The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,105

a third, and it was this third who told him he should move to the van compartment. When Gandhi refused, and said they would have to remove him, the official called a police constable; the constable pushed him and his luggage away. Gandhi settled down to waiting through the night. It was very cold. He had an overcoat in his luggage, but thought that if he asked for it he would be insulted. He did a lot of heart-searching that night. Should he go back to India? Should he stay and fight? Should he go on to Pretoria and not mind? He thought he should stay and fight the disease of prejudice, suffering in the process if he had to. At the end of this heart-searching he decided to take the next available train to Pretoria.

If that was all about him in a crisis he would not be Gandhi. But he was already Gandhi—in addition to everything else, a man of forms, a man of the law, with faith in the law (not yet faith in the faith), and the next morning he sent a long telegram to the general manager of the railway. The train he boarded (with the bedding ticket he had refused at Maritzburg) took him to Charlestown. The Calvary continued there. There was no railway between Charlestown and Johannesburg in those days; there was only a stage coach, and the man in charge of it was an absolute thug. He tormented Gandhi, not allowing him to sit inside, and then requiring him to sit not on the box beside the driver but on the footboard. He knocked Gandhi about so badly that the other passengers objected.

The coach stopped for the night in the small village of Standerton (not on any biggish map now). There were Indians there, sent by Gandhi’s employer to receive Gandhi. So there was protection, and Gandhi used the lull to write a full letter to the agent of the coach company. He got an encouraging reply: the coach from Standerton would be bigger, and the thuggish leader would not be on it. The Indians who were looking after him took him to the coach in the evening, found him a good seat, and so, at last, he reached Johannesburg safely. To do the final leg of the journey, to Pretoria, in the style he insisted on as a lawyer—first class—he took the precaution of writing a note to the station master telling him who and what he was, going in person to buy the ticket (one sovereign) and wearing a frock-coat and necktie (there is a photograph of Gandhi in South Africa in this garb, and if we assume that his wardrobe was limited, it is possible that this photograph shows Gandhi as he went to the Johannesburg ticket office). And then, as so often happens when we prepare too much for trouble, there was none. The man in the ticket office was not South African. He was from Holland, and he was all courtesy and friendship.

Gandhi at this stage believed in the British Empire. He believed that Indians in South Africa were discriminated against because they were politically indifferent, made no representations and were not organised. When the legal work that had brought him to South Africa was done (he persuaded the parties in dispute to accept arbitration), he prepared to go back to India. He went to Durban to wait for a ship. While he was there he saw an item in the local newspaper about the Indian Franchise: there was before the Natal legislature a bill that sought to disenfranchise the Indians of the province. Gandhi was shocked, but the rich Indian businessmen he spoke to knew nothing about it, and were not too concerned. That was even more shocking; and what they decided to do after a little discussion was to shift the burden of protest to Gandhi.

So Gandhi postponed his return to India. It happened like that again and again; his vision of Indian disabilities widened; Gandhi’s one year in South Africa stretched in the end to twenty years. He had been very young and untrained, absurdly shy, only a lawyer who could draft memorials, when he came to South Africa; he was in middle life when he left, the lawyer subsumed in the mahatma, his political tools perfected: civil disobedience, the fast, his own spirituality.

It had all begun to happen on that terrible journey from Durban to Maritzburg to Charlestown to Standerton to Johannesburg to Pretoria.