Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T01:22:25.406Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Mahatma Gandhi and South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Brian M. Du Toit
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

The years that Gandhi spent in South Africa have been admirably described by several scholars. This articles traces the development of a philosophy which became uniquely identified with Gandhi, and then looks at his legacy in South Africa, especially his influence in the social, religious, and political spheres. How is it possible that the shadow of so apparently frail a figure was cast so widely over events during most of this century?

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , December 1996 , pp. 643 - 660
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

References

1 Mehta, Ved, Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles (New York, 1977), p. 76.Google Scholar

2 Pachai, Bridglal, Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa (Johannesburg, n.d.), p. 1.Google Scholar

3 Swan, Maureen, Gandhi: the South African experience (Johannesburg, 1985), p. 45.Google Scholar

4 This was neither the first nor the only Indian newspaper in South Africa but it gave voice to Gandhi's ideas. Indian Opinion was edited by Gandhi, Manilal until his death in 1956, and ceased publication in 1960.Google Scholar

5 Swan, op. cit. p. 62.

6 Quoted by Huttenback, Robert A., Gandhi in South Africa (Ithaca, 1971), p. 193.Google Scholar

7 Gandhi, M. K., An Autobiography or the Story of my Experiments with Truth (Washington, DC, 1948 edn.), p. 92.Google Scholar

8 Ibid. p. 264.

9 Mehta, op. cit. p. 112.

10 Gandhi, op. cit. p. 266.

11 Mehta, op. cit. p. 118.

12 Gandhi, op. cit. p. 198.

13 Sharp, Gene, Gandhi as a Political Strategist (Boston, 1979), p. 27.Google Scholar

14 Gandhi, op. cit. p. 364.

15 Ibid. p. 365.

16 Green, Martin, Tolstoy and Gandhi: men of peace (New York, 1983), p. 86.Google Scholar

17 Mehta, op. cit. p. 124.

18 Gandhi, op. cit. p. 172.

19 In 1912 Dube became the first president of the South African Native Congress, later known as the African National Congress.

20 This school was based on the model of Tuskegee Institute, developed by Booker T. Washington in Alabama in the United States in 1881.Google Scholar

21 Swan, op. cit. p. 60.

22 With the assistance of a friend, Kallenbach, Hermann, Gandhi established a second communal settlement in 1910 in Transvaal, calling it Tolstoy Farm. There were, in Gandhi's words, op. cit. p. 407, ‘Hindu, Musalman, Parsi and Christian boys and some Hindu girls…a family, in which I occupied the place of the father’. It was closed in January 1913 in anticipation of Gandhi's departure from South Africa.Google Scholar

23 Ibid. p. 327.

24 Ibid. p. 386.

25 Quoted by Pachai, Bridglal, The South African Indian Question, 1860–1971 (Cape Town, 1971), p. 32.Google Scholar

26 Gandhi, op. cit. p. 387.

27 Ibid. p. 337.

28 Quoted by Nanda, B. R., Mahatma Gandhi (London, 1958), p. 96.Google Scholar

29 Gandhi, op. cit. p. 389.

30 Mehta, op. cit. p. 122.

31 Green, op. cit. p. 136.

32 Swan, op. cit. p. 250.

33 In spite of this concession Indians were never permitted during the next 83 years of white control to settle in the Orange Free State, in contrast to Transvaal.

34 Pachai, The International Aspects of the South African Indian Question, p. 66.

35 Meer, Fatima, Portrait of Indian South Africans (Durban, 1969), p. 32.Google Scholar

36 Hancock, W. K., Smuts: the sanguine years, 1870–1919 (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 346–7.Google Scholar

37 Moodley, Kogila A., ‘South African Indians: the wavering minority’, in Thompson, Leonard and Butler, Jeffrey (eds.), Change in Contemporary South Africa (Berkeley, 1975), p. 259.Google Scholar

38 Swan, op. cit. p. 51.

39 Meer, op. cit. p. 28.

40 Simons, H. J. and Simons, R. E., Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850–1950 (Harmondsworth and Baltimore, 1969), p. 72.Google Scholar

41 Huttenback, op. cit. p. 138.

42 Ibid. Perhaps because of this self-interest and exclusivity by the Indians, or because the Zulu thought they were being exploited, there was a riot in Durban in January 1949. Indian-owned stores were burned, looting was widespread, and 136 people were killed. For a number of years there remained a residue of fear and distrust at the personal level.

43 Gerhart, Gail M., Black Power in South Africa (Berkeley, 1979), p. 102.Google Scholar

44 Sparks, Allister, The Mind of South Africa (London, 1990), p. 330.Google Scholar

45 Arkin, A. J., Magyar, K. P., and Pillay, G. J., The Indian South Africans (Pinetown, 1989), p. 100.Google Scholar

46 Sparks, op. cit. p. 236.

47 Kuper, Leo, ‘African Nationalism in South Africa, 1910–1964’, in Wilson, Monica and Thompson, Leonard (eds.), The Oxford History of South Africa, Vol. II, South Africa, 1879–1966 (Oxford, 1971), p. 445.Google Scholar

48 Luthuli, Albert, Let My People Go (London, 1962), p. 92.Google Scholar

49 Joseph, Helen, Side by Side (New York, 1986).Google Scholar

50 Gerhart, op. cit. p. 134.

51 Kuper, Leo, Passive Resistance in South Africa (New Haven, 1957), p. 44.Google Scholar

52 Kuper, Hilda, Indian People in Natal (Durban, 1960), p. 49.Google Scholar

53 Quoted in Gerhart, op. cit. p. 61.

54 Hilda Kuper, op. cit. p. 49.

55 Leo Kuper, loc. cit. p. 446.

56 Mandela, Nelson, Long Walk to Freedom (Boston, 1994), p. 111.Google Scholar

57 Benson, Mary, Nelson Mandela: the man and the movement (New York, 1986), pp. 42–3.Google Scholar

58 This campaign resulted in massive arrests and convictions under the Suppression of Communism and Riotous Assembly Acts, as well as new powers hastily authorised in terms of the Public Safety and the Criminal Law Amendments Acts.

59 Duncan, Patrick, ‘Passive Resistance’, in Africa South (Cape Town), 10—12 1956, p. 82.Google Scholar

60 In 1958 a group of dissidents advocating the use of violence left the ANC in order to form the Pan-Africanist Congress, which was soon associated with a terrorist group called Poqo and banned. In 1961 the ANC secretly established a military wing known as Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation).

61 Sparks, op. cit. pp. 234 and 269.

62 Mandela, op. cit. p. 111.

63 Benson, op. cit. p. 31.

64 Mandela explains in op. cit. p. 369 that a hunger strike is useless unless publicised: ‘Otherwise, prisoners will simply starve themselves to death and no one will know’.

65 Benson, op. cit. p. 216.

66 ‘News in Brief’, in Hindusim Today (Hanamaulu, HL), 17, 4, 04 1995.Google Scholar

67 Turner, Harold W., ‘The Place of Independent Religious Movements in the Modernization of Africa’, in Journal of Religion in Africa (Leiden), 2, 1, 1969, p. 47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

68 Becken, Hans-Jürgen, ‘The Nazareth Baptist Church of Shembe’, in Missiological Institute, Lutheran Theological College, Our Approach to the Independent Church Movement in South Africa (Mapumulo, Natal, 1966), pp. 104–5.Google Scholar

69 Toit, Brian M. du, ‘Religious Revivalism Among Urban Zulu’, in de Jager, E. J. (ed.), Man: anthropological essay⋅ (Cape Town, 1971), pp. 89 and 97.Google Scholar

70 Gerhart, op. cit. p. 21.

71 Toit, Brian M. du, Aging and Menopause Among Indian South African Women (Albany, 1990), p. 48.Google Scholar