be useful to us and also to himself. He would be able to instruct our counsel better than ourselves. And he would have the advantage of seeing a new part of the world, and of making new acquaintances.35
Gandhi had questions about the offer. Was he expected to appear in court or simply to instruct counsel? How long was he expected to be in South Africa? What was the pay? The brothers arranged a meeting between Mohandas and Sheth Abdul Karim Jhaveri, an acquaintance of Lakshmidas and a partner in Dada Abdulla. Gandhi reports that the partner assured him that the job would not be difficult and that he envisioned Gandhi assisting the firm with its English-language correspondence. The company could offer him a fee of £105, first-class round-trip travel, the payment of all expenses while Gandhi was in the company’s employ, and an assurance that the job would take less than a year.
Gandhi realized quite quickly that this was not a job to brag about. He knew that he “was hardly going there as a barrister,” but “as a servant of the firm.”36 The advantages to taking this position in South Africa were numerous, however. In one stroke he could escape the political intrigue of Kathiawad, be done with the drudgery of drafting petitions and applications, avoid any further violation of the ethical proscriptions against paying commissions, send back £105 to his family,37 take up work that appeared to call for no public speaking, and shake from his sandals the dust of the country in which he had failed as a barrister.
Without haggling over the terms of his employment, without ruing his departure except for the “pang of parting” from his wife,38 and without evincing so much as an inkling of understanding how this decision would change his life forever, he agreed to go to South Africa.
Gandhi had had quite enough of India.
THREE
An Abundant and Regular Supply of Labour
The self-interest of the European brought the Indian to South Africa; self-interest has sought to get rid of him from the country; self-interest, so far as this cannot be achieved, is determined to keep him in what is regarded as his place.
J. F. HOFMEYR
THERE COULD HARDLY BE A stranger and more complex setting for the formative years of Gandhi’s public life than the colony of Natal, to which he sailed in 1893. At the time of his arrival, Natal had all the economic, political, and social complexity one might expect from a place populated by native Africans, come upon by the Portuguese, and developed by the Dutch, before being wholly taken over by the British.
Natal (from the Latin natus, “birth”) was given its name by the explorer Vasco da Gama, who, on his journey from Portugal to India, passed by Natal’s verdant coast at Christmastime in the year 1497. It was not da Gama’s fellow Portuguese, however, who were to leave a serious European mark on Natal. Dutch from the Cape colony, uncomfortable with the notion of color equality professed by the new British administration established there in 1815, entered the province in the early decades of the nineteenth century in search of fertile agricultural lands, ample native labor, and a setting where they could re-create a pleasant and secure way of life. This movement to Natal peaked with significant migrations to the region in the 1830s and the establishment of the Republic of Natalia in 1839, an ill-fated, short-lived Dutch endeavor that was never able to overcome serious financial and administrative difficulties.1 The British, meanwhile, had established themselves along the coast, desirous of capitalizing on the rich farmlands that lay there and the harbor available for development at the coastal town of Durban.2 The British declared Natal a dependency of the Cape colony in 1843 with little opposition from the Dutch, who recognized that their experiment in government had failed. In 1856 Natal became a separate colony from the Cape. Britain granted it responsible government in 1893,3 the year of Gandhi’s arrival.
THE NATAL ECONOMY AND ITS DEMAND FOR LABOR
The Europeans saw Natal’s fertile coastlands not with the eyes of tourists but those of capitalists. There they experimented with efforts to grow maize, cotton, indigo, arrowroot, tobacco, and coffee. Eventually they learned that the area was suited for the growing of a lucrative cash crop, sugar.4 The capital necessary to underwrite the sugar industry was available because banks had already been established in Natal. Labor, however, was another matter. The owners of the sugar plantations turned to what appeared to them a vast, untapped supply of labor in the native population, but most efforts to recruit native Africans as laborers ended in failure.5 Frustrated, the Europeans tried a series of moves, some bizarre, to find workers. They attempted to lure English farmhands, import convicts, and attract Chinese and Malays from the Far East. All these attempts were unsuccessful in producing the large stocks of reliable workers needed to run an agricultural enterprise. The situation became desperate, with the Natal Mercury warning that the lack of labor would “in the near future imperil the whole country.”6
Finally, the thoughts of the plantation owners and others who favored a supply of cheap, reliable labor turned to India. Several years after the Colonial Office at the Cape of Good Hope broached the idea with the government of India,7 Natal in 1860 was able to negotiate a system of indentured labor that called for the importation of workers to be bound to their employers for three years, paid 10 shillings a month, and supplied with housing and food.8 When the laborer’s indenture was mature, the laborer could return to India, re-enlist for another period of indenture, or receive property equal to what it would have cost the government to ship him or her back to India.9 After 6,445 immigrants had been imported between 1860 and 1866, the dissatisfaction of the government of India with the operation of this arrangement, together with effects of an economic depression on Natal, resulted in the suspension of immigration in 1866.10
After the depression of 1866 began to ease and the demand for sugar began to rise, interest in the importation of Indian laborers resurfaced. More than two hundred “Planters, Merchants and others interested in the supply of Labour” petitioned the Natal government for help: “Your memorialists are more profoundly impressed as ever with the necessity of an increased supply of labour; it is absolutely essential for carrying on the Industries of the Coast Lands, and for giving to capitalists arriving among us that security which is required in entering on enterprises involving so large an outlay which can only be successfully prosecuted by a more abundant and regular supply of labour.”11
GROWERS VERSUS MERCHANTS
This renewal of interest in immigration troubled the government of India, concerned, as it was, over the complaints it had received about the treatment of its citizens during the previous period of immigration. The Natal government, however, gave sufficient assurances such that India permitted immigration to resume in 1874. These assurances included provisions that an indentured servant could return to India at the end of ten years (five years of service, followed by five years of freedom), that there should be no unequal treatment of Indians who remained, and that certain substantial percentages of the immigrants be women.12 These provisions, reluctantly accepted by the government of Natal, practically guaranteed that immigration would result in a permanent Indian population in Natal, a prospect feared by important elements of the Natal economy. For years there had been tension between the coastal growers on the one hand and the merchants and traders on the other over the question of immigration. The white growers needed Indian laborers to run their farms, while the white merchants and traders were apprehensive over the increased competition from freed Indians who became hawkers, market-gardeners, and traders, and from Indian merchants who voluntarily came to Natal to profit by serving the needs of the expanding Indian community. With the agreement to renew immigration, however, the growers’ needs trumped the merchants’ fears, as well as the concerns of the larger white society about the social disruption the Indians’ presence might cause. The conflict between the growers’ interests in cheap labor for their agricultural and other enterprises and the merchant class’
