Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

by Joseph Lelyveld

  All that can be said by way of extenuation about such passages is that they were addressed to whites. If we want to give him any benefit of the doubt, we might say that the eager-to-please advocate was maybe playing to his audience, seeking to advance his argument that so-called British Indians could safely be acknowledged as cultural and political equals of whites, worthy citizens bound to them by their common imperial ties—that equality of sorts for Indians would not, in the near or far future, undermine the dominance of whites. But he was up against the color bar. For many whites, color was all that mattered; in this view, Indians had to be classed first and foremost as “non-white” if white dominance was to be maintained as the basic premise of social order. To concede that there could be “British Indians”—Indians who met standards that could be acknowledged as “civilized”—was a step away from admitting the unthinkable, the possibility of “British” or “civilized” Africans. It was an attitude that had riled Gandhi practically from the time he set foot in the country. In his fifth month in South Africa he clipped and saved a snatch of racist verse from a humor column in a Transvaal newspaper:

  Oh, say have you seen

  On our market so clean

  Where the greens are exposed to the view,

  A thing black and lean,

  And a long way from clean,

  Which they call the accursed Hindoo.

  Insisting that Indians were British was one way of resisting the easy classification that blackness suggested to colonial minds, and not just colonial minds but Indian minds as well, as Gandhi himself, having returned to India, acknowledged years later in these reflections on race:

  A fair complexion and a pointed nose represent our ideal of beauty. If we discard this superstition for a moment, we feel that the Creator did not spare Himself in fashioning the Zulu to perfection … It is a law of nature that the skin of races living near the equator should be black. And if we believe there must be beauty in everything fashioned by nature … we in India would be free from the improper sense of shame and dislike which we feel for our own complexion if it is anything but fair.

  Back now to those 1908 reflections on race and the mixing of races that jail inspired in Gandhi’s own mind: it’s not their content but the timing that makes them stand out, for they happen to frame the single most farsighted and enlightened thing Gandhi would say on the subject during his many years in Africa. In May 1908—scarcely four months after his first imprisonment ended, a little more than four months before his second began—the recently sprung barrister was asked to argue the negative side in a formal debate before the YMCA in Johannesburg. The issue was tailor-made: “Are Asiatic and Colored races a menace to the Empire?”

  “In a well-ordered society,” Gandhi begins, “industrious and intelligent men can never be a menace.” Immediately he makes it plain that he’s speaking of Africans as well as Indians (and the mixed-race people known in South Africa as Coloreds). “We can hardly think of South Africa without the African races … South Africa would probably be a howling wilderness without the Africans,” he says. The ugly racial stereotype of the “raw Kaffir” has been discarded. Africans are described as being among “the world’s learners.” Nothing special has to be done for them, “able-bodied and intelligent” as they are. But “they are entitled to justice” and what he calls “a fair field.” He makes the same claim for indentured Indians, brought to the country as “semi-slaves.” It’s not a question of political rights, he carefully insists. It’s a question of being able to own land, live and trade where they want, move freely from province to province, without regard to color, so they are no longer barred from having “their being on God’s earth in South Africa with any degree of freedom, self-respect and manliness.” Implicitly, for the first time, indentured Indians and Africans coming into the colonial labor market are put on the same plane.

  So far what’s new here is that the debater has bracketed Africans with Indians. Otherwise it’s his standard trope, his appeal for equality of opportunity for his people. But as he starts to wrap up, he takes a further step. He has always said it’s not a question of political rights, but now he breaks out of that straitjacket. On this one occasion, he allows himself to talk about “free institutions” and “self-government” and the duty of the British to lift “subject races” to “equality with themselves.” Surprisingly, in this imperial context, he finds a vision of something like “the rainbow nation” the multiracial South Africa of today aspires, or at least claims, to be:

  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 civilization that perhaps the world has not yet seen? There are differences and misunderstandings, but I do believe, in the words of the sacred hymn, “We shall know each other better when the mists have rolled away.”

  How do we reconcile these two contrasting Gandhis, each circa 1908 in South Africa—this debater and visionary with the narrow racial pleader who, earlier and afterward that same year, spoke in such a different vein? Can one be seen as more real or enduring than the other? Put another way, can what he says to a white audience be taken as more genuine than what he says to Indians? The answer is so far from being obvious that the only possible conclusion seems to be that Gandhi’s views on race—on blacks in particular—were now contradictory and unsettled. Considering what they had been, this has to be seen as an advance.

  If Gandhi was in flux, so was the country. An all-white national convention was about to set a constitutional course. Standing apart with their list of grievances against the Transvaal, Indians were in no position to influence the debate. In fact, there was no national Indian organization. Gandhi himself was all that connected the Transvaal British Indian Association to the Natal Indian Congress. Less and less did they seem like different faces of a single movement. (It wasn’t till 1923, nine years after Gandhi left South Africa, that a national Indian organization finally came into being, calling itself the South African Indian Congress; by then, the organizations he led were dormant.)

  Even the courageous band of Transvaal protesters courting arrest—his “self-suffering” satyagrahis—were sometimes less united than he might have wished. This became evident, he later acknowledged, in the tight quarters of a jail. “Indians of all communities and castes lived together in the jail, which gave us an opportunity to observe how backward we are in the matter of self-government.” Some Hindus refused to eat food prepared by Muslims or fellow prisoners of lower caste. One satyagrahi objected to sleeping near another from the scavenger subcaste; he was afraid his own caste would punish him, perhaps even brand him as outcaste if it learned of his propinquity to an untouchable. Speaking about caste in a specifically South African context for the first time, Gandhi denounced “these hypocritical distinctions of high and low” and the “caste tyranny” that lay behind them. So both forms of government—“self-government” (meaning how Indians treated Indians) and national government for South Africa (meaning whites ruling everyone else)—were on his mind when he spoke to the YMCA in Johannesburg between his first two jail experiences. At its heart, each held for him the issue of equality. In that sense, he now saw the issue through different ends of one telescope. On this occasion at least, in taking the long view, Gandhi managed to include Africans in his vision of “a civilization that perhaps the world has not yet seen.”

  But outside prison walls, who were the Africans in his life? What, after fifteen years in the country, did he actually know of them? The historical record has remarkably little to say on that score. There is a photograph taken in early 1910 of a dapper, neatly groomed Gandhi, in shirtsleeves and tie, sleeves rolled up, casually sitting on a hillside, where a big tent has been pitched, with a few of the pioneers who would form the nucleus of his nascent utopian community. Standing off to the side, very much apart, are two black men. Possibly these are “Native Isaac” and “Native Jacob,” whose monthly wages of one pound each are detailed in the diary of Gandhi’s
friend and fellow settler Hermann Kallenbach, the architect who purchased the land for what became known as Tolstoy Farm and later functioned as its treasurer. Gandhi would propose, in a set of rules drafted for this new commune and boot camp for nonviolent resisters, that it employ no servants. “It is understood that the ideal is not to employ native labor and not to use machinery,” he’d written. But Isaac and Jacob remained on Kallenbach’s books until the end of its brief life of two and a half years. Gandhi himself later came close to portraying these low-paid farmhands as noble savages in a paean to the life of physical labor in the fields of Tolstoy Farm: “I regard the Kaffirs, with whom I constantly work these days, as superior to us. What they do in their ignorance we have to do knowingly.” (Rajmohan Gandhi, his grandson, suggests this may have been his last use of the epithet “kaffir.”)

  On the building site of Kallenbach’s new home (photo credit i3.1)

  Other Africans from the neighborhood may have visited Tolstoy Farm—as Zulus living near the Phoenix Settlement visited there—but no such visitors, nor the seemingly indispensable Isaac and Jacob, were invited into the mixed group of Indians and whites that made up the company of Gandhian recruits. Their leader couldn’t have passed many days in his two decades in Africa without seeing ordinary Africans, legions of them. But the question of how much contact he had with them, like the question posed earlier of how much actual contact he had with indentured Indians toiling on the plantations and in the mines, finds no ready answer. It can only be inferred from what he wrote. He had a fair amount to say about indentured Indians—about their miserable circumstances, about caste—before he finally became involved with them. Few and far between were his reflections on Africans. Calling him ethnocentric doesn’t cover the case. He had plenty to say to—and about—whites.

  In the several thousand pages Gandhi wrote in South Africa, or later about South Africa, the names of only three Africans are mentioned. Of the three, he acknowledges having met only one. And when it comes to that one African, what documentary evidence there is covers only two meetings with Gandhi—seven years apart—leaving to our imaginations the question of whether they ever met again.

  His name was John Langalibalele Dube. A Zulu aristocrat descended from Zulu chiefs, he’d been raised at the American Zulu Mission station in Inanda, where his father, James Dube, had become one of the first converts and, eventually, a pastor as well as a prosperous farmer, so prosperous that he had thirty gold sovereigns to invest in sending his son off in the company of an American missionary to Oberlin College in Ohio. John Dube thus took a cultural leap as long as the one Gandhi managed when he crossed the black water to be trained as a lawyer in London. Later Dube returned to America to be ordained in Brooklyn as a Congregational minister and raise funds for an industrial school modeled on Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. Dube called Washington, to whom he made a pilgrimage in 1897, “my patron saint … my guiding star.”

  In 1900 he founded an organization called the Natal Native Congress, in hopes of giving a voice to Zulus on issues of land, labor, and rights where the traditional chiefs seemed unprepared to engage white authorities. The new group’s name strongly suggested that it found its model in Gandhi’s own Natal Indian Congress. Twelve years later, John Dube became the first president—president-general he was called—of the South African Native National Congress, which later simplified its nomenclature, calling itself the African National Congress, the name under which it finally took power in 1994 after the country’s first experience of nonracial universal suffrage. In homage to John Dube’s standing as a founding father, Nelson Mandela made a point of casting his own first vote in Inanda at Dube’s school, the Ohlange Institute. The place has since been known as First Vote.

  So if Gandhi was to know only one African of his own generation, John Dube, just two years his junior, was probably the one to know. That is exactly what Gandhi himself concluded after hearing Dube speak in 1905 at the home of a white planter and civic leader named Marshall Campbell. “This Mr. Dubey [sic] is a Negro of whom one should know,” he wrote in Indian Opinion. The article had an unfortunate headline: THE KAFFIRS OF NATAL. And Gandhi called Dube the leader of “educated Kaffirs,” which demonstrates that for him the word applied to all blacks, including Congregational ministers and headmasters, not merely unlettered tribal Africans. Still, his summary of the speaker’s remarks—more than likely the first speech he’d ever heard by an educated African and quite possibly the last—was respectful and sympathetic:

  They worked hard and without them the whites could not carry on for a moment. They made loyal subjects, and Natal was the land of their birth. For them 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.

  What’s striking here is that Gandhi had to travel the several miles to the Campbell residence in Mount Edgecombe to meet Dube. The two men were near neighbors; the Ohlange Institute in Inanda was (and is) less than a mile from the Phoenix Settlement, its buildings visible to this day from the veranda of Gandhi’s cottage. A brisk walker like Gandhi could have crossed the narrow valley that separated them in less than half an hour.

  Only one such visit surfaces in the written record. Just as disappointing is the absolute lack of any correspondence, even a brief note, indicating they kept in touch or were used to addressing one another with familiarity. Gandhi was absent from Phoenix much more than he was present there in the eight years following its founding; and when he was there, often for a matter only of days, his routine was to focus on the settlers, going door-to-door to visit families, holding prayer meetings, gathering the children around him. And there was always Indian Opinion with its weekly demand for more copy from its proprietor and guiding light. Even so, it’s surprising how little turns up linking him to his Zulu neighbor. We know that Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the Indian leader who toured South Africa in Gandhi’s company in 1912, was taken to Dube’s school during a stay of less than forty-eight hours at Phoenix. But only in Dube’s Zulu-language newspaper, Ilanga lase Natal (Sun of Natal) do we find evidence that Gandhi accompanied him. We know also that Ilanga was printed for a brief time on the hand-operated press at the Phoenix Settlement; that the Ohlange Institute came into being just three years before Gandhi’s Phoenix; and that Indian Opinion was just months older than Ilanga. But tantalizing as these parallels are, they continue to run on in parallel without yielding any firm evidence of a crossing of paths by Gandhi and John Dube beyond their somewhat formal encounters at the white plantation owner’s spacious residence and years later, on the occasion of the Gokhale visit.

  There’s another Gandhi who later became a regular visitor at the Ohlange Institute, stopping by now and then on his daily walks. That Gandhi also got to know Isaiah Shembe, called by his followers the Prophet. In 1911 the Prophet founded the Nazareth Church—the largest movement among Zulu Christians, with more than two million adherents today—at Ekuphakameni, which lies between Inanda and Phoenix. (The Nazareth Church was called independent, meaning it was unaffiliated to any white denomination.) Shembe had a bigger impact on South Africa, it can be argued, than the founder of the Phoenix Settlement ever had. The other Gandhi, the one who took the trouble to cultivate the acquaintance of these two significant African leaders, was Manilal, the mainstay of Phoenix after his father returned to India. When John Dube died in 1946 at seventy-five, the headline on his obituary in Indian Opinion read A GREAT ZULU DEAD. “To us at the Phoenix Settlement from the days of Mahatma Gandhi,” the obituary said, “he has been a kindly neighbor.”

  Sparse as this record is, the names Gandhi, Dube, and Shembe are hallowed today as a kind of Inanda troika, if not trinity, by the publicists and popular historians responsible for weaving a teachable heritage for the new South Africa out of the disparate movements that struggled into existence under oppressive white rule. The fact that three leaders of such consequence emerged in rural Natal in the same decade, within an area of les
s than two square miles, is too resonant with possibilities to be overlooked. It has to be more than a coincidence. And so we find the man who became the new South Africa’s third president elected by universal franchise, Jacob Zuma, celebrating “the solidarity between the Indians and Africans” that came into being in Inanda. “What is also remarkable about the history of the Indo-African community in this area is the link that existed between three great men: Gandhi, John Langalibalele Dube and the prophet Isaiah Shembe of the Nazareth Church.” A tourist brochure urges visitors to follow the “Inanda Heritage Route” from Gandhi’s settlement to the Dube school and finally to Shembe’s church. (“Inanda where there is more history per square centimeter than anywhere in South Africa!” the brochure gushes, making no allusion to the sad, sometimes alarming state of what might otherwise be seen as a hard-pressed rural slum, except for the telltale caution that it not be visited without “a guide who knows the area well.”)