He worked in South AfricaIn 1893, he accepted a one-year contract with an Indian company operating in Natal, South Africa. He became interested in the situation of the 150,000 compatriots residing there, fighting against laws that discriminated against Indians in South Africa through passive resistance and civil disobedience.
However, the incident that would serve as a catalyst for his political activism occurred several years later, when traveling to Pretoria, he was forcibly removed from the train at Pietermaritzburg station because he refused to move from the first class to the third class, Destined to the black people. Later, traveling on a stagecoach, he was beaten by the driver because he refused to give up his seat to a white-skinned passenger. In addition, in this trip, he suffered other humiliations when he was denied lodging in several hotels because of his race. This experience brought him much more in touch with the problems faced daily by black people in South Africa. Also, after suffering racism, prejudice and injustice in South Africa, he began to question the social situation of his countrymen and himself in the society of that country.
When his contract was terminated, he prepared to return to India. At the farewell party in his honor in Durban, leafing through a newspaper, it was reported that a law was being drafted in the Legislative Assembly of Natal to deny the vote to the Indians. He postponed his return to India and engaged in the task of elaborating various petitions, both to the Natal Assembly and to the British Government, trying to prevent that law from being approved. Although it did not achieve its objective, since the law was enacted, it managed, however, to draw attention to the problems of racial discrimination against the Indians in South Africa.
Gandhi in South Africa (1895).He expanded his stay in this country, founding the Indian Party of the Congress of Natal in 1894. Through this organization he was able to unite the Indian community in South Africa into a homogenous political force, flooding the press and government with allegations of violations of the Civil rights of the Indians and evidence of discrimination by the British in South Africa.
Gandhi returned to India shortly to take his wife and children to South Africa. Upon his return, in January 1897, a group of white men attacked him and tried to lynch him. As a clear indication of the values that would maintain throughout his life, he refused to report his attackers to justice, stating that it was one of his principles not to seek redress in court for damages inflicted on his person.
At the beginning of the South African War, Gandhi considered that the Indians should participate in this war if they aspired to legitimize themselves as citizens with full rights. Thus, he organized bodies of non-combatant volunteers to assist the British. However, at the end of the war, the situation of the Indians did not improve; In fact, continued to deteriorate.
In 1906, the government of Transvaal promulgated a law that forced all the Indians to register. This led to a massive protest in Johannesburg, where for the first time Gandhi adopted the platform called satyagraha ('attachment or devotion to truth') which consisted of a nonviolent protest.
Gandhi insisted that the Indians openly defy, but without violence, the enacted law, suffering the punishment that the government would impose. This challenge lasted for seven years in which thousands of Indians were imprisoned (including Gandhi on several occasions), beaten and even shot for protest, refuse to register, burn their registration cards and any other form of nonviolent rebellion. Although the government managed to suppress the Indians' protest, the denunciation abroad of the extreme methods used by the South African government finally forced the South African general Jan Christian Smuts to negotiate a solution with Mahatma Gandhi.
