Gandhi's Record on Race During His Years in South Africa

Long before he became the Mahatma revered for leading India’s independence movement, Mohandas Gandhi spent 21 years, from 1893 to 1914, working as a lawyer and political organizer in South Africa. He arrived at 23 to handle a legal case for an Indian trading firm and stayed to campaign for the rights of South Africa’s Indian minority, a struggle that shaped the tactics of nonviolent resistance, or satyagraha, he later brought to India. That record has also, especially over the past two decades, drawn intense scrutiny for how Gandhi treated and described the country’s Black African majority during those same years.

The documentary record is extensive. In petitions, letters and articles from the 1890s and 1900s, Gandhi repeatedly used the term “kaffir,” a racial slur for Black South Africans, and argued that Indians, as a supposedly more “civilized” people, should not be classed alongside Africans under discriminatory laws. In an 1893 petition to the Natal legislature, he objected to Indians being “brought down to the level of the raw Kaffir.” In a 1904 letter to a Johannesburg health officer, he complained about an unsanitary settlement that housed “Kaffirs” alongside Indians and pushed for their removal, and he separately objected on multiple occasions to Indian prisoners being held in the same facilities as Black African inmates. During the Second Boer War of 1899 to 1900, and again during the suppression of the 1906 Bambatha Rebellion, an uprising by Zulu people against a poll tax, Gandhi organized and led an Indian Ambulance Corps that served the British colonial forces, a choice historians have read as reflecting his hope that wartime loyalty would earn Indians better treatment from the empire, though it placed him institutionally on the side of the same colonial system enforcing racial hierarchy over Africans.

The most detailed modern accounting of this record came from South African academics Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed in their 2015 book “The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire,” which drew on Gandhi’s own collected writings to argue that his South African years were defined far more by advancing Indian interests within the colonial racial order than by any broader anti-racist solidarity. The scholarship has renewed public debate well beyond academic circles. In 2016, lecturers at the University of Ghana launched a petition calling for the removal of a Gandhi statue unveiled that year by India’s then-president, citing his description of Africans as “uncivilized” and his use of “kaffir.” After more than two years of pressure, the university took the statue down in December 2018. Similar objections have surfaced around Gandhi memorials elsewhere in Africa and in South Africa itself.

Historians generally agree the picture is not static. Some point to a gradual, partial shift late in Gandhi’s time in South Africa, including his 1908 imprisonment alongside Black African activists and a warmer, though still limited, relationship with John Dube, founding president of the African National Congress’s predecessor organization. Reddy and others have argued Gandhi’s views evolved further after he left, as his philosophy of universal human dignity matured in India. But that later evolution does not erase the documented record of his South African decades, and most contemporary historians treat the two as separate, sequential chapters rather than let the latter retroactively soften the former.