Just as was the case with India in the early years of independence, South Africa too is going through a moral high. Apartheid, a most practical device that helped in the development of South African capitalism, is now seen in retrospect as having invested South Africans with a unique suffering badge. But the passage from moral high to moral arrogance and entitlement is very short and quick.
Decolonised South Africa, like decolonised India nearly half a century earlier, began as the toast of the world. India had its Mahatma Gandhi; South Africa had (and still has) Nelson Mandela. The other leaders of the Indian and South African struggle, many of them first among equals of Gandhi and Mandela, were equally impressive. Like India in the first decade-and-a-half of independence, by when the edges of glamour were looking decidedly frayed, South Africa too revels in international adulation.
Every international visitor wanted to, and even now wants to, have a photo opportunity with Mandela. The similarities with Jawaharlal Nehru, an authentic hero for Mandela, who too enjoyed being consulted, are unmistakable.
Gandhi’s experiments in the political and social organisation of sections of the Indian community in South Africa, the presence of a large community of persons of Indian origin in the then Transvaal and Natal, the shared experience of British colonialism — all these have contributed to the perception that the liberation movement in South Africa was deeply influenced by the Indian experience.
The widely known and documented similarities between the Indian National Congress and the African National Congress, in their nomenclature, their all-class composition and their internal structures, are generally pressed to the exclusion of important differences — in particular the way in which the national liberation movements in the two countries negotiated the linkages with the working class and the communist parties.
Most crucially, the near-total correlation between race and class in the South African situation, with the oppressed majority suffering both race and class oppression, was absent in the Indian situation. All attempts by some ideologues to construct a caste-class correlation, the spark that would ignite the genuine Indian revolution, have floundered on the bedrock (or should one say, in the quicksands?) of other social realities.
The Indian vision of virtually painless nation-building, seamless economic and social progress, the consolidation of model democratic institutions, a fine balance between growth and distributive justice, public welfare and so on turned sour soon. In fact, given the unresolved national and class questions, it was inevitable that the scaly horrors would creep out from under the rocks sooner rather than later.
It would take a very brave person to crow about the Indian path to economic progress, social prosperity and justice. Neither the thorny path of ”mixed economy” of the past nor the broad highway of unbridled liberalisation and the orthodoxy of the market has delivered on its promises.
Hence, the relevance of India as a salutary example, a cautionary tale from which South Africa can learn a few lessons. Apart from the bitter awakening that South Africa, as much as India, will experience when the ”free market” will turn out to be free only selectively, the Indian failures hold particular lessons for South Africa whose unresolved problems are at the least as severe as India’s.
Eleven distinct national groups in nine provinces at unequal stages of development, with the most numerous of them, the Zulus, also with the most authentic memories supported by historical records of heroic resistance to colonialism.
There is also an erstwhile ruling national group, the Afrikaners, talented and resourceful, who too cherish equally authentic memories of historic resistance against the mighty British empire and for some of whom the war (the Anglo-Boer South African War) has not really ended.
The scheming English-speaking South Africans unrelenting with their agenda of recolonisation, strengthened in this resolve by the entrenched international alliance between the United States, Britain and other English-speaking countries of the old Commonwealth.
And on the ground, the increasing disparities in incomes, quality of life and lifestyles, the other side of globalised capitalist development, the unrelenting rage.
Faced with such challenges, South Africa’s leaders may find, like India’s post-colonial leaders had to, that it is time to get off the moral high horse and get some dirt on one’s hands.
Also of relevance to a post-apartheid and a post-colonial South Africa is an examination (or a re-examination) of a man whose life bridged India and South Africa: Gandhi.
Gandhi’s life and work in South Africa is a matter of historical record. As is the case with any great revolutionary leader, his record, much of it set out in detail by Gandhi himself, is constantly being embellished and reconstructed (and, of late, deconstructed) to suit the political and ideological exigencies at given points of time. The appropriation of Gandhi in democratic South Africa sometimes stretches one’s historical credulity. In a notable speech at Stanger in KwaZulu-Natal, Mandela once coalesced the figures of King Shaka, Gandhi and Albert Luthuli, finding the most unsuspected commonalities bonding them.
Such fiction notwithstanding, there is profound truth in the proud claim made by politicised South Africans across the race spectrum acknowledging Gandhi as one of their own: ”He came to South Africa as a barrister to fight a case; we sent him back to India as a revolu-tionary.” Yes, but what did he think of Africans, amid whom he lived and worked for 21 years?
While old-fashioned atheists (like this writer) may consider references to them as kaffir or heathen as badges of honour, it is also true that the word kaffir, as has been given currency in South Africa under the British and the Boers, carried (and still carries) extremely offensive connotations. Gandhi (like many South Africans even now in private conversations among their own kind) had no inhibitions about referring to Africans as kaffirs. This is not surprising since the substance of these observations about Africans was that they were savage and uncivilised; and their purport was to caution and advise South African Indians against even trying to make common cause with the Africans.
ES Reddy in his collection of essays on Gandhi in South Africa provides numerous citations from Gandhi’s writings, the most frequent of which is the reference to the ”raw kaffir”. In the words of Surendra Bhana: ”Gandhi, in common with the Indian leaders generally, not only harboured racial prejudice against Africans, but considered them inferior. His prejudices against ‘kaffirs’, as he called them show through. ‘We may entertain no aversion to kaffirs’, he wrote in 1909, ‘but we cannot ignore the fact that there is no common ground between them and us in the daily affairs of life.”’
Reddy also notes that Gandhi, who continued to be closely involved from a distance in Indian politics in South Africa, was consistently opposed to every suggestion or proposal — Nehru was apparently the leading spirit behind such thinking — that the Indian National Congress should advise the Natal Indian Congress and the Transvaal Indian Congress to launch joint struggles with the Africans.
Such truth, Gandhi’s own truth recorded by Gandhi himself, also compels one to admit that his struggle in South Africa did not embrace the majority of the land’s inhabitants.
Indian political expression and mobilisation in the former Transvaal and Natal pre-date Gandhi’s arrival; the true radicalisation of the Indian working class had to wait for a new generation of profoundly committed South Africans — Indians and others — who set in motion large-scale labour organisations underpinned by the ideology of class struggle.
A former Indian correspondent in South Africa for The Hindu, MS Prabhakara remains an observer of South African affairs. These extracts first appeared in the Indian Economic and Political Weekly in May this year.