Syerramia Willoughby describes how Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence evolved and influenced events in South Africa. Read more articles in the “Why India-Africa relations matter” blog series.
For as long as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi lived, he never forgot the events of 7 June 1893 for they lit within him the first political stirrings that would dominate the rest of his life. By the time of his death in 1948, he would be acclaimed as one of the greatest figures of the twentieth century and as Bapu (or Father) of the Indian nation. Yet when he arrived in South Africa in 1893 he was a timid, modest man whose attempts at establishing a law practice in Bombay failed because he was too shy to speak up in court, according to his biographer Dinanath Tendulkar.
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Gandhi (centre) is pictured with other Indian resistance leaders in South Africa
On that evening in 1893, the young Gandhi was forcibly removed from a whites-only carriage on a train in Pietermaritzburg and spent the rest of the night in a cold waiting room. Nearly forty-six years later he would say,