Venerating Gandhi as the arbiter of anticolonial struggle obscures the history of Africans.
The past decade has yielded a number of works by Indian authors on the South African Gandhi—the Gandhi who spent twenty-one formative years living and working in the racially riven country that was home to native Africans, Hindu and Muslim, indentured and trader class Indians, Dutch settlers, and British colonizers. What stands out in some of these works is the persistent attempt to portray Gandhi’s relationship with Africans as one of cooperation and collaboration toward a common political goal, a goal born from shared aspirations for social and political equality. This narrative, however, obscures particular nuances about Gandhi’s early political project, sanitizing aspects of his biography and—by dint of placing Gandhi at the forefront of struggles against white minority rule—virtually erasing Africans from this history.
By emphasizing the seminal role of Gandhi and the vanguard role of Indians in the South African liberation struggle, history ends up serving a racist narrative.
Following on from earlier works by Anil Nauriya, Rajmohan Gandhi, and an edited collection by Shanti Sadiq Ali, Ramachandra Guha’s Gandhi Before India perpetuates this narrative; though a comprehensive study, it underscores how the story of the South African Gandhi remains—ironically—incomplete. For Guha, it is on African soil that Gandhi honed his sense of empathy, anti-racism, anti-colonialism and quest for equality, a view that has garnered enough social currency to make Gandhi as much a celebrated figure in South African history, as in Indian history. In the Prologue, Guha holds that “because they [Indians] were better educated and better organized [than Africans], some Indians could more actively challenge the facts of white domination.” In one bold sweep, the century-long resistance of Africans to the colonial wars of dispossession is written out of history.
Seeing Africans as a people without a history of resistance allows the author to further argue that, because Indians were better educated and organized, they were the first to suffer racial discrimination and were more adept at challenging white domination, hence “Indians should really be considered to be among apartheid’s first victims. And in so far as it was Gandhi who led the first protests against the racial laws, he should really be recognized as being among apartheid’s first opponents.” Rajmohan Gandhi, in a similar vein, wrote in 2006 that “the Indian struggle was paving the way for an African struggle” and repeated this in September 2015 when he wrote in the Indian Express that “the struggle for Indian rights in South Africa paved the way for the struggle for black rights.”
Yet, when held up to close scrutiny, the idea that Indians were the first to suffer racial restrictions and the first to resist it, cannot be sustained. These were turbulent times and in numerous and creative ways, Africans across the country directly confronted white rule, circumvented it and sought less overt ways of subverting it. Some of this recent work on Gandhi has echoes of liberal South African historians such as W.H. MacMillian who wrote in the 1920s and is now lampooned for holding that Africans “must, for many years, remain incapable of independent political thought and action.” A century after Macmillan, we seem to have returned to this antiquated mode of thinking.
In numerous and creative ways, Africans across the country directly confronted white rule, circumvented it and sought less overt ways of subverting it.
To write a history that renders Africans and African insurgency almost invisible at a time when they were being dispossessed of their lands at breakneck speed and resistances and collaborations were breaking out across the country is astonishing and reveals an incredibly jaundiced eye to understanding the emergent social relations beating at the center of the racist capital accumulation project. What inspires such glib assertions in the face of historical evidence? One possible explanation is that because these studies focus almost exclusively on the relationship between Indians and Whites, Africans are at best bit-players in this unfolding drama. Or is there something deeper at play? Are these writers, in viewing this history through the lens of Indian nationalism, consciously and deliberately making Gandhi and Indians central to the liberation narrative?
By emphasizing the seminal role of Gandhi and the vanguard role of Indians in the South African liberation struggle, history ends up serving a racist narrative—not necessarily by intent, but by methodological default and evidence gerrymandering. Such a history glosses over important contradictions between Gandhi’s legacy and Gandhi’s biography. For example, why did Gandhi stay true to Empire during his entire stay in South Africa? How do we reconcile the man who advocated nonviolence with the one who demanded guns for Indians in the aftermath of the Bhambatha Rebellion and recruited soldiers to fight for the British in World War I? Why were Africans excluded from Gandhi’s moral compass and political ideals? In seeking accommodation within the existing political setup, was Gandhi complicit with the racial make-up of the country?
focuses on Gandhi’s first leadership experiences and the complicated lessons they reveal.
Gandhi’s two decades-long tenure as a lawyer and community organizer in South Africa was set against the backdrop of late 19th and early 20th century European colonialism, and he was not immune—either as victim or perpetrator—to this hierarchical mindset. The colonial system was bent on privileging a settler minority by imposing a plethora of taxes on Africans and forcing them off the land and into a dehumanizing migrant labour system that saw them confined to single-sex hostels. In urban areas Africans carried passes and were subject to myriad restrictions. Gandhi—despite countenancing prejudice and racial stereotyping as well—embraced the racial science of his day to argue that Indians, as Aryans, should not be placed on the same footing as Africans since they were civilizationally more advanced; that in defending the British Empire to make his case for Indians in South Africa, Gandhi put himself in the unpleasant position of having to defend brutal aspects of imperial rule during the South African War and the Bhambatha Rebellion; and that he accepted the principle of white minority rule so long as Indians were granted a few rights and privileges.
Ultimately, Gandhi’s political imagination was limited to equality within Empire. Despite what the hagiographies might say, he maintained conservative views on class, race, and caste privilege, leading to Arundhati Roy’s description of him as the “saint of the status quo.” His ambiguous relationship with white minority rule and his approach to African oppression and subjugation are of critical importance when studying not only Gandhi’s legacy, but the history of colonial oppression and resistance in South Africa writ large. Rejecting the sanitized version of Gandhi’s South African years will, hopefully, cast light on other progenitors of the country’s long-fought anticolonial and antriracist struggles, and lead the way to more open dialogue about race in present-day South Africa.
The South African Gandhi is one of the inaugural books in Stanford University Press's new book series, South Asia in Motion. To learn more about this series, see series editor Thomas Blom Hansen's explanation of the series' aims.
Start reading The South African Gandhi »
Ashwin Desai is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg and co-author of The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire.
Goolam Vahed is Associate Professor in the History, Society, and Social Change Cluster of the University of KwaZulu-Natal and co-author of The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire.
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