Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (14 page)

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 president 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.

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:

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.