Gandhi Before India (20 page)

Gandhi’s skills in court were admired by the Europeans who opposed him. In a case of bankruptcy, he represented one creditor, while a white lawyer named R. H. Tatham represented another. When Gandhi’s proposal to sell the debtor’s business was accepted over an alternate proposal offered by Tatham, the latter jokingly remarked: ‘Gandhi’s supreme. The triumph of black over white again.’
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The young lawyer’s work made an impression on two visitors from overseas. In March 1897, the traveller and soldier Francis Younghusband came to Natal. He met Gandhi, whom he described as ‘the spokesman of the Indian community and the butt of the [white] agitators’. He found him a ‘particularly intelligent and well-educated man’. Gandhi invited the traveller for dinner at his ‘well-furnished English villa’, where a group of Indian merchants further impressed him by talking fluently ‘on all the current events of the time. Such men as these naturally resent the use of the term “coolie” … But while they complain of being classed separately from Europeans they are much offended at Kaffirs being classed with them.’
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The following year, when the Gandhis were well established in Durban, they were visited by Pranjivan Mehta. The two had been close from their student days in London, the bond made more solid by the fact that it was in Mehta’s home in Bombay that Gandhi met the Jain seer Raychandbhai. Mehta was now based in Rangoon, running a jewellery
business. In the summer of 1898 he visited Europe, and on his way back stopped in South Africa to see Gandhi. Disembarking at Cape Town, he found at once that he ‘was in a place where the colour of the skin counted for everything and [the] man nothing’. He was denied rooms in several hotels, and also treated discourteously on the long train journey from the Cape eastwards to Durban.
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Once he reached Natal, Mehta was much happier – nourished by the company of his friend, and impressed by what he was doing there. Mehta was struck by how, under Gandhi’s leadership, ‘diverse communities [of Indians] remain united and vigilant about protecting the rights of one another.’ He was moved by the diaspora’s connection to the motherland, manifest in the £1,200 sent from Natal after the great famine and plague of 1896–7. The ‘people of India’, Mehta told an audience of Gujaratis in Durban, ‘can take great pride in the kind of concern you have shown towards them, even though you are thousands of miles away from India.’
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While based in Natal, Gandhi was also drawn into the Indian question in the Transvaal. Here, the ruling race were the Boers, who spoke Afrikaans and were largely of Dutch extraction. When, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the British took firm control of the Cape, the Boers commenced their ‘great trek’ inland. They established themselves beyond the Vaal and Orange rivers, displacing the Africans and taking control of vast areas of fertile land. Their economy, and their sense of self, was founded on farming, herding and hunting. While the British coveted the coast – which provided access to their jewel in the east, India – the Boers had possession of these inland territories. In the 1850s they formed two, semi-autonomous, republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal (the latter also known, from the 1880s, as the South African Republic).
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Racial politics in the Transvaal were more complicated than in Natal. The Boers had come here to carve a space separate and independent from the British. For many decades their Utopia lay safe, until the discovery of gold near Johannesburg in 1886 prompted a massive and mad rush of immigrants. By the time Gandhi first visited the city in 1893, English-speaking migrants outnumbered the Afrikaans-speaking Boers by two to one. The workers in the mines were mostly African, but the
managers, supervisors and owners were largely English. And as Johannesburg boomed, it was the English, rather than the Boers, who ran the new hotels, restaurants, hospitals, clubs, theatres and other accoutrements of a bustling modern city.

Known as
Uitlanders
(Afrikaans for ‘outsider’) the English had the numbers; they had the money; what they wanted was a share of political power. The Boers, however, claimed that the Transvaal was their homeland, whereas the Uitlanders were greedy foreigners. The franchise was therefore restricted to those resident in the Republic for more than fourteen years. This was resented by the Uitlanders, who also had other complaints; for instance, that the state enjoyed a monopoly over the production and sale of dynamite, a commodity of vital importance to the mining industry.

In the 1890s, the main question of Transvaal politics was the conflict between Boer and Briton. But there was a secondary problem, namely the contamination of the Boer dreamland by an even less wanted group of immigrants, the Indians. With the mining boom in the Rand their numbers rapidly increased. They set up shops in the main towns, and also opened stores in the countryside. Hawkers with less capital at their disposal sold goods on the streets.

When Gandhi first visited Johannesburg, there were already more than a hundred Gujarati traders in town. Some firms were very large – with assets in the tens of thousands of pounds and branches in Durban, the Cape and Bombay. There was also an emerging Indian working class, composed of labourers, domestic servants and hawkers. In Johannesburg’s leading hotels, Indians were ‘much preferred [by their employers] to white waiters, owing to their civility, sobriety, and to their being more amenable to discipline.’
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A few Indians entered the Orange Free State as well. Before their numbers could increase, the Volksraad, or parliament, expelled them from the province. With special permission, Indians could work in the Free State in strictly menial jobs, such as servants on farms. But more respectable and profitable trades were closed to them.

Encouraged by the Free Staters, in 1885 the Transvaal’s Volksraad passed a law making it impossible for ‘so-called Coolies, Arabs, Malays and Mohammedan subjects of the Turkish Empire’ to buy property. The law also empowered the Government to specify particular streets and localities where Asians would live and trade.

For a decade after the law was passed it lay sleeping on the statute books. But in 1894 Boer politicians, worried that the numbers of Indians were now in the thousands rather than dozens, sought to implement it. Notices were issued that traders who were not white would be sent to designated areas known as ‘Locations’, within which they had to conduct their businesses.
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In desperation, the Indians sought an interview with the President of the Transvaal, the crusty and dogmatic old general, Paul Kruger. Kruger came out to meet them with a Bible in hand. The Indians set out their grievances. The Christian warrior, consulting his Book, answered that they were descendants of Esau and Ishmael, and hence bound by God to slavery. Kruger and his Bible went back to their house, while the Indians retreated, bewildered.
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The Indians now approached the British to intervene. An agreement signed in London in 1884 guaranteed the rights of Her Majesty’s subjects to trade and live where they pleased in the South African Republic. Indian traders asked only that this clause be honoured. In 1895, pressed by the British, the SAR appointed an arbitrator, a former Chief Justice of the Free State. He heard the two sides and came out strongly in favour of his fellow Boers, noting that

the constitution of the South African Republic, the terms of which could not have been unknown to the British Government, lays down that no equality between the white and coloured races shall be tolerated … every European nation or nation of European origin has an absolute and indefeasible right to exclude alien elements which it considers to be dangerous to its development and existence, and more especially Asiatic elements, from settling within its territory.’
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The arbitrator had left a window open – the Indians, he said, could ‘test’ their case in the High Court in Pretoria. A Gujarati merchant now appealed against the law under which he was to be sent to a Location. (This was Tayob Khan, whose dispute with Dada Abdulla had brought Gandhi to South Africa in the first place.) Brought in on the case, Gandhi argued that Indians were of ‘Indo-Germanic’ stock, and hence exempt from the racial laws of the Transvaal Volksraad.

One judge on the bench was persuaded by Gandhi’s arguments; the other two were not. In August 1898, the Court finally ruled against Tayob Khan. The threat of eviction loomed large. On 31 December
1898, a group of thirty merchants wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in alarm. If implemented, the court’s judgment ‘would mean practical ruin to the Indian traders in the Transvaal’. They faced a ‘constant dread of having their stores shut up at any moment, and being removed on sufferance tenure to locations unfit for comfortable habitation, devoid of sanitary arrangement, situated in a locality unsuitable for trade, and all this for no fault of theirs’.
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By 1898, more than a quarter of the world’s supply of gold came from the Transvaal. Uitlander mine-owners made extraordinary profits. But the Boer-controlled state did not do too badly either. In 1886, state revenue was £196,000; ten years later, it had jumped to £400,000. The capitalists whose firms had contributed to the growing coffers wanted a greater say in how to spend the government’s revenue. On the other hand, those in charge of the state were loath to cede control.
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Egged on by the imperial adventurer Cecil Rhodes – who had vast business interests in South Africa – a group of conspirators planned to overthrow Kruger’s regime by force. An officer named Jameson was to cross the border into Transvaal with a force of 1,000 men; meanwhile, the English residents in Johannesburg would start an insurrection. In the event, Jameson’s force was surrounded and made to surrender by the Boers; and the uprising within never happened.

The collapse of the ‘Jameson Raid’ of 1895 intensified the rift between Boer and Briton. The pro-imperial party was led by the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, and the High Commissioner in Cape Town, Lord Milner. Both believed that control of the Transvaal was central to Great Britain’s mission in Africa and the world. In February 1898, Milner wrote to Chamberlain that ‘there is no way out of the political troubles of South Africa except reform in the Transvaal or war. And at present the chances of reform in the Transvaal are worse than ever.’ Eighteen months later, Chamberlain wrote a memo to the British Cabinet complaining that the Boers were ‘flouting successfully British control and interference’, and that what happened next depended on ‘whether the supremacy which we have so long claimed and so seldom exerted, is to be finally established and recognised or for ever abandoned’.
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By this time, the British were shipping large numbers of troops to
South Africa. Ten thousand soldiers came from India and the Mediterranean; several thousand more from England itself. The bellicosity was unmistakable. In October 1899 the Boers asked that troops sent since July of that year be withdrawn. When the British refused, they crossed into Natal, and the war had begun.

One consequence of the war between Boer and Briton was the flight of Indians from the South African Republic. As British subjects, they were identified with the enemy. The Indians streamed into Natal, seeking refuge among their compatriots in the colony. Gandhi and the Natal Indian Congress helped raise money and find homes for them.

The Indians in Natal were merchants and labourers. Few had any military experience. However, Gandhi thought that as subjects of the British Empire they should show support for their side. He had been volunteering with a hospital in Durban, run by a Reverend Dr Booth. Now, with Dr Booth’s encouragement, he offered to raise a corps of Indian ambulance workers to care for the sick and the wounded.

On 17 October 1899, days after the beginning of hostilities, Gandhi convened a meeting in Durban to discuss his proposal. Some Indians were opposed to helping the British. Did they not oppress them as much as the Boers? And what if the other side won? Would not the Boers then wreak vengeance on them? Gandhi answered that they lived in South Africa as subjects of the British Empire. To help the rulers now would refute the charge that Indians were interested only in ‘money-grubbing and were merely a deadweight upon the British’. Here was a ‘golden opportunity’ to prove these charges were baseless.
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Gandhi’s arguments prevailed. The next day he wrote to the Natal Government, ‘unreservedly and unconditionally’ offering assistance. The Indians did not know how to handle arms, but they still ‘might render some service in connection with the field hospitals or the commissariat’, thus showing that, in common with other subjects of the Queen, they were ‘ready to do duty for their Sovereign on the battlefield’.
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By the first week of January, 1900, 500 Indians had agreed to serve in the ambulance corps. A list of volunteers reveals that the Gujarati merchants had prudently stayed away. A large number of Indian Christians had come forward to serve their Sovereign. Others who joined included working-class Hindus, mostly of Tamil extraction.
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The Indians were sent into the field, where they followed the soldiers from camp to camp, taking care of the stragglers. The conditions were hard; they had to march up to twenty-five miles a day, go many hours without food and water, and sleep out in the open. They were dangerously close to the action, carrying the wounded to safety as shells fell around them. Some volunteers were asked to dismantle Boer telegraph lines. Others were told to gather up rifles and cartridges abandoned by the enemy.
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An English journalist left a vivid account of the ambulance corps at work. Following the reversals at Spion Kop, he saw ‘the Indian mule-train move up the slopes of the Kop carrying water to the distressed soldiers who had lain powerless on the plain’. After a night’s work which would have ‘shattered men with much bigger frames’, the reporter ‘came across Gandhi in the early morning sitting by the roadside – eating a regulation army biscuit’. While the British soldiers were ‘dull and depressed’, Gandhi ‘was stoical in his bearing, cheerful and confident in his conversation, and had a kindly eye’.
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