Part 2 (1/2)

So far what's new here is that the debater has bracketed Africans with Indians. Otherwise it's his standard trope, his appeal for equality of opportunity for his people. But as he starts to wrap up, he takes a further step. He has always said it's not a question of political rights, but now he breaks out of that straitjacket. On this one occasion, he allows himself to talk about ”free inst.i.tutions” and ”self-government” and the duty of the British to lift ”subject races” to ”equality with themselves.” Surprisingly, in this imperial context, he finds a vision of something like ”the rainbow nation” the multiracial South Africa of today aspires, or at least claims, to be: If we look into the future, is it not a heritage we have to leave to posterity, that all the different races commingle and produce a civilization that perhaps the world has not yet seen? There are differences and misunderstandings, but I do believe, in the words of the sacred hymn, ”We shall know each other better when the mists have rolled away.”

How do we reconcile these two contrasting Gandhis, each circa 1908 in South Africa-this debater and visionary with the narrow racial pleader who, earlier and afterward that same year, spoke in such a different vein? Can one be seen as more real or enduring than the other? Put another way, can what he says to a white audience be taken as more genuine than what he says to Indians? The answer is so far from being obvious that the only possible conclusion seems to be that Gandhi's views on race-on blacks in particular-were now contradictory and unsettled. Considering what they had been, this has to be seen as an advance.

If Gandhi was in flux, so was the country. An all-white national convention was about to set a const.i.tutional course. Standing apart with their list of grievances against the Transvaal, Indians were in no position to influence the debate. In fact, there was no national Indian organization. Gandhi himself was all that connected the Transvaal British Indian a.s.sociation to the Natal Indian Congress. Less and less did they seem like different faces of a single movement. (It wasn't till 1923, nine years after Gandhi left South Africa, that a national Indian organization finally came into being, calling itself the South African Indian Congress; by then, the organizations he led were dormant.) Even the courageous band of Transvaal protesters courting arrest-his ”self-suffering” satyagrahis-were sometimes less united than he might have wished. This became evident, he later acknowledged, in the tight quarters of a jail. ”Indians of all communities and castes lived together in the jail, which gave us an opportunity to observe how backward we are in the matter of self-government.” Some Hindus refused to eat food prepared by Muslims or fellow prisoners of lower caste. One satyagrahi objected to sleeping near another from the scavenger subcaste; he was afraid his own caste would punish him, perhaps even brand him as outcaste if it learned of his propinquity to an untouchable. Speaking about caste in a specifically South African context for the first time, Gandhi denounced ”these hypocritical distinctions of high and low” and the ”caste tyranny” that lay behind them. So both forms of government-”self-government” (meaning how Indians treated Indians) and national government for South Africa (meaning whites ruling everyone else)-were on his mind when he spoke to the YMCA in Johannesburg between his first two jail experiences. At its heart, each held for him the issue of equality. In that sense, he now saw the issue through different ends of one telescope. On this occasion at least, in taking the long view, Gandhi managed to include Africans in his vision of ”a civilization that perhaps the world has not yet seen.”

But outside prison walls, who were the Africans in his life? What, after fifteen years in the country, did he actually know of them? The historical record has remarkably little to say on that score. There is a photograph taken in early 1910 of a dapper, neatly groomed Gandhi, in s.h.i.+rtsleeves and tie, sleeves rolled up, casually sitting on a hillside, where a big tent has been pitched, with a few of the pioneers who would form the nucleus of his nascent utopian community. Standing off to the side, very much apart, are two black men. Possibly these are ”Native Isaac” and ”Native Jacob,” whose monthly wages of one pound each are detailed in the diary of Gandhi's friend and fellow settler Hermann Kallenbach, the architect who purchased the land for what became known as Tolstoy Farm and later functioned as its treasurer. Gandhi would propose, in a set of rules drafted for this new commune and boot camp for nonviolent resisters, that it employ no servants. ”It is understood that the ideal is not to employ native labor and not to use machinery,” he'd written. But Isaac and Jacob remained on Kallenbach's books until the end of its brief life of two and a half years. Gandhi himself later came close to portraying these low-paid farmhands as n.o.ble savages in a paean to the life of physical labor in the fields of Tolstoy Farm: ”I regard the Kaffirs, with whom I constantly work these days, as superior to us. What they do in their ignorance we have to do knowingly.” (Rajmohan Gandhi, his grandson, suggests this may have been his last use of the epithet ”kaffir.”) [image]

On the building site of Kallenbach's new home (photo credit i3.1) (photo credit i3.1)

Other Africans from the neighborhood may have visited Tolstoy Farm-as Zulus living near the Phoenix Settlement visited there-but no such visitors, nor the seemingly indispensable Isaac and Jacob, were invited into the mixed group of Indians and whites that made up the company of Gandhian recruits. Their leader couldn't have pa.s.sed many days in his two decades in Africa without seeing ordinary Africans, legions of them. But the question of how much contact he had with them, like the question posed earlier of how much actual contact he had with indentured Indians toiling on the plantations and in the mines, finds no ready answer. It can only be inferred from what he wrote. He had a fair amount to say about indentured Indians-about their miserable circ.u.mstances, about caste-before he finally became involved with them. Few and far between were his reflections on Africans. Calling him ethnocentric doesn't cover the case. He had plenty to say to-and about-whites.

In the several thousand pages Gandhi wrote in South Africa, or later about South Africa, the names of only three Africans are mentioned. Of the three, he acknowledges having met only one. And when it comes to that one African, what doc.u.mentary evidence there is covers only two meetings with Gandhi-seven years apart-leaving to our imaginations the question of whether they ever met again.

His name was John Langalibalele Dube. A Zulu aristocrat descended from Zulu chiefs, he'd been raised at the American Zulu Mission station in Inanda, where his father, James Dube, had become one of the first converts and, eventually, a pastor as well as a prosperous farmer, so prosperous that he had thirty gold sovereigns to invest in sending his son off in the company of an American missionary to Oberlin College in Ohio. John Dube thus took a cultural leap as long as the one Gandhi managed when he crossed the black water to be trained as a lawyer in London. Later Dube returned to America to be ordained in Brooklyn as a Congregational minister and raise funds for an industrial school modeled on Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton's Tuskegee Inst.i.tute. Dube called Was.h.i.+ngton, to whom he made a pilgrimage in 1897, ”my patron saint...my guiding star.”

In 1900 he founded an organization called the Natal Native Congress, in hopes of giving a voice to Zulus on issues of land, labor, and rights where the traditional chiefs seemed unprepared to engage white authorities. The new group's name strongly suggested that it found its model in Gandhi's own Natal Indian Congress. Twelve years later, John Dube became the first president-president-general he was called-of the South African Native National Congress, which later simplified its nomenclature, calling itself the African National Congress, the name under which it finally took power in 1994 after the country's first experience of nonracial universal suffrage. In homage to John Dube's standing as a founding father, Nelson Mandela made a point of casting his own first vote in Inanda at Dube's school, the Ohlange Inst.i.tute. The place has since been known as First Vote.

So if Gandhi was to know only one African of his own generation, John Dube, just two years his junior, was probably the one to know. That is exactly what Gandhi himself concluded after hearing Dube speak in 1905 at the home of a white planter and civic leader named Marshall Campbell. ”This Mr. Dubey [sic] is a Negro of whom one should know,” he wrote in Indian Opinion Indian Opinion. The article had an unfortunate headline: THE KAFFIRS OF NATAL THE KAFFIRS OF NATAL. And Gandhi called Dube the leader of ”educated Kaffirs,” which demonstrates that for him the word applied to all blacks, including Congregational ministers and headmasters, not merely unlettered tribal Africans. Still, his summary of the speaker's remarks-more than likely the first speech he'd ever heard by an educated African and quite possibly the last-was respectful and sympathetic: They worked hard and without them the whites could not carry on for a moment. They made loyal subjects, and Natal was the land of their birth. For them there was no country other than South Africa; and to deprive them of their rights over lands, etc., was like banis.h.i.+ng them from their home.

What's striking here is that Gandhi had to travel the several miles to the Campbell residence in Mount Edgecombe to meet Dube. The two men were near neighbors; the Ohlange Inst.i.tute in Inanda was (and is) less than a mile from the Phoenix Settlement, its buildings visible to this day from the veranda of Gandhi's cottage. A brisk walker like Gandhi could have crossed the narrow valley that separated them in less than half an hour.

Only one such visit surfaces in the written record. Just as disappointing is the absolute lack of any correspondence, even a brief note, indicating they kept in touch or were used to addressing one another with familiarity. Gandhi was absent from Phoenix much more than he was present there in the eight years following its founding; and when he was there, often for a matter only of days, his routine was to focus on the settlers, going door-to-door to visit families, holding prayer meetings, gathering the children around him. And there was always Indian Opinion Indian Opinion with its weekly demand for more copy from its proprietor and guiding light. Even so, it's surprising how little turns up linking him to his Zulu neighbor. We know that Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the Indian leader who toured South Africa in Gandhi's company in 1912, was taken to Dube's school during a stay of less than forty-eight hours at Phoenix. But only in Dube's Zulu-language newspaper, with its weekly demand for more copy from its proprietor and guiding light. Even so, it's surprising how little turns up linking him to his Zulu neighbor. We know that Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the Indian leader who toured South Africa in Gandhi's company in 1912, was taken to Dube's school during a stay of less than forty-eight hours at Phoenix. But only in Dube's Zulu-language newspaper, Ilanga lase Natal Ilanga lase Natal (Sun of Natal) do we find evidence that Gandhi accompanied him. We know also that (Sun of Natal) do we find evidence that Gandhi accompanied him. We know also that Ilanga Ilanga was printed for a brief time on the hand-operated press at the Phoenix Settlement; that the Ohlange Inst.i.tute came into being just three years before Gandhi's Phoenix; and that was printed for a brief time on the hand-operated press at the Phoenix Settlement; that the Ohlange Inst.i.tute came into being just three years before Gandhi's Phoenix; and that Indian Opinion Indian Opinion was just months older than was just months older than Ilanga Ilanga. But tantalizing as these parallels are, they continue to run on in parallel without yielding any firm evidence of a crossing of paths by Gandhi and John Dube beyond their somewhat formal encounters at the white plantation owner's s.p.a.cious residence and years later, on the occasion of the Gokhale visit.

There's another Gandhi who later became a regular visitor at the Ohlange Inst.i.tute, stopping by now and then on his daily walks. That Gandhi also got to know Isaiah Shembe, called by his followers the Prophet. In 1911 the Prophet founded the Nazareth Church-the largest movement among Zulu Christians, with more than two million adherents today-at Ekuphakameni, which lies between Inanda and Phoenix. (The Nazareth Church was called independent, meaning it was unaffiliated to any white denomination.) Shembe had a bigger impact on South Africa, it can be argued, than the founder of the Phoenix Settlement ever had. The other Gandhi, the one who took the trouble to cultivate the acquaintance of these two significant African leaders, was Manilal, the mainstay of Phoenix after his father returned to India. When John Dube died in 1946 at seventy-five, the headline on his obituary in Indian Opinion Indian Opinion read read A GREAT ZULU DEAD A GREAT ZULU DEAD. ”To us at the Phoenix Settlement from the days of Mahatma Gandhi,” the obituary said, ”he has been a kindly neighbor.”

Spa.r.s.e as this record is, the names Gandhi, Dube, and Shembe are hallowed today as a kind of Inanda troika, if not trinity, by the publicists and popular historians responsible for weaving a teachable heritage for the new South Africa out of the disparate movements that struggled into existence under oppressive white rule. The fact that three leaders of such consequence emerged in rural Natal in the same decade, within an area of less than two square miles, is too resonant with possibilities to be overlooked. It has to be more than a coincidence. And so we find the man who became the new South Africa's third president elected by universal franchise, Jacob Zuma, celebrating ”the solidarity between the Indians and Africans” that came into being in Inanda. ”What is also remarkable about the history of the Indo-African community in this area is the link that existed between three great men: Gandhi, John Langalibalele Dube and the prophet Isaiah Shembe of the Nazareth Church.” A tourist brochure urges visitors to follow the ”Inanda Heritage Route” from Gandhi's settlement to the Dube school and finally to Shembe's church. (”Inanda where there is more history per square centimeter than anywhere in South Africa!” the brochure gushes, making no allusion to the sad, sometimes alarming state of what might otherwise be seen as a hard-pressed rural slum, except for the telltale caution that it not be visited without ”a guide who knows the area well.”) On my last visit to Inanda, banners stamped with Dube's face were streaming from lampposts on the Kwa Mashu Highway, which cuts through the district, alternating with lampposts bearing Gandhi banners. Such sanctification of their imagined alliance rests on little more than the political convenience of the moment and a wispy oral tradition. Lulu Dube, the last surviving child of the Zulu patriarch, grew up with the notion that her father kept in touch with Gandhi. ”In fact, they were friends, they were neighbors and their mission was one,” she said in a chat on the veranda of Dube's house, which was declared a national monument at the time of the first democratic election, then left to rot (to the point that eighty-year-old Lulu, fearful of a roof collapse, had moved into a trailer nearby). Born sixteen years after Gandhi left the country, she's at best a link in a chain, not a witness. Ela Gandhi, keeper of her grandfather's flame in Durban as head of the Gandhi Trust, inherited a similar impression. She was raised at Phoenix but decades after her grandfather departed. She was only eight when he was killed. A member of the African National Congress, she's aware that, politically and historically, this is treacherous ground, so she chooses her words with care. ”They were each concerned with dignity, particularly the dignity of their own people,” she said of the two men on the banners.

What the real history, as opposed to heritage mythmaking, seems to disclose is a deliberate distancing of each other by Gandhi and John Dube, a recognition, on rare occasions, that they might have common interests but a determination to pursue them separately. If there could ever have been a possibility of their making common cause, it may well have been stalled for a generation by Gandhi's calculated reaction to a spasm of Zulu resistance in 1906-the year after they met-that was instantly characterized as a ”rebellion” and brutally suppressed by Natal's white settlers and colonial authorities.

The immediate provocation for the rising was a new head tax on ”natives,” called a poll tax, and the severe penalties imposed on those who failed to pay up promptly. The broader provocation was a sense among Zulus-those still bound by tradition and those adapting to imported ways and faiths-that they were losing what was left of their land and autonomy. Numbers as much as race always had to be factored into these South African conflicts. Altogether the Zulus of Natal outnumbered the whites by about ten to one in that era (outnumbered the whites and Indians combined by about five to one). Gandhi's instant reflex, as at the time of the Anglo-Boer War seven years earlier, had been to side with English-speaking whites who identified themselves with British authority in their struggle with Afrikaans-speaking whites who resisted it. Here again he offered to raise a corps of stretcher bearers-another gesture of Indian fealty to the empire, which in his view was the ultimate guarantor of Indian rights, however circ.u.mscribed they proved in practice. It was a line of reasoning few Zulus were likely to appreciate.

The story isn't a simple one. Gandhi and Dube, each in his own way, were men of divided loyalties at the time of what came to be known as the Bhambatha Rebellion. Martial law was declared by trigger-happy colonial whites confronting Zulus armed mainly with a.s.segais, or spears, before anything like a rebellion got under way. The spark was a face-off in early February between a group of protesting Zulu artisans from a small independent church and a police detachment sent to arrest its leaders. One of the policemen pulled a revolver, spears were thrown, and before the smoke cleared, two of the officers had been killed. The protesters were then rounded up and twelve of them sentenced to death. The British cabinet tried at first to have the executions postponed, but the condemned men were lined up at the edge of freshly dug graves and shot on April 2. A few days later, a chief named Bhambatha, who was being sought for refusal to pay the tax, took to the deepest, th.o.r.n.i.e.s.t bush in the hills of Zululand with some 150 warriors. A thousand troops were sent in hot pursuit, homesteads were raked with machine-gun fire, sh.e.l.led, and then burned. More warriors took to the hills. Against this background, under the leaders.h.i.+p of the man who would one day be called a mahatma, the Indian community offered its support to the governing whites in the fight against the so-called rebels. The least temperate of his many justifications for this stand is worth quoting at length, for it's revealing on several levels: For the Indian community, going to the battlefield should be an easy matter; for, whether Muslim or Hindu, we are men with profound faith in G.o.d...We are not overcome by fear when hundreds of thousands die of famine or plague in our country. What is more, when we are told our duty, we continue to be indifferent, keep our houses dirty, lie hugging our h.o.a.rded wealth. Thus, we live a wretched life, acquiescing in a long, tormented process ending in death. Why then should we fear the death that may overtake us on the battlefield? We have much to learn from what the whites are doing in Natal. There is hardly any family from which someone has not gone to fight the Kaffir rebels.

Obviously, what we have here is a rant. Gandhi's irony is out of control; his inclination to scold undermines his desire to persuade. He has lost the thread of his argument about duty and citizens.h.i.+p. What comes across is revulsion, barely contained anger over the cultural inertia of his own community, its resistance to the social code he hopes to inculcate. If it offers nothing else, he seems to feel, the battlefield promises discipline.

The war posed a different set of conflicts for John Dube, the Congregational minister seeking to arm young Zulus not with spears but with the Protestant work ethic and basic skills that could win them a foothold in a trading economy. The rebels were, on the other hand, his people, and in the final stages of the conflict it was the chiefdom from which he descended that was attacked. The Christian in Dube, not to mention the pragmatist, could not endorse the rising, but the mercilessness of the repression shook his faith in the chances for racial peace. Cautiously, in the columns of his newspaper, he questioned the heavy-handedness of the whites. Soon he was summoned to appear before the governor and warned that the martial law regulations applied to him and his paper. Somewhat chastened, he later wrote that the grievances of the rebels were real but ”at a time like this we should all refrain from discussing them.”

What was said to be the severed head of Chief Bhambatha had been displayed and the rebellion all but crushed by June 22, when Gandhi finally left Durban for the struggle for which he'd been beating the drums in the columns of Indian Opinion Indian Opinion for two months. This time the community had managed to restrain its enthusiasm for what he proposed as a patriotic duty and opportunity. Gandhi had the rank of sergeant major but a much smaller band of stretcher bearers under his nominal command than he'd had at the start of the Anglo-Boer War: nineteen as opposed to eleven hundred in the earlier conflict; of the nineteen, thirteen were former indentured laborers; this time just four of twenty, counting Gandhi himself, could be cla.s.sed as ”educated.” In the next few weeks, in the sporadic final clashes of the conflict, the colonial troops were told to take no prisoners. What Gandhi and his men got to witness were the consequences of the mopping up, the worst part of the repression. At this stage of the conflict, there were few white wounded. Mostly the Indians ended up treating Zulu prisoners with terrible suppurating lacerations, not warriors with bullet wounds, but villagers who'd been flogged beyond submission. for two months. This time the community had managed to restrain its enthusiasm for what he proposed as a patriotic duty and opportunity. Gandhi had the rank of sergeant major but a much smaller band of stretcher bearers under his nominal command than he'd had at the start of the Anglo-Boer War: nineteen as opposed to eleven hundred in the earlier conflict; of the nineteen, thirteen were former indentured laborers; this time just four of twenty, counting Gandhi himself, could be cla.s.sed as ”educated.” In the next few weeks, in the sporadic final clashes of the conflict, the colonial troops were told to take no prisoners. What Gandhi and his men got to witness were the consequences of the mopping up, the worst part of the repression. At this stage of the conflict, there were few white wounded. Mostly the Indians ended up treating Zulu prisoners with terrible suppurating lacerations, not warriors with bullet wounds, but villagers who'd been flogged beyond submission.

[image]

Sergeant Major Gandhi with stretcher bearers, 1906 (photo credit i3.2) (photo credit i3.2)

Gandhi later wrote that the suffering Zulus, many of whom had been untreated for days, were grateful for the ministrations of the Indians, and maybe that was so. White medics wouldn't touch them. But back at Phoenix, roughly forty miles from these scenes, Gandhi's relatives and followers were seized by the fear that the Zulus in their neighborhood would rise against them in retaliation for the choice he'd made. He'd deposited Kasturba and two of his four sons there before leaving for the so-called front. ”I do not remember other things but that atmosphere of fear is very vivid in my mind,” Prabhudas Gandhi, a cousin who was a youngster at the time, would later write. ”Today when I read about the Zulu people's rebellion, the anxious face of Kasturba comes before my eyes.” No reprisals materialized, but signs of Zulu resentment over Gandhi's decision to side with the whites were not lacking. Africans would not forget, said an article reprinted in another Zulu newspaper, Izwi Labantu Izwi Labantu, ”that Indians had volunteered to serve with the English savages in Natal who ma.s.sacred thousands of Zulus in order to steal their land.” That article was by an American. Izwi Izwi offered no comment of its own. But it did say: ”The countrymen of Gandhi...are extremely self-centered, selfish and alien in feeling and outlook.” In London, an exile Indian publication called offered no comment of its own. But it did say: ”The countrymen of Gandhi...are extremely self-centered, selfish and alien in feeling and outlook.” In London, an exile Indian publication called The Indian Sociologist The Indian Sociologist, which tacitly supported terrorist violence in the struggle for Indian freedom, found Gandhi's readiness to join up with the whites at the time of the Zulu uprising ”disgusting.”

As the Zulu paper implied, Gandhi's own outlook may have initially been alien and, in that sense, self-centered. But he was profoundly moved by the evidence of white brutality and Zulu suffering that he witnessed. Here again is Joseph Doke, his Baptist hagiographer: ”Mr. Gandhi speaks with great reserve of this experience. What he saw he will never divulge...It was almost intolerable for him to be so closely in touch with this expedition. At times, he doubted whether his position was right.” The biographer seems to hint unwittingly at taboos of untouchability that Sergeant Major Gandhi's small band had to overcome. ”It was no trifle,” he writes, for these Indians ”to become voluntary nurses to men not yet emerged from the most degraded state.” Eventually, Gandhi did divulge what he saw-in his Autobiography Autobiography, composed two decades after the event, and in conversations in his last years with his inner circle. ”My heart was with the Zulus,” he then said. As late as 1943, during his final imprisonment, Sus.h.i.+la Nayar tells us, he was still recounting ”the atrocities committed on the Zulus.”

”What has. .h.i.tler done worse than that?” he asked Nayar, a physician who was attending his dying wife and himself. Gandhi, who'd tried writing to Hitler on the eve of world war in an attempt to soften his heart, never quite realized, or at least acknowledged, that the fuhrer represented a destructive force beyond anything he'd experienced.

By his own account, the horror over what he'd seen in Natal and the soul-searching over his unpopular decision to side with the whites produced the major turning point of his life spiritually. Gandhi drew a straight line from his battlefield reflections to his vow of perfect celibacy-necessary, he felt, to clear the way for a life of service and voluntary poverty-and from that vow to the one he offered at the Empire Theater in Johannesburg on September 11, 1906. All this happened in little more than two months: marching off to support the whites, swearing off s.e.x for the rest of his life, and following up that life-transforming promise to himself with his vow of nonviolent resistance to the Transvaal ”Black Act,” which then became his first exercise of the strategy later called satyagraha. Gandhi's testimony of cause and effect is irrefutable as far as it goes, but, as Erik Erikson noted, it doesn't carry us to anything approaching a full understanding. ”These themes, were they to be clarified,” the psychoa.n.a.lyst wrote, ”might more directly connect the two decisions of avoiding both s.e.xual intercourse and killing. For it would seem that the experience of witnessing the outrages perpetrated on black bodies by white he-men aroused in Gandhi both a deeper identification with the maltreated, and a stronger aversion against all male sadism-including such s.e.xual sadism as he had probably felt from childhood on to be part of all exploitation of women by men.”

What was not aroused in Gandhi in the immediate aftermath of the Bhambatha Rebellion-not, at least, as far as we can discern-was a deepened curiosity about black Africans or sympathy for them that reached further than pity. Two years later, when he started writing about his first experience of jail, they were still ”kaffirs,” too uncivilized and dirty to be incarcerated with Indians, let alone to be seen as potential allies. In part, this may have been because of a change in context: leaving Natal and returning to his base in Johannesburg, having left his family behind at Phoenix, Gandhi also left behind whatever opportunities he might still have had to build bridges and, ultimately, deepen contacts with a Zulu leader like John Dube who spoke for a small Christianized, landowning black elite, sometimes called in the language of urban Zulus the amarespectables amarespectables.

In part, it was also due to Gandhi's continued reluctance to let go of the idea that his so-called British Indians were naturally the allies of whites, just another kind of settler. If indentured Indian ”coolies” were still seen, in his view, as too ill-bred, unlettered, and backward to be citizens, then what could he do about ”kaffirs” except put them out of mind? Gandhi kept his distance and apparently found it easy to do so. A tacit alliance between blacks and Indians was the opposite of what he'd all along been seeking. If he thought about it at all, he would have known that such an alliance could only deepen white racial hysteria. He must have understood, too, that it would not have been an easy sell in his own community. Much later he knit together a rationalization out of such disparate reflections. Asked long after he returned to India by a visiting delegation of black Americans whether he'd ever made common cause with blacks during his time in South Africa, Gandhi replied, implying he had to resist the impulse: ”No, I purposely did not invite them. It would have endangered their cause.” A few years later, a quarter of a century after he returned home, he told a black South African, ”Yours is a far bigger issue.”

This Gandhi, the full-blown Mahatma of 1939, is doing some retrospective tidying up. In 1907, the Gandhi who actually resided in South Africa, the barrister and community leader, sent a letter to Sir Henry McCallum, the colonial governor who had imposed martial law on the restive Zulus the previous year. The letter is written a year after Gandhi's vows. The doctrine of nonviolent resistance has now been proclaimed, but ”the many-sided Gandhi,” as Naipaul called him, is arguing that the time had come to give Indians an opportunity for service in the colonial militia, a force whose most obvious function-as he had to know, given his experience the previous year-was to keep Zulu power in check.

”I venture to trust,” the special pleader pleads, ”that as the work done by the Corps had proved satisfactory, the Indian community will be found some scope in the Natal Militia. If such a thing is done, I think it will be mutually advantageous and it will bind the Indians, who are already a part of the body politic in Natal, closer to the Colony.”

Gandhi knew in his heart that he'd taken the wrong side at the time of the rebellion, but he was still ready to claim a dividend from the white authorities for services rendered, just as he'd sought ”the Queen's Chocolate” as a reward for his service with the ”body s.n.a.t.c.hers” on a couple of the early battlefields of the Anglo-Boer War.