third-class carriages in the
Cape. “I wanted to experience the same hardships myself,” he wrote in a letter
to M P Fancy, an associate in South Africa, on March 16, 1910. The practice of
third class travel that he would continue in India evidently had this African
origin. For such Europeans as were able to rise above colour prejudice, he
usually had a word of praise.
A remarkable change in Gandhi had thus come in South Africa
itself. By May 1908, moving beyond expressing
his concern merely over Indian issues, Gandhi rejected the policy of
segregation and envisioned a South Africa in which the various races
“commingle”. It is in this 1908 speech, made at the YMCA in Johannesburg
on May 18, 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?”
A citizen of the British Empire: Even as a young Indian Gandhi had a nationalist pride.
Queen Victoria's proclamation of 1858 (made a year after the Great Indian
Rising of 1857) had committed the British Crown:
"We hold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian
territories by the same obligations of duty which bind us to all our other
subjects... It is our further will that, so far as may be, our subjects, of
whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to offices in our
service, the duties of which they may be qualified by their education, ability,
and integrity, duly to discharge."
To appreciate Gandhi's evolution in South Africa it is
necessary to understand that he treated this Proclamation as a Magna Carta for
India and Indians and for many years this Proclamation and the British
Constitution were his points of reference.
He expected to be treated in South Africa the same way as he was when he
lived in England while studying law. When confronted with the harsh realities
of racial discrimination in South Africa, he insisted on legal equality for
Indians with Europeans. Laws in South Africa however tended repeatedly to deny
the equality that Gandhi believed Indians were entitled to under the
Proclamation and the British Constitution.
Asserting citizenship of the Empire, he understood this also to carry obligations. This is what led him on two occasions to volunteer nursing and paramedical service to the British side in the South African War of 1900 and the Bambatha Rebellion of 1906. Although Gandhi participated in the latter, he ended up nursing the Zulu victims and also came to see the justice of the African cause.
Asserting citizenship of the Empire, he understood this also to carry obligations. This is what led him on two occasions to volunteer nursing and paramedical service to the British side in the South African War of 1900 and the Bambatha Rebellion of 1906. Although Gandhi participated in the latter, he ended up nursing the Zulu victims and also came to see the justice of the African cause.
Positive attitude on expansion of African rights: Racists seek to restrict the rights of other communities or
peoples. Gandhi even in his South African years had a positive attitude on
expansion of African rights. As I have shown in my work, The African Element
in Gandhi (2006), Gandhi welcomed African franchise rights as early as in
1894. Gandhi and his paper, the Indian Opinion, extolled outstanding
African achievements.
Gandhi supported and welcomed industrial training and
general educational efforts among the Africans. While in South Africa, Gandhi
reached out to African leaders like John Langalibalele Dube (1871-1946) who was
later to be the first president-general of the African National Congress. Dube
who, like Gandhi, admired the African American educationist, Booker T
Washington, ran an industrial school, the Ohlange Institute, in Inanda near
Phoenix. Gandhi set up his Phoenix Settlement close to the Ohlange Institute.
"There was frequent social contact between the inmates of the Phoenix
settlement and the Ohlange Institute," writes E S Reddy in Gandhiji's
Vision of a Free South Africa (1995). Reddy writes that John Dube's paper, Ilange lase 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 the leading African editor John
Tengo Jabavu to set up a college for Africans.
As early as in 1905, Gandhi had supported Africans’ rights
in land. He and his journal welcomed the Transvaal Supreme Court judgement in
the case of Edward Tsewu (b. 1866), another future founder of the African
National Congress, upholding the Africans’ right to hold land. Gandhi’s paper
severely condemned the Natives Land Act, 1913, as an “Act of confiscation” and
supported John Dube’s criticism of the Act.
Gandhi’s notions on race benefited from his intellectual exposure
to influences such as those of Olive Schreiner and Jean Finot. Soon after
Gandhi's release from prison in 1908, 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. Gandhi would repeatedly refer to her lack of racial prejudice
and made a specific reference to it at the session of the Indian National
Congress in Kanpur in 1925. She was clearly one of the vital influences that
entered into the transformation and broadening of outlook that Gandhi
experienced in South Africa on the question of race, particularly from
mid-1908.
Similarly, Jean Finot’s work, Race Prejudice, is
another formative but unjustly neglected influence on Gandhi from this period.
Gandhi referred to Finot’s work a few
months before the Universal Races Congress was held in 1911. The Polish-born
Finot had become a French citizen in 1897. In France he founded and edited La Revue des
Revues which
brought him into contact with writers like Tolstoy. Finot’s work against race
prejudice, Les Prejuge des Races, was published in Paris in 1905. The English language
translation appeared the following year. It is this work which was noticed and
commended in Indian Opinion in September 1907.
Gandhi’s criticism of the South African Constitution of 1909-1910
was also based on his vision of non-racial nationhood. Gandhi had vital
insights into the emerging South African nation and stressed the need for a
non-racial conception of it. Gandhi criticises the 1909-10 Constitution for its
racist content. In 1910 Gandhi criticised the racially-based constitutional
set-up in South Africa under which an African leader like Walter Rubusana, a
future founder of the ANC, was not considered entitled to contest for
Parliament although he could be a member of the Provincial Legislature in the
Cape. Earlier, in 1904, Gandhi had endorsed Rubusana’s interrogation of Sir
Gordon Sprigg in East London and Rubusana’s criticism of discriminatory
pavement regulations in that Eastern Cape city.
Supporting political organisations among Africans: Gandhi supported the growth of political organisations
among Africans. Gandhi’s paper, Indian Opinion, welcomed the
establishment in January 1912 of the African National Congress (then named the
South African Native National Congress) as an “awakening”. Six months before the ANC was
formed, Gandhi’s paper carried a report about the likely formation of such an
organisation. The report cited Pixley Seme (1881-1951), who would reputedly be
the main driving force behind the establishment of the organisation, and would
later become its fifth President-General.
John Dube, the African leader from Natal and Gandhi’s
neighbour in Inanda, near Durban, was chosen to be the first President-General
of the African National Congress; Walter Rubusana became Vice-President.
Gandhi’s paper welcomed the choice of John Dube, “our friend and neighbour” and
published in detail the ‘manifesto’ issued by Dube. At least seven years earlier, in 1905, Gandhi had met John
Dube and heard him speak. He had then praised John Dube and wrote in favour of
African land rights. In the following year in 1906, Gandhi’s paper praised a ‘manifesto’ issued by John Dube against colonial
policies that displayed unfairness towards Africans.
When Gopal Krishna Gokhale visited South Africa at Gandhi's
invitation, Gandhi took him to meet John Dube on November 11, 1912, at the
Ohlange Institute near Phoenix and discuss “matters of politics”. The historic
significance of the meeting is immense. John Dube had been chosen as the first
President of the African National Congress at the beginning of the year. Gokhale
had been President of the Indian National Congress in 1905. After his return to
India, Gandhi too would be President of the Indian National Congress – in 1924.
Dube’s paper, Ilanga lase
Natal, reported
that Gokhale, accompanied by Gandhi and others “was received by our boys and
girls who greeted him with cheers and gave him an exhibition of band and vocal
music.” The same issue, dated November 15, 1912, carried an editorial on
Gokhale’s visit to South Africa. It observed:
“The reception and attention that are being given by the
Government and people of South Africa to the Hon. G. K. Gokhale, and the
hearing he has received on all sides when he has touched upon the
unsatisfactory relations existing between the European and Indian population of
the Union, convey a lesson of importance to the Native population. We have seen
and heard a great man whose knowledge and experience is equal to that of the
foremost statesmen of our day, and he is a black man….We Natives of South
Africa have not been given the opportunity of taking part in the affairs of our
fatherland, and consequently cannot boast of such leaders as are Messrs Gokhale and Gandhi….The Natives
have taken a most important step in
establishing a representative Congress of their own. They should perfect that
organisation and support their Congress and men they have chosen to office by
every means in their power. Let them speak as those having authority, and the
claims of the Natives to attention will at least always have a hearing.”
Gandhi enjoyed the trust of leading figures in the African
National Congress. Selby Msimang consulted Gandhi on legal matters in the
absence of Pixley Seme with whom Msimang was associated. Pixley Seme himself
had called on Gandhi at Tolstoy Farm near Johannesburg in 1911. An account of
this has become available from the memoirs of Pauline Podlashuk, a future
medical doctor who was active in the suffragette movement in South Africa as
secretary of the Women’s Enfranchisement League.
Gandhi’s paper welcomed the African women’s anti-pass struggle in
the Orange Free State, South Africa in 1913 with a full front page article on
August 2 emblazoned with the banner heading, “Native Women's Brave Stand"
in capital letters. In the 1906 Rising, Gandhi had wanted to do what he saw as
his duty by the settlers. By 1913 his sympathies had moved to the Africans so
long as the struggle was non-violent. One reason for some misunderstanding of
Gandhi's position has been his anxiety that struggles ought to be nonviolent
and his reluctance to endorse an amalgamated struggle involving all communities
until he had satisfied himself that this condition would be met.
Seeing the justice of the African cause: Racial prejudice would be seen in the fact that Gandhi and
other Indians who were imprisoned in the passive resistance campaign resented
being classed with Africans, especially those convicted for criminal offences.
Various reasons contributed to this and while some of these were of a racial
nature, Gandhi was particularly irked by the fact that "...this
thoughtless classification has resulted in the Indians being partly
starved...." (Indian Opinion, March 7, 1908 in Collected Works of
Mahatma Gandhi, Vol 8, p.120)
Yet even this resentment was mixed with some introspection
by Gandhi: "It was however as well that we were classed with the Natives.
It was a welcome opportunity to study the treatment meted out to Natives, their
conditions [of life in gaol] and their
habits. Looked at from another point of view, it did not seem right to feel bad
about being bracketed with them." (Indian Opinion, March 7, 1908 in
Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol 8, p.135). In an interview given to D A Rees after his release from
prison, Gandhi remarked: "Asiatic prisoners are classed with Natives. I do
not object to this, but I claim that they should be supplied with food
according to their customs."
Gandhi also spoke out on public health issues in favour of
the African people. He criticised racist policies on public health which had
“meant death and destruction to the
Native people of this country.” Gandhi spoke out against segregation even in
the context of a smallpox outbreak. He supported African civic rights and
critiqued the jury system for its bias against Africans.
Although Gandhi offered his nursing and paramedical
services to the British in the 1906
Rebellion, he came to see the justice of
the African cause. It is on seeing this that
Gandhi commended passive resistance as a method to the African people. The methods of struggle envisaged by
Gandhi were becoming more intensive and defiant. He had reached the end of
the petitioning road. In a note Gandhi
sent in Gujarati, for his journal of August 28, 1909, he wrote:
“I see the time
drawing nearer everyday when no one, whether black or white, will succeed in
obtaining a hearing by merely making petitions. If I am right, then no force in
the world can compare with soul force, that is to say, satyagraha. I therefore
wish that Indians should fill the gaols if, by the time this letter is published,
there has been no decision or solution.”
He recommends passive resistance to Africans in June 1909
and to the Coloured People. In line with this he also supported the protest
made by the Coloured community at the time of the Prince of Wales visit to Cape
Town in 1910.
Arriving at the interconnectedness of struggles: Gandhi had resented the use of the term "coolie" for Indians, particularly the educated sections. He had, however, regrettably himself used the term "kaffir", then current in South Africa, for the Africans. Gandhi’s own vocabulary improved with time in South Africa
itself and not merely upon leaving it. Despite kaffir being an expression that had to some
extent entered South African usage, Gandhi discarded using it for the Africans
before he left South Africa. Gandhi in South Africa gradually grew out of the
tendency to use the word kaffir, taking its usage towards the end of
his stay there (1913-14) to a vanishing point.
Kaffir was essentially an Arabic term for
non-believers. The term, having acquired a special meaning in South Africa as a
dismissive synonym for the Africans, had also entered South African laws of the
time. Some of the Christian missions of the time also adopted it. The term was
also adopted to connote African language(s) and Lovedale Press published a
"Kaffir-English Dictionary" at least as late as in 1915. Many Africans used the term themselves. John
Knox Bokwe, wrote a "Kaffir Wedding Song" the second edition of which
was published in 1894, a year after Gandhi's arrival in South Africa. In the
United States, ‘Negro’
has now been discarded as an expression, but so many African American writers
in the early years had used it themselves even in titles of books they wrote.
Gandhi understood the interconnectedness of struggles for
freedom. In July 1926 Gandhi emphasised a vital axiom about the struggle
against racial discrimination which set limits to how far Indian demands could
be expected to be met in South Africa without a forward movement in that
country as a whole: “I do not conceive the possibility of justice being done to
Indians if none is rendered to natives of the soil”. (Young India, July
22, 1926 in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol 31, p. 182)
The same thought recurs here: “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.” (Gandhi in Young India, April 5, 1928 in Collected Works of
Mahatma Gandhi, Vol 36, p. 190).
Extending the methods he had adopted in India, in 1926
Gandhi commended world-wide nonviolent
non-co-operation against exploitation. Following the economic boycott of
foreign cloth that Gandhi had encouraged and sponsored in India, he had been
recommending the same course to other Asians and to Africans. He had declared
in 1926: “There is however no hope of avoiding the catastrophe” (of increased
racial bitterness) “unless the spirit of exploitation that at present dominates
the nations of the West is transmuted into that of real helpful service, or
unless the Asiatic and African races understand that they cannot be exploited
without their co-operation, to a large extent voluntary, and thus
understanding, withdraw such co-operation.” (Young India, March 18, 1926
in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol 30, pp. 135-136)
Support to other African leaders: In addition, Gandhi offered his encouragement to African leaders in other
parts of Africa, such as Kenya. As early as in 1924 Gandhi had commented on the
case of the African leader Harry Thuku,
an early organiser of Kenya's African workers. Thuku, who had protested against
the flogging to death of some of his countrymen and against forced labour by
African unmarried girls on plantations of white settlers, was detained without
trial and deported. Gandhi described Thuku as the victim of “lust for power” and wrote that if Thuku
“ever saw these lines, he will perhaps find comfort in the thought that even in
distant India many will read the story of his deportation and trials with
sympathy.”
During his visit to England in 1931, Gandhi had a meeting
with Jomo Kenyatta, the future leader of Kenya. Jeremy
Murray-Brown, Kenyatta's biographer, writes about the meeting: "Kenyatta
met the Indian leader in November 1931, and Gandhi then inscribed Kenyatta’s
diary with the words: 'Truth and nonviolence can deliver any nation from
bondage'."
As early as in 1931,
Gandhi extended support for the independence of the Gold Coast (the later
Ghana).With Gandhi already committed to Indian independence, and to full
Egyptian independence, his commitment to all of Africa could be no less. While
visiting London, Gandhi was asked, on 31 October 1931, a question about the
country that the world would later know as Ghana: “For some years Britain would
continue certain subject territories like Gold Coast. Would Mr. Gandhi object?”
Gandhi replied: “I would certainly object.” When
recently the authorities in Ghana decided, under pressure from a university
faculty swayed by some recent writings, to remove Gandhi's statue from the
campus in Legon, they in fact removed one of the earliest supporters of Ghana's
independence.
From Mohandas to Mahatma: In a deeper and more complex way than most, Gandhi understood, as we have seen, the interconnectedness
of struggles. Interestingly, so indeed did many of the protagonists who would
in the first instance be affected by his struggles, such as the European settlers in Africa. As in Kenya
in later years, so in South Africa, there was a general apprehension voiced by
the European Press during Gandhi's
African years that whatever was conceded to the relatively minuscule
community of Indians would sooner or later have to be conceded to the Africans.
Hence the stout resistance to conceding Indian civil and political rights.
The Indian struggle was apparently a struggle only on
behalf of Indians. Yet it was far wider in its consequences. This was noted for
example by the APO, the journal of the Colored people of South Africa,
(organised under the banner of the African People’s Organisation)
on Gandhi’s departure
from South Africa. Much of the evolution in Gandhi's ideas took place
while he was yet in South Africa. This is what Nelson Mandela seemed
to refer to when he said in effect: “You gave us Mohandas Gandhi, we
returned him to you as Mahatma Gandhi"
Anil Nauriya studied economics and is counsel at the Supreme Court of India. He has been writing since the 1970s and has focused frequently on secularism and the state and on struggles for freedom. His writings in the last two decades include The African Element in Gandhi (2006)
see also
