It’s been a hundred years since Mahatma Gandhi left South African soil. He went on to alter the course of history in India, but he’d already taught South Africa’s oppressed a few lessons in effective, peaceful resistance – and South Africa taught him a few things in return.
Our country played a pivotal role in shaping Gandhi’s political outlook. In turn, his leadership and courage at the turn of the 20th century shaped the course of South African liberation history.
He had come to our country to represent an Indian firm on a legal matter, but stayed on to launch an impressive campaign of civil disobedience against discriminatory policies and practices faced by Indian indentured labourers and business people in Natal and Transvaal.
Gandhi’s Passive Resistance Campaigns of 1907 and 1913 brought him international acclaim. Our late President Mandela referred to this when he delivered a speech in India stating, “You gave us Mohandas [Gandhi]; we returned him to you as Mahatma (meaning ‘venerable’ in Sanskrit)”.
Gandhi first experienced race discrimination in 1893 when he was thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg Station because he refused to leave the “whites-only”, first-class compartment.
He later said that this was a defining moment in his life, when he came face to face with the “disease of colour prejudice”. He swore to make it his responsibility to fight this social disease with all his strength. His moral indignation of a singular incident sparked a passion for social equality, which would act as a catalyst for his radicalisation and politicisation.
During the two decades he spent in South Africa, Gandhi organised popular resistance of Indians against the white colonial and republican governments of the British and Afrikaners respectively. Racist laws aimed at restricting Indians from participating in the economy, invalidating their customary marriages, and restricting their free movement in the country were vigorously opposed.
The organisational lessons that Gandhi learnt in South Africa would serve him well in the anti-colonial struggle he waged in India against the British. Gandhi’s resistance campaigns certainly influenced the course of political history in South Africa in later years.
There can be little doubt that African leaders that had gathered in Bloemfontein in January 1912 to form the African National Congress (ANC) would have looked to the struggles led by Gandhi.
Many years later, Mandela said that Gandhi was “the archetypal anti-colonial revolutionary”. He went on to proclaim that “both Gandhi and I suffered colonial oppression, and both of us mobilised our respective peoples against governments that violated our freedoms”.
In a fitting coincidence of history, the two leaders were both lawyers who spent time in jail cells in Johannesburg’s Old Fort prison – Gandhi in 1906, and Mandela in 1962.
Perhaps the greatest legacy that Gandhi left in South Africa was his fellow satyagrahis. In later years, the families of his close confidants such as Thambi Naidoo, Parsi Rustomji and Ahmed Mohamed Cachalia played a major role in the struggle for a non-racial, democratic South Africa.
His example of determined, non-violent struggle and defending the dignity of all human beings remains relevant to this day.
As we mark the centenary of Gandhi’s departure from South Africa, let us recommit to promoting and emulating the lessons of life that he has bequeathed to all of us.
Courtesy Prema Naidoo, trustee of the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation