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big for his britches. The agent’s reply was wholly unapologetic, telling Gandhi to sue if he wished. Nonplussed, Gandhi sought the advice of Mehta, who happened to be in the area on a case. Mehta’s reply was just what one would expect from a wiser and older hand. Transmitting his advice to Gandhi through a third party, Mehta wrote: “Such things are the common experience of many vakils and barristers. He is still fresh from England, and hot-blooded. He does not know British officers. If he would earn something and have an easy time here, let him . . . pocket the insult. He will gain nothing by proceeding against the sahib, and on the contrary will very likely ruin himself. Tell him he has yet to know life.”³² Gandhi took Mehta’s advice, despite its being “bitter as poison” to him.³³ “Never again shall I place myself in such a false position, never again shall I exploit friendship in this way,” Gandhi pledged to himself.³⁴ It was a pledge he was to honor for a lifetime.

      A SOUTH AFRICAN OFFER

      Gandhi had no hope of reconciling with the agent. As a result, he believed this experience destroyed any chance of establishing a Rajkot practice, for it was in the agent’s court that Gandhi would have made the lion’s share of his appearances. Because Gandhi’s practice depended on fees, he and his brother recognized that Gandhi needed employment that did not rely for its success on being in a courtroom run by a hostile judge. Salaried employment as a government minister or as a judge, for example, would offer Gandhi an opportunity to escape the consequences of his disastrous encounter with the agent, but jobs such as these could not be had simply for the asking. Obtaining such positions required political intrigue, intrigue in which Gandhi now steadfastly refused to engage. His refusal exacted a price. Gandhi speaks in his memoirs of representing some clients in an effort to have their excessive land rent moderated. He failed at this and expresses dissatisfaction that the decision was based simply on the discretion of the authorities—the exercise of which he apparently was unwilling to influence in the usual Kathiawad way—and not upon a rule or regulation.

      Gandhi’s practice in Rajkot was earning him a modest living. But this was not the life of the successful barrister he and his family had envisioned. Indeed, everything about this work was wrong. It was routine, he had to pay commissions to get it, it did not come to him by virtue of his own reputation, and it took place in a legal and political world overflowing with rank corruption.

      Lakshmidas was not blind to his brother’s difficulties and to the ill effect they were having on his own fortunes. He apparently made it his task to contact his friends and business acquaintances in an effort to find a way out for Mohandas. Not knowing the momentous chain of events its offer would put in motion, a Porbandar business with ties to South Africa answered Lakshmidas’ call. Gandhi recalls Dada Abdulla and Company’s letter to his brother as stating:

      We have business in South Africa. Ours is a big firm, and we have a big case there in the Court, our claim being £40,000. It has been going on for a long time. We have engaged the services of the best vakils and barristers. If you sent your brother there, he would be useful to us and also to himself. He would be able to instruct our counsel better than ourselves. And he would have the advantage of seeing a new part of the world, and of making new acquaintances.³⁵

      Gandhi had questions about the offer. Was he expected to appear in court or simply to instruct counsel? How long was he expected to be in South Africa? What was the pay? The brothers arranged a meeting between Mohandas and Sheth Abdul Karim Jhaveri, an acquaintance of Lakshmidas and a partner in Dada Abdulla. Gandhi reports that the partner assured him that the job would not be difficult and that he envisioned Gandhi assisting the firm with its English-language correspondence. The company could offer him a fee of £105, first-class round-trip travel, the payment of all expenses while Gandhi was in the company’s employ, and an assurance that the job would take less than a year.

      

      Gandhi realized quite quickly that this was not a job to brag about. He knew that he “was hardly going there as a barrister,” but “as a servant of the firm.”³⁶ The advantages to taking this position in South Africa were numerous, however. In one stroke he could escape the political intrigue of Kathiawad, be done with the drudgery of drafting petitions and applications, avoid any further violation of the ethical proscriptions against paying commissions, send back £105 to his family,³⁷ take up work that appeared to call for no public speaking, and shake from his sandals the dust of the country in which he had failed as a barrister.

      Without haggling over the terms of his employment, without ruing his departure except for the “pang of parting” from his wife,³⁸ and without evincing so much as an inkling of understanding how this decision would change his life forever, he agreed to go to South Africa.

      Gandhi had had quite enough of India.

      THREE

      An Abundant and Regular Supply of Labour

      The self-interest of the European brought the Indian to South Africa; self-interest has sought to get rid of him from the country; self-interest, so far as this cannot be achieved, is determined to keep him in what is regarded as his place.

      J. F. HOFMEYR

      THERE COULD HARDLY BE A stranger and more complex setting for the formative years of Gandhi’s public life than the colony of Natal, to which he sailed in 1893. At the time of his arrival, Natal had all the economic, political, and social complexity one might expect from a place populated by native Africans, come upon by the Portuguese, and developed by the Dutch, before being wholly taken over by the British.

      Natal (from the Latin natus, “birth”) was given its name by the explorer Vasco da Gama, who, on his journey from Portugal to India, passed by Natal’s verdant coast at Christmastime in the year 1497. It was not da Gama’s fellow Portuguese, however, who were to leave a serious European mark on Natal. Dutch from the Cape colony, uncomfortable with the notion of color equality professed by the new British administration established there in 1815, entered the province in the early decades of the nineteenth century in search of fertile agricultural lands, ample native labor, and a setting where they could re-create a pleasant and secure way of life. This movement to Natal peaked with significant migrations to the region in the 1830s and the establishment of the Republic of Natalia in 1839, an ill-fated, short-lived Dutch endeavor that was never able to overcome serious financial and administrative difficulties.¹ The British, meanwhile, had established themselves along the coast, desirous of capitalizing on the rich farmlands that lay there and the harbor available for development at the coastal town of Durban.² The British declared Natal a dependency of the Cape colony in 1843 with little opposition from the Dutch, who recognized that their experiment in government had failed. In 1856 Natal became a separate colony from the Cape. Britain granted it responsible government in 1893,³ the year of Gandhi’s arrival.

      THE NATAL ECONOMY AND ITS DEMAND FOR LABOR

      The Europeans saw Natal’s fertile coastlands not with the eyes of tourists but those of capitalists. There they experimented with efforts to grow maize, cotton, indigo, arrowroot, tobacco, and coffee. Eventually they learned that the area was suited for the growing of a lucrative cash crop, sugar.⁴ The capital necessary to underwrite the sugar industry was available because banks had already been established in Natal. Labor, however, was another matter. The owners of the sugar plantations turned to what appeared to them a vast, untapped supply of labor in the native population, but most efforts to recruit native Africans as laborers ended in failure.⁵ Frustrated, the Europeans tried a series of moves, some bizarre, to find workers. They attempted to lure English farmhands, import convicts, and attract Chinese and Malays from the Far East. All these attempts were unsuccessful in producing the large stocks of reliable workers needed to run an agricultural enterprise. The situation became desperate, with the Natal Mercury warning that the lack of labor would “in the near future imperil the whole country.”⁶

      Finally, the thoughts of the plantation owners and others who favored a supply of cheap, reliable labor turned to India. Several years after the Colonial Office at the Cape of Good Hope broached the idea with the government of India,⁷ Natal in 1860 was able to negotiate a system of indentured labor that called for the importation of workers to be bound

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