When in 1893 a young Mohandas Gandhi first landed in Durban from Rajkot, he was an unremarkable lawyer from a provincial backwater. SA, his home for the next 22 years, proved to be the crucible forging him into what he was to become.
The incipient Gandhi was unsure of his place in the world, hidebound to his caste and one whose perspectives were framed by a narrow legal framework of contracts and petitions. But the Gandhi who left was the discoverer of alchemy; he had identified the method by which subjugated masses could bring callous empires to their knees without a single shot being fired. It was to be an idea that revolutionised the 20th century.
The decades spent in colonial SA were where Gandhi’s political conscience was moulded in the face of colonial oppression. SA was a laboratory where he tested, discarded and refined — he later referred to this period as his “experiments with truth”.
Humankind had resisted oppression since the dawn of civilisation — what made Gandhi unique was how he saw resistance as a holistic concept, covering both the inner and outer realm. Thus his doctrine of satyagraha encompassed not only peaceful resistance but multiple dimensions, which included self-sufficiency, the sublimation of the self, moral virtue (brahmacharya) and ahimsa (non-harm). And, importantly, these experiments were first constructed at the storied Phoenix Settlement, in present-day KwaZulu-Natal.
Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie’s new book, Gandhi’s African Legacy charts the history of this important settlement, which lives on in the popular imagination of followers of non-violent principles. Mesthrie, professor emeritus of history at the University of the Western Cape, has spent her career writing about the Gandhi family, of which she (as Gandhi’s great granddaughter) is one. It is a monumental work — years in the making and filled with much original research.
“The least Indian of Indian leaders,” sniffed VS Naipaul of Gandhi’s leadership qualities in the 1920s when (after leaving colonial SA) he led the Indian independence movement. But actually this was a compliment.
What separated Gandhi from other independence leaders — his lack of Indian parochialism, his ability to rise above his caste and understand the psyche of the impoverished masses — was precisely due to his SA experience. And Phoenix was crucial to his development. Here — and in its sister settlement, Tolstoy Farm on the outskirts of Johannesburg — the Gujarati Hindu Gandhi set up communities that imbibed the influences of a diverse group of Jewish, Tamil-speaking, Christian, Muslim and Parsi followers.
Mesthrie’s book covers the history of this community through hundreds of letters and a wide range of protagonists.
She chronicles how Phoenix was central to Gandhi’s evolution of satyagrahi concepts. Originally purchased in 1904 for £1,000, the plot was 100 acres of jungle in the undeveloped Natal interior. But Gandhi saw the potential to transform it into a community of workers informed by an mix of Tolstoyan principles of shared land ownership and egalitarianism as well as his own ideals of community service and environmental stewardship.
Everyone, regardless of rank — including Gandhi and his family — received the same wages and were expected to work equally. Residents grew their own produce and aimed to be self-sufficient. Building and cooking work was a communal affair. Illnesses were cured by natural methods. A teaching curriculum was prepared for the children of residents, staffed by workers themselves.
Later, a school for mainly African children from the surrounding countryside was built. Above all, Phoenix was the home of Indian Opinion, the weekly newspaper that became the mouthpiece of the peaceful resistance struggles in Natal and the various national campaigns that were launched during colonialism and apartheid.
So much about Gandhi has been analysed in the thousands of books about him, so what new seam of information does this new book mine? Luckily, there are several.
The first area of freshness is that this is primarily a book of letters, many previously unpublished. What emerges is an immediacy and a rawness of emotion often absent from other histories. This is a huge asset of the book; the many millions of words written about the man and his movement can have the perverse effect to make him more, not less, remote. The letters make him more human.
The second area of freshness is that the author brings other characters to the forefront, introducing readers to a wider ensemble of actors who took on Gandhi’s mantle and devoted themselves to peaceful resistance. Alan Paton, a long-standing trustee, held peace vigils at Phoenix and believed Gandhi’s legacy was worth protecting. Ismail and Fatima Meer, stalwarts of the struggle, helped to raise funds. Chief Albert Luthuli, our first Nobel Peace Prize winner, saw his trusteeship cut short by thinly disguised murder.
Above all, the cast is headed by Manilal, Gandhi’s devoted son, along with Manilal’s tireless and long-suffering wife Sushila. If anything, Manilal is the doomed hero of this history. We see the father returning to India (and into the worldwide imagination) while the young son is left behind to look after the printing press, the community and all the burdens associated with it.
Manilal is unswerving in his devotion to the cause, wishing only to “be worthy of Bapu”. Yet this devotion ultimately means that Manilal becomes, in Mesthrie’s phrase, “Gandhi’s prisoner” — unable to leave Phoenix because the manually prepared Indian Opinion is a continuous job from which there is no respite, yet unable to depart from shadow of the father, who insists on detailed reports on how his son lives, castigating him where his conduct is deemed unsatisfactory.
A soft-spoken man, Manilal’s letters over decades show someone in despair over lack of funds for the Phoenix enterprise, facing crisis after crisis. While Gandhi’s battles were fought in SA in a colonial age, Manilal lives during the apartheid age and he struggles to find a legitimate place for himself among the various resistance leaders who emerged in the 1950s. Manilal is a hero with an exalted surname and a higher purpose, but, unable to be his own man, is ultimately a hero whom few follow. Mesthrie, herself Manilal’s granddaughter, imbues his life with deep poignancy.
The final area of strength of the book is that it shows the multiracial nature of Phoenix. A cynical and virulent narrative in post-apartheid SA posits that Indians hold deep-seated antagonism towards Africans, which can never be reconciled — and that this antagonism stems directly from Gandhi’s 19th century attitudes. Mesthrie reminds us how Phoenix — almost uniquely in the country before the advent of democracy — was populated by Zulus working side by side and living among the other residents.
The book suffers from some drawbacks. Because much rests on the letters themselves, it feels awkward when we hear only one side of the correspondence without getting insight into the recipients’ responses. Readers may feel like they are listening to a one-sided conversation. And with the letters being confined to the settlement, there are historical gaps in the wider narrative.
It’s jarring to read the letters from 1948 and not see correspondence from the fateful period around January 30, when Gandhi was assassinated in New Delhi by a Hindu fanatic. This was a traumatic day for newly independent India as well as (presumably) the settlement, yet we see little of this trauma in the letters presented.
Overall, it is a noteworthy academic study that deserves a favourable reception among those seeking to understand how our own political conscience in 20th-century SA was forged.
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