Gandhi & Churchill (21 page)

This legislation was not just a racial affront, and a challenge to what Gandhi called “the just place of the better class” of Indians, as the Franchise Bill had been.
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It was a severe economic blow to merchants like Dada Abdullah, who had benefited from mass Indian immigration in their steamship business and moneylending operations. Many white businessmen also relied on that cheap labor to work their sugar plantations and coal mines. The Congress sprang into action again, with petitions and angry newspaper articles, but again to no avail.

The British government in London formally assented to the Franchise Bill, the Immigrant Restriction Bill, and then a Dealers’ Licensing Bill, which allowed municipal governments to deny or refuse to renew trading licenses to local Indian merchants (which, under white pressure, they were increasingly doing), without comment. The Crown’s approval was a crushing defeat, made more humiliating by the fact that many Indians felt that Gandhi’s outspoken efforts had only made whites angrier and guaranteed the bills’ passage.
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If the situation for Indians was bad in Natal, it was even worse in the Boer Republic of the Transvaal. There no British Colonial Office or viceroy’s council in Calcutta had standing to offer even a token defense of Indian rights. The Boers were free to do what they liked. In 1895 they had in effect ordered Indian merchants into separate ghettos or “bazaars” on the edge of cities like Pretoria and Johannesburg. The Indians protested and asked the Colonial Office to intervene, but even their old friend and protector Lord Ripon could do nothing. In August 1898 Gandhi managed to get a Transvaal court to hear an appeal of the bazaar restrictions, only to have the Boer judges resoundingly rule against him.

The blow was particularly bitter for Gandhi, coming at the worst possible time. Inside his beautiful house in Beach Grove, his family life was chaotic. He had had a spectacular quarrel with Kasturbai over a chamber pot. Gandhi had begun simplifying and downsizing his household, part of a growing self-denying puritanism in his personal and professional habits. At age thirty he suddenly decided that he could do many of the menial tasks he usually left to the servants or Kasturbai, like cooking, washing, and even (with hilarious results) cutting his own hair.

Another task was emptying the house’s chamber pots, a constant chore in a large house with a wife and three children, including his nephew, twelve servants and staff, and only one indoor toilet. One day, without thinking, he had ordered Kasturbai to carry out his law clerk’s chamber pot.

Kasturbai’s experiences in South Africa had not been happy ones, to say the least. She found the place totally alien and the people hostile, not to say violent. Gandhi’s insistence on running Beach Grove Villa like a European’s house meant that she had to give up the Hindu domestic rituals that were precious to her. In addition, Gandhi made her wear Western-style shoes, which pinched her feet, and a sari made in a strange Parsi design, because Gandhi told her the Parsis were “the most civilized” of the Indian immigrant communities.
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Now he was commanding her to handle a stranger’s filth—an act of pollution fit only for an Indian of the lowest caste.

She exploded in rage. With tears coursing down her cheeks, she screamed at Gandhi: “Keep your house to yourself, and let me go!” Gandhi lost his temper as well; he began yelling and dragging her down to the gate to throw her out, until a sobbing Kasturbai finally persuaded him to let her go.

For Gandhi, it was an extraordinary episode, almost unique. Husband and wife were soon reconciled, but the incident would plague him for years.
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Certainly some part of him realized it was an explosion of rage not just against Kasturbai’s defiance but against his whole situation in Natal.

His efforts on behalf of his countrymen and clients had failed. He had become a lightning rod for criticism in the Indian community and newspapers. His sons were getting no education—Gandhi felt it would be unfair to use special influence to get them enrolled in a Natal school while other Indians lacked that privilege.
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In the summer and autumn of 1899 he was an isolated, unhappy, and increasingly frustrated man living at odds with his own principles. His religious beliefs, his native culture, and his New Age friends must have seemed very far away.

Events, however, were about to shake him out of his confining routine—and transform South Africa and the British Empire in the process.

The summer of 1898 was the last great period of British imperialism, the last glorious iridescence of confidence and unapologetic pride. The Diamond Jubilee of the year before had reminded Victoria’s subjects everywhere that they were still part of the greatest empire on earth, extending over ten million square miles. Gandhi and the Natal Congress had sent official congratulations to Buckingham Palace, “in token of our joy.” They thanked Victoria for “the peace we enjoy in India…and the confidence of security and prosperity which enables us to venture abroad.” Gandhi had even taught his children to sing “God Save the Queen” in English.
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In 1898 the victor of Omdurman, Herbert Kitchener, secured British hegemony over the Sudan by checkmating French imperial ambitions at Fashoda. In Egypt and Suez Governor-General Lord Cromer had reduced the country’s debt, abolished forced labor and the use of the lash, and established a competent Egyptian Civil Service along Indian lines. In the Cape Colony Cecil Rhodes was dreaming of building a great Capetown-to-Cairo railway that would connect Africa north to south and draw the vast interior together under British rule. “We are the first race in the world,” he explained, “and the more of the world we [rule], the better it is for the human race.” No one, certainly no English speaker, was in the mood to disagree.
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Not even Mohandas Gandhi. That same year a new commissioner for Britain’s Cape Colony arrived. Alfred Milner was a Cromer protégé and had much the same confident, even arrogant, spirit. Milner wanted to break the power of the Boer republics as a crucial step to confirming British power and making South Africa a civilized country—to his mind, the same thing. As commissioner, he put heavy pressure on the Boers across the border to respect the rights of the British subjects in their midst, including, ironically, Indians living in the Transvaal. For a brief moment Gandhi seemed to have found an ally, if not exactly a champion.
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Milner’s real focus, however, was securing control of the gold fields of Transvaal, which now provided almost one-third of the world’s gold supply. In order to back up his threats against the Boers, Milner threatened to bring in British troops. The Transvaal’s president Paul Kruger warned him to desist. When Milner ignored Kruger’s ultimatum in October, the situation exploded into war—exactly what Milner and the British government had wanted all along.

Britons assumed it would be an easy win. Many of Gandhi’s counterculture friends in London opposed the war as unprovoked aggression against a free people (conveniently ignoring the Boers’ own brutal oppression of the Transvaal’s black majority). Gandhi, however, did not join them. He saw supporting the war against the Boers both as an obligation and as an opportunity.

In 1899 Gandhi still “vied with Englishmen” in his loyalty to Britain and in support of the axiom that “British rule was on the whole beneficial to the ruled,” whether in India or Natal or anywhere else. He still believed that the South African color bar was “quite contrary to British traditions” and only temporary. Once the war was won, justice would prevail and Indians would reap the rewards of showing their commitment to Queen and Country.

That at least was the gist of Gandhi’s proposal to his fellow members of the Natal Indian Congress. “If I demanded rights as a British citizen,” he told them, it was also his duty “to participate in the defense of the British Empire.”
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The question was how, especially since the idea of war directly challenged his commitment to nonviolence.

The solution Gandhi arrived at was to organize an ambulance corps. In the past year he had begun volunteering in a Durban free hospital for the poor and indigent run by a white missionary doctor named Lancelot Booth. It had been Gandhi’s first real contact with poor Indian laborers, men and women sick with fever or from malnutrition and work-related injuries. He had enjoyed the work; indeed, nursing and tending the sick had become, as he said later, one of the “two passions” of his life. The other was his British patriotism.
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Gandhi argued to his fellow Natal Indians that rescuing and tending to British wounded would be a crucial way “to show the Colonists they were worthy subjects of the Queen.” Few of them knew anything about firearms: Natal Indians were forbidden to own them by law. But as army medics, they could impress the government with their courage and commitment and build political capital they could use later. So on October 19, 1899, the first group of Indian volunteers gathered to sign up as “ready to do duty for their Sovereign on the battlefield” against the Boers. Gandhi’s name headed the list.
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Gandhi was not the only person to see war against the Boers as an opportunity to get into the firing line.

Earlier that month, just as tensions with the Boers were building to a climax, Milner received a letter from Joseph Chamberlain at the Foreign Office in London. “I am sending a line to anticipate a probable visit from Winston Churchill,” it read, “who is going as correspondent for the
Morning Post
…He is a very clever young man with many of his father’s qualifications. He had the reputation for being bumptious, but I have not myself found him so, and time will no doubt get rid of the defect if he has it.” Chamberlain added, “He is a good writer and full of energy. He hopes to be in Parliament but want of means stands in the way.”
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In fact, Winston at twenty-four had already tried for a seat in Oldham in Lancashire and lost. The best way to draw votes the next time around, he decided, was to get himself in the middle of another war, especially one that looked like as sure a thing as the one against the Boers. His only worry was that the British Army would wrap things up before he got there, and the fighting would be over. This time certainly he would not be disappointed.

On October 14, 1899, Winston set sail from Southampton on the ship that was carrying the army’s new commander in chief for South African operations, General Redvers Buller. A large crowd gathered on the dock to sing “Rule Britannia” and “God Save the Queen.”
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Everything promised an exciting imperial adventure, and Winston had stocked his tropical kit with a plentiful supply of champagne as well as whiskey, for which he had developed an addiction in India.
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Another correspondent, J. B. Atkins, spotted him on deck, “slim, slightly reddish-haired, pale, lively, frequently plunging along the deck with neck out-thrust.” Winston was battling both seasickness
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and his feverish impatience to reach Capetown so that he could get started on his future. “I had not before encountered this sort of ambition,” Atkins confessed, “unabashed frankly egotistical…It was as though a light was switched on inside him which suddenly shone out through his eyes.”
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Everyone expected that a war pitting the world’s greatest power against a band of outnumbered rednecks like the Boers would proceed swiftly to victory. But the very day Churchill reached Capetown, the British garrison at Ladysmith in Natal had suffered a major reverse. The Boers may have been outnumbered, but they were well armed with modern Mauser rifles and even field artillery, and well led. Acting on the principle that the best defense is a strong offense, they had poured into Natal and swiftly enveloped key strongpoints, including Ladysmith, the railway junction between Durban and the Transvaal.

At Nicholson’s Neck, north of Ladysmith, the British to their consternation lost two hundred killed and gave up twelve hundred prisoners to the Afrikaans-speaking cowherds. “We have greatly underestimated the military strength and spirit of the Boers,” Winston wrote to his mother after hearing the news. He predicted that “a fierce and bloody struggle is before us.” In fact, the Boers had started out so well that when Winston presented his introductions to Commissioner Milner, the older man confessed his fears that the Boer insurgency might spread into the Cape Colony.
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Winston saw that the heaviest fighting was going to be in Natal and was desperate to get there. He caught a train from Capetown to Port Elizabeth, the last one before the Boers cut the line. From there he boarded a steamer for Durban where, at precisely the same moment, Gandhi was organizing a crash course on medical care for his ambulance corps recruits.
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They were going to be needed. In the ship’s sick bay Winston had the shock of meeting a fellow officer from the Fourth Hussars, Reggie Barnes. Barnes had been shot through the leg during fierce fighting around Elandslaage. Barnes told him of the Boers’ skill with horse and rifle and their bravery and determination. They had proved to be masters of the arid rugged terrain on which the battles of the Boer War were going to be fought.
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This was not going to be a dashing adventure like Omdurman or the Malakand Valley. It was a grim war of white men killing white men with the latest weapons, firing from trenches and from behind barbed wire—the startling prelude to the slaughter to come in the Great War.

The train from Durban brought Winston as far as Estcourt, thirty miles south of Ladysmith. There he met another former army acquaintance, Captain Aylmer Haldane, and his old school chum Leo Amery, now a correspondent with the London
Times.
They were stuck there because the railway line had been cut. A battalion of Dublin Fusiliers and a handful of Natal volunteer infantry were all that stood between the Boers and Durban. Haldane’s commander had ordered him to load up his Dubliners in an armored train and reconnoiter the track ahead. Without hesitation Winston volunteered to go with him.