Gandhi and South Africa. Principles and Politics

Brown, Judith M. and Martin Prozesky (eds.) Gandhi and South Africa. Principles and Politics New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1996, 131 pp.

As South Africa is embroiled in the process of reevaluating its history, it is significant that this collection of essays, some by leading scholars of Gandhi, seeks to emphasize Gandhi's role in South Africa as part of that country's history, rather than as a prelude to his work in India. The editors rightly point out, hitherto, most of the vast corpus of works on Gandhi have tended to relegate the civil rights leader's experience in South Africa to a preparatory phase in his larger fight for Indian independence, or to ignore it all together. As Judith Brown argues in her introductory chapter, a reaffirmation of the `African Gandhi' (p. 2) is important not only for an understanding of the crucial two decades of his life when he formulated his political philosophy, but also for evaluating his impact on Africa.

Gandhi and South Africa is an ambitious book, derived primarily from a conference on `Gandhi and his Significance' at the University of Natal in 1993 which marked the centenary of Gandhi's first confrontation with racist South Africa. While the book sets out to uncover the South African Gandhi and his significance for local politics there, it does not always achieve its stated goals. Some of the essays, including Brown's contributions, lapse into precisely the sorts of discussions which the editors sought to overcome where Gandhi's work in South Africa is treated as only a prelude to his life in India. In her `The Making of a Critical Outsider', Brown stresses how South Africa `made the Indian Gandhi' (p. 29), but never seriously takes up how this was the case. Indeed, the reader would find more significant discussion of the South African context in her important work, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (New Haven, 1989). Nevertheless, Brown's chapters, particularly `The Vision of Non-Violence and the Reality' which has some interesting biographical material on Gandhi, are important for getting a sense of Gandhi's wider significance for India and the world.

The real strengths of the book lie in the essays which do focus on the South African Gandhi. The chapters by Bill Guest, Karen Harris, Margaret Chatterjee and A. J. Parel in particular begin to address the kinds of questions which are significant for South Africa and its place in world history. They give fresh and often lively treatment to important new perspectives on migrations studies, questions about ethnicity, and the South African historical context in which Gandhi's worked and wrote his influential treatises.

Bill Guest, who has written extensively on the political economy of Natal, provides a useful and detailed background to Gandhi's arrival and early work in South Africa. By examining the political and economic forces at play in white settler-dominated Natal, Guest explains how, in the 1880s, white fears and reactionary legislation shifted from a focus on the African majority to the Indian minority. He shows how Gandhi arrived in South Africa at a time of rising racial tensions not only between whites and Indians, but also between Africans and Indians. His sound statistical analysis supports the argument that a major concern of whites was the rising commercial strength of the Indian community, and the newly arrived `Passenger Indians' in particular. Guest's chapter is an important contribution for it not only sets the context for Gandhi's work, it provides a broader perspective of the material circumstances of Indians in Natal. This allows the reader to gain an understanding of the complexities of Indian migration to South Africa, and to consider when and why the Indian community developed. In this way, the issues which Gandhi was concerned with, and how he faced racism in South Africa, come to light. Parel's `The Origins of Hind Swaraj' grapples effectively with the complex questions of post- modernity and Gandhi's view of British 'civilization' and industrialization. Parel's chapter shows how the South African context provided Gandhi an intellectual and social foundation for formulating his philosophies quite independently of the nationalist movement in India. It also points to larger questions of significance regarding the debate about modernity and Gandhi's critique of it. Moreover, Parel emphasizes the South African dimensions by illuminating the origins of Gandhi's Hindu Swaraj in the radical politics of the Transvaal Indian community. Thus, Parel demonstrates how Gandhi's view of the British empire was fundamentally shaped in South Africa. As important, Parel draws our attention to broader issues of historical importance by showing how Britain's `civilizing mission' was perceived and contested by Gandhi.

Karen Harris's tantalizing examination of Gandhi and the Indian community's relations with the similarly oppressed Chinese community offers a new insight into ethnicity in South Africa. In many ways, Harris's chapter is the most interesting and important in the book. By reconsidering the revisionist approach established by J. Stone, G. Ashe, M. Tayal (Swan) and L. Switzer, which emphasized the contradictions and ambiguities in Gandhi's political program, she provides an important analysis of the ethnic dimensions of the passive resistance campaigns against racist legislation in South Africa. In the same way that Bill Freund's Insiders and Outsiders: The Indian Working Class of Durban, 1910-1990 (Heinemann, 1995) sheds new light on how class and ethnicity were negotiated by Indian South Africans, Harris reveals the deeper class interests held in common by the leadership of the Chinese and Indian passive resistance movements. What emerges from her chapter is a fascinating account of the competitive, and ultimately exclusive nature of ethnicity for the Chinese and Indian communities and how an alliance failed despite Gandhi's efforts to forge a pan-Asian front. This is an important piece for it begins to address some of the significant implications of Gandhi's work in and for South Africa and the various communities there.