Last week I finished a book titled 'The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer Of Empire' and I immediately thought about doing a write-up on it because it not only made a strong impression on me but it also left me with some serious thoughts. The book is about Mahatma Gandhi but unlike a biography, it focuses on a specific period of his life and investigates the impact of his activities during that period. The era in focus is the 21 year stint he spent in South Africa between 1893- 1914 and the main subject investigated is his relationship with the British Crown.
Walter Rodney once said "Among the oppressed and unfree, the only great men are those who struggle to destroy the oppressor". It's with that same spirit that I dived into this book with the aim of finding out just what Gandhi stood for and whose interests was he representing during his stay in South Africa. I wanted to weigh him as a freedom fighter and man, and see how he measured up...
This is a very well researched book with carefully selected details and information to provide a context for the individual under investigation. The authors, Goolam Vahed and Ashwin Desai, did a remarkable job of not propagandising the narrative and instead lay all the relevant information in front of you as a reader so you can see what kind of a man Gandhi was, whose interests did he serve and whether he is really worthy of his sacred place in history.
Aside from putting Gandhi's activities under the microscope, this is a great book to help one understand the history and purpose of South Africa as a whole. Whether you are black, white, Indian, coloured or even Chinese, this book gives you an understanding of the long pre-determined role your race is meant to play in South Africa. Today much has supposedly changed from the late 1800's and early 1900's when Paul Kruger, Jan Smuts and the rest of their settler contemporaries unapologetically declared South Africa to be a white man's country but yet the economic patterns and race relations they were seeking out are still very much intact. By exploring the courses set in motion by the colonial criminals of the past, this book, whether advertently or inadvertently, explains the racial and power relations South Africa today and the role that Gandhi played as a preeminent leader in the Indian community.
So what was clear to me after reading the book was that, regardless of what he did after he left South Africa, the Gandhi myth is one of history's greatest frauds. The knowledge presented undresses Gandhi as a shameless stooge of the British Empire who used his professional prestige to further a colonial agenda with the hopes of Britain and the white power structure rewarding his efforts by recognising South African Indians as equal to the white counterparts. He was blatantly racist, he was an imperial and colonial Uncle Tom, he wasn't for women's equality, and he wasn't pro-poor, even with the Indian community that he was supposedly serving.
In relation to empire, Gandhi had an unbelievably romanticised and naive notion of what Britain stood for and his political aspirations Indians in South Africa were always attached to the British Empire. Gandhi believed that British Imperialism existed for the good of the world and even went as far as saying that "England will prove to be India's deliverer". Any realist will tell you that empires have nothing to do with deliverance; they are about subjugation, exploitation, and theft.
As far as his relationship with the native African community goes, after reading this book, I would go as far as saying that Gandhi was disgusted by black people. When his own words are examined, you get the impression of a man who doesn't merely dislike blacks, he absolutely abhors blacks! In fact his first win in South African court was in a case where he was arguing that Indians should not have to suffer the burden of sharing the same post-office entrance as blacks. Gandhi was enraged whenever he sensed that whites were reducing his people "to the level of the raw Kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife and then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness". His attitude towards blacks was always dismissive and hateful. He even went as far as describing whites and Indians as 'the two great communities of South Africa' despite the fact that blacks were and still are the overwhelming majority in South Africa. And when the Bhambatha Rebellion came, Gandhi was busy recruiting Indian troops to help the British slaughter the Zulu's. When his fighting troops were rejected, he settled for a nursing role. Vahed and Desai explain the motivation behind this supposed 'man of peace' participating in war by saying "Bloodied African bodies were stepping stones to gain favour with local whites and the crown". It's men like Gandhi that have put a perhaps irrevocable strain on the relationship between blacks and Indians in South Africa. It wouldn't be unfair to say that there is cohesion but mutual distrust between the two collective communities.
Even in his treatment of Indian people, Gandhi was not a man 'of the people' or 'for the people'. Indians were divided by class and Gandhi's main priorities were the interests of the trader class. He had little tolerance for the labour class which he saw as uncivilised. He spent his energies not fighting for the indentured labourers in Natal but rather fought for the trader classes to be allowed access to Transvaal. The hardships of the indentured labourers left them in need of a champion but Gandhi neglected them and rather preferred to further enrich the privileged class by pushing for entry into the lucrative Tranvaal market.
What was also telling about the South African Gandhi's character was that he had no plans plans for Indians to play a political role and some of his proposals to the white power structure, both in Britain and here in South Africa, were pretty much an affront to the dignity of the Indian race. In a lot of his writings and speeches he underlines, over and over again, that Indians would be perfectly happy to be a politically servile group just so long as the racial distinction between them and whites was reduced. The need to feel white was so ingrained in his mind that Gandhi wanted all Indians to take pride in British subjugation and settle for the proximity to whiteness it brought. Such a man is a political coward. He even went to pathetic lengths to prove that whites and Indians were biologically joined by the same Aryan bloodline.
On the subject of women empowerment, Gandhi is on the wrong side of history on that matter too. He was happy to make use of them and also praise their efforts and courage in the Indian struggle but emancipating them from patriarchal institutions was never on his agenda. In fact the only time women's views influenced him was when he was dealing with white women.
Overall it must be said that information presented by this book provokes an opinion from the reader and I myself was no exception. I'll say that Gandhi did not play a constructive role in the building of South Africa and his mischief should not be swept under the rug just because he later went on to become a global darling and a liberation icon. Any monument in South Africa that commemorates him is a mockery of the notion of racial equality and an insult to the revolutionary martyrs of the Bhambatha Rebellion. But that's just my opinion based on the information I gathered from the book. I hope that after reading this, you acquire your own copy of the book and come to your own conclusions.
