AFRICAN NATIONALISM: The fakilure of Gandhism


In its earlier stages, up to about I960, non-white nationalism in South Africa was deeply affected by Gandhi's policy of non-violent civil disobedience. Indeed Gandhiism has ' South African origins. It was between 1906 and 1908 that a civil disobedience campaign was launched in South Africa under the leadership of Gandhi, directed against laws in the Transvaal which required Indians to carry registration certificates. The movement had an impact on African opinion in South Africa. Leo Kuper, in the second volume 'of the Oxford History of South Africa, has reminded us of a series of Gandhian protests in South Africa in those early years.
 
African women in Bloemfontein used the technique of civil disobedience in 1913 in their protests against the extension of pass laws to them by municipalities in the Orange Free State. The women's movement spread to other towns, and continued for a few years.
 
In 1919 the African National Congress (founded in 1912) started experimenting with these techniques in Johannesburg. The Communist Party in Durban in 1930 also went 'Gandhian'.
 
The Indians in South Africa resisted in 1946 in a similar way in protest against the Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Act. Meanwhile the struggle in India itself was helping to give Gandhian tactics global visibility and capturing the imagination of politically conscious blacks in South Africa, as well as elsewhere. Then came the South African Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws of 1952, again using Gandhian techniques of civil disobedience.
 
The Gandhian resistance in South Africa in the early 1950s was an alliance between blacks and Indians in the Union. It was in July 1951 that the African and Indian Congresses appointed a joint Planning Council. The aim was to co-ordinate the efforts of Africans, Indians and coloured peoples in a mass campaign for the repeal of the pass laws, the Group Areas Act on racial segregation, the Separate Representation of Voters Act which further curtailed the political rights of Coloureds and the Bantu Authorities Act seeking to ensure a retribalization of Africans.
 
The campaign was successful in terms of the degree of involvement of the three groups, but a failure in terms of its aims. The failure was even more significant as an indicator of the limits of Gandhiism at a time when the system in South Africa was closing up and getting more intolerant.
 
Civil disobedience, which concentrated on protests against segregated public places, had no effect on a ruthless government which had no guilty conscience about using the police and the courts in severe repressive measures.
 
A new law, the Criminal Law Amendment Act, was specifically directed against civil disobedience. Many of the demonstrators were imprisoned on pass offences, and their leaders were banned. The so-called Treason Trials lasted for four years, at the end of which the accused were acquitted but the government had achieved its purpose in keeping the leaders out of circulation for a long time.
 
The only positive result of the Defiance Campaign was intangible and difficult to measure; this was the heightened political awareness among Africans and the swelling of the ranks of the African National Congress (ANC) to a reputed 100 000.

Gandhi's walking on foot did not change anything (Line Drawing by Edith Khainza)
Gandhian methods were persisted in by the ANC for some time after 1952. The new President-General of the ANC, in 1953 was Chief Albert Luthuli (1898-1967), a former teacher and government chief in Zululand, and a convinced pacifist and admirer of Gandhi and Gandhiism. In spite of being restricted from 1953 to 1956, Luthuli inspired the ANC to back a series of boycotts: a bus boycott in Alexandra Township against higher fares, in which African workers walked to work and back for three months, forcing the company to reduce the new fares; and a potato boycott against the hiring and working conditions on some European farms.
 
The high point of Luthuli's leadership was the 1955 Congress of the People, and the achievement of a higher level of interracial political co- operation, where delegates of the ANC, the Indian Congress, the white -supported Congress of Democrats, the Coloured People Organization and the Congress of Trade Unions adopted a Freedom Charter. The charter stated that 'South Africa belongs to all who live in it, Black and White', called for a Bill of Rights, and advocated democratic not majority rule. Thus the Charier represented a call for an inclusive form of nationalism involving all racial groups rather than a concern for an exclusive African nationalism.
 
The government's response to the Charter was a new wave of raids, mass arrests and bannings. The younger generation of ANC activists soon became impatient with Gandhiism, with non-violence and with interracial co-operation. The supporters of an exclusive form of African nationalism, the Africanists, seceded from the ANC in 1958 to form the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) in 1959. The PAC was not only not committed to non-violence and interracialism but was also more socialist in its aims than the ANC.
 
The ANC has continued, however, to attract more African support then the PAC. The PAC's founder and leader was Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe (1924-78), until 1957 the editor of The Africanist and until I960 a languages assistant at the University of Witwatersrand. Sobukwe was held in prison from March I960 until May 1963, when he was transported to Robben Island. When his term of imprisonment was completed he was detained in his home area near Kimberley.
 
Even Minister of Justice Vorster could not avoid referring to Sobukwe's 'dynamic personality, great organizing abilities and a divine sense of his mission', as justification for detaining him indefinitely.
 
Luthuli received the Nobel Peace Prize for I960 in Europe in December 1961, for his efforts towards non-violent change in South Africa. But non-violence had failed already, and, as we have seen, the more militant activists of the ANC and PAC formed Umkhonto we Sizwe and POQO.
 
The activities and limited achievements of armed movements have been.' described in some detail in the previous chapter. The history of unarmed resistance movements in the 1970s is chronicled in the next section.
« Previous | Next »

National Movements and New States in Africa