Suter studied to be a missionary at Cliff College and Harley House in England, and was ordained as a Baptist pastor. In 1885, Suter left England and moved to Durban, South Africa. He felt that God had called him to work among the Zulus. He worked as a draper in a large store, witnessing to Zulu people in his spare time. Suter and a fellow missionary, George Gale, began to preach the gospel in compounds and hostels in Durban. In 1893, the first African church was opened, then a night school for Bible classes.
The year 2014 marks the centenary of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's departure from South Africa and his return to India. This article explores the history and historiography of Gandhi's relationships with those he called "my Christian friends" during his years in South Africa (1893-1914). James Hunt's Gandhi and the British Religions., published in 1986, is the major work on this topic, but this article seeks to explore aspects downplayed by Hunt and to offer a new synthesis, rather than original research. The article examines the influence of Christian contacts from a range of denominations and traditions on Gandhi's religious and political development, notably with reference to his understanding that religion and political commitment are profoundly interconnected, and specifically with reference to his philosophy of satyagraha. The second part of the article reviews Gandhi's influence within the Christian churches, and the controversial political legacies surrounding his relationship with the first ANC President, John Langalibelele Dube, who was a Congregational Church minister. This part of the article will also debate the use of nonviolence as a political strategy by ANC President Albert Luthuli, a Methodist lay preacher whose Christian faith shaped his political beliefs.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) was a key member of the Congress Party that led the struggle for Indian independence, finally achieved in 1947. Bom in India, Gandhi trained for law in Britain and, in 1893, took up a legal case in South Africa, where he remained until his permanent return to India in 1914. Here, in the course of his campaigns for Indian rights on the Reef and in Natal, he developed satyagraha, his philosophy and strategy of nonviolent resistance, which he later applied in India (Gerhart & Karis 1977:30; Brain 1989:264-5).
Scholars of Gandhi's religious development discern three decisive and geographically distinct formative stages: the India of his youth; England, where his personal exploration of Hinduism and his exposure to Christian and neo-Christian ideas began; and the crucible of the South African years. Brown notes that when Gandhi left England, he had "no real religious commitment, no vision to inspire his adult life", but that in South Africa he found "his true self and realised "his vocation" (Brown 1989:26, 30). Lelyveld discerns no clear evidence of Gandhi's political thought before 1893 and argues that Gandhi's South African apprenticeship should be seen as "more than ... an extended footnote to the fully-fledged Mahatma" (Lelyveld 2011:3, xii). Writing decades later of his recognition of Hinduism as his own religious way, Gandhi remarked of his relationships with Christians whom he had met in South Africa in the early 1890s:
Finding it difficult to establish himself as a barrister in India, in 1893 Gandhi accepted an offer of employment from Dada Abdulla, a Muslim merchant in Durban (Guha 2013:63). As Gandhi (1949:89) soon noticed, "the Indians were divided into different groups". Of the first Indian immigrants to Natal, indentured workers who arrived in 1860, about 86% were Hindu, 12% Muslim and 2% were Christians, but in Natal, Christian missionary work raised this proportion to 8% of the working class population (Swan 1985:13). When their articles were complete, some of the indentured returned to India, but a higher proportion remained and established themselves as smallholders and farmers, fishermen, tradesmen, hawkers and traders. The second major group of immigrants, 'passenger' Indians who had paid the cost of travel to Natal themselves, were Muslim and Hindu merchants from Gujarat, many of them wealthy. By the time of Gandhi's arrival, another group was emerging: these were the South African-born children of the indentured, who were often well-educated and fluent in English and who formed an emerging professional class of lawyers, civil servants, teachers and interpreters (Swan 1985:10-19).3 Because most schools were run by Christian missionaries, about 28% of this class were Christian and had well-established communities by the 1890s (Swan 1985:14; Bhana & Vahed 2005:141). His initial employment over, Gandhi was on the verge of departure from South Africa in 1894, just as Natal was about to gain responsible government which would give an all-white parliament power to legislate for the Indian population, but was asked to lead a campaign for Indian participation in the franchise. Local merchants did not trust colonial-educated Indian lawyers, who were perceived to be "under the thumb of the white clergymen, who in their turn are subject to the Government" (Gandhi 1949:116). The campaign failed in its immediate objective, but ensured that Gandhi remained in South African for another twenty years, and he regarded it as worthwhile because "the agitation had infused new life into the community and had brought home to them the conviction that the community was one and indivisible and that it was as much their duty to fight for its political rights as for its trading rights" (Gandhi 1949:118). However, Indian Christians did not shape Gandhi's religious beliefs.
Gandhi arrived in Durban on 23 May 1893, and set off by train to Johannesburg on behalf of his new employer on 31 May. Later that night he was evicted from the first-class compartment of the train, for which he had purchased a ticket, and spent the night at Pietermaritzburg station. His telegram of complaint to the railway authorities indicated a determination to defend his own rights and the roots of a resolution to combat discrimination on a more general scale. The lawyer acting for Dada Abdul la in Pretoria was A.W. Baker, a member of the South African General Mission, which was established in 1889 to preach Christianity to both whites and blacks, and Baker set his sights on conversion of Gandhi to his own faith (Tidrick 2006:29). Ramchandra Guha's recent book, Gandhi before India, devotes scarcely a paragraph to this, unlike Tidrick, Lelyveld and, particularly, James Hunt, for whom this is one of the key encounters between Gandhi and the British Nonconformists (Hunt 1986:23-50). Gandhi's autobiography also deals with the contact with Baker and his circle in detail. He was invited into their homes, offered suitable books to read and participated in a short daily prayer meeting, which included a prayer for Gandhi himself, which he quotes as follows: "Lord, show the path to the new brother who has come amongst us. Give him, Lord, the peace that Thou hast given us. May the Lord Jesus who has saved us save him too. We ask all this in the name of Jesus" (Gandhi 1949:101-102). Baker also invited Gandhi to attend the Wellington Convention, an evangelistic revival meeting, which he hoped would persuade Gandhi to convert. Gandhi appreciated that Baker treated him as a brother and that he encountered personal hostility for travelling with an Indian person, and he was touched by the faith he witnessed. Although he told Baker that "nothing could prevent me from embracing Christianity, should I feel the call", adding that "I had no hesitation in giving him this assurance as I had long since taught myself to follow the inner voice", ultimately
1 Hick and Hempel, in their 1989 study, Gandhi's Significance for Today: The Elusive Legacy, recorded that there were at that stage 400 biographical studies of Gandhi, mostly uncritical works repeating "ritualised and mythologised versions of familiar incidents" (1989: 61). This article pays particular attention to Brown (1989), Tidrick (2006) and Lelyveld (2011), but refer to other books and journal articles among the works consulted.
2 For more detail on the impact of theosophy and related organisations such as the Esoteric Christian Union on Gandhi, see Tidrick 2006:11-20,32-50. Despite the word "Christian" in the title of the latter, it was essentially a theosophical rather than a Christian body and Gandhi wrote that he liked both organisations because "they seemed to support Hinduism" (quoted in Tidrick 2006:45).
3 For a historical overview of the Indian community in Natal from 1860-1910, see Brain 1989: 249-265 and Guha 2013: 63-67.
4 Lancelot Parker Booth (1850-1925) studied medicine at Edinburgh University and came to Natal as a medical officer with the Indian Immigration Department. He resigned in 1883 and offered himself to the Anglican Church as a medical missionary among the Indian population, and was ordained as a priest in 1885. Booth opened a dispensary in 1883. In 1900 he left Durban to become Dean of Umtata and in 1912, went to Cape Town. Aged 64 when the First World War broke out, he served overseas as chaplain with the South African Native Labour Contingent (Govinden 2002:31-39,111-2).
5 They probably met again in 1912 when the Indian nationalist leader Gopal Gokhale came from India to investigate the circumstances of Indians in South Africa and visited Ohlange, as Gandhi accompanied him throughout the visit (Hughes 2011:172).
6 See Guy 2005:15-27.
7 Francis Stillwell Knight Gregson, graduate of Brasenose College, Oxford, was ordained as a priest in the Church of England and served in Gateshead and Leeds before coming to Natal. He was appointed as Rector of St Thomas's in Durban in 1893 {South African Provincial Church Directory 1907:228).
8 Interview with S. Zietsman, 17 July 2012, Durban.
9 For his analysis of the article in Sechaba 5 May 1969, see Couper 2008:177-8.
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