(Natal Indian Congress stalwart, Rabbi Bugwandeen, addressing the people in Chatsworth in the 1980s)
Researching through my
articles and stories on the Natal Indian Congress between the early 1970s and
the early 1990s, I came across a lengthy historical feature that I had written sometime
in October 1987 for the Press Trust of India. The article is an historical
account of how the Natal Indian Congress played a vital role in representing
people of Indian-origin while fighting for the full political, social and
economic rights of all South Africans. The NIC committed itself to the freedom
of all South Africans ever since its formation in 1894 and right up to the
early 1990s.
The following was the Introduction
and the main article that the Press Trust of South Africa submitted to PTI and
other international media outlets at that time. I will publish the other
stories in another feature soon.
October 1987
INTRODUCTION
The Natal Indian Congress,
one of the oldest political organisations in South Africa which although not
banned, faces continuous repressive actions at the hands of the Pretoria
Government, has just successfully held its first national conference in nearly
a decade at a secret venue somewhere in Durban.
The conference – although organised
under the strains of the emergency regulations – attracted more than 200
delegates from 19 branches.
Marimuthu Subramoney (aka
Subry Govender) of the Press Trust of South Africa News Agency analyses some of
the conference resolutions and takes a look at the organisation that is playing
a pivotal role on behalf of the local Indian-origin community in the struggle
for full political rights for all South Africans.
NATAL INDIAN CONGRESS
REPRESENTS THE TENACITY OF LEADERS AGAINST OPPRESSION
The very fact that the Natal
Indian Congress organised a conference at a time when the Pretoria Government
is employing some of the most oppressive measures against all progressive
forces is a clear demonstration of the tenacity of South Africa’s
anti-apartheid Indian-origin leaders in the fight against continued white
minority rule and political domination in the country.
The calibre of the leaders it
has chosen to head the organisation and the content of its resolutions also demonstrates
that the Congress is head and shoulders above other organisations and people in
the Indian-origin community who masquerade as “leaders" of the community.
(Seated: (From left – George Sewpersadh,
M J Naidoo, Archie Gumede, Mewa Ramgobin, and Pravin Gordhan. Standing: (From
left) – , Swaminathan
Gounden, Dr Jerry Coovadia, Thumba Pillay, , Mrs Ela Ramgobin (Gandhi), Zac Yacoob (back), , Paul David, Roy Padaychie and Yunus Mahomed)
(Photo courtesy of Mr
Swaminathan Gounden)
All the leaders elected to
official positions have sometime or the other been banned, detained,
house-arrested, jailed and tried for High Treason in the continuing struggles
against the hegemonic rule of the white ruling class in South Africa.
(George Sewpersadh, Archie
Gumede, Billy Nair, Paul David, Mewa Ramgobin and M J Naidoo) (Photo _ Press
Trust of SA News Agency via Natal Indian Congress)
(Dr Jerry Coovadia)
A S Chetty (Photo courtesy Shan Pillay)
Those elected are Mr George
Sewpersadh (president), who has been banned, detained and tried for High
Treason; Mr Mewa Ramgobin (vice-resident), who has been banned for more than 17
years, detained and tried for High Treason; Mr Billy Nair (vice-president), who
has served 22 years on Robben Island; Dr Hoosen Coovadia (vice-president), who
has been harassed and intimidated; Mr A. S. Chetty (vice-president), who has
been banned, detained and refused a passport; Dr Farook Meer (joint secretary),
who has been detained and denied a passport; Mr Alf Karrim (Joint secretary),
who has been detained and refused a passport; and Mr Hashim Seedat (treasurer),
who has been refused a passport.
(Dr Farouk Meer (extreme
right) with some of the stalwarts at a function in Durban sometime in 2018). They
are Bishop Rubin Philip, Paddy Kearney, Swaminathan Gounden, Sonny Singh, and Dr
Dilly Naidoo) – Photo Subry Govender
Three other officials
elected, Mr Yunus Mahomed, Mr Praveen Gordhan and Mr Roy Padaychee, are
presently in hiding along with Mr Nair because of the emergency regulations.
All three activists have been previously detained and banned.
(Mr Roy Padaychie)
The Congress, which was one
of the strongest allies of the ANC when it was still a legal organisation,
adopted some of the most far-reaching resolutions that will propel the Indian-origin
community into the front-line of the anti-apartheid struggle.
The resolution that is bound
to further needle the ruling class is that in the Congress's viewpoint the
Indian-origin people are part of the oppressed and as such they should fully
involve themselves with other progressive forces in the attainment of a
non-racial, democratic and unfragmented South Africa. The Congress is of the
view that only through a non-racial and democratic political solution that
there could be a just social order in South Africa.
The Congress also rejected in
toto all apartheid structures, particularly the tri-cameral parliament which
was being used by some "opportunistic Indians to mislead" the Indian community.
The Congress, which received
messages of support from the Government of India and the ANC, also showed that
it was not only concerned about the situation in South Africa when it condemned
Pretoria's de-stabilising role in Southern Africa and called for the immediate
withdrawal of its troops from Angola and from Namibia.
The Congress also condemned
the United States, Britain, West Germany
and Japan for what it termed their collaboration with apartheid. The so-called
constructive engagement policies of President Ronald Regan of the United States
and Britain's Mrs Margaret Thatcher were seen by the Congress as mere
smokescreens to buttress racial domination and continued white minority rule in
South Africa.
(Mahatma Gandhi with activists with supported his Passive Resistance campaigns in the early 1900s. – Photo Mahatma Gandhi library Phoenix Centre)
The present high profile
anti-apartheid stances of the Congress has its genesis in the writings,
thoughts and leadership qualities of its founder, Mahatma Gandhi, in 1894 who
arrived in South Africa to take up the cause of not only discriminated Indian
traders but also to mobilise indentured sugar cane labourers against
exploitation and maltreatment by the white farmers in Natal. During his stay in
South Africa Gandhi not only formulated his policy of "satyagraha" or
"passive resistance" but laid the foundations for the involvement of
the Indian community in mass protest actions against racial discrimination.
In 1906 he was able to get
the Indians in the Transvaal to participate in passive resistance campaigns
against a law that affected their trading rights and in 1913 he mobilised both
traders and indentured labourers to participate in another passive resistance
campaign against a poll tax and a law that rendered illegal, Indian marriages.
When the second campaign
ended and when Gandhi finally left for India in 1914, he had successfully
emancipated Indian politics from the personal interests of the traders and the
way seemed paved for the emergence of a political movement comprising all sections of the Indian-origin
community. But this was never realised and the class cleavage between trader
and indentured - manifests itself even today in the policies and strategies
pursued by those who collude with the Pretoria Government on one side, and the
Natal Indian Congress and the Transvaal Indian Congress on the other.
After Gandhi's departure, the
local Indian-origin community suffered a leadership vacuum with the Natal
Indian Congress coming under the influence of the merchant class. Efforts to
consolidate the struggles of the Indian people took place in 1923, who at this
time were facing some of the worst forms of anti-Indian enactments, when the
Natal Indian Congress, the Transvaal British Indian Association and the Cape
British Indian Council established the South African Indian Congress. But in
spite of a spate of restrictive and humiliating laws and regulations directed
against the Indian community, the South African Indian Congress failed to
emulate Gandhi in embarking on passive resistance campaigns. This was mainly
due to the fact that the organisation had come under the control of the
merchant class - a group bent on preserving existing trading rights rather than
on regaining eroded human rights
. The merchant-controlled
SAIC adopted a weak-kneed attitude despite the union government adopting the
policy that the “Indian as a race in this country, is an alien element in the
population, and no solution of this question will be acceptable to the country
unless it results in a very considerable reduction of the Indian population in
this country".
While the SAIC failed the
Indian-origin community nationally, in Natal the Natal Indian Congress not only
failed to take up the issues of the indentured labourers but also failed to
enter into any co-operation with the African community. The question of whether
to co-operate with the white government or to identify with African and
Coloured nationalist movements widened the ideological divide between the
Congress, now under the control of the moderate A.I. Kajee - P. R. Pather
group, and a new group emerging under the leadership of Dr Monty Naicker, who
had just returned to the country after qualifying as a general medical practitioner
at the University of Edinburgh.
In 1943 when the Smuts
Government, passed the Trading and Occupation of Land Restriction Act (Pegging
Act), the Kajee-Pather group reached a compromise agreement with the government
instead of rejecting the act in toto.
Led by Dr Naicker, 12 members
of the NIC repudiated the agreement and formed themselves into the
Anti-Segregation Council to agitate for adult suffrage on a common roll. This
group finally ousted the conservative merchant leaders and took over control of
the Congress under the presidentship of Dr Naicker.
The conservative clique
resigned from the congress and formed themselves into the Natal Indian
Organisation - the forerunner of political parties we now find collaborating
with apartheid.
(Dr Monty Naicker with Dr Yusuf Dadoo in the 1960s) (Photo supplied by Mr Swaminathan Gounden)
Immediately after coming into
power, Dr Naicker and his group together with Dr Yusuf Dadoo of the Transvaal
Indian Congress launched the 1946 Passive Resistance Campaign against the
Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Act (Ghetto Act). Over the next
few years more than 2 000 resisters, including 300 women, courted arrest and
Dadoo and Naicker repeated Gandhi's initial act of resistance by illegally
crossing the Natal-Transvaal border.
The first act of official political
co-operation between Indians and Africans took place during this period when Dr
A.B. Xuma, president of the ANC, and a branch of the ANC expressed solidarity
with Indian resisters by joining the campaign.
In March 1947 Xuma, Dadoo and Naicker
officially signed a pact of co-operation to work together for full franchise
rights and equality with whites. In 1950 the Congress leaders in Natal and
Transvaal forged closer links with the African people when they succeeded in
getting Indian workers to join the ANC’s call for a stayaway from work as a
political protest.
In 1952 the ANC and the Indian congresses
once again demonstrated their unity of purpose when they jointly sponsored the
Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign - a campaign they saw as a tactical step
towards politicising the masses, inculcating a spirit of national
consciousness, and building the national liberation movements into mass
organisations of the people. It is doubtful whether the Defiance Campaign achieved
all its objectives, but for the Indian congress it led to the consolidation of
its ranks and the forging of indelible links with the ANC.
(Photo New Delhi)
The Prime Minister of India, Pundit
JawaharlalI Nehru, even recognised this broader struggle when in a speech in
London in June 1953 he said that the position of Indians in South Africa had
been deliberately allowed by his government to become a secondary issue to the
larger question of apartheid because it affected all black people. The Natal
Indian Congress with the Transvaal Indian Congress consolidated inter-racial
co-operation in June 1955 when they adopted the Freedom Charter along with the
ANC, the Coloured Peoples’ Congress and the Congress of Democrats (whites). The
role of the congress leaders was further highlighted when 20 of them were
charged with High Treason along with 136 other white, coloured and African
leaders immediately after the Congress of the People. Inspite of the treason
charges, Indians continued to participate in protests and often the ANC boycott
calls exceeded all expectations. For instance, in 1959 even some Indian traders
participated in the potato boycott.
(Dr Monty Naicker- Natal Indian Congres; Dr Yusuf Dadoo – Transvaal Indian Congress; with Nelson Mandela and other ANC freedom leaders) (Photo supplied by Swaminathan Gounden)
And in May 1961, Indians responded in large
numbers to Nelson Mandela's call for a three-day strike. However, in the aftermath
of the Sharpeville uprisings when leaders of the congress were either
imprisoned, banned or forced into exile, the Natal Indian Congress along with
other affiliates of the ANC, was effectively rendered impotent, 
bringing to an end another
era of militancy.
In the vacuum that was created over the
next decade the Pretoria Government has attempted to co-opt the Indian-origin
community with the collusion of nefarious political leaders now participating
in the tri-cameral parliament.
But its efforts were thwarted when the
Natal Indian Congress was revived by Mr Ramgobin in 1971. Inspite of the
subsequent bannings, detentions, restrictions and High Treason trials, the
Congress has managed to survive and broaden the struggle by actively initiating
the establishment of the United Democratic Front in 1983.
The holding of the conference now - albiet
under trying circumstances - has taken place at a time when there is a great
deal of debate among many political leaders as to whether there should not be a
change of strategy in order to advance the national democratic struggle.
Judging from the calibre of the officials
elected and the content of the resolutions adopted, it is clear that the Natal
Indian Congress will tackle the vital issues with necessary thought and care so
that the rights of not only the Indian-origin community but that of the broader
national democratic struggle will also be advanced.
Th
Natal Indian Congress is in good hands and there is no doubt that they will not
allow the Rajbansis’ and the Reddys’ (two Indians who are now the main
collaborators with the Botha regime) to mislead and misdirect the Indian-origin
community at a time when the fight against apartheid is gaining momentum every day.
- Press Trust of SA news agency October 1987
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