In so many ways Gandhi’s South Africa experiences represent the decisive turning point in his life. No one would have been more surprised than M. K. Gandhi, who accepts a rather minor role in a legal case in South Africa that is supposed to take him away from India for not more than a year. Instead he remains for 21 years, although the total time is closer to 19, since it includes two extended trips to India and two to England.
The Gandhi who leaves Bombay on 19 April 1893 and arrives in Port Durban on 23 May has no clear direction and is unsure of who he is and what he believes. He has had an unsuccessful beginning to a legal career. He dresses in expensive Western suits and wears a stylish turban. Although he is an unknown, insignificant Indian, this Gandhi, so unlike the later Gandhi, is self-centred with a rather elitist pride in the fact that he is a British-educated barrister. He is a rather anglicized Indian and considers himself a very loyal citizen of the British Empire, with its advanced modern civilization.
The Gandhi who leaves South Africa for the last time on 18 July 1914 emerges as the Indian leader in South Africa, known and admired in India, with a strong commitment to the philosophy and practices of truth and nonviolence. He is the originator and organizer of mass, moral, nonviolent, activist, satyagraha campaigns of noncooperation, resistance and civil disobedience. He is the leader who boldly negotiates with the most powerful authorities, is self-confident and self-reliant and endures voluntary and involuntary suffering and imprisonment. He is the remarkable person who remakes himself in appearance, diet and ways of living and rejects much of the modern Western civilization he had embraced. In short, the Mohandas Gandhi who leaves South Africa for the final time looks like the Indian leader and world famous Mahatma, the most influential proponent of nonviolence. How does this radical transformation occur?1
What is the South African context within which Indians live in the late nineteenth century? As becomes legally transparent in later Apartheid laws, there are four main racial groupings: the dominant Whites (mainly the minority privileged British and the larger number of Dutch Boers or Afrikaners), the majority Blacks or indigenous tribal Africans, the ‘coloured’ or ‘mixed’ population and the Indians. The Indians come after 1860 as indentured servants to work on the sugar plantations and later as merchants and traders. Gandhi lives in the eastern coastal state of Natal, a British Crown Colony that includes Durban, and the interior state of Transvaal, the Boer territory that includes Pretoria and Johannesburg. Upon arrival he is immediately aware of the strong anti-Indian race prejudice, oppression and humiliation, as seen in how Whites address Indians, including Gandhi, with the insulting epithets ‘coolie’ (a pejorative term for Asian labourers) and ‘Sammy’ (or ‘Sami’, a derogative term derived from the fact that many Indians have ‘swamy’ as part of their last names, though the term in India means ‘master’ or ‘guru’).
As Gandhi describes in his autobiography and in his book Satyagraha in South Africa, a Meman Muslim firm in Porbandar, Dada Abdullah & Co., writes to his brother Laxmidas, asking if Mohandas would be willing to go to South Africa to assist in a lawsuit. The firm does a lot of business in South Africa and the wealthy head there is Abdullah Sheth. A directionless and desperate Mohandas agrees to take this rather minor case in which Abdullah files a financial claim against his relative Tyeb Sheth, who lives in Pretoria, where the case will be heard.
What is most significant about this case is what it reveals about Gandhi’s developing values that go far beyond his legal career and extend to his entire philosophy and practices of nonviolence and truth. Gandhi is successful in winning the case before an arbitrator. He is disturbed when he realizes that in the present adversarial legal system the lawyer who ‘wins’ most decisively, who destroys the opponent as legal enemy, who secures the maximum financial settlement, is the most successful. For Gandhi, this is an aggressive violent approach that often opportunistically conceals and distorts morality and truth and that stirs up and leads to bitterness, hatred, desire for revenge and escalating violence. Gandhi convinces Abdullah that he should not bankrupt and humiliate his relative and should accept smaller settlement payments over a longer period of time. For Gandhi this illustrates the only justifiable role for a lawyer (as for a doctor, journalist, politician and other ‘professionals’): to live a life of selfless service, pursuing truth and justice and always aiming for a win–win resolution of conflicts. In such conflict resolution, you relate to ‘the other’ not as enemy to be exploited and dominated, but instead as an integral part of your nonviolent, loving, truthful, interconnected, unifying ethical and spiritual reality.
On the seventh or eighth day after his arrival in South Africa, Gandhi experiences the following famous incident at Pietermaritz burg, popularly known as Maritzburg, the capital and second largest city of Natal (now the province of Kwazulu-Natal). This experience is sometimes described as the most decisive trans-form ative turning point in Gandhi’s life.
As befitting his self-image of a British-trained barrister, M. K. Gandhi has a first-class train ticket for his journey from Durban to Pretoria. A white passenger complains, and Gandhi is asked by an official to move from the first-class compartment to a van compartment. When he refuses a police constable is summoned and throws Gandhi and his luggage off the train at Pietermaritz burg railway station. Humiliated, huddled and shivering through out the night in the unlit waiting room, Gandhi debates whether to return to India or remain in South Africa. He resolves that the former would be cowardly and that it is his duty to remain in order to finish his legal case, expose colour prejudice and fight for his rights.
He reaches Charlestown, where he continues his journey by stagecoach, experiencing more race prejudice, insults and humiliation. Although he has a valid ticket, the driver refuses to allow him to sit inside with whites and Gandhi reluctantly agrees to sit outside next to the driver. Later the driver places a dirty sackcloth on the footboard and orders Gandhi to get down and sit there. When Gandhi refuses, he starts beating him and dragging him down. Fortunately some of the alarmed white passengers intervene and say that he can sit inside with them. There are other similar humiliating experiences in Gandhi’s introduction to South Africa, such as being ordered in court to remove his turban, and rather than experience the humiliation he decides to leave. On another occasion a guard on duty by President Kruger’s house in Pretoria pushes and kicks him from the footpath into the street.
The Pietermaritzburg railway station incident, reinforced by similar experiences, marks the beginning of a new and radically different Gandhi, even if it takes years and decades for the trans formation to mature. Responding to race prejudice and humiliation, Gandhi begins to evolve as a human being with a new self-confidence and determination, an awareness of the violence of injustice and inequality, a sensitivity to moral and spiritual duty, a commitment to a life of nonviolent dignity, freedom and integrity that involves selfless service encompassing the well-being of others.
His case concluded, Gandhi is about to return to India when he learns of a bill that will disenfranchise Natal Indians and is ‘the first nail in our coffin’. Persuaded to remain, Gandhi increasingly identifies with the plight of South African Indians, keeps extending his stay and emerges as the Indian leader. In 1894 he becomes founder-secretary of the Natal Indian Congress. Over the years he focuses almost entirely on the living conditions of Indians and on race prejudice and oppression directed against the Indian community. He becomes aware of and resists blatant injustices denying civil and human rights as expressed through anti-Indian legislation that involves disenfranchisement, unjust and unbearable taxation, removing the legitimacy of Hindu, Muslim and other Indian marriages, and humiliating racial group registration. On at least two occasions he is almost killed and in 1908 he begins the first of his many imprisonments. In all, including the later imprisonments in India, Gandhi will spend about six years in prison.
Gandhi starts Indian Opinion in 1903, communicates and interacts with influential leaders in India, such as his ‘political guru’ Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Sir Pherozeshah Mehta and Bal Gangadhar ‘Lokmanya’ Tilak, as well as leaders in Britain and South Africa. He develops skills in symbolically representing and publicizing injustices and in organizing nonviolent campaigns. He experiments with personal and group living, including taking the vow of brahmacharya in 1906 and founding the Phoenix Settlement ashram outside Durban in 1904 and the Tolstoy Farm ashram outside Johannesburg in 1910. He experiments with undermining hierarchical distinctions and prohibitions, including those involving manual labour, caste and untouchability, with simple living, alternative medical and health practices and alternative food consumption that involves a radical vegetarian diet. By 1912 he completely rejects European dress.
Although Gandhi is very limited and selective in his reading, there are at least three dramatic, life-changing influences that arise from the literature he reads in South Africa. In this regard he lists Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You, John Ruskin’s Unto This Last and the Jain Rajchandra (Shrimad Raychandbhai Ravajibhai Mehta), who comes closest to being Gandhi’s religious mentor or guru, as the three most important modern influences on his life.
Gandhi writes that Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You ‘overwhelmed’ him and ‘left an abiding impression’. He even claims that it is reading Tolstoy that converts him to a philosophy and practice of nonviolence.2 Tolstoy is critical of traditional organized, coercive, violent religion. He submits that we should instead follow the divine within each of us, focusing on our inner experiences that constitute a meaningful ethical and spiritual existence. His focus is on the example of Jesus Christ in the Gospels, especially in the Sermon on the Mount. We should embody the principle of ‘nonresistance’ to violence and evil, in the sense of turning the other cheek, not hating or killing and loving our enemies. Gandhi corresponds with Tolstoy late in his life. He obtains permission to translate and publish Tolstoy’s A Letter to a Hindoo, which claims that weak Hindus and other Indians, who are 99 per cent of the population, are complicit with and largely responsible for their own enslavement by a small number of British colonialists. They can free themselves if they adopt nonviolence and nonviolent noncooperation with evil. All of these principles from Tolstoy are embraced by Gandhi and become major features of his philosophy and practices of nonviolence.
In a dramatic description Gandhi tells how reading Ruskin’s Unto This Last, on a train trip from Johannesburg to Durban in 1904, has a ‘magical influence’ on him and is a ‘turning point’ in his life.3 Gandhi cannot lay the book aside, gets no sleep, discovers some of his deepest convictions in the book and ‘is determined to change my life in accordance with the ideals of the book’. Ruskin’s teachings that Gandhi embraces are that ‘the good of the individual is contained in the good of all’, that all labour ‘has the same value’ in that ‘all have the same right of earning their livelihoods from their work’ and a life of labour, as involving farming and handicrafts, ‘is the life worth living’. After reading Unto This Last Gandhi founds his intentional community at the Phoenix Settlement, and this serves as the model for his other ashrams. He later publishes the Gujarati translation of Unto This Last as Sarvodaya, meaning ‘the welfare of all’, and that is the name of Gandhi’s economic philosophy. One cannot overestimate the formative influence of Ruskin’s Unto This Last in shaping Gandhi’s challenging and innovative philosophy of nonviolence with his emphasis on meeting the basic material needs of others, focusing on those who are most exploited and with greatest need, and formulating a social relational approach that is egalitarian and recognizes the contributions and value of all labour. This economic philosophy allows Gandhi to oppose hierarchical, dominant, modern economic systems as inherently exploitative and violent.
The third influential source of literature can be described as Gandhi’s interest in religious writings. Much of the impetus for this comes from other believers in South Africa. Some are confrontational in a judgemental, intolerant and verbally violent way, and this reinforces Gandhi’s aversion to traditional organized religion and its aggressive missionaries. Others approach Gandhi in a respectful and loving way in their attempts at interesting him in and or even converting him to their religions. At their urging Gandhi studies the Bible, the Qur’an and other religious scriptures and writings.
Gandhi becomes confused and, at a time of doubt and crisis, turns to the Jain Rajchandra, whom he knew as a family friend in Gujarat. Rajchandra, who dies at the age of 33, is known as a philosopher, poet, jeweller and person of spotless character with a remarkable sense of detachment, equanimity and renunciation. Gandhi is impressed with his burning desire for self-realization and his central ‘passion to see God face to face’. Rajchandra has a scholarly knowledge and respect for Hinduism. In 1894 Gandhi sends him 28 questions and receives appreciated answers and recommended readings and guidance on Hinduism, including extolling the pure path of brahmacharya. Gandhi states that of all the religious leaders and teachers he met, he most respects Rajchandra, although he could not accept him or anyone else as his spiritual guru.4
These experiences point to the importance of diverse contextual influences in negatively and positively shaping Gandhi’s unique approach to God, Hinduism and other religions. Under the influence of Tolstoy, Rajchandra and others, Gandhi, for example, repeatedly claims that he embraces Christ, especially the essential teaching as symbolically represented by Christ on the Cross, as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount, but he doesn’t like what traditional Christians do. He claims to accept the essential Christian message while rejecting Christ as the Son of God and exclusive divine incarnation, and he claims that it would not matter to the ethical and spiritual teaching whether Christ had never lived. When asked by Christians why he doesn’t become a Christian, he responds: ‘What makes you think I’m not?’ And he provides similar responses to other religions. He can affirm that he is a Muslim, and that the splendid Qur’an contains as much, but not more, truth as the Vedas, Bible and other scriptures. He then goes on to tell Muslims, as well as other believers, that their sacred scriptures are human constructions and that they should reject anything in their religious texts and institutions that violates their own moral experiences and human reason.
Similarly, increasingly reacting to British, Christian and other condemnations in South Africa, Gandhi becomes comfortable affirming that he is a proud Indian and a believing Hindu. But he is critical of much of traditional Hinduism, scriptural claims, hierarchical institutions and violent practices. His emerging sense of nonviolent Hinduism has a strong sense of renunciation, of a rather stoic asceticism, of self-control of ego-desires and attachments as part of self-purification. But his Hindu approach rejects traditional Hindu renunciation of an illusory world. His nonviolent, truthful, moral approach is very worldly, and his renunciation focuses on how we engage in transformative action and service.
While in South Africa Gandhi’s changing approaches to war are striking, puzzling and often controversial. He repeatedly affirms his nonviolent philosophy that war is immoral. However, in 1899 he organizes and leads a volunteer Indian Ambulance Corps in the Boer War on the side of the British, even though he claims that his sympathies lie with the Dutch Afrikaners. Even more troubling, in 1906 he organizes and leads a volunteer Ambulance Corps of Indian stretcher-bearers in the ‘Zulu Rebellion’ on the side of the British, even though he writes that his sympathies are with the native Zulus. When carrying wounded Zulus on stretchers he is particularly disturbed, especially by how the British cruelly inflict mass slaughter as more of a manhunt than a war. What makes his involvement even more controversial arises from his statements about Zulus and other indigenous Africans that strike many as uninformed, condescending and racist.
In justifying his participation in the Boer War and Zulu Rebellion Gandhi’s major justification is that this is his duty as a loyal supporter of the British Empire. His other major justification is that the British consider Indians weak, cowardly, backward and incapable of self-governance. He believes that volunteering in the British war effort will change British attitudes, demonstrating that Indians are loyal, courageous and worthy of respect. This may contribute to India’s growing movement for greater self-rule and independence. Of course, the latter leaves Gandhi open to the charge that, in a seemingly anti-Gandhian manner, he is willing to sacrifice the lives of Boers and Zulus in order to achieve Indian ends. Such opportunism blatantly violates Gandhi’s major philosophical doctrine that ends, even noble ends, cannot be used to justify immoral violent means.
In 1914, after he leaves South Africa, Gandhi supports the British war effort by raising an ambulance corps in London. In 1918 he actively recruits in India for the British war effort. Many of his closest associates are confused and dismayed. They do not understand how M. K. Gandhi, the opponent of war and violence, can justify such a position.
Gandhi is a remarkable human being, but one who is contextually shaped and has many personal weaknesses. What is remarkable is his capacity to be self-critical and to transform himself. In the illustrations of his approach to war and in many other examples, the later Gandhi often rejects earlier positions in terms of his evolving philosophy and practices.
Three South African experiences of monumental significance demonstrate this evolution in transformation in Gandhi, his philosophy and his influence: first, the gathering in 1906 in Johannesburg that leads to the introduction of satyagraha; second, the writing of Hind Swaraj in 1909 on the return ship from London, and third, the later satyagraha struggles, culminating in the ‘Great March’ of 1913.
On 11 September 1906 a packed gathering assembles at the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg to protest a Transvaal Asiatic Department’s proposal to amend the Asiatic Law. This law will require Indians to obtain new certificates of registration, be finger-printed and produce the certification each time it is requested by police officers, who will be allowed to enter private houses for inspection. Failure to comply would invite fines, imprisonment or deportation. After speakers support a resolution opposing the proposed law, Haji Habib dramatically asserts that the oppo-sitional resolution must be passed ‘with God as witness’ and ‘in the name of God that he would never submit to that law’. Deeply impressed, Gandhi proposes that Transvaal’s Indians consider taking such a solemn pledge, and as he describes in Satyagraha in South Africa, ‘all present, standing with upraised hands, took an oath with God as witness not to submit’. This is usually dated as the beginning of Gandhi’s satyagraha, his revolutionary approach and best-known method for implementing his philosophy of nonviolence. Dissatisfied with the passive nature and other connotations of the commonly used term ‘passive resistance’, Gandhi offers a prize in Indian Opinion, and in 1907 he modifies the winning entry to ‘satyagraha’ (‘firmness for the truth’, translated as truth-force, love-force and soul-force).
Two years later Gandhi goes to London during July–November in an unsuccessful attempt to lobby against anti-Indian legislation and for South African Indian interests. On his return voyage he writes Hind Swaraj in only ten days, 13–22 November, and also translates Tolstoy’s ‘A Letter to a Hindoo’. Gandhi scholars and followers often describe Hind Swaraj as his most important work.5
More of a manifesto, an argument, an invitation to rethink values, approaches and philosophies than a scholarly book, the 90-page Hind Swaraj takes the form of a dialogue between the Editor, expressing Gandhi’s views, and the Reader, representing various prominent Indian views, including those of expatriates Gandhi has met in London. The Reader consists of privileged moderates, including leaders in the Indian National Congress, who believe that Indian independence can be achieved through legal reforms and constitutional means, and extremists, including anarchists and terrorists, who believe that Indian independence can be achieved only by using any means necessary, including illegal, extra-constitutional and violent means.
Hind Swaraj is especially significant because it reveals the radical changes Gandhi has undergone in South Africa. Often in misleadingly oversimplistic and irrelevant ways, it presents profound insights, values and commitments that are at the foundation of Gandhi’s mature philosophy and practices and may be very relevant today. He forcefully argues that Indians should stop worshipping and imitating some supposedly superior British and Western Civilization. According to Gandhi, true civilization and culture have to do with how human beings live their lives in the world. ‘Modern Civilization’ is violent, materialist, consumerist, ego-centered, focuses on bodily desires and privileges the ‘machine craze’. It is alienating, dehumanizing and lacks any deep sense of morality and duty. The superior ‘Ancient Civilization’ of India is human-centric rather than machine-centric and money-centric. It is essentially nonviolent, privileges morality and spiritual realization, addresses our higher human capacities and focuses on human integrity and harmonious relations with other beings and with nature.
More specifically, in terms of the book’s title, Gandhi submits that both the moderates and the extremists uphold a limited and false view of swaraj. They mimic the inadequate methods, values, and models from ‘Modern Civilization’. Even the so-called radical approaches of the extremists simply embrace modern colonial values they claim to reject. They only wish to exchange the violent British tiger for a violent Indian tiger, which will perpetuate the domination and exploitation of most Indians. Instead Gandhi proposes something far more revolutionary: real political independence, not realized in Britain, the usa or India in 1947, is based on real ‘self-rule’ (swa = self and raj = rule). Without citizens capable of self-rule, actively participating and self-determining, we cannot experience the real egalitarianism, freedom and democracy extolled, but not realized, in ‘independent’ modern nation states.
Therefore during his final years in South Africa M. K. Gandhi develops a more authentic understanding of who he is, what he believes and how to put this into practice through innovative experiments with truth, especially through heightened and broadened satyagraha campaigns. These include methods of nonviolent resistance, picketing, burning registration cards, civil disobedience and arrests. Traditional Indian class and gender restrictions are broadened so that satyagraha can include women, poor mineworkers and their families. These experiments culminate in what Gandhi and others call the ‘Great March’ of April 1913, consisting of 2,037 men, 127 women and 57 children, from Natal and crossing the Transvaal Volksrust border. For this last and most successful South African resistance campaign Gandhi and the satyagrahis focus on the anti-Indian tax, refusal to recognize Indian marriages that are not Christian unions, immigration restrictions and indentured labour. Police brutality, killings and arrests lead to pressure on the South African Government from London and Delhi. This leads to the agreement between General Jan Smuts and Gandhi and the passage of the Indians’ Relief Act of 1914. The tax is abolished, Indian marriages are recognized as legal and various rights and the easing of some entry restrictions are granted.
Gandhi sees this victory, albeit a limited one, as the culmination of the long satyagraha struggle that started in September 1906, and he decides that it is time to return to India. The Gandhi who enters South Africa in expensive suits and fights to travel first class leaves as the Gandhi who dresses like a poor indentured labourer and travels by the lowest third class. But the unknown Indian has become the widely recognized and admired leader, the proponent of love and nonviolence and author of the revolutionary method of mass nonviolent resistance and transformation. On 18 July 1914 the Gandhis leave Cape Town for England, and on 19 December they set sail for Bombay.