In South Africa

Many ingredients went into the experiment of Gandhi in South Africa. The first was Gandhi’s unalterable belief in God. To Gandhi, God was truth, justice and love. Truth and justice were concepts, but love or hate furnished the motivation for action. Hate was acting in South Africa. Could love be made to act effectively in the same area of human life? Gandhi’s inner mind said, yes, it can because it must. Otherwise, God would be defeated, i.e. truth and justice would be defeated. That was impossible! This was the logic of Gandhi. How then could love be made to act? Certainly it could not be made to act in the manner hatred acted. Suppression, torture, violence, the prison and the bullet were the instruments of hate. These must be rejected as instruments of love. But what could be the instruments of love? Having come to the conclusion that love must reject the weapons of hate, Gandhi set about to discover the instruments of love in the battle of the weak against the strong. Discoveries came to him one after the other. The weak must not surrender. The weak must not obey. Instead of inflicting suffering, the weak must invite suffering on themselves and put the tyrant to shame and make his weapons as useless as possible. This must be done collectively by the entire Indian community. Large masses of people must act together nonviolently. Gandhi was modern enough to understand the significance of numbers which he did not disdain in a mood of super-saintliness. He realised at once that it was his duty to disobey iniquitous laws and make all his people also disobey them. He understood why the White minority Government used cruel violence to suppress coloured people. It was only under suppression that the coloured millions, including Indians, would give unmurmuring obedience. The whole aim was to secure obedience through terror. Gandhi's answer was to create fearlessness and inaugurate disobedience. Disobedience suddenly became the only duty. But there could be violent disobedience! Gandhi discovered that violence weakened disobedience and still left the initiative in the hands of the tyrant who was the master of the art of violence. Disobedience became more effective when it was nonviolent. Gandhi thus arrived at this strategy of effective disobedience through nonviolence. Here was the unassailable logic of nonviolent disobedience. Disobedience and surrender are poles apart. Disobedience was the exact opposite of surrender. If the tyrant secured no obedience from the slave what would happen? He would punish the slave, beat him up, throw him into prison, shoot at him with bullets. Yes, the tyrant was bound to do all these. So Gandhi said to himself and his people that disobedience should persist in spite of everything the tyrant did. The tyrant could torture, imprison and kill a few people, but he could not do that to the whole of the people when they were nonviolent. Therefore, the larger the number, the better. But the question was, would the weak disobey in sufficiently large numbers and face the consequences of disobedience? Here Gandhi’s mind hesitated. Then he quickly came to his next discovery. There was a soul in each human being. Whatever might be the differences between human beings due to different circumstances and conditions of history in recent centuries, man himself who was several hundred thousand years old on earth had each one a soul equal to every other soul. God created man in his own image, said the Bible. God resided in each human being, said the Gita. The Buddha and Mohammed affirmed the same truth. Gandhi was a believer. He decided heroically to act upon the basis of the equality of human souls.

From that belief sprang the faith that there was no man or woman so small, weak or helpless who could not discover the strength of the soul inside and make use of it when life itself was in peril before tyranny. Gandhi put his faith not only in the transcendent God but the God imminent in every man and woman. Gandhi thus pieced together all these fragments of truth and welded them into a new courage and hope. Thus, step by step, the experimenter in the laboratory of South Africa arrived at his radiant discovery of the power of passive resistance which later evolved into the revolutionary weapon of satyagraha.

Gandhi at once applied his discovery to the situation. He gave the call to his people to awake, arise and act nonviolently. They were only poor, weak and illiterate coolies who had long submitted to tyranny and knew the pains of slavery. But they responded to him in the most astonishing manner. Gandhi’s faith in man was justified. What happened as passive resistance grew and advanced is now part of history. It startled the Whites in South Africa and flashed the message of a new revolution across the world. The coolies began civil disobedience. The Whites became angry. They struck out at Gandhi and his coolies with all their weapons. Thousands were thrown into prisons, properties were confiscated, crowds were beaten up. Disobedience continued nevertheless. No Indian surrendered and no Indian obeyed. No Indian weakened in the struggle because of the beatings and the prisons. It became a long drawn out struggle of seven years which ended in the Smuts-Gandhi agreement. The struggle ennobled the coolies, gave them confidence and self-reliance. The Whites were ashamed inside themselves and were cleansed a little. The Whites were Christians. The coolies showed them the meaning of the Cross. Both sides emerged from the struggle with a premonition that something new had happened to them equally. The world had changed a little, not only in South Africa but in the conscience of man. Tolstoy wrote to Gandhi that the struggle he organised in South Africa was important for the whole world. More than everything else Gandhi himself was a transformed man. Deep within him there stirred the first awareness of a great mission and we witness the rebirth of the man Gandhi into Gandhi the Mahatma. Mahatma literally means great soul. That was an apt title which Dr. Annie Besant and poet Rabindranath Tagore combined to confer on the transformed man from South Africa.

This then was Gandhi’s discovery in his laboratory of South Africa. It was the discovery of a weapon with which the weak can fight the strong. It is perhaps the greatest discovery of our century. It was a greater discovery than that of atomic power in our time. Atomic weapons are now in the hands of the mighty and with these weapons the strong will fight the strong and destroy themselves. But here was the discovery of a weapon which the weakest could use with effect against the strongest. Nonviolence was certainly older than Gandhi. But Gandhian nonviolence is altogether a new thing in history. Under the technology of satyagraha, Gandhi threaded nonviolence in a chain reaction and then harnessed its redemptive power to revolution, thus knocking out the idea that the essence of revolution was in violence, blood and terror. Gandhi proved that there could be massive nonviolent action against tyranny and injustice which could shake both to pieces and at the same time redeem alike the tyrant and his victim. Gandhi's courage, his faith in the common man, his power to organise love in action, his iron determination and his power of analysis and synthesis which he applied to his experiment in South Africa, require a much fuller study than any undertaken so far.

His Discoveries

But when we look into the splendid mosaic of his thoughts and deeds there is one thing which stands out as unique and puts him in the forefront of the evolution of man in our time. This was the unique discovery he made in a unique laboratory. The laboratory was South Africa and the discovery was satyagraha. It was history which threw Gandhi into the South African laboratory. The situation in South Africa was itself unprecedented in history. It was not merely that a white minority Government brutalized itself and millions of coloured people in an attempt to permanently enslave them. Slavery was nothing new in the world, but this one was unique in that it was grounded in a new metaphysics and ethics buttressed by modern science. Every thought and action conceivable to diabolic human ingenuity was drawn upon to perpetuate the subjection of the many who were weak to the few who were strong. Any rebellion was totally made impossible. The very thought of rebellion was made treason. The White minority Government was armed not only with weapons but with perverted laws, institutions and philosophy. This slavery itself was held up as part of God’s plan for man and the teachings of the New Testament were blackened and poisoned in support of it. The Bible had taught through twenty centuries that God made man in His image, but the White tyrants in South Africa taught that this applied only to the White man and never to the coloured man. The many who were weak and held in subjection had no arms, no organisation, no education, no power of any kind. They could work and manage to live only within the unbreakable boundaries of their slavery. Once they accepted their slavery, they were fed, clothed and given shelter, but without any human rights whatsoever, not even for a husband to live with his wife, nor a mother with her children. They could live like cattle in the cattlesheds of this fantastic civilization. Any attempt to break away was met with torture and death. It was a terrible prison house within the heart of modern civilization. History cast Gandhi into such a prison house. He had lived and studied in London. He was a Barrister-at-law. He was an Indian with a great and ancient tradition of culture in his blood. He was, however, young and inexperienced. He could have turned tail and run away from this terror. It was at this point that Gandhi revealed the first glimmer of his greatness. He stood firm and looked at the terror with unflinching eyes. Can we not say, in humility today, that God broke into history at this point and gave Gandhi the inner urge to stand firm? He had behind him only unlettered, poor and weak Indian coolies and he himself was dubbed a coolie barrister by the arrogant Whites who kept the keys of the prison. The historic challenge before Gandhi was whether the weak could fight the strong with any hope of redemption. Throughout history in all the battles between the strong and the weak the weak had always surrendered or perished. Gandhi asked himself the question if the inescapable fact of history, as it appeared to be, could ever represent the law of truth, justice and love, i.e. the law of God. Again, God broke into the soul of Gandhi and Gandhi knew at once that what surrounded him was really the negation of the law of history and the law of God. That settled, he plunged into the experiment to discover a weapon with which the weak could fight the strong.