Victory achieved
June 26, 2024
For eight years, beginning in 1906, Gandhi led a passive resistance campaign in South Africa, trying to persuade the white minority who ruled the country to repeal—or at least soften—some of the policies which discriminated against the Indian community. On June 26, 1914, the Indians’ Relief Bill passed into law.
The most onerous burden on the community was a £3 tax. When indentured Indians had worked for five years, they had three choices:
Return to India;
Sign a fresh two-year indenture; or
Pay an annual £3 tax for the privilege of remaining in South Africa.
As Gandhi described the tax in his Autobiography, it applied to the laborer’s wife, any sons over 16, and daughters over 13. A family of four might owe £12 a year, “when the average income of the husband was never more than 14s. a month.” (A shilling was 1/20th of the British pound, so that puts the father’s income at £8.5 annually.) This, Gandhi wrote, “was atrocious and unknown anywhere else in the world.”
Repeal of the tax had always been one of the demands of the satyagraha campaign. Some other demands had been met the previous year and a new one was added: repeal of the Asiatic Registration Act and the immigration of educated Indians had been addressed, but a Supreme Court decision had invalidated non-Christian marriages. It was this last outrage that had inspired Gandhi’s wife Kasturba to get herself arrested as part of the struggle.
Gandhi went to Cape Town to lobbying for the passage of the Indians’ Relief Bill. He was still recovering from a two-week fast the previous month; the health problems would continue to plague him into the fall. He spent June trying to overcome the opposition: anti-Indian prejudice was widespread.
Fortunately, he had allies. General Jan Smuts, the Colonial Secretary who had made a settlement with Gandhi during his first jail term and negotiated the most recent agreement, used his political influence to shepherd it through the legislature. "To tame the opposition,” Smuts and the Prime Minister “had to use all their powers of persuasion; in fact, but for party loyalty, all the Dutch back-benchers would have voted against the Bill.”1
On June 26, 1914, the bill passed, and the victory celebrations began. Within a month, Gandhi and his wife would say their goodbyes to South Africa and set off for India (by way of London). But that’s another story…
Has finishing a job every triggered a move for you?
Gandhi Before India (Ramachandra Guha, 2013) p. 517