Great Soul_ Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India Part 2

So far what's new here is that the debater has bracketed Africans with Indians. Otherwise it's his standard trope, his appeal for equality of opportunity for his people. But as he starts to wrap up, he takes a further step. He has always said it's not a question of political rights, but now he breaks out of that straitjacket. On this one occasion, he allows himself to talk about "free inst.i.tutions" and "self-government" and the duty of the British to lift "subject races" to "equality with themselves." Surprisingly, in this imperial context, he finds a vision of something like "the rainbow nation" the multiracial South Africa of today aspires, or at least claims, to be: If we look into the future, is it not a heritage we have to leave to posterity, that all the different races commingle and produce a civilization that perhaps the world has not yet seen? There are differences and misunderstandings, but I do believe, in the words of the sacred hymn, "We shall know each other better when the mists have rolled away."

How do we reconcile these two contrasting Gandhis, each circa 1908 in South Africa-this debater and visionary with the narrow racial pleader who, earlier and afterward that same year, spoke in such a different vein? Can one be seen as more real or enduring than the other? Put another way, can what he says to a white audience be taken as more genuine than what he says to Indians? The answer is so far from being obvious that the only possible conclusion seems to be that Gandhi's views on race-on blacks in particular-were now contradictory and unsettled. Considering what they had been, this has to be seen as an advance.

If Gandhi was in flux, so was the country. An all-white national convention was about to set a const.i.tutional course. Standing apart with their list of grievances against the Transvaal, Indians were in no position to influence the debate. In fact, there was no national Indian organization. Gandhi himself was all that connected the Transvaal British Indian a.s.sociation to the Natal Indian Congress. Less and less did they seem like different faces of a single movement. (It wasn't till 1923, nine years after Gandhi left South Africa, that a national Indian organization finally came into being, calling itself the South African Indian Congress; by then, the organizations he led were dormant.) Even the courageous band of Transvaal protesters courting arrest-his "self-suffering" satyagrahis-were sometimes less united than he might have wished. This became evident, he later acknowledged, in the tight quarters of a jail. "Indians of all communities and castes lived together in the jail, which gave us an opportunity to observe how backward we are in the matter of self-government." Some Hindus refused to eat food prepared by Muslims or fellow prisoners of lower caste. One satyagrahi objected to sleeping near another from the scavenger subcaste; he was afraid his own caste would punish him, perhaps even brand him as outcaste if it learned of his propinquity to an untouchable. Speaking about caste in a specifically South African context for the first time, Gandhi denounced "these hypocritical distinctions of high and low" and the "caste tyranny" that lay behind them. So both forms of government-"self-government" (meaning how Indians treated Indians) and national government for South Africa (meaning whites ruling everyone else)-were on his mind when he spoke to the YMCA in Johannesburg between his first two jail experiences. At its heart, each held for him the issue of equality. In that sense, he now saw the issue through different ends of one telescope. On this occasion at least, in taking the long view, Gandhi managed to include Africans in his vision of "a civilization that perhaps the world has not yet seen."

But outside prison walls, who were the Africans in his life? What, after fifteen years in the country, did he actually know of them? The historical record has remarkably little to say on that score. There is a photograph taken in early 1910 of a dapper, neatly groomed Gandhi, in s.h.i.+rtsleeves and tie, sleeves rolled up, casually sitting on a hillside, where a big tent has been pitched, with a few of the pioneers who would form the nucleus of his nascent utopian community. Standing off to the side, very much apart, are two black men. Possibly these are "Native Isaac" and "Native Jacob," whose monthly wages of one pound each are detailed in the diary of Gandhi's friend and fellow settler Hermann Kallenbach, the architect who purchased the land for what became known as Tolstoy Farm and later functioned as its treasurer. Gandhi would propose, in a set of rules drafted for this new commune and boot camp for nonviolent resisters, that it employ no servants. "It is understood that the ideal is not to employ native labor and not to use machinery," he'd written. But Isaac and Jacob remained on Kallenbach's books until the end of its brief life of two and a half years. Gandhi himself later came close to portraying these low-paid farmhands as n.o.ble savages in a paean to the life of physical labor in the fields of Tolstoy Farm: "I regard the Kaffirs, with whom I constantly work these days, as superior to us. What they do in their ignorance we have to do knowingly." (Rajmohan Gandhi, his grandson, suggests this may have been his last use of the epithet "kaffir.") [image]

On the building site of Kallenbach's new home (photo credit i3.1) (photo credit i3.1)

Other Africans from the neighborhood may have visited Tolstoy Farm-as Zulus living near the Phoenix Settlement visited there-but no such visitors, nor the seemingly indispensable Isaac and Jacob, were invited into the mixed group of Indians and whites that made up the company of Gandhian recruits. Their leader couldn't have pa.s.sed many days in his two decades in Africa without seeing ordinary Africans, legions of them. But the question of how much contact he had with them, like the question posed earlier of how much actual contact he had with indentured Indians toiling on the plantations and in the mines, finds no ready answer. It can only be inferred from what he wrote. He had a fair amount to say about indentured Indians-about their miserable circ.u.mstances, about caste-before he finally became involved with them. Few and far between were his reflections on Africans. Calling him ethnocentric doesn't cover the case. He had plenty to say to-and about-whites.

In the several thousand pages Gandhi wrote in South Africa, or later about South Africa, the names of only three Africans are mentioned. Of the three, he acknowledges having met only one. And when it comes to that one African, what doc.u.mentary evidence there is covers only two meetings with Gandhi-seven years apart-leaving to our imaginations the question of whether they ever met again.

His name was John Langalibalele Dube. A Zulu aristocrat descended from Zulu chiefs, he'd been raised at the American Zulu Mission station in Inanda, where his father, James Dube, had become one of the first converts and, eventually, a pastor as well as a prosperous farmer, so prosperous that he had thirty gold sovereigns to invest in sending his son off in the company of an American missionary to Oberlin College in Ohio. John Dube thus took a cultural leap as long as the one Gandhi managed when he crossed the black water to be trained as a lawyer in London. Later Dube returned to America to be ordained in Brooklyn as a Congregational minister and raise funds for an industrial school modeled on Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton's Tuskegee Inst.i.tute. Dube called Was.h.i.+ngton, to whom he made a pilgrimage in 1897, "my patron saint...my guiding star."

In 1900 he founded an organization called the Natal Native Congress, in hopes of giving a voice to Zulus on issues of land, labor, and rights where the traditional chiefs seemed unprepared to engage white authorities. The new group's name strongly suggested that it found its model in Gandhi's own Natal Indian Congress. Twelve years later, John Dube became the first president-president-general he was called-of the South African Native National Congress, which later simplified its nomenclature, calling itself the African National Congress, the name under which it finally took power in 1994 after the country's first experience of nonracial universal suffrage. In homage to John Dube's standing as a founding father, Nelson Mandela made a point of casting his own first vote in Inanda at Dube's school, the Ohlange Inst.i.tute. The place has since been known as First Vote.

So if Gandhi was to know only one African of his own generation, John Dube, just two years his junior, was probably the one to know. That is exactly what Gandhi himself concluded after hearing Dube speak in 1905 at the home of a white planter and civic leader named Marshall Campbell. "This Mr. Dubey [sic] is a Negro of whom one should know," he wrote in Indian Opinion Indian Opinion. The article had an unfortunate headline: THE KAFFIRS OF NATAL THE KAFFIRS OF NATAL. And Gandhi called Dube the leader of "educated Kaffirs," which demonstrates that for him the word applied to all blacks, including Congregational ministers and headmasters, not merely unlettered tribal Africans. Still, his summary of the speaker's remarks-more than likely the first speech he'd ever heard by an educated African and quite possibly the last-was respectful and sympathetic: They worked hard and without them the whites could not carry on for a moment. They made loyal subjects, and Natal was the land of their birth. For them there was no country other than South Africa; and to deprive them of their rights over lands, etc., was like banis.h.i.+ng them from their home.

What's striking here is that Gandhi had to travel the several miles to the Campbell residence in Mount Edgecombe to meet Dube. The two men were near neighbors; the Ohlange Inst.i.tute in Inanda was (and is) less than a mile from the Phoenix Settlement, its buildings visible to this day from the veranda of Gandhi's cottage. A brisk walker like Gandhi could have crossed the narrow valley that separated them in less than half an hour.

Only one such visit surfaces in the written record. Just as disappointing is the absolute lack of any correspondence, even a brief note, indicating they kept in touch or were used to addressing one another with familiarity. Gandhi was absent from Phoenix much more than he was present there in the eight years following its founding; and when he was there, often for a matter only of days, his routine was to focus on the settlers, going door-to-door to visit families, holding prayer meetings, gathering the children around him. And there was always Indian Opinion Indian Opinion with its weekly demand for more copy from its proprietor and guiding light. Even so, it's surprising how little turns up linking him to his Zulu neighbor. We know that Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the Indian leader who toured South Africa in Gandhi's company in 1912, was taken to Dube's school during a stay of less than forty-eight hours at Phoenix. But only in Dube's Zulu-language newspaper, with its weekly demand for more copy from its proprietor and guiding light. Even so, it's surprising how little turns up linking him to his Zulu neighbor. We know that Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the Indian leader who toured South Africa in Gandhi's company in 1912, was taken to Dube's school during a stay of less than forty-eight hours at Phoenix. But only in Dube's Zulu-language newspaper, Ilanga lase Natal Ilanga lase Natal (Sun of Natal) do we find evidence that Gandhi accompanied him. We know also that (Sun of Natal) do we find evidence that Gandhi accompanied him. We know also that Ilanga Ilanga was printed for a brief time on the hand-operated press at the Phoenix Settlement; that the Ohlange Inst.i.tute came into being just three years before Gandhi's Phoenix; and that was printed for a brief time on the hand-operated press at the Phoenix Settlement; that the Ohlange Inst.i.tute came into being just three years before Gandhi's Phoenix; and that Indian Opinion Indian Opinion was just months older than was just months older than Ilanga Ilanga. But tantalizing as these parallels are, they continue to run on in parallel without yielding any firm evidence of a crossing of paths by Gandhi and John Dube beyond their somewhat formal encounters at the white plantation owner's s.p.a.cious residence and years later, on the occasion of the Gokhale visit.

There's another Gandhi who later became a regular visitor at the Ohlange Inst.i.tute, stopping by now and then on his daily walks. That Gandhi also got to know Isaiah Shembe, called by his followers the Prophet. In 1911 the Prophet founded the Nazareth Church-the largest movement among Zulu Christians, with more than two million adherents today-at Ekuphakameni, which lies between Inanda and Phoenix. (The Nazareth Church was called independent, meaning it was unaffiliated to any white denomination.) Shembe had a bigger impact on South Africa, it can be argued, than the founder of the Phoenix Settlement ever had. The other Gandhi, the one who took the trouble to cultivate the acquaintance of these two significant African leaders, was Manilal, the mainstay of Phoenix after his father returned to India. When John Dube died in 1946 at seventy-five, the headline on his obituary in Indian Opinion Indian Opinion read read A GREAT ZULU DEAD A GREAT ZULU DEAD. "To us at the Phoenix Settlement from the days of Mahatma Gandhi," the obituary said, "he has been a kindly neighbor."

Spa.r.s.e as this record is, the names Gandhi, Dube, and Shembe are hallowed today as a kind of Inanda troika, if not trinity, by the publicists and popular historians responsible for weaving a teachable heritage for the new South Africa out of the disparate movements that struggled into existence under oppressive white rule. The fact that three leaders of such consequence emerged in rural Natal in the same decade, within an area of less than two square miles, is too resonant with possibilities to be overlooked. It has to be more than a coincidence. And so we find the man who became the new South Africa's third president elected by universal franchise, Jacob Zuma, celebrating "the solidarity between the Indians and Africans" that came into being in Inanda. "What is also remarkable about the history of the Indo-African community in this area is the link that existed between three great men: Gandhi, John Langalibalele Dube and the prophet Isaiah Shembe of the Nazareth Church." A tourist brochure urges visitors to follow the "Inanda Heritage Route" from Gandhi's settlement to the Dube school and finally to Shembe's church. ("Inanda where there is more history per square centimeter than anywhere in South Africa!" the brochure gushes, making no allusion to the sad, sometimes alarming state of what might otherwise be seen as a hard-pressed rural slum, except for the telltale caution that it not be visited without "a guide who knows the area well.") On my last visit to Inanda, banners stamped with Dube's face were streaming from lampposts on the Kwa Mashu Highway, which cuts through the district, alternating with lampposts bearing Gandhi banners. Such sanctification of their imagined alliance rests on little more than the political convenience of the moment and a wispy oral tradition. Lulu Dube, the last surviving child of the Zulu patriarch, grew up with the notion that her father kept in touch with Gandhi. "In fact, they were friends, they were neighbors and their mission was one," she said in a chat on the veranda of Dube's house, which was declared a national monument at the time of the first democratic election, then left to rot (to the point that eighty-year-old Lulu, fearful of a roof collapse, had moved into a trailer nearby). Born sixteen years after Gandhi left the country, she's at best a link in a chain, not a witness. Ela Gandhi, keeper of her grandfather's flame in Durban as head of the Gandhi Trust, inherited a similar impression. She was raised at Phoenix but decades after her grandfather departed. She was only eight when he was killed. A member of the African National Congress, she's aware that, politically and historically, this is treacherous ground, so she chooses her words with care. "They were each concerned with dignity, particularly the dignity of their own people," she said of the two men on the banners.

What the real history, as opposed to heritage mythmaking, seems to disclose is a deliberate distancing of each other by Gandhi and John Dube, a recognition, on rare occasions, that they might have common interests but a determination to pursue them separately. If there could ever have been a possibility of their making common cause, it may well have been stalled for a generation by Gandhi's calculated reaction to a spasm of Zulu resistance in 1906-the year after they met-that was instantly characterized as a "rebellion" and brutally suppressed by Natal's white settlers and colonial authorities.

The immediate provocation for the rising was a new head tax on "natives," called a poll tax, and the severe penalties imposed on those who failed to pay up promptly. The broader provocation was a sense among Zulus-those still bound by tradition and those adapting to imported ways and faiths-that they were losing what was left of their land and autonomy. Numbers as much as race always had to be factored into these South African conflicts. Altogether the Zulus of Natal outnumbered the whites by about ten to one in that era (outnumbered the whites and Indians combined by about five to one). Gandhi's instant reflex, as at the time of the Anglo-Boer War seven years earlier, had been to side with English-speaking whites who identified themselves with British authority in their struggle with Afrikaans-speaking whites who resisted it. Here again he offered to raise a corps of stretcher bearers-another gesture of Indian fealty to the empire, which in his view was the ultimate guarantor of Indian rights, however circ.u.mscribed they proved in practice. It was a line of reasoning few Zulus were likely to appreciate.

The story isn't a simple one. Gandhi and Dube, each in his own way, were men of divided loyalties at the time of what came to be known as the Bhambatha Rebellion. Martial law was declared by trigger-happy colonial whites confronting Zulus armed mainly with a.s.segais, or spears, before anything like a rebellion got under way. The spark was a face-off in early February between a group of protesting Zulu artisans from a small independent church and a police detachment sent to arrest its leaders. One of the policemen pulled a revolver, spears were thrown, and before the smoke cleared, two of the officers had been killed. The protesters were then rounded up and twelve of them sentenced to death. The British cabinet tried at first to have the executions postponed, but the condemned men were lined up at the edge of freshly dug graves and shot on April 2. A few days later, a chief named Bhambatha, who was being sought for refusal to pay the tax, took to the deepest, th.o.r.n.i.e.s.t bush in the hills of Zululand with some 150 warriors. A thousand troops were sent in hot pursuit, homesteads were raked with machine-gun fire, sh.e.l.led, and then burned. More warriors took to the hills. Against this background, under the leaders.h.i.+p of the man who would one day be called a mahatma, the Indian community offered its support to the governing whites in the fight against the so-called rebels. The least temperate of his many justifications for this stand is worth quoting at length, for it's revealing on several levels: For the Indian community, going to the battlefield should be an easy matter; for, whether Muslim or Hindu, we are men with profound faith in G.o.d...We are not overcome by fear when hundreds of thousands die of famine or plague in our country. What is more, when we are told our duty, we continue to be indifferent, keep our houses dirty, lie hugging our h.o.a.rded wealth. Thus, we live a wretched life, acquiescing in a long, tormented process ending in death. Why then should we fear the death that may overtake us on the battlefield? We have much to learn from what the whites are doing in Natal. There is hardly any family from which someone has not gone to fight the Kaffir rebels.

Obviously, what we have here is a rant. Gandhi's irony is out of control; his inclination to scold undermines his desire to persuade. He has lost the thread of his argument about duty and citizens.h.i.+p. What comes across is revulsion, barely contained anger over the cultural inertia of his own community, its resistance to the social code he hopes to inculcate. If it offers nothing else, he seems to feel, the battlefield promises discipline.

The war posed a different set of conflicts for John Dube, the Congregational minister seeking to arm young Zulus not with spears but with the Protestant work ethic and basic skills that could win them a foothold in a trading economy. The rebels were, on the other hand, his people, and in the final stages of the conflict it was the chiefdom from which he descended that was attacked. The Christian in Dube, not to mention the pragmatist, could not endorse the rising, but the mercilessness of the repression shook his faith in the chances for racial peace. Cautiously, in the columns of his newspaper, he questioned the heavy-handedness of the whites. Soon he was summoned to appear before the governor and warned that the martial law regulations applied to him and his paper. Somewhat chastened, he later wrote that the grievances of the rebels were real but "at a time like this we should all refrain from discussing them."

What was said to be the severed head of Chief Bhambatha had been displayed and the rebellion all but crushed by June 22, when Gandhi finally left Durban for the struggle for which he'd been beating the drums in the columns of Indian Opinion Indian Opinion for two months. This time the community had managed to restrain its enthusiasm for what he proposed as a patriotic duty and opportunity. Gandhi had the rank of sergeant major but a much smaller band of stretcher bearers under his nominal command than he'd had at the start of the Anglo-Boer War: nineteen as opposed to eleven hundred in the earlier conflict; of the nineteen, thirteen were former indentured laborers; this time just four of twenty, counting Gandhi himself, could be cla.s.sed as "educated." In the next few weeks, in the sporadic final clashes of the conflict, the colonial troops were told to take no prisoners. What Gandhi and his men got to witness were the consequences of the mopping up, the worst part of the repression. At this stage of the conflict, there were few white wounded. Mostly the Indians ended up treating Zulu prisoners with terrible suppurating lacerations, not warriors with bullet wounds, but villagers who'd been flogged beyond submission. for two months. This time the community had managed to restrain its enthusiasm for what he proposed as a patriotic duty and opportunity. Gandhi had the rank of sergeant major but a much smaller band of stretcher bearers under his nominal command than he'd had at the start of the Anglo-Boer War: nineteen as opposed to eleven hundred in the earlier conflict; of the nineteen, thirteen were former indentured laborers; this time just four of twenty, counting Gandhi himself, could be cla.s.sed as "educated." In the next few weeks, in the sporadic final clashes of the conflict, the colonial troops were told to take no prisoners. What Gandhi and his men got to witness were the consequences of the mopping up, the worst part of the repression. At this stage of the conflict, there were few white wounded. Mostly the Indians ended up treating Zulu prisoners with terrible suppurating lacerations, not warriors with bullet wounds, but villagers who'd been flogged beyond submission.

[image]

Sergeant Major Gandhi with stretcher bearers, 1906 (photo credit i3.2) (photo credit i3.2)

Gandhi later wrote that the suffering Zulus, many of whom had been untreated for days, were grateful for the ministrations of the Indians, and maybe that was so. White medics wouldn't touch them. But back at Phoenix, roughly forty miles from these scenes, Gandhi's relatives and followers were seized by the fear that the Zulus in their neighborhood would rise against them in retaliation for the choice he'd made. He'd deposited Kasturba and two of his four sons there before leaving for the so-called front. "I do not remember other things but that atmosphere of fear is very vivid in my mind," Prabhudas Gandhi, a cousin who was a youngster at the time, would later write. "Today when I read about the Zulu people's rebellion, the anxious face of Kasturba comes before my eyes." No reprisals materialized, but signs of Zulu resentment over Gandhi's decision to side with the whites were not lacking. Africans would not forget, said an article reprinted in another Zulu newspaper, Izwi Labantu Izwi Labantu, "that Indians had volunteered to serve with the English savages in Natal who ma.s.sacred thousands of Zulus in order to steal their land." That article was by an American. Izwi Izwi offered no comment of its own. But it did say: "The countrymen of Gandhi...are extremely self-centered, selfish and alien in feeling and outlook." In London, an exile Indian publication called offered no comment of its own. But it did say: "The countrymen of Gandhi...are extremely self-centered, selfish and alien in feeling and outlook." In London, an exile Indian publication called The Indian Sociologist The Indian Sociologist, which tacitly supported terrorist violence in the struggle for Indian freedom, found Gandhi's readiness to join up with the whites at the time of the Zulu uprising "disgusting."

As the Zulu paper implied, Gandhi's own outlook may have initially been alien and, in that sense, self-centered. But he was profoundly moved by the evidence of white brutality and Zulu suffering that he witnessed. Here again is Joseph Doke, his Baptist hagiographer: "Mr. Gandhi speaks with great reserve of this experience. What he saw he will never divulge...It was almost intolerable for him to be so closely in touch with this expedition. At times, he doubted whether his position was right." The biographer seems to hint unwittingly at taboos of untouchability that Sergeant Major Gandhi's small band had to overcome. "It was no trifle," he writes, for these Indians "to become voluntary nurses to men not yet emerged from the most degraded state." Eventually, Gandhi did divulge what he saw-in his Autobiography Autobiography, composed two decades after the event, and in conversations in his last years with his inner circle. "My heart was with the Zulus," he then said. As late as 1943, during his final imprisonment, Sus.h.i.+la Nayar tells us, he was still recounting "the atrocities committed on the Zulus."

"What has. .h.i.tler done worse than that?" he asked Nayar, a physician who was attending his dying wife and himself. Gandhi, who'd tried writing to Hitler on the eve of world war in an attempt to soften his heart, never quite realized, or at least acknowledged, that the fuhrer represented a destructive force beyond anything he'd experienced.

By his own account, the horror over what he'd seen in Natal and the soul-searching over his unpopular decision to side with the whites produced the major turning point of his life spiritually. Gandhi drew a straight line from his battlefield reflections to his vow of perfect celibacy-necessary, he felt, to clear the way for a life of service and voluntary poverty-and from that vow to the one he offered at the Empire Theater in Johannesburg on September 11, 1906. All this happened in little more than two months: marching off to support the whites, swearing off s.e.x for the rest of his life, and following up that life-transforming promise to himself with his vow of nonviolent resistance to the Transvaal "Black Act," which then became his first exercise of the strategy later called satyagraha. Gandhi's testimony of cause and effect is irrefutable as far as it goes, but, as Erik Erikson noted, it doesn't carry us to anything approaching a full understanding. "These themes, were they to be clarified," the psychoa.n.a.lyst wrote, "might more directly connect the two decisions of avoiding both s.e.xual intercourse and killing. For it would seem that the experience of witnessing the outrages perpetrated on black bodies by white he-men aroused in Gandhi both a deeper identification with the maltreated, and a stronger aversion against all male sadism-including such s.e.xual sadism as he had probably felt from childhood on to be part of all exploitation of women by men."

What was not aroused in Gandhi in the immediate aftermath of the Bhambatha Rebellion-not, at least, as far as we can discern-was a deepened curiosity about black Africans or sympathy for them that reached further than pity. Two years later, when he started writing about his first experience of jail, they were still "kaffirs," too uncivilized and dirty to be incarcerated with Indians, let alone to be seen as potential allies. In part, this may have been because of a change in context: leaving Natal and returning to his base in Johannesburg, having left his family behind at Phoenix, Gandhi also left behind whatever opportunities he might still have had to build bridges and, ultimately, deepen contacts with a Zulu leader like John Dube who spoke for a small Christianized, landowning black elite, sometimes called in the language of urban Zulus the amarespectables amarespectables.

In part, it was also due to Gandhi's continued reluctance to let go of the idea that his so-called British Indians were naturally the allies of whites, just another kind of settler. If indentured Indian "coolies" were still seen, in his view, as too ill-bred, unlettered, and backward to be citizens, then what could he do about "kaffirs" except put them out of mind? Gandhi kept his distance and apparently found it easy to do so. A tacit alliance between blacks and Indians was the opposite of what he'd all along been seeking. If he thought about it at all, he would have known that such an alliance could only deepen white racial hysteria. He must have understood, too, that it would not have been an easy sell in his own community. Much later he knit together a rationalization out of such disparate reflections. Asked long after he returned to India by a visiting delegation of black Americans whether he'd ever made common cause with blacks during his time in South Africa, Gandhi replied, implying he had to resist the impulse: "No, I purposely did not invite them. It would have endangered their cause." A few years later, a quarter of a century after he returned home, he told a black South African, "Yours is a far bigger issue."

This Gandhi, the full-blown Mahatma of 1939, is doing some retrospective tidying up. In 1907, the Gandhi who actually resided in South Africa, the barrister and community leader, sent a letter to Sir Henry McCallum, the colonial governor who had imposed martial law on the restive Zulus the previous year. The letter is written a year after Gandhi's vows. The doctrine of nonviolent resistance has now been proclaimed, but "the many-sided Gandhi," as Naipaul called him, is arguing that the time had come to give Indians an opportunity for service in the colonial militia, a force whose most obvious function-as he had to know, given his experience the previous year-was to keep Zulu power in check.

"I venture to trust," the special pleader pleads, "that as the work done by the Corps had proved satisfactory, the Indian community will be found some scope in the Natal Militia. If such a thing is done, I think it will be mutually advantageous and it will bind the Indians, who are already a part of the body politic in Natal, closer to the Colony."

Gandhi knew in his heart that he'd taken the wrong side at the time of the rebellion, but he was still ready to claim a dividend from the white authorities for services rendered, just as he'd sought "the Queen's Chocolate" as a reward for his service with the "body s.n.a.t.c.hers" on a couple of the early battlefields of the Anglo-Boer War.

The strain on the Reverend John Dube, who imbibed a strategy of accommodation from his exemplar Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton, was even more severe. In the aftermath of the rebellion, the Oberlin graduate and Congregational minister positioned himself as a defender and supporter of the Zulu king, Dinuzulu, who had been put on trial for high treason. He had spoken of the need to raise "the native people out of the slough of ignorance, idleness, poverty and superst.i.tion." In later years, at a ceremony honoring white missionaries, he sounded almost fawning in his expression of a grat.i.tude that had to be genuine, for he was a missionary himself. "Who was it," he asked his white audience, "who taught us the benefits and decency of wearing clothes? Who was it who taught us that every disease is not caused by witchcraft...that a message can be transmitted by writing on a piece of paper?" But now in the aftermath of the 1906 conflict, he showed that he was prepared to exempt some tribal traditions from such broadsides. Dube remained close to the Zulu royal house and thus immersed in ethnic politics for the rest of his life. He also spoke for a broader nationalism as the first leader of the movement that became the African National Congress. But the straddle between these two kinds of politics-urbanbased ma.s.s politics and aristocratic tribal politics-became increasingly difficult. In 1917, the first Congress president was eased out. The accommodationist in him had expressed a willingness to accept the principle of racial separation that the white government was pus.h.i.+ng in exchange for an expansion of the so-called native reserves. To secure a bigger Zululand, he was prepared to bow reluctantly to a law that reserved most of Natal for whites. This was too much for younger Africans rising in the movement.

The law was the Natives Land Act, pa.s.sed in 1913 by the white parliament, just three years after white hegemony had been formally built into the new Union of South Africa. A huge, blatant land grab, the law made it illegal for blacks to own land in 92 percent of the entire country. Dube was eloquent in denouncing it. So, strikingly, was Gandhi, in what was really his first serious engagement with any measure weighing on Africans. "Every other question, not excluding the Indian question, pales into insignificance before the great Native question," he now wrote in Indian Opinion Indian Opinion. "This land is theirs by birth and this Act of confiscation-for such it is-is likely to give rise to serious consequences unless the Government take care." The date was August 30, 1913. Gandhi was already in his last year in the country when he wrote those words. Not only that, he was already laying the strategy for his last, most radical campaign there, his first on behalf of indentured laborers. Suddenly, it seems, he is less parochial, able for the moment, at least on paper, to take something approaching a national view.

It's tempting to try to imagine what the two neighbors, each a religiously inclined political leader-a Congregationalist Zulu and a neo-Christian Hindu-might have had to say to each other had they met to exchange views at this time. It's not impossible that there was such an encounter, but, more likely, each was aware at a distance of what the other was saying and doing. Indian Opinion Indian Opinion reprinted a portion of an appeal John Dube addressed to the British public. "You must know that every one of us was born in this land, and we have no other," he said. "You must know that for untold generations this land was solely ours-long before your father had put a foot on our sh.o.r.es." That could have moved Gandhi. reprinted a portion of an appeal John Dube addressed to the British public. "You must know that every one of us was born in this land, and we have no other," he said. "You must know that for untold generations this land was solely ours-long before your father had put a foot on our sh.o.r.es." That could have moved Gandhi.

For his part, John Dube professed to have been struck by the example of nonviolent resistance that Gandhi's followers were about to furnish. Decades later a memoir appeared in the Gujarati language describing an encounter between Dube and a British cleric in which the African described an instance of nonviolent resistance that he said he'd witnessed himself at Phoenix in late 1913: About five hundred Indians were sitting together in a group. They had come there after going on a strike in their factory. They were surrounded from all sides by white managers, their staff and white police...Whiplashes began to descend on the backs of the Indians sitting there, in quick rapidity, without stop. The whites beat them with lathis and said, "Get up, do your work. Will you do your duty or not?" But n.o.body rose. They sat, quite motionless...When whips and lathis failed, gun b.u.t.ts came to be used.

The Gujarati was translated into Hindi, the Hindi back into English. It would be a miracle if those were Dube's exact words, but some such conversation may have occurred. Dube may even have expressed admiration for the fort.i.tude of the Indians who followed Gandhi, though probably not in the words attributed to him in this Gujarati reminiscence, which has the Zulu expressing wonder over their "divine power" and "Himalayan firmness." Or all this may be little more than rosy self-congratulation on the part of an Indian witness with a hazy memory. What Dube is known to have said is less admiring. While Zulus fought among themselves, he observed in 1912, "people like Indians have come into our land and lorded it over us, as though we who belong to the country were mere nonent.i.ties." Heather Hughes, a Dube biographer, writes of "his p.r.o.nounced anti-Indianism." She quotes a Dube article headlined "The Indian Invasion" that ran in Ilanga: Ilanga: "We know from sad experience how beneath our very eyes, our children's bread is taken by these Asiatics." "We know from sad experience how beneath our very eyes, our children's bread is taken by these Asiatics."

Perhaps it is just as well that, as far as we can tell, the two neighbors never had that searching conversation. Even if there was a moment after the new white regime imposed the Natives Land Act when they appear to have been more or less aligned, they were moving in different directions. For more than six years after the 1906 Zulu rising, Gandhi had devoted most of his time and energy to the Transvaal. At the start of 1913, he abruptly s.h.i.+fted back to Natal. Within months, he was laying plans for a new satyagraha campaign, with the repeal of a three-pound head tax ex-indentured Indians were required to pay annually if they wanted to stay on in the country as one of its main demands.

Dube, meanwhile, was consumed by the land issue, by the dispossession of his people. Later a Zulu newspaper would portray the Reverend John Dube sitting in his Chevrolet, a mere onlooker, as the police marched a group of black Communist organizers to jail in Durban. If Gandhi had stayed on in South Africa, he might have been similarly sidelined. As leaders of the African National Congress made their first tentative international contacts, they came into touch with Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders of the Indian independence movement that had grown up in Gandhi's shadow. In 1927, Nehru and Josiah Gumede, then ANC president, twice crossed paths-at an anti-imperialism conference in Brussels and in Moscow at the tenth-anniversary celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution. Nehru and his circle were quick to take the view, from afar, that Indians in South Africa should stand together with blacks there. Gandhi himself held out. "However much one may sympathize with the Bantus," he wrote as late as 1939, "Indians cannot make common cause with them." Two years later, in 1941, an ant.i.thetical political message was personally delivered in Durban by the young Indira Nehru-later to be known by her married name, Gandhi-who stopped off in South Africa on her way home from Oxford, having been forced by the outbreak of war to take the Cape route. "Indians and Africans must act together," she said. "Common oppression must be met with the united and organized power of all the exploited people." That night, according to one reminiscence, Gandhi's son Manilal endorsed "a united front of all non-Europeans" for the first time in his life.

Manilal's father by this time was more than a quarter of a century removed from South Africa. Perhaps, reflecting back over all the years and miles he'd traveled since his jail experiences there in the aftermath of the Bhambatha Rebellion, he sensed there were grounds for conflict between Indians and Africans in Natal. A year after Gandhi's death, in January 1949, communal rioting, sometimes characterized as a Zulu "pogrom" against Indians, engulfed Durban. The violence had been sparked by a scuffle with a young Zulu in an Indian shop. By the time it burned out, 142 persons had been listed as killed-the majority, as a result of police fire, African migrant laborers-and more than 1,700 1,700 injured. The violence exposed the long-standing African resentment of the relatively privileged status of Indians in the racial hierarchy, of Indian shopkeepers in particular. A hangover of fear and mutual suspicion lingered for years. injured. The violence exposed the long-standing African resentment of the relatively privileged status of Indians in the racial hierarchy, of Indian shopkeepers in particular. A hangover of fear and mutual suspicion lingered for years.

Yet three years later Indian and African activists in South Africa finally succeeded in coming together politically to make common cause against apartheid, a program for comprehensive racial separation and white dominance that neither Dube nor Gandhi lived to see. In 1952, the African National Congress and the South African Indian Congress agreed on what was called the Defiance Campaign Against Unjust Laws.

The nonviolent campaign could be seen as self-consciously Gandhian in tactics and strategy. But few African leaders were ready to embrace him as their patron saint. From the other side of the Indian Ocean, shortly before his a.s.sa.s.sination, the Mahatma had finally given his highly qualified support to the idea of Indians throwing in their lot with Africans. "The inclusion of all the races while logically correct," he said, "is fraught with grave danger if the struggle is not kept at the highest level." Between the lines, he seems to be expressing his doubts that blacks would hew to nonviolent principles. For his part, the young Nelson Mandela had to overcome his own doubts about an alliance with Indians. "Many of our gra.s.sroots African supporters saw Indians as exploiters of black labor in their role as shopkeepers and merchants," he later said.

Manilal Gandhi, the faithful second son, briefly lent his name to the Defiance Campaign, but he was mostly out of step. Following his father's example, he endured fasts of increasing duration against apartheid; in his case, however, their impact was not great. Repeatedly, he courted arrest by going to the white section of the library or post office in Durban, but the police had instructions to merely take down his name. Finally, at the end of the year, in the company of other whites and Indians, he managed to get arrested by entering a black "location" in the Transvaal town of Germiston. He was then sentenced to fifty days in jail for the crimes of "meeting with Africans" and "incitement to break laws." But Manilal had no organized following of his own and remained an independent operator, standing "outside the organized struggle," his granddaughter and biographer, Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, acknowledges. The movement had become more radical than Manilal, who was suspicious of the influence of Communists, would ever be. And its commitment to nonviolence was merely tactical. At one meeting, as Manilal, seeking to be "worthy of Bapu and serve as he served," sermonized at length on the ethical discipline of satyagraha, the young Nelson Mandela rattled his teacup to signal his impatience.

The first Gandhi in South Africa never had to face the kind of retaliation the Afrikaner nationalist regime now rolled out in the form of repressive new security laws, allowing arbitrary arrest, preventive detention at the hands of an emboldened security police, and bannings, not only of organizations, but of individuals (making it illegal for their words to appear in print or for them to meet more than one person at a time); eventually, as the struggle intensified, the white regime would resort to torture, "disappearances," bombings, and a.s.sa.s.sination. The colonial regime in India had been repressive, regularly jailing Gandhi and his followers, but it had never imagined it could remove them permanently from the scene, that it could purge India of the Indian national movement. The Afrikaner regime had exactly that ambition when it came to the sponsors of the Defiance Campaign. Long before the movement was driven underground, younger leaders like Mandela and Oliver Tambo reappraised their tactical embrace of the Gandhian code of nonviolence.

But satyagraha did get its trial in a national cause, the cause of nonracial justice. For a brief time, it was no longer parochially Indian in its appeal. And a much older, more mellow Mandela himself would later claim, once he'd emerged from his long imprisonment and stepped into the role of father of the nation, that the model for the ma.s.s action campaigns he'd witnessed in his youth had been the nonviolent campaign the original Gandhi led in 1913. "The principle was not so important that the strategy should be used even when it was self-defeating," Mandela said then, explaining how he'd deployed his own interpretation of Gandhi against Gandhi's son. "I called for nonviolent protest for as long as it was effective." As an interpreter of Gandhian doctrines, Mandela was decidedly less rigorous about means and ends than their originator. Still, no one was better qualified to certify that Gandhi was indeed a founding father in the country he adopted temporarily, as well as in his own.

[image]

Doke's Gandhi, 1908 (photo credit i3.3) (photo credit i3.3)

4.

UPPER HOUSE.

THE R REVEREND D DOKE, the first of Gandhi's many hagiographers, took a snapshot of the pensive barrister as he recuperated in 1908 from his beating at the hands of the Pathans. His subject bears little resemblance to the Gandhi the world would come to know. Lean and slouching in casual Western clothes, he gazes past the lens with an expression that's inward and contemplative, not kindly or twinkling in the manner of the loincloth-clad public man who'd evoke a ma.s.s following in India within little more than a decade. Yet he'd already laid out essential components of his thought and leaders.h.i.+p strategy. Ec.u.menical and open-minded in his approach to religion and relations between sects of all description, loyal by his own lights to the British Empire and to values embedded in the British legal system, yet aggressive in his resistance to unjust colonial laws that system not infrequently upheld, the Johannesburg Gandhi now claimed the right to follow his conscience-what he would variously identify as his "inner voice" or, simply, "truth"-in every sphere of life. Yet he was still Gandhiji or Gandhibhai-the suffixes indicating respect for an elder or leader and fraternal feeling for a relative or friend-and not yet canonized as a mahatma, still engaged in self-creation, finding his way to a grounded sense of himself and his mission. In his own mind, we may infer, self and mission both felt incomplete as he closed in on his late thirties.

Celibacy as a spiritual discipline was now a preoccupation of his daily life but not, as yet, a theme of his public discourse; his interviews with his Baptist Boswell never, or so it appears from Doke's book, got around to the delicate subject of brahmacharya. Probably the politician in him understood that this was the least appealing side of his evolving doctrine. He'd experienced s.e.xual pa.s.sion but could never condone it or, having made his choice, simply drop the subject. "Marriage is not only not a necessity but positively a hindrance to public and humanitarian work," he'd later write. Those, like himself and Kasturba, who'd fallen into the coils of matrimony could save themselves by living together chastely as brother and sister. "No man or woman living the physical or animal life can possibly understand the spiritual or ethical." Gandhi doted on children but regarded childbirth as prima facie evidence of a moral lapse. With distressing regularity, he'd nag his daughters-in-law and others close to him to mend their ways and not do it again.

His vegetarianism was still in his early Johannesburg years a matter of moral preference, hygiene, and heritage, but apart from eschewing meat and grinding his own grain, he hadn't yet placed severe strictures on his diet, hadn't yet arrived at the conviction that the curbing of one appet.i.te was dependent on the curbing of another, that s.e.xual abstinence and diet were closely linked. He still drank milk, still enjoyed spicy food in convivial settings. Such indulgences would soon be brought to an abrupt end. The vegetarian would try for a time to become a fruitarian, having concluded that milk, other dairy products, and most spices have aphrodisiac qualities; he'd also give up salt, cooked food, and seconds, eventually measuring his intake in ounces and thoroughly chewing each spare mouthful of carefully blended and pounded mush-lemons, honey, and almonds were usually part of the mix along with grains and leaves-in order to derive as much nourishment from as little food as possible. Mastication would thus become one of his many lesser disciplines and causes.

"Meagerness," he'd later write, was the ethical standard by which diet should be measured, according to "G.o.d's economy" and Gandhi's own reading of a Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. That standard enjoined a perpetual "partial fast," which would require "a grim fight against the inherited and acquired habit of eating for pleasure." Grim was the word for it. A full meal, Gandhi would write, was "a crime against G.o.d and man...because the full-mealers deprive their neighbors of their portion." There you have the Gandhi of 1933, not 1906. The rule-giving ashram dweller who'd finally decide that delicious food was an invitation to gluttony, who'd find wry satisfaction in being portrayed as a faddist and crank, who'd bring his conviction that less is more to his solitary repasts, had yet to make his entrance. He may have felt driven to distance himself from his wife and sons, but he was still a social being in the early stage of his Johannesburg years, when he is reported to have gone on picnics and ridden a bicycle.

The inner change is harder to trace with any exact.i.tude in the six and a half formative years he spent in Johannesburg after witnessing the brutal reprisals against Zulus in Natal-a period that stretches from August 1906 to January 1913-but it's at least as significant as the well-doc.u.mented evolution of the public man. For five of those years he lived in the Transvaal without family. Gandhi insists in his Autobiography Autobiography that he'd intended from the first to settle at Phoenix himself, give up his law practice, and support himself and the settlement through manual labor. But his emotional need for distance, for not being hemmed in by customary obligations, seems as obvious and important in anchoring him in Johannesburg as the ongoing satyagraha campaign against the Transvaal's racial legislation. Gandhi treated the Transvaal as the main arena because that's where the campaign against discriminatory legislation had been launched. If satyagraha was his most important "experiment with truth," the Transvaal was now the favored workstation in his laboratory. His obligations to the local community were heavy; he was locked into a test of will with the white provincial government, personified by Jan Christian s.m.u.ts, the onetime Boer general, now provincial minister of the interior. that he'd intended from the first to settle at Phoenix himself, give up his law practice, and support himself and the settlement through manual labor. But his emotional need for distance, for not being hemmed in by customary obligations, seems as obvious and important in anchoring him in Johannesburg as the ongoing satyagraha campaign against the Transvaal's racial legislation. Gandhi treated the Transvaal as the main arena because that's where the campaign against discriminatory legislation had been launched. If satyagraha was his most important "experiment with truth," the Transvaal was now the favored workstation in his laboratory. His obligations to the local community were heavy; he was locked into a test of will with the white provincial government, personified by Jan Christian s.m.u.ts, the onetime Boer general, now provincial minister of the interior.

That's all obvious. But the Transvaal was also where he needed or wanted to be for his own purposes. He could have made a case for basing himself in Natal, which by then was clearly the center of Indian life in South Africa. Its Indian community outnumbered the Transvaal's by about ten to one (110,000 to 11,000 by 1908). He had established the Phoenix Settlement there. It was where Indian Opinion Indian Opinion was edited and printed. Also, Natal was where nearly all Indians under the indenture system still labored, in conditions he'd described as "semi-slavery." In fact, the number of Indians still under indenture in Natal in that period was more than three times the Transvaal's total Indian population. And in those same years-before racial issues were nationalized with the creation in 1910 of the Union of South Africa-the legislative a.s.sembly in English-speaking Natal could hardly be said to lag in its drive to stiffen existing anti-Indian statutes and pa.s.s new ones. was edited and printed. Also, Natal was where nearly all Indians under the indenture system still labored, in conditions he'd described as "semi-slavery." In fact, the number of Indians still under indenture in Natal in that period was more than three times the Transvaal's total Indian population. And in those same years-before racial issues were nationalized with the creation in 1910 of the Union of South Africa-the legislative a.s.sembly in English-speaking Natal could hardly be said to lag in its drive to stiffen existing anti-Indian statutes and pa.s.s new ones.

With Gandhi mostly absent and looking the other way, the white political cla.s.s of Natal proved itself to be at least as inventive in coming up with new racial measures and as relentless as the Afrikaans-speaking Transvaalers. The dueling white supremacists may have fought on opposing sides in the recently concluded Anglo-Boer War, but there was no choosing between them when it came to their mutual hostility to the idea of equal citizens.h.i.+p for the Indian minority. Colonial Natal was a place where the leading newspaper, The Natal Mercury The Natal Mercury, was happy to publish a letter signed with the nom de plume "Anti-Coolie." The letter said it was a disgrace that Indian shops were allowed to do business in the center of Durban. (The Mercury Mercury continues to publish in post-apartheid South Africa. Today in its lobby, a larger-than-life-size portrait of Gandhi, matching an equally large portrait of Mandela, peers down on journalists and their visitors, a guardian angel blessing their endeavors.) continues to publish in post-apartheid South Africa. Today in its lobby, a larger-than-life-size portrait of Gandhi, matching an equally large portrait of Mandela, peers down on journalists and their visitors, a guardian angel blessing their endeavors.) The Natal of Gandhi's day had a pressing economic need for indentured Indian labor; so argued the plantation and mine owners whose mouthpiece the Mercury Mercury was. But it wasn't ready to be outdone when it came to restrictions on free Indian immigration. Sir Henry McCallum, the governor to whom Gandhi had appealed for militia places for Indians in recognition of their service at the time of the Zulu rising, saw "no reason why we should be swamped by was. But it wasn't ready to be outdone when it came to restrictions on free Indian immigration. Sir Henry McCallum, the governor to whom Gandhi had appealed for militia places for Indians in recognition of their service at the time of the Zulu rising, saw "no reason why we should be swamped by black matter black matter in the wrong place," just because of the demand for field labor. So a new immigration act, pa.s.sed as early as 1903, in the immediate aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War, made it easy to bar any immigrant who couldn't fill out an application in a European language to the loosely defined satisfaction of officials. Year after year, Indians were turned back on this basis by the thousands. Next came a munic.i.p.al corporations act designed to eliminate Indian voting rights at the local level-the final disenfranchising step backward on what had been, fourteen years earlier, Gandhi's first South African issue; and just as regularly legal screws were tightened to restrict licenses for Indian shopkeepers. Any indentured laborers or former indentured laborers-or their descendants in perpetuity-were cla.s.sed for purposes of these acts as belonging to "uncivilized races." In order to keep them that way, public funds were cut off for Indian secondary schools. Finally, in 1908, came a bill designed to make it impossible for any "Asiatics" to hold trading licenses in Natal after 1918, even those whose families by then would have been trading in the province for two generations. in the wrong place," just because of the demand for field labor. So a new immigration act, pa.s.sed as early as 1903, in the immediate aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War, made it easy to bar any immigrant who couldn't fill out an application in a European language to the loosely defined satisfaction of officials. Year after year, Indians were turned back on this basis by the thousands. Next came a munic.i.p.al corporations act designed to eliminate Indian voting rights at the local level-the final disenfranchising step backward on what had been, fourteen years earlier, Gandhi's first South African issue; and just as regularly legal screws were tightened to restrict licenses for Indian shopkeepers. Any indentured laborers or former indentured laborers-or their descendants in perpetuity-were cla.s.sed for purposes of these acts as belonging to "uncivilized races." In order to keep them that way, public funds were cut off for Indian secondary schools. Finally, in 1908, came a bill designed to make it impossible for any "Asiatics" to hold trading licenses in Natal after 1918, even those whose families by then would have been trading in the province for two generations.

Yet Gandhi remained stuck in the Transvaal, following his own path. In 1907 he came to Durban three times to address monthly meetings of the Natal Indian Congress. Each time he harangued his listeners on the need to support the campaign in the Transvaal. Only occasionally did he comment in his paper, usually from afar, on developments in Natal. By 1909, as the final diplomatic and parliamentary steps were being taken to form the new Union under an all-white Parliament-making it, in essence, a color-coded democracy for the white minority only-the Indian communities of the Transvaal and Natal sent parallel delegations to London to lobby on their parochial issues rather than the national one. Gandhi, whose influence in Natal was by then conspicuously waning, headed the Transvaal team.

Yes, he was preoccupied with the satyagraha campaign. But he was also working out a new sense of family in these years. "I fail to understand what you mean by the word 'family,'" he'd written in 1907 to his elder brother Laxmidas not quite a year after he'd deposited his wife and sons at Phoenix. Laxmidas had complained that he was failing to meet his family obligations on two continents. "If I could say so without arrogance," he now replied, "I would say that my family now comprises all living beings."

He'd been sending money to his brother for more than a decade to pay off various debts and fulfill his role as the extended family's primary earner, which he undertook when he sailed to Britain for legal training. Laxmidas had a continuing claim on his income, Gandhi now acknowledged. But there was a catch-he no longer viewed himself as having a personal income. He didn't deny that his law practice still raked in money, only that he put it to his own use. "I use all the money that G.o.d gives me for the public good," he explained breezily. Basically the "public good" in this context meant covering the losses of the weekly Indian Opinion Indian Opinion and helping to keep the Phoenix Settlement afloat. (It would have been "both a loss and a disgrace," Gandhi later wrote, if the paper had been allowed to die. "So I kept pouring out all my money until ultimately I was practically sinking all my savings in it.") In effect, Gandhi was presenting a seemingly secular-some would say heretical-take on the traditional Hindu concept of the sannyasi, the religious wanderer who turns his back on the joys, distractions, and obligations of family life in order to devote himself wholly to spiritual discipline in the form of meditation and prayer. Self-invented, one of a kind, he henceforth presents himself as the sannyasi as social worker. and helping to keep the Phoenix Settlement afloat. (It would have been "both a loss and a disgrace," Gandhi later wrote, if the paper had been allowed to die. "So I kept pouring out all my money until ultimately I was practically sinking all my savings in it.") In effect, Gandhi was presenting a seemingly secular-some would say heretical-take on the traditional Hindu concept of the sannyasi, the religious wanderer who turns his back on the joys, distractions, and obligations of family life in order to devote himself wholly to spiritual discipline in the form of meditation and prayer. Self-invented, one of a kind, he henceforth presents himself as the sannyasi as social worker.

His own visits to the Phoenix Settlement in these years proved to be irregular and usually brief, so much so that they took on the air of royal visitations or command inspections. "One day news came that Gandhiji would be visiting Phoenix," wrote Prabhudas Gandhi, a nephew's son who grew up there. "The settlement became alive with excitement. The settlers began to tidy the press as well as their homes." Prabhudas cannot remember "if Gandhiji ever stayed longer than a fortnight or a month." Sometimes he "did not come for months," and then it might be only for a matter of days. "I could stay there only for brief periods," Gandhi himself acknowledges. Considering that he'd kept Johannesburg as his base of operations, it's not altogether surprising that he didn't drop in more often, or that his erstwhile Durban followers didn't see more of him. The two centers, now an hour's flight distant from each other, were twenty-four hours apart by rail in that era; he'd leave Joburg one evening, arrive in Durban the next. We don't know exactly how often he made the trip, but it's plain he didn't make it as often as he might have. It's a pattern that would recur in Gandhi's life. Only sometimes would his travels be geared to the obvious needs of the movements that viewed him as their leader; frequently his whereabouts-in an ashram, on tour for a cause-would be dictated by a more personal agenda; his followers would understand that he was engaged with something else, or sense that he'd withdrawn. That sense began to spread among the Indians of Natal, especially among the Muslim merchant cla.s.s whose members had been his earliest clients and supporters. They didn't appreciate his remoteness, or understand his readiness to compromise with s.m.u.ts on the "Black Act" after preaching that it was a "do or die" issue. At his first meeting in Durban in 1908, another Pathan rushed the platform brandis.h.i.+ng a club. Someone doused the lights, saving Gandhi from yet another beating.

Meanwhile, he was a.s.sembling a surrogate family in Johannesburg, where his following remained avid, especially among Tamils, originally from South India, whose difficult Dravidian language he'd periodically set himself to learning when immobilized in prison or on an ocean voyage. The most stalwart of the Johannesburg Tamils was a builder and trader named Thambi Naidoo who'd come to South Africa from the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, where his parents had been indentured. Naidoo was uneducated but spoke five languages (English, three South Indian