South Africa Years: The Making of a Activist
How a young Indian lawyer's experiences with racial discrimination in South Africa transformed him into a political activist and shaped his philosophy of nonviolent resistance.
A Lawyer Confronts Racism
In 1893, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi arrived in South Africa as a 23-year-old lawyer hired to handle a civil dispute. He planned to stay one year. He stayed twenty-one. The experience that changed everything came almost immediately: he was thrown off a first-class train at Pietermaritzburg station for refusing to move to a lower-class carriage despite holding a valid ticket. That night, shivering on the station platform, Gandhi later said he resolved to fight racial discrimination rather than accept it.
South Africa's Indian community — mostly indentured laborers and merchants — faced systematic discrimination. They were denied voting rights, required to carry registration passes, and subjected to a special tax. Gandhi organized the Natal Indian Congress in 1894 and began developing the tactics he would later take back to India.