Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (22 page)

Strikers march into the Transvaal at Volksrust
(photo credit i5.4)

If the authorities calculated that the detention of Gandhi and his Jewish lieutenants, Polak and Kallenbach, would be enough to break the back of the strike, they soon discovered that it had a momentum all its own. The indentured mine workers from Natal got within fifty miles of Johannesburg before a mass arrest could be organized. They had to be reminded by Polak that satyagraha ruled out active resistance to arrest. It took two days to pack them into three special trains that were waiting for them in the town of Balfour. Unlike Gandhi, the authorities made no provision for feeding the strikers, who were immediately prosecuted when they got back to Natal for the statutory crimes of abandoning their workplaces and illegally crossing the provincial border. They were then sentenced to hard labor underground at the mines, which had been conveniently certified as annexes to the overflowing Newcastle and Dundee jails—“outstations,” they were called—with their white foremen deputized as warders. Hard labor meant there would be no pay for the six months the sentences would last. Beatings with sticks and
sjamboks
, whips made out of rhino or hippo hide, were among the methods used to herd the strikers back to work.

At the
Ballengeich mine, the source of the first coal miners to march with Gandhi, the indentured laborers had been absent from the compound for nearly two weeks by the time they were returned.
Goolam Vahed and
Ashwin Desai, two South African scholars who have written a comprehensive account of the repression that followed the strike, offer the testimony a laborer named Madhar Saib later gave to the so-called protector about his encounter with a white mine captain named Johnston: “
He gave me strokes with a sjambok on the posterior, the Kaffir policeman holding me by one of my hands. He then told me to go to work … [then] tripped me with his foot and I fell down, whereupon he placed his foot on my throat and gave me another stroke which caught me on the penis. When I urine it hurts.”

Having discovered that hunger and exhaustion wouldn’t be enough to break the strikes, the authorities had now determined on a crackdown. “
Any government worth its salt would put its foot down,” said Smuts, noting with scathing accuracy that the demand for the repeal of the head tax on former indentured workers had been “an afterthought” for Gandhi. His elevation of the head tax as an add-on to his earlier list of
demands, Smuts said in a telegram to the mine owners, was a political maneuver “intended to influence Natal Indians, to whom the real grounds which he started the passive resistance movement, and which never included this tax, do not appeal.”

The mine owners, disillusioned by the losses they’d suffered after listening to Gandhi’s sweet talk, were now pressing for action.
The
Natal Coal Owners Association said the time had come for the strikers to be arrested.
Taking their cues, editorial writers demanded to know why the government’s response had been so feeble.
The Star
, which never bothered to dispatch a reporter to the scene, called on it to end its “shilly-shallying” in an editorial that ran under a headline that shouted
COOLIE INVASION
. How was it possible, the newspaper asked, that “a handful of fanatics, however conscientious,” could get away with preaching “defiance of the laws of the Union”?

Adding to the gathering pressure for a crackdown was the
spread of the strike’s seeming flood tide even after Gandhi and his lieutenants had been locked up, even after the Natal strikers had been shipped back to the coal mines as not merely indentured laborers but prisoners of the state. From the coalfields in the hinterland it now reached the sugar lands on the Indian Ocean coast, leading at the height of the harvest season to a seemingly spontaneous succession of walkouts from the plantations and sugar refineries where indentured Indians still amounted to three-quarters of the workforce, taking in places where Gandhi had never campaigned.

The first walkout from a sugar estate appears to have come on November 5, at Avoca on the north shore, not far from Phoenix. By November 8, sugar refineries on the south shore had been hit, and by the middle of the month, when a stoppage by Indian street cleaners, water carriers, household servants, railway men, and boatmen briefly paralyzed Durban, there were probably more than ten thousand indentured Indians on strike in the province. In Durban, the strike was “practically universal,” the chief magistrate reported on November 17. Sporadic incidents of sugarcane fields being set ablaze spread panic among the planters, some of whom bundled their wives and children off to safer precincts in the city.

The authorities now found themselves spread thin. Detachments of British troops had to be rushed from as far away as King William’s Town in the Eastern Cape and Pretoria.
At the height of the unrest, Durban found that its only detectives who could speak Hindustani or Tamil had been dispatched to Dundee to work on the case against the imprisoned
Gandhi, who by then had been moved to Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, where Indians were basically banned.
Rajmohan Gandhi suggests that this was done “so that no Indian could see Gandhi or carry messages from him.”

The impression that this resistance and strife in the sugar country was spontaneous, that Gandhi the prisoner had willed or organized none of it, seems plausible on its face. How and when could he have done so? Nevertheless, there are scattered hints that the idea of calling out the plantation workers had crossed his mind. Before his own arrest on November 10, Hermann Kallenbach said as much in an interview in Johannesburg. “
The leaders of the movement will not have the least compunction about asking all Indians on the sugar plantations to come out,” he was reported to have said, at least two weeks before any had done so. The Indians could “get work on the farms anywhere,” the report of his musings continued, “because they were more intelligent than the natives.” In five years at Gandhi’s side, the architect appears not to have learned how the indenture system, with its binding contracts, operated, or what he was supposed to think about the mental capacity of Africans. Perhaps his words were just bluster, intended merely to add to the pressure on the authorities.
Nevertheless, Vahed and Desai found evidence that Gandhi’s followers in the newly formed
Natal Indian Association were sufficiently on top of events, despite the spreading turmoil, to ship food to striking laborers on a north-coast sugar estate after their employers had cut off rations.

The plantation to which the food aid was shipped happened to be at Mount Edgecombe, where Gandhi had encountered the African leader John Dube under the auspices of its owner, Marshall Campbell, eight years earlier. Campbell had been sympathetic to Gandhi’s movement up to this point. He’d given a lunch honoring Gokhale the previous year; he was also a consistent opponent of the three-pound tax on former indentured workers. After his release from prison, Gandhi would write to him to say how sorry he was that Campbell’s plantation was one of the first hit.
He’d told his supporters in Durban, Gandhi’s letter said, that “your men should be the last to be called out,” acknowledging plainly enough that before being jailed, he’d been in on a discussion of tactics for extending the strike to the coastal sugar lands. “Had I been free and assisted in calling out the men,” Gandhi told Campbell, “I must freely admit that I would have endeavored to call out your men also; but, as I have already stated, yours would have been the last estate.”

For Campbell the letter was a last straw. His estates had seen weeks of turmoil. Gandhi’s fine words about
nonviolence were contradicted, he replied, by “grave threats of personal violence made by persons whom I believe to be your agents.” Campbell writes as one who’s sure of his facts. He’d actually been away from Natal and is relying on the testimony of his son William, who was relying in turn on that of his youngest brother, Colin. “The men will not listen to anybody but Ghandi [
sic
] or the gun,” William wrote to his father who stopped short of calling Gandhi a hypocrite but lectured him severely on the harm done to defenseless Indians he was purporting to lead:

In a second letter noticeably less apologetic than his first, Gandhi replied with the perfunctory distress of a field commander who has been informed of civilian casualties in an operation he ordered. Passive resistance, he reminded Campbell starchily, was the community’s “only weapon.” Obviously, its use over a wide area would have caused “much greater suffering” than earlier satyagraha campaigns. It could not have been otherwise. As he said in his first letter to Campbell, “
In all our struggles of this nature, the innocent as well as the guilty suffer.”

Neither Gandhi nor the plantation owner makes the slightest allusion to the role played by Campbell’s son Colin in the deadliest of the confrontations at Mount Edgecombe. The account eventually accepted by a magistrate acknowledged that the violence had its origins in an attempt by the younger Campbell to force the striking laborers back to work with the support of mounted police. It also acknowledged that
Colin Campbell drew his revolver and fired four shots.
By his own testimony—accepted without question by the police, the magistrate, and the white press—the shooting came when he was already under attack; because his horse was agitated, he said, his shots went wild. Indians testified that he fired the first shots, killing an indentured worker named Patchappen,
one of eight Indians killed or mortally wounded on the morning of November 17, and wounding another. Though Gandhi later mourned indentured workers who lost their lives in such confrontations as martyrs, he refrained from laying blame only on the side of the whites. On his farewell tour of South Africa a half year later, making his final rounds on Natal’s north coast, he sounded as if he’d come to accept some of the elder Campbell’s strictures. Fighting with sticks and burning fields of sugarcane were not passive resistance, he told an audience of indentured cane workers, according to a paraphrase of his remarks that ran in
Indian Opinion
.
If he’d not been in jail, he’d “have repudiated them entirely and allowed his head to be broken rather than permit them to use a single stick against their opponents.” It wasn’t a point Gandhi often made on his farewell tour, which took on a triumphalist air, but it may have lodged in his consciousness. Later, in India, much to the dismay of his lieutenants in the nationalist movement, he regularly put the brakes on satyagraha campaigns at the first sign that the
discipline of nonviolence was giving way.

The tone of Campbell’s letters had been patronizing in a colonial way but not as hostile as might have been expected, considering all that had gone on at Mount Edgecombe.
The Indians had refused to cut sugarcane for two weeks before the shootings. Local planters soon were calling for a show of force by mounted police to contain the agitation. Within a couple of days, bands of striking indentured laborers were reported to be roaming the neighborhood, armed with clubs and the long, razor-sharp knives used for cutting cane, stopping at residences of planters and their white managers to demand that Indian house servants come out and join the struggle. Or so the Durban newspapers reported.

A detachment of police, “both European and Native, galloped to Mount Edgecomb” from neighboring Verulam on November 17,
The Natal Advertiser
said. The “native police … quickly got in among their natural enemies,” meaning the indentured Indians, until they had to be restrained. The Africans were armed with assegais, or spears, and the heavy Zulu war club known as a knobkerrie, a carved staff ending in a bulbous hardwood head that could be wielded like a medieval mace.

In reports by journalists and officials on clashes on the mines and in the sugar lands in these weeks, a standard story line unfolds. The forces of law and order are portrayed as restrained as long as they’re kept under firm white command. The Indians are easily agitated, soon beyond reason, uncontrollable, nearly crazed, even when confronted by a well-armed constabulary with drawn firearms. The Indians fought with sticks
and stones, the reports said; a handful are described as brandishing cane knives.
These themes are regularly reflected in headlines in the English-language press.
POLICE SHOW EXEMPLARY PATIENCE
, the
Transvaal Leader
assured its readers, even as
COOLIES RUN AMUCK
.

Here’s a judicial commission’s eventual explanation of why Indian strikers had to be gunned down in the clashes at Mount Edgecombe: “
The Indians were very excited and violent, and so determined were they that, though one of their number had been killed and several wounded … they had not been intimidated.” A failure to use firearms, the commission concluded on the basis of testimony by militia officers, “might eventually have led to greater bloodshed.” Ballistic evidence, it maintained, contradicted testimony by Indians who said the first shots had been fired by Campbell’s son. The mounted police had to be called out, it explained, to deal with laborers committing the crime of disobeying a lawful order to return to work.

The police, members of the
South African Mounted Rifles, had been “
overwhelmed in numbers by the coolies” who charged “with all the suddenness characteristic of the Asiatic variableness of temper,” the
Transvaal Leader
told its readers, hewing to the official line.
The commission that looked into the Mount Edgecombe clashes also looked into a disturbance on November 21 at the
Beneva Sugar Estates near Esperanza, where four strikers were killed after a display of Indian “variableness” forced the police to choose between using their weapons and leaving unarmed whites, including nearby women and children, “at the mercy of an excited crowd of almost two hundred Indians.” The indentured cane cutters, in the official account, had resisted a police order to march to a nearby magistrate so they could be charged with desertion in an orderly way. Instead, they’d fallen supine and lain on their backs. “Get off your horses and come cut our throats,” one of them unaccountably cries out in the official version, which the commissioners easily swallowed. When the police then approach on horseback, a seemingly possessed Indian leaps to his feet and smacks a trooper’s horse with a stick, so hard that the animal falls down. Then, as the troopers withdraw, some with their revolvers unholstered, they’re pursued by laborers with sticks.
A witness told
Reuters the Indians fought like “dervishes.”