Great Soul

by Joseph Lelyveld

  On my last visit to Inanda, banners stamped with Dube’s face were streaming from lampposts on the Kwa Mashu Highway, which cuts through the district, alternating with lampposts bearing Gandhi banners. Such sanctification of their imagined alliance rests on little more than the political convenience of the moment and a wispy oral tradition. Lulu Dube, the last surviving child of the Zulu patriarch, grew up with the notion that her father kept in touch with Gandhi. “In fact, they were friends, they were neighbors and their mission was one,” she said in a chat on the veranda of Dube’s house, which was declared a national monument at the time of the first democratic election, then left to rot (to the point that eighty-year-old Lulu, fearful of a roof collapse, had moved into a trailer nearby). Born sixteen years after Gandhi left the country, she’s at best a link in a chain, not a witness. Ela Gandhi, keeper of her grandfather’s flame in Durban as head of the Gandhi Trust, inherited a similar impression. She was raised at Phoenix but decades after her grandfather departed. She was only eight when he was killed. A member of the African National Congress, she’s aware that, politically and historically, this is treacherous ground, so she chooses her words with care. “They were each concerned with dignity, particularly the dignity of their own people,” she said of the two men on the banners.

  What the real history, as opposed to heritage mythmaking, seems to disclose is a deliberate distancing of each other by Gandhi and John Dube, a recognition, on rare occasions, that they might have common interests but a determination to pursue them separately. If there could ever have been a possibility of their making common cause, it may well have been stalled for a generation by Gandhi’s calculated reaction to a spasm of Zulu resistance in 1906—the year after they met—that was instantly characterized as a “rebellion” and brutally suppressed by Natal’s white settlers and colonial authorities.

  The immediate provocation for the rising was a new head tax on “natives,” called a poll tax, and the severe penalties imposed on those who failed to pay up promptly. The broader provocation was a sense among Zulus—those still bound by tradition and those adapting to imported ways and faiths—that they were losing what was left of their land and autonomy. Numbers as much as race always had to be factored into these South African conflicts. Altogether the Zulus of Natal outnumbered the whites by about ten to one in that era (outnumbered the whites and Indians combined by about five to one). Gandhi’s instant reflex, as at the time of the Anglo-Boer War seven years earlier, had been to side with English-speaking whites who identified themselves with British authority in their struggle with Afrikaans-speaking whites who resisted it. Here again he offered to raise a corps of stretcher bearers—another gesture of Indian fealty to the empire, which in his view was the ultimate guarantor of Indian rights, however circumscribed they proved in practice. It was a line of reasoning few Zulus were likely to appreciate.

  The story isn’t a simple one. Gandhi and Dube, each in his own way, were men of divided loyalties at the time of what came to be known as the Bhambatha Rebellion. Martial law was declared by trigger-happy colonial whites confronting Zulus armed mainly with assegais, or spears, before anything like a rebellion got under way. The spark was a face-off in early February between a group of protesting Zulu artisans from a small independent church and a police detachment sent to arrest its leaders. One of the policemen pulled a revolver, spears were thrown, and before the smoke cleared, two of the officers had been killed. The protesters were then rounded up and twelve of them sentenced to death. The British cabinet tried at first to have the executions postponed, but the condemned men were lined up at the edge of freshly dug graves and shot on April 2. A few days later, a chief named Bhambatha, who was being sought for refusal to pay the tax, took to the deepest, thorniest bush in the hills of Zululand with some 150 warriors. A thousand troops were sent in hot pursuit, homesteads were raked with machine-gun fire, shelled, and then burned. More warriors took to the hills. Against this background, under the leadership of the man who would one day be called a mahatma, the Indian community offered its support to the governing whites in the fight against the so-called rebels. The least temperate of his many justifications for this stand is worth quoting at length, for it’s revealing on several levels:

  For the Indian community, going to the battlefield should be an easy matter; for, whether Muslim or Hindu, we are men with profound faith in God … We are not overcome by fear when hundreds of thousands die of famine or plague in our country. What is more, when we are told our duty, we continue to be indifferent, keep our houses dirty, lie hugging our hoarded wealth. Thus, we live a wretched life, acquiescing in a long, tormented process ending in death. Why then should we fear the death that may overtake us on the battlefield? We have much to learn from what the whites are doing in Natal. There is hardly any family from which someone has not gone to fight the Kaffir rebels.

  Obviously, what we have here is a rant. Gandhi’s irony is out of control; his inclination to scold undermines his desire to persuade. He has lost the thread of his argument about duty and citizenship. What comes across is revulsion, barely contained anger over the cultural inertia of his own community, its resistance to the social code he hopes to inculcate. If it offers nothing else, he seems to feel, the battlefield promises discipline.

  The war posed a different set of conflicts for John Dube, the Congregational minister seeking to arm young Zulus not with spears but with the Protestant work ethic and basic skills that could win them a foothold in a trading economy. The rebels were, on the other hand, his people, and in the final stages of the conflict it was the chiefdom from which he descended that was attacked. The Christian in Dube, not to mention the pragmatist, could not endorse the rising, but the mercilessness of the repression shook his faith in the chances for racial peace. Cautiously, in the columns of his newspaper, he questioned the heavy-handedness of the whites. Soon he was summoned to appear before the governor and warned that the martial law regulations applied to him and his paper. Somewhat chastened, he later wrote that the grievances of the rebels were real but “at a time like this we should all refrain from discussing them.”

  What was said to be the severed head of Chief Bhambatha had been displayed and the rebellion all but crushed by June 22, when Gandhi finally left Durban for the struggle for which he’d been beating the drums in the columns of Indian Opinion for two months. This time the community had managed to restrain its enthusiasm for what he proposed as a patriotic duty and opportunity. Gandhi had the rank of sergeant major but a much smaller band of stretcher bearers under his nominal command than he’d had at the start of the Anglo-Boer War: nineteen as opposed to eleven hundred in the earlier conflict; of the nineteen, thirteen were former indentured laborers; this time just four of twenty, counting Gandhi himself, could be classed as “educated.” In the next few weeks, in the sporadic final clashes of the conflict, the colonial troops were told to take no prisoners. What Gandhi and his men got to witness were the consequences of the mopping up, the worst part of the repression. At this stage of the conflict, there were few white wounded. Mostly the Indians ended up treating Zulu prisoners with terrible suppurating lacerations, not warriors with bullet wounds, but villagers who’d been flogged beyond submission.

  Sergeant Major Gandhi with stretcher bearers, 1906 (photo credit i3.2)

  Gandhi later wrote that the suffering Zulus, many of whom had been untreated for days, were grateful for the ministrations of the Indians, and maybe that was so. White medics wouldn’t touch them. But back at Phoenix, roughly forty miles from these scenes, Gandhi’s relatives and followers were seized by the fear that the Zulus in their neighborhood would rise against them in retaliation for the choice he’d made. He’d deposited Kasturba and two of his four sons there before leaving for the so-called front. “I do not remember other things but that atmosphere of fear is very vivid in my mind,” Prabhudas Gandhi, a cousin who was a youngster at the time, would later write. “Today when I read about the Zulu people’s rebellion, the anxio
us face of Kasturba comes before my eyes.” No reprisals materialized, but signs of Zulu resentment over Gandhi’s decision to side with the whites were not lacking. Africans would not forget, said an article reprinted in another Zulu newspaper, Izwi Labantu, “that Indians had volunteered to serve with the English savages in Natal who massacred thousands of Zulus in order to steal their land.” That article was by an American. Izwi offered no comment of its own. But it did say: “The countrymen of Gandhi … are extremely self-centered, selfish and alien in feeling and outlook.” In London, an exile Indian publication called The Indian Sociologist, which tacitly supported terrorist violence in the struggle for Indian freedom, found Gandhi’s readiness to join up with the whites at the time of the Zulu uprising “disgusting.”

  As the Zulu paper implied, Gandhi’s own outlook may have initially been alien and, in that sense, self-centered. But he was profoundly moved by the evidence of white brutality and Zulu suffering that he witnessed. Here again is Joseph Doke, his Baptist hagiographer: “Mr. Gandhi speaks with great reserve of this experience. What he saw he will never divulge … It was almost intolerable for him to be so closely in touch with this expedition. At times, he doubted whether his position was right.” The biographer seems to hint unwittingly at taboos of untouchability that Sergeant Major Gandhi’s small band had to overcome. “It was no trifle,” he writes, for these Indians “to become voluntary nurses to men not yet emerged from the most degraded state.” Eventually, Gandhi did divulge what he saw—in his Autobiography, composed two decades after the event, and in conversations in his last years with his inner circle. “My heart was with the Zulus,” he then said. As late as 1943, during his final imprisonment, Sushila Nayar tells us, he was still recounting “the atrocities committed on the Zulus.”

  “What has Hitler done worse than that?” he asked Nayar, a physician who was attending his dying wife and himself. Gandhi, who’d tried writing to Hitler on the eve of world war in an attempt to soften his heart, never quite realized, or at least acknowledged, that the führer represented a destructive force beyond anything he’d experienced.

  By his own account, the horror over what he’d seen in Natal and the soul-searching over his unpopular decision to side with the whites produced the major turning point of his life spiritually. Gandhi drew a straight line from his battlefield reflections to his vow of perfect celibacy—necessary, he felt, to clear the way for a life of service and voluntary poverty—and from that vow to the one he offered at the Empire Theater in Johannesburg on September 11, 1906. All this happened in little more than two months: marching off to support the whites, swearing off sex for the rest of his life, and following up that life-transforming promise to himself with his vow of nonviolent resistance to the Transvaal “Black Act,” which then became his first exercise of the strategy later called satyagraha. Gandhi’s testimony of cause and effect is irrefutable as far as it goes, but, as Erik Erikson noted, it doesn’t carry us to anything approaching a full understanding. “These themes, were they to be clarified,” the psychoanalyst wrote, “might more directly connect the two decisions of avoiding both sexual intercourse and killing. For it would seem that the experience of witnessing the outrages perpetrated on black bodies by white he-men aroused in Gandhi both a deeper identification with the maltreated, and a stronger aversion against all male sadism—including such sexual sadism as he had probably felt from childhood on to be part of all exploitation of women by men.”

  What was not aroused in Gandhi in the immediate aftermath of the Bhambatha Rebellion—not, at least, as far as we can discern—was a deepened curiosity about black Africans or sympathy for them that reached further than pity. Two years later, when he started writing about his first experience of jail, they were still “kaffirs,” too uncivilized and dirty to be incarcerated with Indians, let alone to be seen as potential allies. In part, this may have been because of a change in context: leaving Natal and returning to his base in Johannesburg, having left his family behind at Phoenix, Gandhi also left behind whatever opportunities he might still have had to build bridges and, ultimately, deepen contacts with a Zulu leader like John Dube who spoke for a small Christianized, landowning black elite, sometimes called in the language of urban Zulus the amarespectables.

  In part, it was also due to Gandhi’s continued reluctance to let go of the idea that his so-called British Indians were naturally the allies of whites, just another kind of settler. If indentured Indian “coolies” were still seen, in his view, as too ill-bred, unlettered, and backward to be citizens, then what could he do about “kaffirs” except put them out of mind? Gandhi kept his distance and apparently found it easy to do so. A tacit alliance between blacks and Indians was the opposite of what he’d all along been seeking. If he thought about it at all, he would have known that such an alliance could only deepen white racial hysteria. He must have understood, too, that it would not have been an easy sell in his own community. Much later he knit together a rationalization out of such disparate reflections. Asked long after he returned to India by a visiting delegation of black Americans whether he’d ever made common cause with blacks during his time in South Africa, Gandhi replied, implying he had to resist the impulse: “No, I purposely did not invite them. It would have endangered their cause.” A few years later, a quarter of a century after he returned home, he told a black South African, “Yours is a far bigger issue.”

  This Gandhi, the full-blown Mahatma of 1939, is doing some retrospective tidying up. In 1907, the Gandhi who actually resided in South Africa, the barrister and community leader, sent a letter to Sir Henry McCallum, the colonial governor who had imposed martial law on the restive Zulus the previous year. The letter is written a year after Gandhi’s vows. The doctrine of nonviolent resistance has now been proclaimed, but “the many-sided Gandhi,” as Naipaul called him, is arguing that the time had come to give Indians an opportunity for service in the colonial militia, a force whose most obvious function—as he had to know, given his experience the previous year—was to keep Zulu power in check.

  “I venture to trust,” the special pleader pleads, “that as the work done by the Corps had proved satisfactory, the Indian community will be found some scope in the Natal Militia. If such a thing is done, I think it will be mutually advantageous and it will bind the Indians, who are already a part of the body politic in Natal, closer to the Colony.”

  Gandhi knew in his heart that he’d taken the wrong side at the time of the rebellion, but he was still ready to claim a dividend from the white authorities for services rendered, just as he’d sought “the Queen’s Chocolate” as a reward for his service with the “body snatchers” on a couple of the early battlefields of the Anglo-Boer War.

  The strain on the Reverend John Dube, who imbibed a strategy of accommodation from his exemplar Booker T. Washington, was even more severe. In the aftermath of the rebellion, the Oberlin graduate and Congregational minister positioned himself as a defender and supporter of the Zulu king, Dinuzulu, who had been put on trial for high treason. He had spoken of the need to raise “the native people out of the slough of ignorance, idleness, poverty and superstition.” In later years, at a ceremony honoring white missionaries, he sounded almost fawning in his expression of a gratitude that had to be genuine, for he was a missionary himself. “Who was it,” he asked his white audience, “who taught us the benefits and decency of wearing clothes? Who was it who taught us that every disease is not caused by witchcraft … that a message can be transmitted by writing on a piece of paper?” But now in the aftermath of the 1906 conflict, he showed that he was prepared to exempt some tribal traditions from such broadsides. Dube remained close to the Zulu royal house and thus immersed in ethnic politics for the rest of his life. He also spoke for a broader nationalism as the first leader of the movement that became the African National Congress. But the straddle between these two kinds of politics—urban–based mass politics and aristocratic tribal politics—became increasingly difficult. In 1917, the first Congress p
resident was eased out. The accommodationist in him had expressed a willingness to accept the principle of racial separation that the white government was pushing in exchange for an expansion of the so-called native reserves. To secure a bigger Zululand, he was prepared to bow reluctantly to a law that reserved most of Natal for whites. This was too much for younger Africans rising in the movement.

  The law was the Natives Land Act, passed in 1913 by the white parliament, just three years after white hegemony had been formally built into the new Union of South Africa. A huge, blatant land grab, the law made it illegal for blacks to own land in 92 percent of the entire country. Dube was eloquent in denouncing it. So, strikingly, was Gandhi, in what was really his first serious engagement with any measure weighing on Africans. “Every other question, not excluding the Indian question, pales into insignificance before the great Native question,” he now wrote in Indian Opinion. “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.” The date was August 30, 1913. Gandhi was already in his last year in the country when he wrote those words. Not only that, he was already laying the strategy for his last, most radical campaign there, his first on behalf of indentured laborers. Suddenly, it seems, he is less parochial, able for the moment, at least on paper, to take something approaching a national view.

  It’s tempting to try to imagine what the two neighbors, each a religiously inclined political leader—a Congregationalist Zulu and a neo-Christian Hindu—might have had to say to each other had they met to exchange views at this time. It’s not impossible that there was such an encounter, but, more likely, each was aware at a distance of what the other was saying and doing. Indian Opinion reprinted a portion of an appeal John Dube addressed to the British public. “You must know that every one of us was born in this land, and we have no other,” he said. “You must know that for untold generations this land was solely ours—long before your father had put a foot on our shores.” That could have moved Gandhi.