ANC veterans, Kgalema Motlanthe, left and Mac Maharaj at the 130th anniversary commemoration of the Natal Indian Congress, at Sastri College, Durban, on September 8, 2024. – Picture: Doctor Ngcobo / Independent Newspapers
By Mac Maharaj
Two remarkable documents define the nature of the South African society we are trying to bring about.
The most recent is the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Act No 1098 of 1996. The other is the Freedom Charter adopted at the Congress of the People held in Kliptown on June 25, 1955.
A profound thread binds these two documents together. Both share the view that SA belongs to all who live in it. The Constitution declares: We, the people of South Africa, … Believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity; and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people.
It is not possible to tell the story of South Africa’s struggle against colonialism and apartheid without including the significant contribution of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) and the Transvaal Indian Congress (TIC). Any history that does not include their role will remain fatally flawed.
As part of celebrating the NIC’s 130th anniversary, we shall briefly explore how the Indian community achieved this in an environment constructed on a hierarchy based on divisive and differentiated racial discrimination.
We shall focus on the strategy and tactics adopted by the NIC and trace how this changed over time. This adaptability ensured that the NIC’s contribution forms an inextricable part of our country’s march to freedom.
The province of Natal achieved self-governing status in 1893. Shortly thereafter the government of Natal introduced a bill abolishing Asian enfranchisement. The white settlers were determined to exclude the Zulus and Indians from the electoral franchise and make Natal a ‘white’ colony. Indian merchants asked Gandhi to assist them in resisting this measure.
At the time there were only 251 registered Indian voters and 9,560 registered white voters.
India was regarded as “Her Majesty’s …greatest and brightest dependency, that enormous Empire of India.” Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858 expressly applied to “the natives of our Indian territories” and claimed that all British subjects were to be treated as equal.
A strategy, based on that understanding, placed the fate of Indians in Natal in the hands of London and success depended on their ability to persuade London. At the same time, Indians in India were seized with how to manage their relations with imperial Britain.
Britain’s interests were clearly reflected in the position taken by the Secretary of State, Joseph Chamberlain, in 1897 when he told the premiers of self-governing colonies that he sympathised with the premiers “determination … that there shall not be an influx of people of alien civilisation, alien in religion, alien in custom”.
In the same breath, and mindful of the jewel that India was in Her Majesty’s Crown, he held that the traditions of the British Empire “did not discriminate on the basis of race which, in any case, would offend Her Majesty’s subjects”.
And so, he held forth that Her Majesty “would amply protect any invasion of the class to which they would justly object”. “An individual did not have to be kept out because of his or her race, but could be excluded because he is ‘dirty, or he is immoral, or he is a pauper, or he has some other objection, which can be defined in an Act of Parliament’.” Colonies should arrange “a form of words which would avoid hurting the feelings of any of Her Majesty’s subjects, while at the same time it would amply protect … against any invasion of the class to which they would justly object”.
That guideline licensed the white settlers of Natal and sealed the fate of the Indian community.
The premiers used colour, while Chamberlain invoked class. History would repeatedly show that Colour and Class were intertwined in South Africa.
And Britain’s approval of the Act of Union of South Africa in 1910 underscored that it relied on the unity of Boer and Brit as the means to secure its interests in South Africa.
In developing the case of Indians in South Africa from the perspective of Britain’s interest in India, Indian merchants in Natal relied on separating the cause of Indians from that of indigenous South Africans.
During this period of struggle by the Indian community did not reach out to other oppressed groups and the other oppressed groups did not reach out to the Indians.
This distant relationship existed despite the fact that, in the 1913 passive resistance campaign led by Gandhi, Indians demonstrated a remarkable ability to mount a mass struggle. In the forefront of organising the campaign were women, and it took on a mass character when workers in the coal mines and the sugar cane fields came out on strike.
Among African leaders, Sol Plaatjie had no contact with Gandhi. According to Boehmer, neither Gandhi nor Plaatjie “made explicit acknowledgement of the example nor the presence of the other, nor of the other’s political movement”.
Although there was some contact between John Dube, the President of the ANC, and Gandhi, Indians were seen (by John Dube) as being able to call on the Indian and imperial governments, while no such avenue was open to Africans.
In the case of the Coloured community, Shula Marks observed that “in a society in which rights and privilege depended increasingly on whiteness, the aspiration of all Coloured organisations was for integration into white society, not its radical subversion”.
Nonetheless, the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910 was slowly drawing together leaders of public opinion across colour and culture.
In the period between the two world wars, thousands of people streamed into Johannesburg and Durban.
Between 1921 and 1949 the Indian population of Durban increased from 16,400 to 123,165 and the African population from 29,022 to 109,543. This enormous migration occurred in a short span of three decades.
The Indians came from the cane fields and the coal mines, while Africans, dispossessed of their land, replaced Indian labour on white-owned farms and the coal mines.
According to Desai and Vahed “two-thirds of Natal’s manufacturing industry and industrial work force was concentrated around Durban because of the port, abundant water supply, inexpensive land and cheap labour”. “Industrial growth took off after 1935 and Indian employment in manufacturing doubled between 1935 and 1949. The work force … concentrated in the food, clothing and textile, leather, furniture, paper and printing industries.
“Indian progress in industry was limited by the Apprenticeship Act, Industrial Conciliation Act (1924), and Minimum Wage Act (1925), which gave preference to white workers. Indians established a position as poorly paid semi-skilled and unskilled industrial operatives … The combination of a large influx of people to the city, the undeveloped industrial sector, the Great Depression, and White Labour Policy consequently resulted in large-scale unemployment and poverty, with many Indians barely surviving on the margins.”
These conditions produced a cohort of Indians who became active in the trade unions and the Communist Party. Many have become household names for the role they played in changing the strategic perspective of Indians in Natal and South Africa.
Some of the stand-out names include George and Vera Poonen, H A Naidoo, MD Naidoo, MP Naicker, Dawood Seedat, RD Naidoo, George Singh, AKM Dockrat, RK Gounden, IC Meer, Dr Kesaveloo Goonam, JN Singh, NG Moodley, Billy Peters, Cassim Amra, PM Harry, Kay Moonsamy, RR Pillay, SV Reddy, Mannie Pillay, Billy Nair and, of course, the life-long freedom fighter Dr Monty Naicker.
During the 1940s union organisers found themselves in an uneasy relationship with the then moderate leadership of the NIC. The NIC’s conservative middle-class leadership sought to incrementally improve the lot of Indians. This resulted in maintaining a separation between the cause of the African and the cause of the Indian.
The union organisers were joined in the cause by the first of Indian middle-class professionals: doctors, lawyers and teachers who were influenced by the anti-colonial struggles and Left debating groups.
This broad range of community activists made it possible for the ‘Nationalist Bloc’ to take control of the NIC and set it on the path of militant mass-based struggle. They embraced lessons from the efforts made by their predecessors under the leadership of Gandhi and drew inspiration from the mass-based 1913 passive resistance campaign.
Under the leadership of Naicker and Dadoo the Indian Congresses launched the 1946-1948 Passive Resistance Campaign during which about 2,000 volunteers were imprisoned. The campaign made a significant impression on the leaders of the newly formed ANC Youth League. And the 1946 mineworker’s strike influenced both leaders in the Youth League and in the Indian Congresses.
The era of militant mass-based resistance had set in. It rapidly became the lynch-pin of the strategy of a wide range of organisations, particularly the CPSA, the ANC, the Indian Congresses, and the trade unions that came together under the banner of Sactu.
A critical element of the strategy and tactics of radicalising the NIC and the TIC, under these changing circumstances was a focus of building an alliance with the ANC.
In the midst of the Passive Resistance Campaign, the two Indian leaders and Dr Xuma, the President of the ANC, signed the Dadoo-Xuma-Naicker Pact in 1947. The Pact marked the beginning of an enduring working relationship between the Indian Congresses and the ANC.
India achieved independence on August 15, 1947. In response to a call by Indian South Africans, the government of India (led by the Congress Party) severed trade links with South Africa, withdrew its High Commissioner and raised the treatment of Indians in South Africa in the United Nations.
The Three Doctors Pact was in line with Nehru’s thinking. Strengthening links with India encouraged the broader alliance against apartheid because Nehru understood the need for Indo-African unity.
The plight of Indians in South Africa, in Nehru’s view, could not be separated from the aspirations of Africans. The people of Indian descent have had to put up with a great deal of discrimination, and we have resented that, he said. But the African people have to put up with something infinitely more, and … our sympathies must go to them even more than to our kith and kin there, he said.
This message resonated with the viewpoints of Monty Naicker and Yusuf Dadoo. This approach challenged any notion of racial exclusivity. It brought to the fore that the Indian community in SA was beginning to see itself as Indian South Africans rather than South African Indians. This perspective would be severely tested in our country’s journey into translating non-racialism from a theoretical attachment to a reality. It would be tested for instance in the instance of the 1949 riots as well as the attempted insurrection in July 2021.
Forging a nation, in which our diversities are an asset, is a formidable undertaking when we bear in mind that the poison of racism was nurtured in our country over a period of more than three and a half centuries.
Continuities and discontinuities, between the evolving strategy and tactics deployed by the different oppressed communities, would be the consequence of racial discrimination being used to inculcate rivalry and fear rather than the unity of the oppressed.
In the aftermath of the 1964 Rivonia Trial, repression had crushed overt mass struggle in SA. The revival of the NIC in 1971 was the result of a search by freedom-minded individuals seeking ways to revive overt mobilisation despite the repression. They included Mewa Ramgobin, Ela Gandhi, Monty Naicker, George Sewpersad, Paul David, Pravin Gordhan and three doctors – Farouk Meer, Jerry Coovadia and Dilly Naidoo.
The revival of the NIC, launch of the Release Mandela Campaign, the 1973 workers strike, the emergence of Black Consciousness and the Soweto students’ uprising of 1976, together forced open the era of united mass action which reached its high point in the decade of the 1980s.
None of this came about without much debate, discussion and contestation. Strategies and tactics were debated in an environment of repression. Underlying these debates were attempts to regroup the anti-apartheid forces that were emerging in different parts of the country.
In the post-1970 era NIC kept alive the ideals of the banned ANC. The emergence of community organisations in the 70s in and around Durban showed that under those conditions the people were more likely to support you if they trusted you, because you were there to help them confront their everyday problems, rather than by arguments about change.
Unity of purpose and action between the UDF, Cosatu, and the SACC, became the hallmark of the decade of the eighties. African, Coloured, and Indian found common cause among themselves and with those white people who saw the need to move from apartheid to democracy.
This unity in struggle became a crucial element in compelling the regime to the negotiating table in 1990.
The survival and resilience of the organisations of the oppressed depended on their ability to refine their understanding of the system under which they lived and adjust their strategy and tactics accordingly.
The ANC Morogoro Conference of 1969 accepted the characterisation of the apartheid system as colonialism of a special type. It put at the core of strategy for national liberation in our country the notion of the African revolution.
Walter Sisulu, in an essay that he wrote in prison in 1976, explained the nature of this revolution in this way: “To speak of the African revolution is to emphasise the fundamental aspect inherent to the structure of oppression, namely, the liberation of the African people is a necessary condition for removing the oppression of all other national groups in SA.
“This is not the case if the liberation of any one or several of the oppressed minority national groups is characterised as the pivot. The concept of the African revolution reaches into the heart of the mechanism of the system of oppression as it obtains here, and projects a vision of a free South Africa, which is assured of the complete elimination of national oppression of all groups.”
The NIC and the TIC were present at the Codesa negotiations that produced the interim constitution of 1993. This was the basis on which the Parliament and Senate, elected in April 1994, were jointly entrusted to constitute the Constitutional Assembly that gave us the 1996 Constitution.
Together the NIC and TIC helped imprint the goal of a non-racial SA founded on the principle of equality and democracy.
The NIC had played its part. It was time now for the cause of non-racialism to be realised through a single political formation, the ANC, working together with the SACP and Cosatu under the rubric of the tripartite alliance.
From 1994 onwards a significant change took place in our political landscape. We live in a constitutional democracy.
Change and transformation would now take place in the context of multi-party contestation and our ability to create a participatory democracy.
Success brings its own problems. The task of transforming our divided society on the basis of non-racialism, gender equality, and democracy remains work in progress.
But the 2024 election results show that there is a growing disillusionment. Those who stayed away from voting were unhappy with the performance of the ANC. Yet they could not see their way clear to voting for any other party. If we allow this tendency to grow it will lead to a disillusionment with democracy itself. We cannot afford to revert to authoritarian rule.
The challenge is not simply for the ANC to work in such a way that it regains its pre-eminent electoral position. It has been the architect and stands at the forefront of the cause of transforming our country to meet the goals in South Africa’s Constitution.
The challenge now is to make it fit for purpose to fulfil that mandate. And it can only do so if we ensure that the people, at their workplaces, in the communities where they live and spend their leisure time, become involved in making change happen in their daily lives.
For this to happen we have to engage within the ANC in a way that ensures renewal is tied to re-organisation. Renewal must also involve encouraging the growth and autonomy of civil society organisations. We have to stop talking about renewal. We have to make it happen.
The ANC remains our vehicle to transform our country. It is in our hands to make the ANC fit for purpose.
Change in the ANC will take place through what we do within the ANC, as well as the pressures that community participation imposes on the ANC from outside the ANC.
Our focus must be: Make Democracy Work! Make Democracy Deliver!
There are no easy answers. As part of finding our way forward, the following are some questions that will help us find that way forward:
The lessons of the contribution of the NIC are there for all to see: the Indian community is not the problem. They are part of the solution. That will only happen if we who are assembled here live and work with this understanding.
* Mac Maharaj is a former ANC NEC member, political prisoner and anti-apartheid activist. This is his statement to the 130th anniversary celebration of the Natal Indian Congress held at Sastri College, Durban on September 8, 2024.
** The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of The African