A narrative of Gandhi and Mandela

In recent weeks, my thoughts have often been with Nelson Mandela, as he remains hospitalised in Pretoria with a lung infection. Despite his condition, his 95th birthday in mid July was marked with respect and love — testament to the unique position he holds as an international public figure of such renown.

For me, this period has also sparked many reflections on the time I spent filming a BBC documentary on Mahatma Gandhi in both India and South Africa, and thinking about the parallels between two great lives.

Before my three-month journey in Gandhiji’s footsteps, I had not appreciated how central his experiences in race-divided South Africa were to the development of his leadership and his political philosophy. He made the country his home for 21 years, after arriving in Durban in 1893.

But this was very much a two way street — while the injustices of South Africa were a key influence on the future Mahatma, his actions there also played a crucial role in influencing future leaders like Nelson Mandela. Mandela himself later said that Gandhi’s influence on the politics and methods of the African National Congress (ANC) had been ‘formidable’.

To understand the parallels, let me take you back to the early days of Gandhi’s time in South Africa. From the first moment, he stood out as a very rare breed — a lawyer — in a country where most of his fellow Indians would be either low-paid labourers or merchants. His professional skills were put to immediate use, but his leadership potential was honed by incidents such as the famous one at Pietermaritzburg station, when he was thrown off a train for sitting in a whites-only carriage.

In his autobiography, Gandhi wrote of the searing experience of the night he then spent in the freezing waiting room while stranded at the station, deliberating what his future in South Africa should be. Ultimately he vowed: ‘I should try if possible to root out the disease of colour prejudice and suffer hardships in the process’.

Gandhi had found his cause and it would be at the heart of his two decades in South Africa. Within a short time he developed plans for a trade union and then organised the Indian merchants for the first time into a political force — the Natal Indian Congress. By 1913, at the height of his power and fame in South Africa, he led over 2,000 striking Indians on a high profile trek across the border from Natal into the Transvaal, in protest at a punitive tax.

Gandhi’s focus was firmly on his own community, but the groundbreaking way he mobilised and inspired his fellow Indians was closely observed by black South Africans.
Among those to have a close-up view of how Gandhi operated was John Dube, the first leader of the African National Congress, who lived close to the Gandhis’ home at Phoenix, outside Durban.

The predecessor to the ANC was Dube’s Natal Native Congress, which he founded in 1894. Dube himself is said to have watched Gandhi’s political activities with great interest, but felt that similar direct action by black Africans at that time would not have the same effect.

It would fall to younger generations to employ the tactics on behalf of all South Africans, and as ANC activities gathered pace in the 1940s and 50s, many descendants of Gandhi’s contemporaries played a role — people like Prema Naidoo, whose grandfather Thambi Naidoo once saved Gandhi from a brutal attack.

By the time Gandhi left South Africa in 1914, his reputation was secure — the authorities were delighted to see his departure for India, regarding him as an unwelcome agitator and a thorn in their side. But the South African experience had been formative — years later Nelson Mandela, visiting India, would say ‘You gave us Mohandas, we returned him to you as Mahatma Gandhi’.

For all the parallels, it is important to note where the two men’s paths diverged, most notably on the use of violence. For Gandhi, politics always had to be moral and he remained true to his non-violent philosophy satyagraha his whole life. Mandela eventually made a different choice, and Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, was formed in 1961.

Mandela explained his thinking in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, saying that ‘non violent passive resistance is effective as long as your opposition adheres to the same rules as you do… but if peaceful protest is met with violence, its efficacy is at an end. For me non violence was not a moral principle but a strategy’.

Gandhi would not have approved, but the irony is that it was South Africa rather than India that managed to achieve a largely peaceful transition to democracy — thankfully it was spared the communal violence that accompanied Independence in 1947. And the contribution of Indian South Africans can still be felt at the heart of the ANC — whether in Mac Maharaj, longtime Mandela confidant and now spokesperson for President Zuma; or Ahmed Kathrada, one of the very few surviving ‘Rivoniatrialists’, sentenced alongside Mandela in 1964.

It is also there in the legacy of the late Fatima Meer, Mandela’s friend and biographer, whom I was lucky to interview back in 2009. With her keen sociologist’s eye, she was able to observe and analyse both him and Gandhi, telling me of the latter’s belief in what she called an ‘inner divinity’. She spoke in her tranquil Durban home, full of mementoes of the struggle of her own life — which saw her often subject to apartheid-era banning orders.
It is a life that symbolized the way the Indian community is woven into the fabric of South Africa, then and now.

The author is presenter on flagship news programme Impact on BBC World News.