Free Gandhi Before India by Ramachandra Guha Page A

Cape Town, he (like Gandhi again) combined professional work with public service.
    Dr Abdurahman was the moving spirit behind the African Political Organization (APO), which pressed for housing rights and the franchise for Coloured people. In 1905 and 1906, Gandhi attended some APO meetings and occasionally wrote for its journal. For Abdurrahman himself he had considerable respect. But ultimately he felt that their causes must stay separate and distinct. In a fascinating piece in
Indian Opinion
he spelt out his reasons for this:
This Association of Coloured People does not include Indians who have always kept aloof from that body. We believe that the Indian community has been wise in doing so. For, though the hardships suffered by those people and the Indians is almost of the same kind, the remedies are not identical. It is therefore proper that the two should fight out their cases, each in their own appropriate way. We can cite the Proclamation of 1857 in our favour, which the Coloured people cannot. They can use the powerful argument that they are the children of the soil. They can also argue that their way of life is entirely European. We can petition the Secretary of State for India, whereas they cannot. They belong largely to the Christian community and can therefore avail themselves of the help of their priests. Such help is not available to us. 28
    The statement represented a distinct evolution of Gandhi’s views – he now quite clearly recognized that all races other than Europeans suffered from structural discrimination in South Africa. The Indians were not alone. Yet each community had to work out its own path in overcoming the disadvantages peculiar to it.
    An Englishman who moved to Johannesburg soon after Gandhi found it ‘the most perplexing, and perhaps the most fascinating’ place in the world. This city on the make and on the move became more diverse every month (if not every minute). Migrants arrived from at least four continents, seeking a slice of the wealth the gold underneath had spawned. It was ‘this cosmopolitan character of the population which forms at once the attractiveness and perplexity of the place. There is no cohesion, there is no monotony.’ 29
    This lack of cohesion was a matter of much concern to the ruling race. The Boers had moved to the hinterland of South Africa to escape British domination. There, they had established a simple social order, with two, unequal, divisions: Boer and Black. The Uitlanders and the Indians then came to complicate it. A compromise (following a bitter war) was forged with the Uitlanders. The Indians, however, were not European; but nor were they African. They were a perplexing element that complicated the black-and-white social order the whites had hoped to construct in South Africa.
    In England and the Netherlands, the countries where the majority of the colonists came from, whites were demographically dominant. In India and Indonesia, countries over which they had political control, the Dutch and the English did not wish to make a permanent home. In this respect South Africa was peculiar and even unique. The Europeans wanted to claim it as their own, an objective to which – at the time – the Indians, and the Indians alone, posed a serious challenge. Hence the enormous hostility towards them. An Englishman visiting the Transvaal in 1905 noticed that, whether as labourers, servants, hawkers or traders, the Indians ‘did their work well’. They were ‘deft [and] quiet’. The trouble was that ‘an Asiatic who competes with a white man is resented; that the man who sells or rents land to him for gain is looked upon as a traitor; and that his competition with white men is regarded as unequal’. 30
    In 1905–6 the Transvaal was in a period of transition. After the endof the Anglo-Boer war it had been constituted as a Crown Colony; now, however, it prepared to be granted ‘responsible government’. A new spirit of ‘white South Africanism’