South Africa was “the making of the Mahatma”

Introduction:

Gandhiji was the most influential and revered of all the leaders who participated in the freedom struggle, that characterisation is not misplaced. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned to his homeland after two decades of residence abroad in January 1915. These  years  had  been  spent  for the  most  part  in  South  Africa,  where  he  went  as  a lawyer,  and  in  time  became  a  leader  of  the  Indian community  in  that  territory.

Body:

South Africa was the crucible that forged Gandhi’s identity as a political activist and was an important prelude to his return to India.

• Gandhiji arrived in South Africa in 1893 at the relatively tender age of 24 as a newly qualified lawyer on a temporary assignment to act on behalf of a local Indian trader in a commercial dispute.
• Victimized by incidents of racial discrimination, Gandhi embarked on a crusade against injustice in South Africa that he continued the rest of his life.
• Gandhi formed the Natal Indian Congress in 1894. This organisation led non-violent protests against the oppressive treatment of the white people towards the native Africans and Indians.
• During the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899, Gandhi gathered around 1,100 Indians and organised the Indian Ambulance Corps for the British but the ethnic discrimination and torture continued on Indians.
• During his time here, he developed the strategy known as satyagraha (truth-force), in which campaigners went on peaceful marches and presented themselves for arrest in protest against unjust laws.
• English writer John Ruskin’s book Unto This Last inspired Gandhi and he set up Phoenix Farm near Durban. Gandhi trained his cadres on non-violent Satyagraha or peaceful restraint. Phoenix Farm is considered as the birthplace of Satyagraha.
• However, it was at the Tolstoy Farm, Gandhi’s second camp in South Africa, where Satyagraha was moulded into a weapon of protest.
• In September 1906, Gandhi organised the first Satyagraha campaign to protest against the Transvaal Asiatic ordinance that was constituted against the local Indians. Again in June 1907, he held Satyagraha against the Black Act.
• In 1908, he was sentenced to jail for organising the non-violent movements. But, after his meeting with General Smuts, a British Commonwealth statesman, he was released. However, he was later attacked for this and was again sentenced to jail against which he organised Satyagraha again
• In 1909, he was sentenced to a three-month jail term in Volkshurst and Pretoria. After his release, Gandhi went to England to seek the assistance of the Indian community there.
• He also fought against the nullification of non-Christian marriages in 1913.
• Gandhi organised another peaceful resistance campaign in Transvaal against the oppression that Indian minors were suffering from. He led around 2,000 Indians across the Transvaal border.

Major learning in South Africa:

• He promoted harmony between religions, and first alerted upper -caste Indians to their discriminatory treatment of low castes and women.
• His greatest learning in South Africa was perhaps the unification of the heterogeneous Indian communitythat comprised of disgruntled merchants and the bonded labourers.
• The notion of Non-Co-Operation Movement, as a civilian weapon to fight governmental tyranny was discussed by Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, John Ruskin Bond etc., but it was Gandhi who gave practical shape to the concept.
• His second weapon, non violence or ahimsa also evolved in South Africa. This cardinal principle of Gandhian philosophy was imbibed from Jainism and Vaishnavism. Gandhi showed to the world how non violence could be used as an effective political tool to fight the injustices hurled by an oppressive government.
• Gandhi embraced a philosophy that disapproved of the norms of Western civilization and conceived of moral reformation of the Indians.

India was also under the similar yoke of colonialism and Gandhiji’s prior experience of freedom struggle in Africa helped him quickly adapt to the Indian conditions and take forward the shaky national movement that was in 1916.

Conclusion:

As the historian Chandran Devanesan has remarked, South Africa was “the making of the Mahatma”. The twenty- one long years that Gandhi lived in South Africa, had a considerable influence on the formation of his political ideologies and the philosophies of his life.