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In the pantheon of freedom fighters, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has pride of place. His fame and influence extend far beyond India and are nowhere more significant than in South Africa. "India gave us a Mohandas, we gave them a Mahatma," goes a popular South African refrain. Contemporary South African leaders, including Mandela, have consistently lauded him as being part of the epic battle to defeat the racist white regime.
The South African Gandhi focuses on Gandhi's first leadership experiences and the complicated man they reveal—a man who actually supported the British Empire. Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed unveil a man who, throughout his stay on African soil, stayed true to Empire while showing a disdain for Africans. For Gandhi, whites and Indians were bonded by an Aryan bloodline that had no place for the African. Gandhi's racism was matched by his class prejudice towards the Indian indentured. He persistently claimed that they were ignorant and needed his leadership, and he wrote their resistances and compromises in surviving a brutal labor regime out of history. The South African Gandhi writes the indentured and working class back into history.
The authors show that Gandhi never missed an opportunity to show his loyalty to Empire, with a particular penchant for war as a means to do so. He served as an Empire stretcher-bearer in the Boer War while the British occupied South Africa, he demanded guns in the aftermath of the Bhambatha Rebellion, and he toured the villages of India during the First World War as recruiter for the Imperial army. This meticulously researched book punctures the dominant narrative of Gandhi and uncovers an ambiguous figure whose time on African soil was marked by a desire to seek the integration of Indians, minus many basic rights, into the white body politic while simultaneously excluding Africans from his moral compass and political ideals.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804797221 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/25/2023 |
| Series: | South Asia in Motion |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 344 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
The South African Gandhi
Stretcher-Bearer of Empire
By Ashwin Desai, Goolam Vahed
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Ashwin Desai and Goolam VahedAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9722-1
CHAPTER 1
The Remains of Empire
[T]he iconic image of Gandhi is of a man of God steeped in austerity, sexually renunciate, meditating in his ashram, who the assasin's bullet providentially transformed into a martyr.... All the evidence available, however, points to the real Gandhi as being very different.... The contrast between the icon and the blood-and-flesh individual is the result of selective memory.
— Claude Markovits (2004: 163–4)
On the brink of the twentieth century, South Africa was engulfed in a war between Boer and Brit sparked by the conflict between British imperial interests and local Boer nationalism. There was also the matter of the rich veins of gold discovered in territory claimed by the Boers which became a substantial economic prize for the victor.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi marshalled a group of mostly South African–born Indian stretcher-bearers and marched into the war zone to support fallen British troops. Gandhi saw the war as an opportunity to demonstrate his loyalty to Empire. In doing so, he hoped to give impetus to his pleas and petitions for Indian equality within South African society as British subjects. Gandhi was seeking equality of a special sort: limited integration into white South African society.
The signing of the Treaty of Vereeniging in 1902 brought to an end the violent conflict between Boer and Brit. It did not, however, provide any safeguards for those who were not white and in the years following the war, racial legislation aimed at Indians gathered force. Still, Gandhi did not give up on his belief that protection could be found under the paternal embrace of Empire.
Even with ample evidence of mounting contempt towards Indians by the new British overlords of South Africa, when the Zulus rose up against crippling taxes in Natal in 1906, Gandhi marched once again to war as a stretcher-bearer of Empire. There were almost no British casualties. As artillery met assegai, three thousand five hundred Zulu were killed, seven thousand huts were burnt, and thirty thousand people were left homeless (Guy 2006: 170). Gandhi and his coolie Ambulance Corps carried the injured of the marauding white colonial militia and tended the bodies of the native victims of British retribution. At the height of this war, Empire Day was celebrated on 24 May 1906 to commemorate the reign of Queen Victoria who had died in 1901. Gandhi used the occasion to reflect on Empire:
As the years roll on, the memory of that noble lady remains as fresh as ever. Her interest in India and its people was intense, and in return, she received the whole-hearted affection of India's millions.... The great British Empire has not risen to its present proud position by methods of oppression, nor is it possible to hold that position by unfair treatment of its loyal subjects. British Indians have always been most devoted to their Sovereign, and the Empire has lost nothing by including them among its subjects.... We venture to suggest that, if there were more of Queen Victoria's spirit of enlightenment put into the affairs of the Empire, we should be worthier followers of so great an Empire-builder (IO: 26 May 1906; CWMG 5: 228).
Gandhi's demonstration of loyalty came to naught. Local British administrators snubbed him and ignored his request for reforms.
This led to Gandhi becoming more activist than petitioner. He began to think through and act on his ideas of satyagraha during his campaigns in the Transvaal against the 1906 'Black Act' that required Indians to record their fingerprints with the Registrar of Asiatics. Gandhi envisaged resistance by highly trained satyagrahis who would attain heightened levels of consciousness and discipline before entering the battlefield where they would appropriate the moral force of passively resisting injustice, whatever blows were rained down upon them.
We do not follow the departing Gandhi too far into his return to India and the new politics that he developed there. However, we do take note of his offer, once more, to be a stretcher bearer for Empire in 1914 when the First World War broke out and then to bear arms in 1918 when the Empire was at risk. Gandhi's avowal of violence again at the behest of Empire, when he consistently denounced violence by Indian strikers in South Africa in 1913, left many of his supporters and friends perplexed.
Gandhi did not stop lobbying for reform during the Transvaal passive resistance campaign. He made the long journey by ship to London in 1906 and again in 1909 for the support of the British government, only to be hoodwinked into believing that the British would safeguard Indian rights in South Africa. The war with the Boers had taken its toll on the British. As Burton points out, 'the result of the South African war was a pyrrhic victory, for the British "success" on the ground came at enormous cost, both in terms of the dead and the wounded and with respect to imperial confidence' (2011: 280). While Gandhi pursued the vocation of being the Empire's stretcher-bearer, the war convinced many in the Colonial Office that the Empire was overreaching. The British responded by providing for self-government for the Boers in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State in 1907, and facilitated the Union of South Africa in 1910, in which three of the four provinces were dominated by Afrikaners (Belich 2009: 386).
The Union saw British capital and Afrikaner nationalism enter into what David Yudelman called a symbiotic relationship (1984: 22). Africans, Asians and coloureds were excluded from political (and economic) power. Their rights were sacrificed at the altar of British economic interests. Britain remained the Union's dominant trading partner. In 1913, it provided 91 percent of South Africa's overseas investment, while 88 percent of South African exports went to Britain. As Belich notes, once the Boers were entrenched in power 'British-South Africa's recolonisation consolidated economically' (2009: 386).
These political developments, as they unfolded from 1902, forced Gandhi to engage with new authorities to advance the demands of Indians. His main sparring partner was one-time Boer War general Jan Christiaan Smuts who became part of the government of the Union of South Africa in 1910. Smuts moved quickly to show his government's loyalty to Empire and his resolve to protect British investments, especially those related to the gold mines. He delivered troops to the British effort in the First World War in the face of rebellion from within his own ranks as he pursued the same strategy as Gandhi — appeasing the British (Belich 2009: 386).
During the period of Gandhi's stay in South Africa the position of Africans worsened dramatically, culminating in the Land Act of 1913 that effectively limited African land ownership to 13 percent of the country's land mass. The Land Act gave de jure status to the land dispossession that was already being enforced violently and which effectively squeezed millions of Africans at the pain of starvation into a brutal labour regime, administered, quite literally, by the whip. Olive Schreiner (1855–1920), novelist and anti-war campaigner, wrote that
blinded by the gain of the moment, we see nothing in our dark man but a vast engine of labour.... If dispossessed entirely of the land for which he now shows that large aptitude for peasant proprietorship ... we reduce this mass to a great seething, ignorant proletariat (TL: 22 December 1908).
Yet, a widely publicised recent study, Gandhi Before India (2013) by Ramachandra Guha, suggests that because Indians were more adept at challenging white domination, the ruling class passed a myriad of laws to restrict their movements and that 'in so far as these restrictions were later extended more thoroughly to the Africans, the Indians should really be considered to be among apartheid's first victims' (2013: 12). This staggering claim ignores three centuries of African dispossession, consisting of a brutal migrant labour system that forced Africans from their homesteads deep underground into the mines of South Africa, the numerous taxes that crippled them economically, and the strict enforcement of curfew and laws which controlled African movement (Van Onselen 1985: 63). Competitive challenges for the colonial market from independent black producers sparked antagonism from white farmers long before the assault on Indian traders and was dealt with by a variety of state-sanctioned methods (see Bundy 1979).
By the beginning of 1913, Gandhi found his mission at an impasse as he embarked on his last major campaign in South Africa. For the first time, the indentured, women and the Indian working classes were the engine room of resistance. The end of this strike marked his departure from the shores of South Africa. How did Gandhi react to the emerging political order post 1902 that was based on ethnic and racial differentiation? Did the suffering of Africans trigger in Gandhi a feeling of affinity, or a need for alliance with them? What shaped Gandhi's attitude towards a political alliance with Africans? As Gandhi sensed that white rule was determined not to make any concessions to Indians, did his strategies change in line with new realities?
This book shows that Gandhi sought to ingratiate himself with Empire and its mission during his years in South Africa. In doing so, he not only rendered African exploitation and oppression invisible, but was, on occasion, a willing part of their subjugation and racist stereotyping. This is not the Gandhi spoken of in hagiographic speeches by politicians more than a century later. This is a different man picking his way through the dross of his time; not just any time, but the height of colonialism; not through any country, but a land that was witness to three centuries of unremitting conquest, brutality and racial bloodletting.
Over the decades the complexities, ironies and blemishes of Gandhi's South African years have been smothered to serve the political expediencies of the day. Commemorating Gandhi is part of a vigorous debate in post-apartheid South Africa about 'history and heritage, "truth" and "lies", and memory and make-believe' (Coombes 2003: 5). The cultural historian Annie Coombes asks us to consider seriously how best to represent national history through cultural institutions and monuments because elites tend to invent stories and historical figures which are seen as the glue to reconcile competing interests in transforming societies (2006: 8). While Coombes calls for an understanding of South Africa's past that goes beyond a simple binary between apartheid and resistance, Gandhi has been reinvented as an icon of non-racialism and as one of the foremost fighters against segregation.
Former South African President Nelson Mandela wrote in Time magazine in 1999:
India is Gandhi's country of birth; South Africa his country of adoption. He was both an Indian and a South African citizen. Both countries contributed to his intellectual and moral genius, and he shaped the liberatory movements in both colonial theaters. He is the archetypal anticolonial revolutionary. His strategy of noncooperation, his assertion that we can be dominated only if we cooperate with our dominators, and his nonviolent resistance inspired anticolonial and antiracist movements internationally in our century.... The sight of wounded and whipped Zulus, mercilessly abandoned by their British persecutors, so appalled him that he turned full circle from his admiration for all things British to celebrating the indigenous and ethnic (Mandela 1999).
At the Chief Albert Luthuli Centenary Celebration at Kwa Dukuza on the KwaZulu-Natal north coast, Mandela said:
It was also around this region that Mahatma Gandhi spent so much of his time conducting the struggle of the people of South Africa. It was here that he taught that the destiny of the Indian Community was inseparable from that of the oppressed African majority. That is why, amongst other things, Mahatma Gandhi risked his life by organising for the treatment of Chief Bhambatha's injured warriors in 1906 (Mandela 1998).
South African President Thabo Mbeki said at the launch of the film Gandhi, My Father at the Monte Casino in Johannesburg:
Launching this film in South Africa is no coincidence, since Gandhi spent many years in South Africa, from 1893 to 1914, a period during which he used his extraordinary energies to fight racism. I think we will agree that the launch of this kind of movie, focusing on one of the greatest opponents of colonialism and racism, is long overdue. We welcome this movie because I trust it can only reactivate our collective memory and deepen our understanding of the great sacrifices of this gigantic human being.... We now know that the greatness of his soul was not limited only to people of Indian descent who called him 'Mahatma', but to the human race as a whole (Mbeki 2007).
Gandhi is publicly commemorated in many ways in South Africa. The Gandhi statue in Pietermaritzburg commemorates the May 1893 incident when he was thrown off the train en route to Pretoria; the area in Johannesburg's central business district where he appeared regularly at the court house is now called Gandhi Square; and the Gandhi Memorial outside the Hamidia Mosque in Fordsburg, Johannesburg, also known as 'Burning Trust', commemorates the burning of passes by Indians in 1908 when the Black Act came into existence.
The need to make a claim on the legacy of Gandhi, the Mahatma, is so great that many inconvenient truths about Gandhi the South African politician, are easily forgotten. The result, as the feminist historian Antoinette Burton points out, is that the
sacrality with which his South Africa career tends to be treated, together with an understandable yet nonetheless selective Indian diasporic struggle/heritage narrative, means that seeing both his relationship with Africans and of Indian–African relationships more generally is a huge challenge (2012: 11).
How should we remember and what should we remember through the monuments dedicated to Gandhi? What exactly are we commemorating? What are we communicating? How do we address the competing constituencies, ambiguities and tensions surrounding Gandhi's South African years?
While a corpus of critical work on Gandhi has emerged over the years, individually, these works have done little to dent the overwhelming storyline of his heroism — of an individual who slowly but inexorably transformed into a Mahatma by the time he left the shores of South Africa in 1914.
The early hagiographies of Gandhi relied on his own writings and on biographies of him by his close friends and contemporaries who were often in awe of him, such as his South African associates Reverend Joseph Doke and Henry Polak, the American journalist Louis Fischer, and the French Nobel Laureate Romain Rolland. Fischer described Gandhi as 'the greatest individual of the twentieth century, if not the twenty centuries' (Fischer 1954: 88). Rolland became Gandhi's 'self-appointed advertiser' in Europe. He once wrote to Gandhi: 'I regard it as one of the honours of my life to have been able to put my efforts to your service and to spread your thought in the world. I am proud of my role' (in Bhole 2000).
The historian Claude Markovits writes that Gandhi's An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927) and Satyagraha in South Africa (1928), upon which much of Gandhi scholarship is based, are problematic because they 'were written in the 1920s, more than ten years after Gandhi's departure from South Africa, entirely from memory, without the help of written notes, and serious doubts exist as to the reliability of such personal memories uncorroborated by other testimonies.' Markovits accuses Gandhi, through these works, of seeking to 'take charge of all subsequent representations of his own life, and to impose an interpretation in terms of his spiritual quest which ought not to be seriously questioned afterwards' (2004: 46). As we examined Gandhi's actions and contemporary writings during his South African stay, and compared these with what he wrote in his autobiography and Satyagraha in South Africa, it was apparent that he indulged in some 'tidying up'. He was effectively rewriting his own history.
Guha's study (2013), despite being well researched, partakes of this logic. However, we contest the overall thrust — that Mohandas transmogrified into Mahatma on African soil, and that a cosmopolitan anti-colonial fighter prefigured the anti-apartheid struggle by both developing personal relationships across race lines and by his opposition to white minority rule.
Set against the existing narrative of Gandhi as a great inventor of the new tactic and philosophy of nonviolent popular politics and as a pioneer of anti-colonial nationalism, this study seeks to demonstrate that principally, his political imagination was limited to equality within Empire. We show that his tactics were shaped in crucial ways by a conservative defence of class, race and caste privilege. T.K. Mahadevan (1982), Maureen Swan (1985), Surendra Bhana and Goolam Vahed (2005), Joseph Lelyveld (2011), Patrick French (2011), Isabel Hofmeyr (2013), and Arundhati Roy (2014), amongst others, point to some of these arguments in different ways, while Faisal Devji (2011) examines Gandhi as an imperial thinker.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The South African Gandhi by Ashwin Desai, Goolam Vahed. Copyright © 2016 Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
A Note on Sources,List of Abbreviations,
About the Authors,
Map of South Africa, 1910,
Map of Natal, 1910,
1. The Remains of Empire,
2. Brown over Black,
3. The War Within,
4. Truth as Experiments,
5. Gandhi's Lieutenants,
6. Shadow-Boxing on the Highveld,
7. The Bhambatha Rebellion,
8. The Black Act,
9. Union and its Discontents,
10. Hind Swaraj,
11. The Moderate as Messiah,
12. Stalemates and New Openings,
13. Women on the March,
14. Border Crossings,
15. The Rajah is Coming,
16. Striking at the Heart of Cities,
17. The Provisional Agreement,
18. The Adjudication,
19. Goodbye Mr Gandhi,
20. Man of Peace, Man of War,
21. Between Leaving and Returning,
References,
Acknowledgements,
Index,