The following month, in March, a court decided that marriages celebrated according to Indian rites should not be recognised in South Africa since Hinduism and Islam allowed for the possibility of polygamy, even if the vast majority of Hindu and Muslim marriages were, in fact, monogamous. ‘In effect’, complained Indian Opinion, ‘it [the court judgement] declares that the wife of a Mohammedan, who goes out of the Province, may not return, because her husband is a polygamist, even if he has only one wife’.51 ‘In the latter event’, the newspaper noted drily, ‘he is termed a monogamous polygamist’. Indian anger was further inflamed when the minister of the interior, Jan Smuts, used disrespectful Boer slang to characterise Islamic divorce, suggesting all that was required was that the man tell his wife to voetsek – get lost.
Against this background of legal restrictions and arbitrary administration, a new immigration law made its way through the South African parliament in the middle of 1913. This law gave government officials – and ultimately the minister of the interior – still wider powers, including the power to exclude any group from migrating to South Africa if they were deemed undesirable on economic grounds or, more broadly, ‘on account of standard or habits of life’ inappropriate to the development of the country. That the intention was to exclude Asian immigration was openly acknowledged. ‘We are all agreed that the unrestricted immigration of Asiatics, whether British subjects or not, is a thing which could not be tolerated’, editorialised the Natal Mercury, explaining that it did not want ‘the unlimited addition of an exotic element in the inferior stage of civilization and with the social characteristics distinguishing the mass of Asiatics from the average European’.52
Although immigration controls against Indians went against a key principle of the British Empire – the free movement of British subjects – many Indians in South Africa were grudgingly prepared to accept controls, as long as their existing rights were recognised. But the problems with the new law went deeper. Giving so much discretionary power to officials, without a right of appeal, threatened injustice at every turn (the Natal Mercury itself complained at this ‘reckless arbitrariness’).53 The fact that different provinces of the Union of South Africa restricted Indians’ movement and settlement in other ways – it was illegal for Indians to travel from Natal to Transvaal without prior registration, for example – provided further grounds for anger. And behind all this lay the suspicion that the immigration law was only a beginning, that the government would tighten the restrictions until even resident Indians might be deprived of their most basic rights to live in South Africa if they were absent for a short period of time, or else cantoned into new areas of settlement.
Gandhi accused the government of South Africa, in putting forward the immigration law, of a ‘breach of trust’.54 He proposed a campaign of passive resistance to oppose it and, perhaps more powerfully still, to force the abolition of the £3 tax. This grievance was particularly acute now, given that Gokhale, when he visited in 1912, thought he had secured a firm commitment from the government to withdraw the tax. Yet a year later it was still on the statute books. The government had not delivered.
This was not the first time that Gandhi had found the government of South Africa to promise one thing and do another. Nor was it the first time he had tried the strategy of passive resistance, known as satyagraha, to force their hand. In Transvaal a few years earlier, protesting against a new requirement for Indians to register themselves – as a prelude to possible further controls – Gandhi had counselled a policy of mass refusal, persuading a meeting of local Indians in Johannesburg’s Imperial Theatre to follow his lead. In subsequent negotiations with the government of Transvaal, and with Jan Smuts, then the Colonial Secretary of Transvaal, Gandhi appeared to have secured a compromise – Indians would register voluntarily, and the law would be withdrawn. But the law was not withdrawn from the statute books. Registration cards were burned. Gandhi led a march from Natal to Transvaal in violation of the law. He was arrested and thrown in jail for his pains.
English-trained lawyer Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, champion of the Indian population of South Africa. He wore traditional Indian clothes for the first time as an adult in 1912.
This time around, his opponent was again Smuts, now the South African minister of the interior; like Gandhi, he was an English-trained lawyer, albeit a former Boer general as well. In some ways, Gandhi now had a stronger hand, opposing not just a law, a symbol, a nuisance – but the very real financial burden of the £3 tax, which forced a large number of Indians from one period of indentured labour to another. Moreover, he had on his side the righteous anger of Indians in India, furious that Gokhale had been misled. Not all Indians in South Africa were convinced that passive resistance would work, however. ‘In the Transvaal many of the leading Indian merchants, who previously provided the sinews of war, have dissociated themselves from the campaign’, noted the Natal Mercury in early October, ‘and in Natal a large section, who on the previous occasion entered into the struggle, are now holding aloof’.55
There was one further weapon which could be used: a strike. In October 1913, several thousand Indians working in the coal mines of northern Natal were successfully called out. The critical issue now was time. How long could the strikers be kept out, keeping up the pressure on the mine owners to persuade the government to think again? Gandhi spoke at gatherings of Indian miners, alongside his allies Thambi Naidoo and C. R. Naidoo, urging the miners not to go back to work. But there were limits to this strategy. It was the poorest who were most affected, forgoing their wages and risking their jobs. They could not be expected to stay out forever. Trying to force a confrontation with the authorities before the miners lost their resolve and the strike its strength, Gandhi threatened to take more radical measures: a march from Natal to Transvaal, as before, illegally crossing the border between the two provinces without prior registration. This, it was hoped, would force a response from the government, either bringing them to the negotiating table or forcing them to lock up the marchers, thus further damaging the government’s credibility and inviting still louder criticism from India, from London and from liberal opinion in South Africa. In smaller groups at first, but ultimately building up to several thousand, the marchers began their trek.
But rather than responding by locking up the marchers as they crossed into Transvaal, Smuts decided instead to do nothing. He preferred to play a waiting game, trusting that the strike would ultimately collapse under its own weight. This was astute, for although money was sent from India to support the strikers and now the marchers, the cost of feeding them was still crippling for the meagre resources of the local Indian associations. Gandhi had already come under fire within the Natal Indian Congress for his precipitate action. Now there was a real possibility that the strategy of passive resistance would fail and that Gandhi would be remembered as a failed agitator. Eventually, Gandhi himself was re-arrested and sentenced to another term in jail.
In November 1913, however, the situation began to change again, this time in Gandhi’s favour. The Indian agricultural workers of southern Natal also came out on strike. This was in some ways more serious than the coal strike, involving many times more workers. The situation for sugar plantations was particularly serious. A whole year’s harvest was at risk, not just a few weeks’ lost production, and the employers had no ready replacement labour force they could bring in to do the work. As the economic costs mounted, Indian Opinion urged mill owners not to attempt to break the strike, but ‘look to the root of the matter’ and make a ‘strong, united appeal to the Government, not for more police, but for the immediate suspension of the tax’.56 Consumers began to feel the pinch. Amongst white Natalians, wild rumours spread that black workers, with their own grievances, were waiting for their moment (though Gandhi himself, ever careful to distinguish Indians from Africans, denied that ‘kaffirs’ had been asked to strike).57 Perhaps a generalised revolt was in the offing.
The final blow to the government of South Afr
ica’s position of studied inaction, however, came not from within South Africa, but from India. There, fearing that angry home opinion at the situation in Natal would destabilise India, Viceroy Charles Hardinge, now fully recovered from the assassination attempt of the previous year, resolved to act himself. Dragooned into the service of an expatriate Indian community, Hardinge took the remarkable step of openly criticising a fellow member of the British Empire, and calling for an independent Commission of Enquiry to be set up in South Africa to investigate the £3 tax and other Indian grievances in Natal. ‘The Indian community of South Africa cannot be too grateful to Lord Hardinge for the brave stand he has ventured to take’, noted Indian Opinion approvingly, ‘knowing full well that his attitude would be resented and that he would be subjected to adverse criticism [by some in South Africa]’.58 For Smuts, this was an embarrassment; for some in South Africa it was unwarranted interference in a domestic matter, indeed The Economist in London classed Hardinge’s intervention a ‘constitutional impropriety of the first order’.59 But it was also an opportunity to compromise. In December 1913, with as much grace as he could muster, Smuts accepted the idea of a commission, with the expectation that it would recommend – as it did the following year – the end of the £3 tax. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s passive resistance campaign had proved a success. Even though disagreement remained on the composition of the commission as the year 1913 ended, one thing was clear: satayagraha had won.
Durban could now sink back into the background of Indian political consciousness, and South Africa could return to the bickering of British and Boers, and to the still bigger issue of white South African concern: the ‘native’ problem. Gandhi’s reputation, however, was now made. After twenty years amongst a community of Indians counted in the tens of thousands, he could now plan a return to the India of 300 million, with the lessons of South Africa fresh in his memory, his philosophy of political action confirmed, and his sense of mission redoubled.
At the end of 1913, Indians in South Africa had reason to celebrate. However, a much larger group of South Africans, black Africans, looked deeper into a well of despair. Gandhi’s success brought no respite for them. Rather, 1913 would be remembered with a dark mark against it, as inequality was more deeply enshrined in law, as opportunities were curtailed, as segregation became a legally enforced reality, and as the world of black South Africans became a little bit smaller. ‘Awakening on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African Native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth’, wrote Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje a few years later, selecting the date of the passage of the Natives Land Act of that year, a law which heavily restricted the purchase of land by black South Africans.60
The black population of South Africa had always been central to the politics of white South Africa, long before the Union of South Africa itself was forged. That black Africans were a numerical majority was obvious, a fact which caused white workers to fear that the price of their labour could be undercut were blacks to enter the skilled workforce, and which caused other whites to fear the possibility of black rule, perhaps brought about by violent rebellion. Unlike in Australia, that blacks had in effect been dispossessed of the lands of their ancestors was broadly admitted by whites in South Africa. But there was disagreement as to the extent of white responsibility for the black population of South Africa, the form this responsibility should take, and the extent to which it might include political rights. In the Cape, if a black farm-owner were wealthy enough and well-educated enough, he might vote in provincial elections. In other parts of South Africa, this was unthinkable. Blacks might be farm-hands, maybe even proprietors, but not voters.
The Anglo-Boer War had been fought, at least as the British presented it, to enforce British interests and British principles in South Africa, including protection of native rights. In making the peace, however, the British accepted that the question of the franchise, and therefore the possibility of a colour bar, would be left to a future South African government, subject only to a special exemption for existing voters in the Cape. When the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910, therefore, London had not insisted upon a colour-blind franchise. ‘Union without honour is the greatest danger any nation can incur’, thundered William Schreiner, a former Prime Minister of the Cape, urging that non-Europeans should not be denied the vote in national elections, provided they fulfilled the same other criteria as might apply to Europeans.61 Outvoted at home and outmanoeuvred in London, however, Schreiner failed in his appeals. The Union of South Africa entered the world of states as a constitutionally unequal state, a democracy for some and a tyranny for others.
On the broader question of how to manage the native ‘problem’, confusion reigned. Complete segregation of black and white was an option in theory – but unworkable in practice. Partial territorial segregation, recommended by the government-appointed Lagden Commission in 1905, was another option, elevating a piecemeal practice of separation at the provincial level into a potential principle of policy at the national level. The idea of allowing European and non-European communities to evolve along different pathways, on different land, was viewed by some as progressive, avoiding tainting European civilisation with tribal instincts and allowing Africans to develop at their own pace, potentially without competition from European farmers, traders and businessmen.62 Others viewed segregation as a dereliction of the duty of Europeans to civilise Africans – or simply as a step backwards, away from the unity of the nation and towards ever-greater fragmentation and narrowness of perspective. Everywhere, land was a central issue. In Natal a few years previously a land commission had awarded the land most suitable for farming to whites, leaving Africans with less good land, from which they were expected to pay the heavy burden of the local poll tax. (In 1906, refusal to pay the tax had spiralled into a full-blown Zulu revolt.) In the Transvaal and elsewhere, white farmers worried about an alleged increase in blacks purchasing land – though in fact blacks owned less than five per cent of land in Transvaal, and less than two per cent in the Orange Free State (as against nine per cent in the Cape, and over thirty per cent in Natal).63 In the Orange Free State, where blacks were now legally disbarred from buying land, Afrikaners feared the steady incursions of black ‘squatters’, paying white farm-owners rent to work the land, and steadily altering the province’s demography. Before he resigned from Botha’s government Barry Hertzog, the Boer nationalist from the Free State, was tasked with coming up with a native policy for the Union of South Africa. Unsurprisingly, his approach was one in which assimilation was rejected, and the harshest form of segregation promoted.
The South African Native National Congress had been set up the previous year to provide, at last, a voice for the African majority. It opposed complete segregation not only as unfair, but also as unprofitable to whites – who benefited from black labour – and as preventing the development of blacks themselves. The Reverend John Dube, president of the Congress, and founder of Ohlange Native Industrial School a few miles from Gandhi’s Phoenix settlement just north of Durban, argued on the pages of the Natal Mercury that ‘the system of tribal segregation might have suited very well a period when barbarism and darkness reigned supreme … but it had and has the fatal defect of being essentially opposed to all enlightenment and Christianity’.64 He continued: ‘The times have changed, and manners must change with them. We natives need the white man, and cannot any longer live and thrive without his teaching, his training, his example’.65
This was pragmatism of a sort. It implied no shame in being African. ‘Our blackness is our Creator’s gift’, Dube wrote, ‘and we, for our part, would not have it replaced by any other colour or tint’. He had no illusions as to what segregation would mean in practice; not the award of good farmland to the African majority, but rather the meagre scraps:
… more likely is it you would prefer to drive the native away to some barren, inhospitable wilderness, fever-stricken districts unwanted by yourselves; make hi
m an outcast in his own fatherland, presumably because you find him helpless and powerless to object. I have said ‘drive’ him away, for I think not one of the million natives now resident in the Province [of Natal] would, without a murmur and without demur, be prepared to sever to your call those sacred ties that bind all human beings possessed of a feeling heart to that dear spot they call and know to be their birthplace and their home. Be assured that no single native would be prepared to move, unless compelled by force. But to prostitute your power to so immoral a proceeding would indeed be a sad object lesson for us, a shameful reflection on a people professing to be guided by the spirit and teachings of Christ.66
Whatever the morality of the matter, the politics of it were against the South African Native National Congress. Spurred by the need to placate Orange Free State politicians who threatened to go their own way now that Barry Hertzog had left Botha’s government, the government of South Africa introduced a Natives Land Bill in parliament in April 1913, largely along the lines which Hertzog had proposed. It would allow blacks to buy land on just seven per cent of the territory of the Union of South Africa (and prevent whites from buying land on that same area), and make ‘squatting’ illegal, thus forcing blacks to work on white farms as employees rather than tenants. Shepherded through the House of Assembly by a minister deemed to be friendly to African interests, the bill was modified – exempting the Cape almost entirely, and suspending some provisions in the Transvaal and in Natal – and then passed. The process of segregation had been sharply accelerated, an inequality worsened, an injustice made the law of the land. The Natal Mercury, noting a gathering of several thousand natives opposed to the law before it was even passed, worried for the security of Durban.67 Afterwards, as the law was put into effect, it expressed sympathy for Africans being told to ‘leave your homes – the homes possibly of your grandfathers, and great-grandfathers – and pay annually for the privilege of your enforced removal’.68 ‘How would this appeal to ourselves were the position reversed?’ the newspaper’s editor asked.69
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