The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire

South Asia in Motion

by Ashwin Desai, Goolem Vahed

A biography detailing Gandhi’s twenty-year stay in South Africa and his attitudes and behavior in the nation’s political context.In the pantheon of freedom fighters, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has pride of place. His fame and influence extend far beyond India and are nowhere more significant than in South Africa. “India gave us a Mohandas, we gave them a Mahatma,” goes a popular South African refrain. Contemporary South African leaders, including Mandela, have consistently lauded him as being part of the epic battle to defeat the racist white regime.The South African Gandhi focuses on Gandhi’s first leadership experiences and the complicated man they reveal—a man who actually supported the British Empire. Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed unveil a man who, throughout his stay on African soil, stayed true to Empire while showing a disdain for Africans. For Gandhi, whites and Indians were bonded by an Aryan bloodline that had no place for the African. Gandhi’s racism was matched by his class prejudice towards the Indian indentured. He persistently claimed that they were ignorant and needed his leadership, and he wrote their resistances and compromises in surviving a brutal labor regime out of history. The South African Gandhi writes the indentured and working class back into history.The authors show that Gandhi never missed an opportunity to show his loyalty to Empire, with a particular penchant for war as a means to do so. He served as an Empire stretcher-bearer in the Boer War while the British occupied South Africa, he demanded guns in the aftermath of the Bhambatha Rebellion, and he toured the villages of India during the First World War as recruiter for the Imperial army. This meticulously researched book punctures the dominant narrative of Gandhi and uncovers an ambiguous figure whose time on African soil was marked by a desire to seek the integration of Indians, minus many basic rights, into the white body politic while simultaneously excluding Africans from his moral compass and political ideals.Praise for The South African Gandhi“In this impressively researched study, two South African scholars of Indian background bravely challenge political myth-making on both sides of the Indian Ocean that has sought to canonize Gandhi as a founding father of the struggle for equality there. They show that the Mahatma-to-be carefully refrained from calling on his followers to throw in their lot with the black majority. The mass struggle he finally led remained an Indian struggle.” —Joseph Lelyveld, author of Great Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India“This is a wonderful demonstration of meticulously researched, evocative, clear-eyed and fearless history writing. It uncovers a story, some might even call it a scandal, that has remained hidden in plain sight for far too long. The South African Gandhi is a big book. It is a serious challenge to the way we have been taught to think about Gandhi.” —Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography, Africa, India, South Africa, World History

345 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 2015

About the author

Prolific sociologist and activist Ashwin Desai, holds a Master’s degree from Rhodes University and a doctorate from Michigan State University. He is professor of sociology at the University of Johannesburg.

(from http://www.cca.ukzn.ac.za/index.php/t...)

Reviews

[Brad Jenkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many people will take this book as a scathing review of Ghandi's whitewashed past (pun intended), but it's so much more than that. What this book shows is that NOBODY is perfect, no matter how infallible they appear. Once we can actually grasp that concept, we will stop holding certain people to such a high degree...above everybody else. Ghandi did a lot of good for the Indian people throughout his entire life...there's no argument there. The problem is when you go back to his time in South Africa when he had a chance to throw his support behind the native people & help pull them out of the depths of English persecution...he refused. Ghandi actually went out of his way to distance Indians from Africans, using the argument that only Indian & English should be on equal standing. With this stance, Ghandi was shoehorned into supporting the whitewashing of South Africa. At times, he was forced into this thinking, but most of the time, he was a willing participant. Does this make Ghandi a bad person? Does this diminish the accomplishments he made later in life? Does this mean we must rethink Mahatma Ghandi, the person? After reading this book, I can give you an unequivocal vote of confidence in the negative to all of those questions. Ghandi was a great man & I will never take that away from him....but he wasn't perfect. Nobody is.

[Asad Qureshi · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book has been an eye opener. All the lies that we had been taught at school. Also the blatant racist and casteist mindset of the "Mahatma" has been exposed (with verifiable references).
To summarize he was not a saint by any stretch of imagination. Just a British subject who thought that Indians and Europeans have common ancestry and hence supreme than others. At most he was just an ordinary politician.
Our era should be known as the era of lies. He was such a hyprocrite that his writing in Gujarati would be totally tuned for the so called higher castes in India. And his english work was just to show him as a saint to the western world. What a shame. And we call him the FOTN! No wonder we are so corrupt

[Abid Alrahman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book discusses Gandhi's life mainly in South Africa. It overturns the false narrative of his saintly character. They trace him through the thick and thin. Through the war and genocide of the Boer "war", the ill fated Bambatha Revolution and many other important episodes which Gandhi witnessed, commented upon and in some cases took part. It navigates through Gandhi's books and the newspaper which Gandhi founded.

An incisive book which I highly recommend the book though what you'll read will sadden you.

[Ajay Thakur · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eyeopener book. Indian authors will not have guts to show these kind of reality.

[Rohit Kumar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gandhi once said Indians believe in the purity of races almost as much as whites do. And he never spoke for better treatment of Africans. Gandhi is the pill from matrix. If you research him, you see a whole another world. And if you don't, you live in your Disneyland where the world had a "Mahatma" and a saint

[Parth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eye opener.