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The passive resistance campaigns led by MK Gandhi in South Africa had huge consequences not only for the history of the country but also for world history in general. Gandhi’s campaigns forged a new form of struggle against oppression that became a model for political and ethical struggles in other parts of the world – especially in India (the struggle for independence) and the United States (the civil rights campaign of the 1960s).
Gandhi himself was transformed by the struggles he waged: his first battles for the rights of a small group of Indians in South Africa eventually broadened his outlook into a more universal struggle for human rights. From a representative of a small faction of one ethnic group Gandhi was forced by the logic of his ‘experiments with truth’ to become a defender of the rights of the oppressed and downtrodden. Yet for some critics he was too constrained by the limits of his middle-class formation and failed to generalise his commitment to a truly universal philosophy of human rights.
Gandhi, as Maureen Swan has demonstrated, was not the initiator of Indian political activity in Natal and South Africa. Indian traders and middle classes had already formed associations to represent their interests before Gandhi arrived in South Africa.
It was around 1904 that Gandhi began to think about his ‘duty’ to the wider community, and not just to his clients, although Swan argues that at that time Gandhi was still thinking about the wider middle classes, and not indentured labourers or non-Indians. She writes: ‘By 1904, however, he had begun to develop the humanistic, universalist political philosophy out of which passive resistance grew. But Gandhi's politics lagged behind his ideology. The first passive resistance campaign was started in Johannesburg in 1907 with, and for, the wealthy South African Indian merchants whom he had so long represented.’
Gandhi’s first passive resistance campaign began as a protest against the Asiatic Registration Bill of 1906. The bill was part of the attempt to limit the presence of Indians in the Transvaal by confining them to segregated areas and limiting their trading activities.

Indians in South Africa

Indians first arrived in South Africa in 1860 as indentured labourers. Between then and 1911, 152,000 Indians had come to work on the sugar estates, most of them from Calcutta and Madras. After 1890 Indians also began to work on the railways and in coal mines. By the turn of the century, there were about 30,000 indentured workers in Natal, and before the Anglo-Boer War a few thousand had moved to the Transvaal.

Indentured Indians arriving in Colonial Natal. Source: www.scnc.ukzn.ac.za
By the 1880s, some Indians began to open shops or trade as hawkers, a development perceived as a threat by Whites, especially in Natal, where the Wragg Commission of 1885-7 found that Indian traders were responsible for ‘much of the irritation existing in the minds of European Colonists’. After Natal was granted self-government in 1893, the government passed a series of laws discriminating against Indians, requiring them to undergo literacy tests, keep accounts in English, and denying them the vote.

After 1895, the workers who had completed their terms of indenture had to pay a tax if they wanted to remain in the country. They were required by law to pay a tax of £3 a year for each member of the family – a huge amount of money at the time. This measure was aimed at pushing people back into indentured labour and encouraged them to return to India.

After 1903/4 Indians were no longer allowed to work in the gold mines on the Rand and opportunities to earn the money to pay the taxes were severely limited. By the middle of the decade, many Indians were severely in debt and went back into new contracts as indentured labourers. They were poorly paid, lived in squalid conditions and death rates were high.

Working conditions were better in coal mines and on the railways, but in the sugar plantations strict control of the workforce meant they could not organise themselves into unions – workers were not allowed to leave their places of employment without written leave, which was rarely given. Strikes were spontaneous and short-lived, and more often workers resorted to other forms of resistance, such as absenteeism, desertion, petty theft or sabotage.
While an Indian elite (made up mostly of Muslim businessmen) already existed, a new elite also emerged from among the Tamil workforce, most of them the children of freed indentured labourers – this new group numbered 300 in a 1904 census. Most of these were salaried white-collar workers - some teachers, small farmers and entrepreneurs, but also lawyers, civil servants and accountants in the mix.

By the late 19th century, Indians had spread to the four colonies that would become the Union of South Africa in 1910, and whites in all of these colonies perceived them as a threat. Governments in all the colonies enacted laws to limit Indian rights to reside and trade. They were required to carry passes and after 1898 were even forbidden to walk on pavements.
Satyagraha: the first campaign

After the victory of the British in the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), Indians in the Transvaal had hoped that the British administration would treat them more favourably, but the British instead passed a string of laws to limit the rights of Indians. In August 1906 the Transvaal Government Gazette published a draft of a new law which made it compulsory for all Indian males above the age of eight to be registered and have their fingerprints taken and recorded. Gandhi said the law would spell ‘absolute ruin for the Indians of South Africa”¦ Better to die than submit to such a law’.

Now Gandhi began to clarify his concept of passive resistance, outlining its rationale. He disliked the notion of passivity, and called for people to come up with an appropriate name for the new mode of resistance. When his nephew made a suggestion, Sadagraha (firmness in a good cause), Gandhi adapted the idea and coined the word ‘Satyagraha’, which means ‘truth force’.
Gandhi biographer Louis Fischer says Satyagraha ‘means to be strong not with the strength of the brute but with the strength of the spark of God’. Satyagraha, according to Gandhi, is ‘the vindication of truth not by infliction of suffering on the opponent but on one’s self’. The intention is to convince the opponent and not to crush him, to convert the opponent, who must be ‘weaned from error by patience and sympathy’.

Before the law came into force, Gandhi organised a mass meeting on 11 September 1906 at the Imperial Theatre in Johannesburg, where 3000 people pledged to defy the law – a short while later this would develop into the first passive resistance campaign. On 20 September 1906, the Crown government passed the Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance No. 29, which became known as the ‘Black Act’.

Gandhi went to London in October to appeal to the British to abolish the Black Act in their crown colony of Transvaal, and met with the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Elgin, and John Morley, Secretary of State for India, addressing MPs in a committee room of the House of Commons.
The British vetoed the law in December 1906, while Gandhi was on a ship returning to South Africa. But the British granted the Transvaal self-government from 1 January 1907, leaving the new administration under General Louis Botha free to re-enact the law, this time as the Transvaal Registration Act. The law eventually came into force on 31 July 1907, after the British government approved the act on 9 May 1907.

On 11 May Gandhi announced that Indians would embark on their campaign against the Black Act.