For his part, John Dube professed to have been struck by the example of nonviolent resistance that Gandhi’s followers were about to furnish. Decades later a memoir appeared in the Gujarati language describing an encounter between Dube and a British cleric in which the African described an instance of nonviolent resistance that he said he’d witnessed himself at Phoenix in late 1913:
About five hundred Indians were sitting together in a group. They had come there after going on a strike in their factory. They were surrounded from all sides by white managers, their staff and white police … Whiplashes began to descend on the backs of the Indians sitting there, in quick rapidity, without stop. The whites beat them with lathis and said, “Get up, do your work. Will you do your duty or not?” But nobody rose. They sat, quite motionless … When whips and lathis failed, gun butts came to be used.
The Gujarati was translated into Hindi, the Hindi back into English. It would be a miracle if those were Dube’s exact words, but some such conversation may have occurred. Dube may even have expressed admiration for the fortitude of the Indians who followed Gandhi, though probably not in the words attributed to him in this Gujarati reminiscence, which has the Zulu expressing wonder over their “divine power” and “Himalayan firmness.” Or all this may be little more than rosy self-congratulation on the part of an Indian witness with a hazy memory. What Dube is known to have said is less admiring. While Zulus fought among themselves, he observed in 1912, “people like Indians have come into our land and lorded it over us, as though we who belong to the country were mere nonentities.” Heather Hughes, a Dube biographer, writes of “his pronounced anti-Indianism.” She quotes a Dube article headlined “The Indian Invasion” that ran in Ilanga: “We know from sad experience how beneath our very eyes, our children’s bread is taken by these Asiatics.”
Perhaps it is just as well that, as far as we can tell, the two neighbors never had that searching conversation. Even if there was a moment after the new white regime imposed the Natives Land Act when they appear to have been more or less aligned, they were moving in different directions. For more than six years after the 1906 Zulu rising, Gandhi had devoted most of his time and energy to the Transvaal. At the start of 1913, he abruptly shifted back to Natal. Within months, he was laying plans for a new satyagraha campaign, with the repeal of a three-pound head tax ex-indentured Indians were required to pay annually if they wanted to stay on in the country as one of its main demands.
Dube, meanwhile, was consumed by the land issue, by the dispossession of his people. Later a Zulu newspaper would portray the Reverend John Dube sitting in his Chevrolet, a mere onlooker, as the police marched a group of black Communist organizers to jail in Durban. If Gandhi had stayed on in South Africa, he might have been similarly sidelined. As leaders of the African National Congress made their first tentative international contacts, they came into touch with Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders of the Indian independence movement that had grown up in Gandhi’s shadow. In 1927, Nehru and Josiah Gumede, then ANC president, twice crossed paths—at an anti-imperialism conference in Brussels and in Moscow at the tenth-anniversary celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution. Nehru and his circle were quick to take the view, from afar, that Indians in South Africa should stand together with blacks there. Gandhi himself held out. “However much one may sympathize with the Bantus,” he wrote as late as 1939, “Indians cannot make common cause with them.” Two years later, in 1941, an antithetical political message was personally delivered in Durban by the young Indira Nehru—later to be known by her married name, Gandhi—who stopped off in South Africa on her way home from Oxford, having been forced by the outbreak of war to take the Cape route. “Indians and Africans must act together,” she said. “Common oppression must be met with the united and organized power of all the exploited people.” That night, according to one reminiscence, Gandhi’s son Manilal endorsed “a united front of all non-Europeans” for the first time in his life.
Manilal’s father by this time was more than a quarter of a century removed from South Africa. Perhaps, reflecting back over all the years and miles he’d traveled since his jail experiences there in the aftermath of the Bhambatha Rebellion, he sensed there were grounds for conflict between Indians and Africans in Natal. A year after Gandhi’s death, in January 1949, communal rioting, sometimes characterized as a Zulu “pogrom” against Indians, engulfed Durban. The violence had been sparked by a scuffle with a young Zulu in an Indian shop. By the time it burned out, 142 persons had been listed as killed—the majority, as a result of police fire, African migrant laborers—and more than 1,700 injured. The violence exposed the long-standing African resentment of the relatively privileged status of Indians in the racial hierarchy, of Indian shopkeepers in particular. A hangover of fear and mutual suspicion lingered for years.
Yet three years later Indian and African activists in South Africa finally succeeded in coming together politically to make common cause against apartheid, a program for comprehensive racial separation and white dominance that neither Dube nor Gandhi lived to see. In 1952, the African National Congress and the South African Indian Congress agreed on what was called the Defiance Campaign Against Unjust Laws.
The nonviolent campaign could be seen as self-consciously Gandhian in tactics and strategy. But few African leaders were ready to embrace him as their patron saint. From the other side of the Indian Ocean, shortly before his assassination, the Mahatma had finally given his highly qualified support to the idea of Indians throwing in their lot with Africans. “The inclusion of all the races while logically correct,” he said, “is fraught with grave danger if the struggle is not kept at the highest level.” Between the lines, he seems to be expressing his doubts that blacks would hew to nonviolent principles. For his part, the young Nelson Mandela had to overcome his own doubts about an alliance with Indians. “Many of our grassroots African supporters saw Indians as exploiters of black labor in their role as shopkeepers and merchants,” he later said.
Manilal Gandhi, the faithful second son, briefly lent his name to the Defiance Campaign, but he was mostly out of step. Following his father’s example, he endured fasts of increasing duration against apartheid; in his case, however, their impact was not great. Repeatedly, he courted arrest by going to the white section of the library or post office in Durban, but the police had instructions to merely take down his name. Finally, at the end of the year, in the company of other whites and Indians, he managed to get arrested by entering a black “location” in the Transvaal town of Germiston. He was then sentenced to fifty days in jail for the crimes of “meeting with Africans” and “incitement to break laws.” But Manilal had no organized following of his own and remained an independent operator, standing “outside the organized struggle,” his granddaughter and biographer, Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, acknowledges. The movement had become more radical than Manilal, who was suspicious of the influence of Communists, would ever be. And its commitment to nonviolence was merely tactical. At one meeting, as Manilal, seeking to be “worthy of Bapu and serve as he served,” sermonized at length on the ethical discipline of satyagraha, the young Nelson Mandela rattled his teacup to signal his impatience.
The first Gandhi in South Africa never had to face the kind of retaliation the Afrikaner nationalist regime now rolled out in the form of repressive new security laws, allowing arbitrary arrest, preventive detention at the hands of an emboldened security police, and bannings, not only of organizations, but of individuals (making it illegal for their words to appear in print or for them to meet more than one person at a time); eventually, as the struggle intensified, the white regime would resort to torture, “disappearances,” bombings, and assassination. The colonial regime in India had been repressive, regularly jailing Gandhi and his followers, but it had never imagined it could remove them permanently from the scene, that it could purge India of the Indian national movement. The Afrikaner regime had exactly that ambition when it came to the sponsors of the Defiance Campaign. Long before
the movement was driven underground, younger leaders like Mandela and Oliver Tambo reappraised their tactical embrace of the Gandhian code of nonviolence.
But satyagraha did get its trial in a national cause, the cause of nonracial justice. For a brief time, it was no longer parochially Indian in its appeal. And a much older, more mellow Mandela himself would later claim, once he’d emerged from his long imprisonment and stepped into the role of father of the nation, that the model for the mass action campaigns he’d witnessed in his youth had been the nonviolent campaign the original Gandhi led in 1913. “The principle was not so important that the strategy should be used even when it was self-defeating,” Mandela said then, explaining how he’d deployed his own interpretation of Gandhi against Gandhi’s son. “I called for nonviolent protest for as long as it was effective.” As an interpreter of Gandhian doctrines, Mandela was decidedly less rigorous about means and ends than their originator. Still, no one was better qualified to certify that Gandhi was indeed a founding father in the country he adopted temporarily, as well as in his own.
Doke’s Gandhi, 1908 (photo credit i3.3)
4
UPPER HOUSE
THE REVEREND DOKE, the first of Gandhi’s many hagiographers, took a snapshot of the pensive barrister as he recuperated in 1908 from his beating at the hands of the Pathans. His subject bears little resemblance to the Gandhi the world would come to know. Lean and slouching in casual Western clothes, he gazes past the lens with an expression that’s inward and contemplative, not kindly or twinkling in the manner of the loincloth-clad public man who’d evoke a mass following in India within little more than a decade. Yet he’d already laid out essential components of his thought and leadership strategy. Ecumenical and open-minded in his approach to religion and relations between sects of all description, loyal by his own lights to the British Empire and to values embedded in the British legal system, yet aggressive in his resistance to unjust colonial laws that system not infrequently upheld, the Johannesburg Gandhi now claimed the right to follow his conscience—what he would variously identify as his “inner voice” or, simply, “truth”—in every sphere of life. Yet he was still Gandhiji or Gandhibhai—the suffixes indicating respect for an elder or leader and fraternal feeling for a relative or friend—and not yet canonized as a mahatma, still engaged in self-creation, finding his way to a grounded sense of himself and his mission. In his own mind, we may infer, self and mission both felt incomplete as he closed in on his late thirties.
Celibacy as a spiritual discipline was now a preoccupation of his daily life but not, as yet, a theme of his public discourse; his interviews with his Baptist Boswell never, or so it appears from Doke’s book, got around to the delicate subject of brahmacharya. Probably the politician in him understood that this was the least appealing side of his evolving doctrine. He’d experienced sexual passion but could never condone it or, having made his choice, simply drop the subject. “Marriage is not only not a necessity but positively a hindrance to public and humanitarian work,” he’d later write. Those, like himself and Kasturba, who’d fallen into the coils of matrimony could save themselves by living together chastely as brother and sister. “No man or woman living the physical or animal life can possibly understand the spiritual or ethical.” Gandhi doted on children but regarded childbirth as prima facie evidence of a moral lapse. With distressing regularity, he’d nag his daughters-in-law and others close to him to mend their ways and not do it again.
His vegetarianism was still in his early Johannesburg years a matter of moral preference, hygiene, and heritage, but apart from eschewing meat and grinding his own grain, he hadn’t yet placed severe strictures on his diet, hadn’t yet arrived at the conviction that the curbing of one appetite was dependent on the curbing of another, that sexual abstinence and diet were closely linked. He still drank milk, still enjoyed spicy food in convivial settings. Such indulgences would soon be brought to an abrupt end. The vegetarian would try for a time to become a fruitarian, having concluded that milk, other dairy products, and most spices have aphrodisiac qualities; he’d also give up salt, cooked food, and seconds, eventually measuring his intake in ounces and thoroughly chewing each spare mouthful of carefully blended and pounded mush—lemons, honey, and almonds were usually part of the mix along with grains and leaves—in order to derive as much nourishment from as little food as possible. Mastication would thus become one of his many lesser disciplines and causes.
“Meagerness,” he’d later write, was the ethical standard by which diet should be measured, according to “God’s economy” and Gandhi’s own reading of a Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. That standard enjoined a perpetual “partial fast,” which would require “a grim fight against the inherited and acquired habit of eating for pleasure.” Grim was the word for it. A full meal, Gandhi would write, was “a crime against God and man … because the full-mealers deprive their neighbors of their portion.” There you have the Gandhi of 1933, not 1906. The rule-giving ashram dweller who’d finally decide that delicious food was an invitation to gluttony, who’d find wry satisfaction in being portrayed as a faddist and crank, who’d bring his conviction that less is more to his solitary repasts, had yet to make his entrance. He may have felt driven to distance himself from his wife and sons, but he was still a social being in the early stage of his Johannesburg years, when he is reported to have gone on picnics and ridden a bicycle.
The inner change is harder to trace with any exactitude in the six and a half formative years he spent in Johannesburg after witnessing the brutal reprisals against Zulus in Natal—a period that stretches from August 1906 to January 1913—but it’s at least as significant as the well-documented evolution of the public man. For five of those years he lived in the Transvaal without family. Gandhi insists in his Autobiography that he’d intended from the first to settle at Phoenix himself, give up his law practice, and support himself and the settlement through manual labor. But his emotional need for distance, for not being hemmed in by customary obligations, seems as obvious and important in anchoring him in Johannesburg as the ongoing satyagraha campaign against the Transvaal’s racial legislation. Gandhi treated the Transvaal as the main arena because that’s where the campaign against discriminatory legislation had been launched. If satyagraha was his most important “experiment with truth,” the Transvaal was now the favored workstation in his laboratory. His obligations to the local community were heavy; he was locked into a test of will with the white provincial government, personified by Jan Christian Smuts, the onetime Boer general, now provincial minister of the interior.
That’s all obvious. But the Transvaal was also where he needed or wanted to be for his own purposes. He could have made a case for basing himself in Natal, which by then was clearly the center of Indian life in South Africa. Its Indian community outnumbered the Transvaal’s by about ten to one (110,000 to 11,000 by 1908). He had established the Phoenix Settlement there. It was where Indian Opinion was edited and printed. Also, Natal was where nearly all Indians under the indenture system still labored, in conditions he’d described as “semi-slavery.” In fact, the number of Indians still under indenture in Natal in that period was more than three times the Transvaal’s total Indian population. And in those same years—before racial issues were nationalized with the creation in 1910 of the Union of South Africa—the legislative assembly in English-speaking Natal could hardly be said to lag in its drive to stiffen existing anti-Indian statutes and pass new ones.
With Gandhi mostly absent and looking the other way, the white political class of Natal proved itself to be at least as inventive in coming up with new racial measures and as relentless as the Afrikaans-speaking Transvaalers. The dueling white supremacists may have fought on opposing sides in the recently concluded Anglo-Boer War, but there was no choosing between them when it came to their mutual hostility to the idea of equal citizenship for the Indian minority. Colonial Natal was a place where the leading newspaper, The Natal Mercury, was happy to publish a l
etter signed with the nom de plume “Anti-Coolie.” The letter said it was a disgrace that Indian shops were allowed to do business in the center of Durban. (The Mercury continues to publish in post-apartheid South Africa. Today in its lobby, a larger-than-life-size portrait of Gandhi, matching an equally large portrait of Mandela, peers down on journalists and their visitors, a guardian angel blessing their endeavors.)
The Natal of Gandhi’s day had a pressing economic need for indentured Indian labor; so argued the plantation and mine owners whose mouthpiece the Mercury was. But it wasn’t ready to be outdone when it came to restrictions on free Indian immigration. Sir Henry McCallum, the governor to whom Gandhi had appealed for militia places for Indians in recognition of their service at the time of the Zulu rising, saw “no reason why we should be swamped by black matter in the wrong place,” just because of the demand for field labor. So a new immigration act, passed as early as 1903, in the immediate aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War, made it easy to bar any immigrant who couldn’t fill out an application in a European language to the loosely defined satisfaction of officials. Year after year, Indians were turned back on this basis by the thousands. Next came a municipal corporations act designed to eliminate Indian voting rights at the local level—the final disenfranchising step backward on what had been, fourteen years earlier, Gandhi’s first South African issue; and just as regularly legal screws were tightened to restrict licenses for Indian shopkeepers. Any indentured laborers or former indentured laborers—or their descendants in perpetuity—were classed for purposes of these acts as belonging to “uncivilized races.” In order to keep them that way, public funds were cut off for Indian secondary schools. Finally, in 1908, came a bill designed to make it impossible for any “Asiatics” to hold trading licenses in Natal after 1918, even those whose families by then would have been trading in the province for two generations.
Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India Page 11
