5 - Imperial brotherhood or white? Gandhi in South Africa

Summary

Mr Gandhi arrives in Natal and becomes a ‘despised being’

In May 1893, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi arrived in Natal, a British colony in South Africa, described that year by Charles Pearson in National Life and Character as ‘already not a white man's colony’. Four years later, in Impressions of South Africa, James Bryce was more forthright: ‘so far as numbers go, the country is a black man's country’. The anxious preoccupation expressed in these assessments would affect Gandhi's experience there in ways he could not have anticipated.

An urbane barrister trained at London's Inner Temple, M. K. Gandhi was twenty-four years old when he journeyed to Natal to work with a client of his Indian law firm. He was the son of a wealthy family of Gujarat merchants, married at eleven years of age and educated in Ahmedabad. Drawn by ambition to study law, he took a ship from Bombay for London in 1888, leaving his wife and first born son in India. As well as attending the regular dinners at the Inner Temple and learning to dress like an English gentleman, Gandhi also sought out some of the two hundred other Indians in London, who were mostly studying law or business, and local theosophists and vegetarians, for whom he wrote articles in their weekly journal. He befriended theosophist Annie Besant, was introduced to Madame Helena Blavatsky on her death bed, read Hindu and Christian scriptures, sat his law exams and matriculated in Latin, French and Science from the University of London.