Gandhi’s desire for Indians to be segregated from blacks

Gandhi’s desire for Indians to be segregated from blacks was so strong that he went to Johannesburg in late August of 1904 to protest the placing of blacks in the Indian section of the city

LAHORE: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1870-1948), the man who inspired great leaders like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, may have harboured racial sentiments against black people if an article on Sulekha.com is to be believed.

The article quotes a series of letters and petitions from Gandhi, linking the black people of Africa to savages and portraying them as little better than animals. Gandhi writes, “A general belief seems to prevail in the colony that the Indians are little better, if at all, than the savages or natives of Africa. Even the children are taught to believe in that manner, with the result that the Indian is being dragged down to the position of a raw Kaffir”.

According to the article, part of Gandhi’s attitude stemmed from his belief in the Aryan Invasion Theory, claiming that the superior white race from the Steppes subjugated darker races all across Eurasia. Gandhi refused to accept classification with ‘aboriginal’ looking ‘savages’: “A reference to Hunter’s ‘Indian Empire’, chapters 3 and 4, would show at a glance who are aborigines and who are not. The matter is put so plainly that there can be no mistake about the distinction between the two. It will be seen at once from the book that the Indians in South Africa belong to the Indo-Germanic stock or, more properly speaking, the Aryan stock.”

He believed that White rule in South Africa – with the help of a reduction in Asiatic immigration was necessary for civilising the blacks with these characteristics: “We, therefore, have no hesitation in agreeing with the view that in the long run assisted Asiatic immigration - into the Transvaal would be disastrous to the white settlement. People will gradually accommodate themselves to relying upon Asiatic labour, and any White immigration of the special class required in the Transvaal on a large scale will be practically impossible. It would be equally unfair to the natives of the soil. It is all very well to say that they would not work, and that, if the Asiatics were introduced, that would be a stimulus to work; but human nature is the same everywhere, and once Asiatic labour is resorted to, there would not be a sustained effort to induce the natives to work under what would otherwise be, after all, gentle compulsion. There would be then less talk about taxing the natives and so forth. Natives themselves, used as they are to a very simple mode of life, will always be able to command enough wages to meet their wants; and the result will be putting back their progress for an indefinite length of time. We have used the words ‘gentle compulsion’ in the best sense of the term; we mean compulsion of the same kind that a parent exercises over children.”

Gandhi thus remained a firm believer in white settlement and rule in South Africa. More explicitly, he wrote that the White race deserved to be the dominant race in South Africa: “What the British Indians pray for is very little. They ask for no political power. They admit the British race should be the dominant race in South Africa. All they ask for is freedom for those that are now settled and those that may be allowed to come in future to trade, to move about, and to hold landed property without any hindrance save the ordinary legal requirements.”

Along with the dominance of the white race in South Africa, Gandhi also held dear the idea of racial purity: “We believe as much in the purity of race as we think they do, only we believe that they would best serve these interests, which are as dear to us as to them, by advocating the purity of all races, and not one alone. We believe also that the white race of South Africa should be the predominating race.”

Commenting on a petition opposing interactions between the whites and the coloureds, Gandhi wrote: “The petition dwells upon ‘the co-mingling of the coloured and white races’. May we inform the members of the conference that, so far as the British Indians are concerned, such a thing is practically unknown? If there is one thing, which the Indian cherishes, more than any other, it is the purity of type. Why bring such a question into the controversy at all?”

Gandhi’s desire for the Indians to be segregated from the blacks was so strong that he went to Johannesburg in late August of 1904 to protest the placing of blacks in the Indian section of the city: “Why, of all places in Johannesburg, the Indian Location should be chosen for dumping down all the Kaffirs of the town passes my comprehension. ...Of course, under my suggestion, The Town Council must withdraw the Kaffirs from the Location. About this mixing of Kaffirs with the Indians, I must confess I feel most strongly.”

It is unclear from the article whether Gandhi later changed his position. However, it does shed some light on the ideas that shaped the mind of one of the most successful political leaders of the 20th century. *

From Cuba to Congo, dream to disaster for Che Guevara

The revolutionary leader describes his African war in exclusive extracts from his previously unpublished diary

• The Guardian, Saturday 12 August 2000 02.03 BST

This is the history of a failure. It descends into anecdotic detail, as one would expect in episodes from a war, but this is blended with reflections and critical analysis. For in my view, any importance the story might have lies in the fact that it allows the experiences to be extracted for the use of other revolutionary movements.
Victory is a great source of positive experiences, but so is defeat, especially if the unusual circumstances surrounding the incident are taken into account: the actors and informants are foreigners who went to risk their lives in an unknown land where people spoke a different language and were linked to them only by ties of proletarian internationalism, so that a method not practised in modern wars of liberation was thereby inaugurated.
These notes will be published some time after they were dictated, and it may be that the author will no longer be able to take responsibility for what is said in them.
More correctly, this is the history of a decomposition. When we arrived on Congolese soil, the revolution was in a period of reflux; then a number of incidents occurred which brought about its final regression, at this time and place at least, in the immense field of struggle that is the Congo.
The most interesting aspect here is not the story of the decomposition of the Congolese revolution, whose causes and key features are too profound to be all encompassed from my particular vantage point, but rather the decomposition of our own fighting morale, since the experience we inaugurated should not go to waste and the initiative of the International Proletarian Army should not die at the first failure. It is essential to analyse in depth the problems that are posed, and to find a solution to them. A good battlefield instructor does more for the revolution than one who teaches a large number of raw recruits in a context of peace...
The idea that guided us was to ensure that men experienced in liberation battles (and subsequently in the struggle with reactionary forces) fought alongside men without experience, and thereby bring about what we called the "Cubanisation" of the Congolese. It will be seen that the effect was the exact opposite, in that a "Congolisation" of the Cubans took place over a period of time. In speaking of Congolisation, we had in mind the series of habits and attitudes to the revolution that characterised the Congolese soldier at those moments of the struggle. This does not imply any derogatory view about the Congolese people, but it does about the soldiers at that time. In the course of the story, an attempt will be made to explain why those fighters had such negative traits.
Letter to Castro

A personal letter written by Che Guevara to Fidel Castro in October 1965 shows the strength of trust between the two men, despite Guevara having left Cuba. Only to Castro could Guevara so openly express his serious doubts about the Congo project, given the competition between rival leaders in different areas.
Congo, 5/10/65
Dear Fidel
I received your letter, which has aroused contradictory feelings in me - for in the name of proletarian internationalism, we are committing mistakes that may prove very costly. I am also personally worried that, either because I have failed to write with sufficient seriousness or because you do not fully understand me, I may be thought to be suffering from the terrible disease of groundless pessimism.
When your Greek gift [Emilio Aragones, a member of the Cuban central committee] arrived here, he told me that one of my letters had given the impression of a condemned gladiator, and the [Cuban health] minister [Jose Ramon Machado Ventura], in passing on your optimistic message, confirmed the opinion that you were forming.
You will be able to speak at length with the bearer of this letter who will tell you his firsthand impressions after visiting much of the front; for this reason I will dispense with anecdotes. I will just say to you that, according to people close to me here, I have lost my reputation for objectivity by maintaining a groundless optimism in the face of the actual situation. I can assure you that were it not for me, this fine dream would have collapsed with catastrophe all around.
In my previous letters, I asked to be sent not many people but cadres; there is no real lack of arms here (except for special weapons) - indeed there are too many armed men; what is lacking are soldiers. I especially warned that no more money should be given out unless it was with a dropper and after many requests. None of what I said has been heeded, and fantastic plans have been made which threaten to discredit us internationally and may land me in a very difficult position.
I shall now explain to you.
Soumialot [Gaston Soumialot, president of the Supreme Council of the Revolution] and his comrades have been leading you all right up the garden path. It would be tedious to list the huge number of lies they have spun.
There are two zones where something of an organised revolution exists - the one where we ourselves are, and part of Kasai province (the great unknown quantity) where Mulele [Pierre Mulele, former minister under Lumumba and the first leader to take up arms] is based.
In the rest of the country there are bands living in the forest, not connected to one another; they lost everything without a fight, as they lost Stanleyville without a fight. More serious than this, however, is the way in which the groups in this area (the only one with contacts to the outside) relate to one another.
The dissensions between Kabila [then second vice-president of the Supreme Council of the Revolution and head of the eastern front where Guevara was] and Soumialot are becoming more serious all the time, and are used as a pretext to keep handing towns over without a fight. I know Kabila well enough not to have any illusions about him. I cannot say the same about Soumialot, but I have some indications such as the string of lies he has been feeding you, the fact that he does not deign to come to these godforsaken parts, his frequent bouts of drunkenness in Dar es Salaam, where he lives in the best hotels, and the kind of people he has as allies here against the other group.
Recently a group from the Tshombist [pro-government] army landed, in the Baraka area (where a major-general loyal to Soumialot has no fewer than a thousand armed men) and captured this strategically important place almost without a fight. Now they are arguing about who was to blame - those who did not put up a fight, or those at the lake who did not send enough ammunition. The fact is that they shamelessly ran away, ditching in the open a 75mm recoilless gun and two 82 mortars; all the men assigned to these weapons have disappeared, and now they are asking me for Cubans to get them back from wherever they are (no one quite knows where) and to use them in battle.
Nor are they doing anything to defend Fizi, 36km from here; they don't want to dig trenches on the only access road through the mountains. This will give you a faint idea of the situation. As for the need to choose men well rather than send me large numbers, you and the commissar assure me that the men here are good; I'm sure most of them are - otherwise they'd have quit long ago. But that's not the point. You have to be really well tempered to put up with the things that happen here. It's not good men but supermen that are needed...
And there are still my 200; believe me, they would do more harm than good at the present time - unless we decide once and for all to fight alone, in which case we'll need a division and we'll have to see how many the enemy put up against us. Maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration; maybe a battalion would be enough to get back to the frontiers we had when we arrived here and to threaten Albertville.
But numbers are not what matters; we can't liberate by ourselves a country that does not want to fight; you've got to create a fighting spirit and look for soldiers with the torch of Diogenes and the patience of Job - a task that becomes more difficult, the more shits there are doing things along the way.
The business with the money is what hurts me most, after all the warnings I gave. At the height of my "spending spree" and only after they had kicked up a lot of fuss, I undertook to supply one front (the most important one) on condition that I would direct the struggle and form a special mixed column under my direct command, in accordance with the strategy that I outlined and communicated to you.
With a very heavy heart, I calculated that it would require $5,000 a month. Now I learn that a sum 20 times higher is given to people who pass through just once, so that they can live well in all the capitals of the African world, with no allowance for the fact that they receive free board and lodging and often their travel costs from the main progressive countries. Not a cent will reach a wretched front where the peasants suffer every misery you can imagine, including the rapaciousness of their own protectors; nor will anything get through to the poor devils stuck In Sudan. (Whisky and women are not on the list of expenses covered by friendly governments, and they cost a lot if you want quality.)
Finally, 50 doctors will give the liberated area of the Congo an enviable proportion of one per thousand inhabitants - a level surpassed only by the USSR, the United States and two or three of the most advanced countries in the world. But no allowance is made for the fact that here they are distributed according to political preference, without a trace of public health organisation. Instead of such gigantism, it would be better to send a contingent of revolutionary doctors and to increase it as I request, along with highly practical nurses of a similar kind.
As the attached map sums up the military situation, I shall limit myself to a few recommendations that I would ask you all to consider objectively: forget all the men in charge of phantom groups; train up to a hundred cadres (not necessarily all blacks)... As for weapons: the new bazooka, percussion caps with their own power supply, a few R-4s and nothing else for the moment; forget about rifles, which won't solve anything unless they are electronic. Our mortars must be in Tanzania, and with those plus a new complement of men to operate them we would have more than enough for now. Forget about Burundi and tactfully discuss the question of the launches. (Don't forget that Tanzania is an independent country and we've got to play it fair there, leaving aside the little problem I caused.)
Send the mechanics as soon as possible, as well as someone who can steer across the lake reasonably safely; that has been discussed and Tanzania has agreed. Leave me to handle the problem of the doctors, which I will do by giving some of them to Tanzania. Don't make the mistake again of dishing out money like that; for they cling to me when they feel hard up and certainly won't pay me any attention if the money is flowing freely. Trust my judgment a little and don't go by appearances. Shake the representatives into giving truthful information, because they are not capable of figuring things out and present utopian pictures which have nothing to do with reality.
I have tried to be explicit and objective, synthetic and truthful. Do you believe me?
Warm greetings ...
Evacuation

By November 1965 Guevara's dream had collapsed against the reality of the Congolese forces' complete incompetence and lack of realism. Grimly he had asked Havana for help to pull out his men, though he toyed with the idea of staying on as a lone exemplar of revolutionary duty.
There was an almost complete disintegration of the troops; some party members even proposed to hold a meeting to ask me to pull out. I was extremely sharp in my replies, warning that I would not accept any such demand or any meeting of that kind and would treat it as treachery, and that I would brand as cowardice even any act of allowing such proposals to circulate. I still had a remnant of authority which kept some degree of cohesion among the Cubans; that was all. But much worse things were happening on the Congolese side.
This paragraph will give some idea of the limbo in which the revolution was then sailing. I will take the liberty of reproducing for you the aspirations, wishes and proposals of the whole population in the Fizi region.
1. The people demand that the military power of our revolution should be entrusted to the friendly forces who are coming to help us, until the country is stabilised.
2. The people request intensive aid from friendly countries, consisting of:
a) military operations, personnel, weapons, equipment, money, etc;
b) technical assistance, engineers, various kinds of technicians, doctors, etc;
c) social assistance, teachers, traders, industrialists.
At 2.30pm we made contact with [the Tanzanian port of] Kigoma. Our message read: Changa: [the Cuban captain responsible for transporting supplies and messages] Total men to evacuate less than 200, will be more difficult each day that passes. We are at Sele, 10 or 15km south of Kibamba.
And I received the longed-for reply.
Tatu: The crossing is set for tonight. Yesterday the commissioner did not let us cross.
The men were euphoric. I spoke with Masengo [the chief of staff of the eastern front] and suggested leaving from that very point at night. As there were a lot of Congolese, the general staff held a meeting at which it was decided that one commander would remain in the Congo with his men and we and the various leaders would evacuate; the troops who were originally from that area would remain there; they would not be told of our intention to withdraw but would be sent on various pretexts to the nearby village.
One of the little boats we still had to ply between various points on the lake arrived and took a large number of the Congolese, but those who were part of our force smelt a rat and wanted to stay. I ordered a selection to be made of those who had conducted themselves best up to that point, so that they would be taken across as Cubans.
For me it was a critical situation. Two men who had comprehensively fulfilled their mission would now be left behind unless they made their way back within a few hours. The full weight of calumnies - both inside and outside the Congo -would fall upon us as soon as we left. My troops were a mixed bunch, and my investigations suggested that I could extract up to 20 to follow me, this time with knitted brows. And then what would I do? All the leaders were pulling out, the peasants were displaying ever greater hostility towards us. But I was deeply pained at the thought of simply departing as we had come, leaving behind defenceless peasants and armed men whose poor battle sense left them effectively defenceless, defeated and with a feeling of betrayal.
For me, to stay in the Congo was not a sacrifice - not for a year, or even for the five years with which I had scared my men. It was part of a concept of struggle that had fully taken shape in my brain. I could reasonably expect six or eight men to accompany me without furrowed brows. But the rest would do it as a duty, either towards me personally, or as a moral duty to the revolution; I would be sacrificing people who could not muster any enthusiasm to fight.
In reality, the thought of remaining in the Congo continued to haunt me long into the night, and perhaps I did not so much take the decision as become one fugitive more. The way in which the Congolese comrades would view the evacuation seemed to me degrading; our withdrawal was a mere flight, or worse, we were accomplices in the deception with which people had been left on the land.
Moreover, who was I now? I had the feeling that, after my farewell letter to Fidel, the comrades began to see me as a man from other climes rather distant from Cuba's specific problems, and I could not bring myself to demand the final sacrifice of remaining behind. I spent the final hours like this, alone and perplexed, until the boats eventually put in at two o'clock in the morning, with a Cuban crew who arrived and set off immediately that very night.
There were too many people for the boats at that late hour. I set three o'clock as the last possible hour for departure, since it would be daylight at 5.30 and we would be in the middle of the lake. Work got under way on organising the evacuation. The sick went aboard, then the whole of Masengo's general staff - some 40 men chosen by himself - and finally all the Cubans. It was a plaintive, inglorious spectacle; I had to chase away men who kept imploring us to take them too; there was no element of grandeur in this retreat, no gesture of defiance. The machine-guns were in position, and I kept the men at the ready, as usual, in case they tried to intimidate us by attacking from the land. But nothing like that happened. There was just a lot of grumbling, while the leader of the would-be escapees cursed in time with the beating of the loose moorings.