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THREE

An Abundant and Regular Supply of Labour

The self-interest of the European brought the Indian to South Africa; self-interest has sought to get rid of him from the country; self-interest, so far as this cannot be achieved, is determined to keep him in what is regarded as his place.

J. F. HOFMEYR

THERE COULD HARDLY BE A stranger and more complex setting for the formative years of Gandhi’s public life than the colony of Natal, to which he sailed in 1893. At the time of his arrival, Natal had all the economic, political, and social complexity one might expect from a place populated by native Africans, come upon by the Portuguese, and developed by the Dutch, before being wholly taken over by the British.

Natal (from the Latin natus, “birth”) was given its name by the explorer Vasco da Gama, who, on his journey from Portugal to India, passed by Natal’s verdant coast at Christmastime in the year 1497. It was not da Gama’s fellow Portuguese, however, who were to leave a serious European mark on Natal. Dutch from the Cape colony, uncomfortable with the notion of color equality professed by the new British administration established there in 1815, entered the province in the early decades of the nineteenth century in search of fertile agricultural lands, ample native labor, and a setting where they could re-create a pleasant and secure way of life. This movement to Natal peaked with significant migrations to the region in the 1830s and the establishment of the Republic of Natalia in 1839, an ill-fated, short-lived Dutch endeavor that was never able to overcome serious financial and administrative difficulties.¹ The British, meanwhile, had established themselves along the coast, desirous of capitalizing on the rich farmlands that lay there and the harbor available for development at the coastal town of Durban.² The British declared Natal a dependency of the Cape colony in 1843 with little opposition from the Dutch, who recognized that their experiment in government had failed. In 1856 Natal became a separate colony from the Cape. Britain granted it responsible government in 1893,³ the year of Gandhi’s arrival.

THE NATAL ECONOMY AND ITS DEMAND FOR LABOR

The Europeans saw Natal’s fertile coastlands not with the eyes of tourists but those of capitalists. There they experimented with efforts to grow maize, cotton, indigo, arrowroot, tobacco, and coffee. Eventually they learned that the area was suited for the growing of a lucrative cash crop, sugar.⁴ The capital necessary to underwrite the sugar industry was available because banks had already been established in Natal. Labor, however, was another matter. The owners of the sugar plantations turned to what appeared to them a vast, untapped supply of labor in the native population, but most efforts to recruit native Africans as laborers ended in failure.⁵ Frustrated, the Europeans tried a series of moves, some bizarre, to find workers. They attempted to lure English farmhands, import convicts, and attract Chinese and Malays from the Far East. All these attempts were unsuccessful in producing the large stocks of reliable workers needed to run an agricultural enterprise. The situation became desperate, with the Natal Mercury warning that the lack of labor would “in the near future imperil the whole country.”⁶

Finally, the thoughts of the plantation owners and others who favored a supply of cheap, reliable labor turned to India. Several years after the Colonial Office at the Cape of Good Hope broached the idea with the government of India,⁷ Natal in 1860 was able to negotiate a system of indentured labor that called for the importation of workers to be bound to their employers for three years, paid 10 shillings a month, and supplied with housing and food.⁸ When the laborer’s indenture was mature, the laborer could return to India, re-enlist for another period of indenture, or receive property equal to what it would have cost the government to ship him or her back to India.⁹ After 6,445 immigrants had been imported between 1860 and 1866, the dissatisfaction of the government of India with the operation of this arrangement, together with effects of an economic depression on Natal, resulted in the suspension of immigration in 1866.¹⁰

After the depression of 1866 began to ease and the demand for sugar began to rise, interest in the importation of Indian laborers resurfaced. More than two hundred “Planters, Merchants and others interested in the supply of Labour” petitioned the Natal government for help: “Your memorialists are more profoundly impressed as ever with the necessity of an increased supply of labour; it is absolutely essential for carrying on the Industries of the Coast Lands, and for giving to capitalists arriving among us that security which is required in entering on enterprises involving so large an outlay which can only be successfully prosecuted by a more abundant and regular supply of labour.”¹¹

GROWERS VERSUS MERCHANTS

This renewal of interest in immigration troubled the government of India, concerned, as it was, over the complaints it had received about the treatment of its citizens during the previous period of immigration. The Natal government, however, gave sufficient assurances such that India permitted immigration to resume in 1874. These assurances included provisions that an indentured servant could return to India at the end of ten years (five years of service, followed by five years of freedom), that there should be no unequal treatment of Indians who remained, and that certain substantial percentages of the immigrants be women.¹² These provisions, reluctantly accepted by the government of Natal, practically guaranteed that immigration would result in a permanent Indian population in Natal, a prospect feared by important elements of the Natal economy. For years there had been tension between the coastal growers on the one hand and the merchants and traders on the other over the question of immigration. The white growers needed Indian laborers to run their farms, while the white merchants and traders were apprehensive over the increased competition from freed Indians who became hawkers, market-gardeners, and traders, and from Indian merchants who voluntarily came to Natal to profit by serving the needs of the expanding Indian community. With the agreement to renew immigration, however, the growers’ needs trumped the merchants’ fears, as well as the concerns of the larger white society about the social disruption the Indians’ presence might cause. The conflict between the growers’ interests in cheap labor for their agricultural and other enterprises and the merchant class’ fear of competition would not remain submerged for long, however. As the Indian population steadily mounted, the wider white community’s fear of the Indian community’s political, as well as economic, power mounted with it. Indeed, as Indian indentured servants, followed by free Indian merchants, started pouring into Natal, the movement for responsible government gained more urgency. The Europeans who demanded responsible government from the Crown knew that, freed from the Colonial Office’s concerns about the Indian government’s reactions over the treatment of Indians in Natal, Natal could deal with its “Indian problem” with a much freer hand.

The numbers tell the story. In 1859, just a year before the importation of indentured servants began, there were no Indians in Natal. In 1880, a mere six years after the resumption of immigration, Europeans in Natal numbered 22,654 to the Indians’ 12,823, less than a two-to-one ratio. By 1891, two years before Gandhi’s arrival, the ratio had become nearly one-to-one. In 1904 the Europeans’ slight edge vanished: there were 103,673 Indians living in Natal to 92,597 Europeans.¹³ With numbers like these, the reality was that, were they fully enfranchised, the Indians could outvote the Europeans.

GANDHI’S CLIENTS

The economic reality was not simply in the numbers but also in the spirit of the Indians who migrated to Natal. Indian entrepreneurs of all types—from lowly market-gardeners,¹⁴ traders, and hawkers to powerful merchants—had a well-deserved reputation for business acumen.¹⁵ It was common for Indians freed from their term of servitude to set up small shops in direct competition with Europeans, often besting them. Of far greater importance, however, were the “Arabs,” mainly Gujarati-speaking Muslims from the region surrounding Gandhi’s birthplace of Porbandar who called themselves Arabs to distinguish themselves from those whom they considered run-of-the-mill Indians. These entrepreneurs came to South Africa for one purpose only—to make their fortunes in business. But a small portion of the total Indian population in Natal, they constituted what historian Maureen Swan calls the “commercial elite.” As such, they controlled Indian political and economic life before and after the time Gandhi arrived in South Africa. The wealth accumulated by these important figures in the Indian community was astonishing. To take one example, economic historian Zbigniew Konczacki estimates that in the period of 1903–1904 the commercial elite reaped profits and other income from trade in Natal to the tune of £502,000.¹⁶

By contrast, the living and working conditions of indentured Indians were deplorable. Swan describes them:

Plantation labourers were overworked (as much as a seventeen or eighteen hour day during the overlapping crushing and planting seasons), malnourished and poorly housed. These aspects of their existence gave rise to abnormally high disease and death rates. . . . In addition, the . . . indentured labour system offered little room for even such basic human comforts as family life. . . . There was . . . a serious imbalance in the male:female ratio, and the possibility of establishing or maintaining a family unit was made . . . remote by the prevalent employer practice of refusing to ration or pay any non-working Indian. In short, there is a solid weight of evidence . . . to suggest that overwork, malnourishment, and squalid living conditions formed the pattern of daily life for most agricultural workers.¹⁷

When the twenty-three-year-old lawyer who would later embrace voluntary poverty boarded the SS Safari in Bombay on April 19, 1893, he was going to South Africa not to champion the interests of oppressed Indian workers, but to represent the interests of the privileged elite.