Soon afterwards, the Cape Assembly constituted a committee to look into the question. The Indians who gave testimony complained about harassment by immigration officials, and insisted that their premises were clean and their accounts up-to-date. European merchants, on the other hand, complained that the Indians ‘eat curry and rice without any spoons’. A trader named Philips said ‘the Indians come here merely as blood suckers, it is a vulgar term, but true’. Claiming that many Europeans had to ‘close their doors’ because of competition, the committee concluded that ‘it is impossible to view the extinction of the European storekeeper without the gravest fears for the future of the Colony’.7
Faced with renewed hostility to his compatriots, Gandhi characteristically did not give up hope. Perhaps if the Indians presented a better face they might be treated more kindly? In two striking articles in Indian Opinion, he asked shopkeepers in Natal to maintain proper accounts, keep their premises clean, and dress well in order to make sure their licences were renewed. And he urged them not to spit, belch or break wind in public. ‘It is sheer stupidity to believe that all these things will not prejudice the Europeans,’ he wrote. ‘While we live in this country, we should so behave that the whites’ prejudices against us are weakened.’8
Gandhi also proposed that some Indians from Natal be sent to the United Kingdom to qualify for the Bar. His former assistant Joseph Royeppen was in London, qualifying at Lincoln’s Inn. Royeppen had gone under his own steam; Gandhi’s friend Pranjivan Mehta – now a prosperous jeweller in Burma – offered to fund another student to follow him. Gandhi’s choice fell on Chhaganlal. ‘You seem to be the only person who can be depended upon to carry forward the heritage of my thought and words,’ he told his nephew. ‘Our ultimate capital is not the money we have, but our courage, our faith, our truthfulness and our ability. If therefore you go to England, your intellect remains unspoiled and you return with your physical and mental powers strengthened, our capital will have appreciated to that extent.’9
Chhaganlal was the son of Gandhi’s first cousin Khushalchand. He was a nephew once removed, yet far closer to him than this relationship might suggest. Twelve years younger than his mentor, he was devoted to Gandhi’s example and his ideas. He had acquired his trust by the manner in which he supervised the composing, printing and distribution of Indian Opinion. In their father’s absence he had to supervise the education of Gandhi’s children as well. Gandhi’s letters to Chhaganlal thus run seamlessly from matters of politics to the upbringing of his sons. A letter of 7 February 1907 says: ‘I know that Manilal is weak in his arithmetic. Please give him adequate attention’; and further – ‘Though Harilal has agreed to stay [in South Africa], I find some uncertainty in what he writes. Therefore, I wrote to you to treat him in such a manner as to have a steadying influence on his mind.’10 Soon afterwards, Chhaganlal had a child of his own, whereupon Gandhi instructed him on how best to raise his baby. He suggested that Chhagan invest in an English cradle, and make sure that the mother’s bed was ‘kept neat and tidy’. The father should do the cleaning himself, even though this particular form of labour was not consistent with his caste. In the rearing of the child, said Gandhi, ‘please do not allow our old customs about untouchability, which are useless and wicked, to come in the way’.11
In the third week of February 1907 the white males of Transvaal voted to elect their first government. The party of the Boers, Het Volk, won a majority. General Louis Botha was sworn in as Prime Minister. Another former General, J. C. Smuts, was appointed Colonial Secretary.
Louis Botha was a quintessential Afrikaner – of farming stock, brought up on a large estate in wide open country in a family which read the Bible out loud several times a day. He had been a brave commander during the war, his resistance delaying the British victory by more than a year. Now, however, Botha ‘stood for the magic cause of reconciliation between the [Boer and British] races’. The war had ravaged the economy of the Transvaal. To restore it to health the one-time rivals had to work together. Botha himself recognized that there was, after all, ‘a great deal in common between the Boer and the English country gentleman – in their joy in country sports, their suspicion of change, their habit of command’.12
More than a love of hunting, what compelled Boer and Briton to now stand together was the need to deny people of colour the elementary rights of citizenship. One of the new Government’s first acts was to have the Asiatic Ordinance of 1906 made into law. A bill embodying its provisions was introduced in the Transvaal Assembly on 20 March. It went through three readings in a single day, before being sent for approval to the Legislative Council. On the 22nd its passage was announced in the government gazette. Lord Selborne wrote to London urging that the King grant his assent as soon as possible. The ‘illicit and unauthorized influx of Asiatics,’ he claimed, was ‘proceeding at an alarming rate’; the bill, which aimed to check this, represented ‘the unanimous demand of all sections of the white community in the Transvaal.’13
On 29 March, the British Indian Association convened a meeting to protest the haste with which the bill was passed. More than a dozen people spoke, in at least four languages. Abdul Gani, Chairman of the BIA, said the bill showed that ‘our legislators [are] the custodians of the whites alone’. Else ‘how could the members become familiar in a night with a bill, which was admittedly very important and complicated?’ Another merchant, Essop Mia, extended the charge of racial prejudice to the Governor, noting that ‘Lord Selborne has been ill-disposed towards us from the outset. He has always regarded us all as coolies and no better than locusts.’ A Hindu priest from Germiston, Ram Sundar Pundit, remarked that ‘the mother gives her child milk, but a step-mother eats him up. The Government is like a step-mother.’
The meeting passed a resolution offering ‘to submit to voluntary registration’ in order to ‘satisfy the Government and popular prejudice’. If this offer was rejected, the Indians requested ‘full Imperial protection by reason of the fact that British Indians have no voice in the choice of the legislators, and represent a very small and weak minority.’ Speaking last, Gandhi said the procedure of voluntary registration would ‘be based on mutual understanding … If gaol-going – which we have been contemplating – comes after this proposal, it will appear more graceful.’14
The Chinese of the Transvaal had joined the Indians in their protest. About 1,100 in all, they worked as merchants, gardeners and laundrymen. The new Act would bear down hard on them too. Their leader, Leung Quinn, decided to make common cause with Gandhi. Originally from Canton, Quinn was a partner in a firm of mineral-water manufacturers in Johannesburg. He had ‘no intention of registering under any circumstances’. The Chinese Association wrote to the Transvaal Government that it endorsed the resolutions passed by the Indian meeting of 29 March. Thus, as the Rand Daily Mail observed, ‘the Asiatic communities of the Transvaal are now as unanimously against the act, as perhaps, the white communities are in favour of it.’15
The protests were amplified in London, where L. W. Ritch was now based. Ritch sent the Colonial Office a series of letters detailing Indian handicaps in the Transvaal. He asked that Royal Assent to the new Ordinance be withheld.16 A more pointed petition came from Joseph Royeppen, once a clerk in Gandhi’s law office in Durban, now a Cambridge graduate and qualified lawyer himself. After a decade studying in the best colleges in England, Royeppen wished to return to South Africa and practise as a lawyer in the Transvaal. But, as he told Lord Elgin, while he was ‘entitled to follow my calling anywhere in His Majesty’s Dominions, I shall not be able to do so in a British Colony neighbouring my own home.’ The liberties that he had enjoyed in England would be denied Royeppen in the country of his birth, ruled as it was by ‘obnoxious restrictions emanating from unreasoning prejudice’.
It is likely that Gandhi put Royeppen up to this challenge; for his case highlighted the hypocrisies of the rulers like no other. Royeppen was a Christian, a Cambridge man, and a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn. However,
he was not white. If a man with his qualifications was debarred from entering the Transvaal, then ‘Indians as a whole will have just reasons for losing much of their faith in the Briton’s sense of justice in the colonies.’17
Back in the Transvaal, Gandhi asked for and was granted an appointment with the new Colonial Secretary, Jan Christian Smuts, a man who – in the decades to follow – was also to have a most profound impact on the history of the British Empire. Born a few months after Gandhi – on 24 May 1870 – Smuts was, unlike the Indian, ‘an expert examination hurdler’. Of proud Boer stock (his family had been in South Africa since the 1690s), Smuts got a first-class in his matriculation, a double first in his BA (from Victoria College, Stellenbosch), and then another first in his Law Tripos at Cambridge.18
A lover of poetry (particularly that of Walt Whitman, on whom he wrote an unpublished book), and a keen student of philosophy and science (especially ecology and botany), Smuts returned to his homeland in 1895 and sought to enter public life. In an early speech at Kimberley, he argued that the Boers and the Britons had to close ranks, or else their position would ‘become untenable in the face of that overwhelming majority of prolific barbarism’. However, the Jameson Raid made him suspicious of British intentions. In 1897 he shifted from Cape Town to the South African Republic, in an expression of solidarity with his fellow Boers. In June 1898 he was appointed State Attorney there. He became a protégé of President Kruger, their relationship akin to, and sometimes described as, that between father and son.
When war broke out Smuts went at once to the front. Put in charge of a unit of commandos, he led them in a series of marches, attacks and retreats. He gave his troops a sense of discipline and direction, thereby acquiring the rank of General. When hostilities ceased he played a key role in the Treaty of Vereeniging. His command of English, his education in England, his love of American poetry and his knowledge of European philosophy all made Smuts – in the eyes of his erstwhile enemies – an exception. An English friend wrote to him that ‘you are the only Afrikander … who has the power of expressing on paper the sentiments, moral and political, of your people.’ Smuts stood out, as ‘for the most part the Afrikander people are still dumb, only able to express themselves in deeds.’19
Smuts’ cosmopolitanism, however, did not cross the boundaries of race. The treaty as drafted by Lord Milner had a clause that read: ‘The Franchise will not be given to Natives until after the introduction of self-government.’ Smuts had this changed to: ‘The question of granting the Franchise to Natives will not be decided until after the introduction of self-government.’ The British hoped to delay the granting of citizenship rights to those who were not white; Smuts and company wanted to deny those rights for ever.
After the war Smuts built a successful practice at the Bar, and raised a brood of children. Then he re-entered politics, helping his neighbour and former Commander-in-Chief, Louis Botha, to form a party, known as Het Volk, representing the Afrikaner interest. When their party won the first elections by a whites-only franchise, Botha asked Smuts to serve as Colonial Secretary.
Like Botha, Smuts realized that Boer and Briton had to mend fences to keep out the (coloured) hordes. In August 1902, he wrote to a prominent British politician in the Cape that the ‘only hope for the future is that the two parts of the [white] population will be sensible enough to work together on a common basis and leave alone the old rivalries and feuds’. At the end of the year, when Joseph Chamberlain came out to South Africa, Smuts wrote to him on behalf of the Transvaal Afrikaners that the new political arrangements must ‘make it plain to the Natives that the war altered the relations between the two white races but not between the white and coloured population of the country’. A memorandum of September 1903, also written by Smuts, opposed the entry of Asians into the Transvaal. The Government, still run by British administrators, was warned of the example of Natal, where ‘the Coolie and the Kaffir are gradually encroaching on ground which formerly belonged to whites, and in many of the towns and villages the Coolies are becoming a permanent, if not predominant factor.’ It would ‘be disastrous to the interests of the white population of South Africa,’ said Smuts, if Transvaal were to follow ‘the desperate and ruinous example of Natal’.20
Now, with the passing of the Asiatic acts, Smuts came face to face with his fellow lawyer, fellow family man and fellow belletrist Mohandas K. Gandhi. On Thursday 4 April, 1907, Gandhi, along with five others (including Abdul Gani and H. O. Ally) set off from Johannesburg to Pretoria to meet Smuts. They boarded the 8.35 a.m. express train, normally reserved for whites, but here allowed to carry a few Indians courtesy of a one-time exemption granted by the General Manager of the South African Railways. At the meeting,
Mr Gandhi narrated all the facts to Mr Smuts. He reminded Mr Smuts that the Indian community had itself registered several times. He … showed in other ways also that the Indians were trustworthy. It was with the help of the Indian community that officials of the Asiatic Office who took bribes had been arrested. Taking all this into consideration, Mr Gandhi said, the Government should, on this occasion, agree to the proposal of voluntary registration.
The others spoke in support of Gandhi’s proposal. Smuts listened patiently, and after the Indians had been at it for close to an hour, said he had heard several things for the first time, and would make enquiries and send them a written reply. This, when it came some days later, was deeply disappointing. Smuts said that compulsory registration was required because of the ‘strong evidence’ of ‘unlawful infiltration’ of Asiatics into the Transvaal. He hoped the Indians ‘would co-operate with the Government in every way by registering themselves lawfully, gracefully and expeditiously’. The BIA replied to Smuts, pointing out again ‘that the new law gravely offends against [the community’s] feelings’, and urging once more that ‘the Indian proposal be given a trial before the law is enforced.’21
This exchange of letters with Jan Smuts on questions of public policy was immediately followed by another exchange on family matters. In early April, Gandhi’s brother Laxmidas had written to him with a long list of complaints. The letter is unavailable, but from Mohandas’s reply one gets a clear sense of its contents. The brother in South Africa began by outlining the roots of their growing estrangement: ‘I am afraid our outlooks differ widely and I see no possibility, for the present, of their being reconciled. You seek peace and happiness through money. I don’t depend on money for my peace …’
Fifteen years after the palace break-in at Porbandar had destroyed his chances of preferment, Laxmidas remained a bitter and frustrated man. His desire for wealth and fame remained unfulfilled. Now, he chastised his younger brother for not caring enough about the family. Mohandas answered:
I fail to understand what you mean by the word “family”. To me, the family includes not only the two brothers but the sister as well. It also includes our cousins. Indeed, if I could say so without arrogance, I would say that my family comprises all living beings: the only difference being that those who are more dependent on me, because of blood relationship or other circumstances, get more help from me.
He then came to the question of money.
As for your demand for a hundred rupees a month, I must say that I see neither the means at present nor the need of meeting it. I run the Phoenix Press with borrowed money. Moreover, I may have to go to gaol in the struggle against the new Ordinance. In that case I may become poorer still … If, however, the condition here improves during the next few months and I am free from trouble, I shall try to send you the money you have asked for by money order with the sole intention of pleasing you.
Gandhi accepted that, as brothers, ‘you and Karsandas have [a right to] a share in my earnings’. He admitted that, by raising the money for him to study in London, Laxmidas had placed him in his debt. However, he pointed out that, while his legal education had cost Rs 13,000, he had since sent his brothers more than Rs 60,000 from South Africa (equivalent to perhaps £320,000 today). ?
??I do not consider that I have obliged [you] by doing this,’ he remarked. ‘Even if nothing was done for me, whatever I have to do for my blood-brother I would do as a matter of duty.’ Then he censoriously added, ‘I must say with deep sorrow that, on account of your extravagant and thoughtless way of life, you have squandered a lot of money on pleasures and on pomp and show. You kept a horse and carriage, gave parties, and spent money on selfish friends; and some money was spent in what I consider immoral ways’ (presumably on prostitutes or on a mistress).22
The Gandhi brothers had once been very close – it was Laxmidas who had stood with Mohandas against their parochial fellow Banias when he wished to go to England, and who then raised the money for his fees and living expenses. But over the years they had drifted apart. Proximity to hedonistic princes in Kathiawar had made Laxmidas less inclined to follow the austere ways of his forebears. His brother, meanwhile, had taken Bania austerity to ever greater extremes in South Africa – simplifying his diet, working with his hands, placing himself in the service of his fellows. Hence the harsh, even savage, letter, in which a once deferential younger brother chastises his elder for his wastefulness and sinfulness.
The brother put in his place, Gandhi returned to the struggle in the Transvaal. With the local and Imperial governments unyielding, the pledge first made in the Empire Theatre in September 1906 would be honoured. To recall Gandhi’s words in that meeting, the time had come for ‘a heroic step to be taken’.