The Role of Indian South Africans: From Gandhi to Apartheid and Beyond

The story of Indian South Africans is one of the most layered chapters in the broader history of the South African diaspora. It stretches across more than 160 years – from the arrival of indentured labourers on sugar plantations in the 1860s to the complexities of post-apartheid identity politics today. At its centre is a community that has shaped, and been shaped by, some of the most consequential political upheavals of the modern world. And it begins, in many ways, with a young barrister who boarded a ship to Natal in 1893 with no intention of changing history.

How Indians came to South Africa 🔗

The Indian presence in South Africa did not begin with political activism – it began with colonial labour demand. Between 1860 and 1911, over 140,000 indentured labourers were brought from India to South Africa, predominantly to work the sugar plantations of Natal in conditions that amounted to semi-slavery. Most were Tamil- and Telugu-speakers from south India, with a smaller number of Hindi-speakers from the north. Alongside them came a distinct group – Gujarati Muslim merchants and traders – who formed the foundation of an Indian commercial class.

Once their indenture contracts ended, many workers chose to stay rather than return to India, accepting land grants and setting up small enterprises. This alarmed colonial authorities and white settlers, who responded with a wave of legislation restricting Indian movement, trade, and land ownership. Indians were prohibited by statute from living in the Orange Free State, needed special permits to travel between provinces, and faced continuous pressure to repatriate. The community was, from the outset, legally marginalised – and it was this marginalisation that would draw one particular newcomer into political life.

Gandhi in South Africa: activism, contradiction, and transformation 🔗

Mohandas Gandhi arrived in South Africa in May 1893 as a 23-year-old barrister, to assist an Indian merchant in a civil lawsuit. He had no prior political experience. What he encountered – racial humiliation, systematic discrimination, and the collective vulnerability of the Indian community – changed the course of his life and, eventually, world history.

Gandhi founded the Natal Indian Congress in 1894 and the Transvaal British Indian Association in 1903, both designed to defend Indian civil rights. In 1906, he launched the Satyagraha movement – a form of nonviolent civil resistance that would later define the anti-colonial struggle in India and inspire movements worldwide. In 1908, Gandhi and 3,000 peaceful protesters burned their registration certificates in defiance of discriminatory laws. After years of sustained resistance, the South African Prime Minister General Smuts signed an agreement accepting the movement’s main demands.

The contested legacy: civil rights champion or racial exclusionist? 🔗

Gandhi’s South African legacy is not uncomplicated. While his development of Satyagraha represents a genuine contribution to political resistance, historians have documented troubling aspects of his views during those same years. Throughout his stay in South Africa, Gandhi repeatedly underlined shared Indo-Aryan roots between Indians and Europeans, arguing the British Empire should treat Indians more respectfully than Black Africans. He used derogatory language about Black Africans in his writings and, according to scholars, actively sought to distance Indians from Africans in the racial hierarchy of colonial South Africa.

Some historians argue his efforts to improve the status of the Indian community were primarily focused on ensuring Africans were treated worse than Indians – a goal of greater social inequality rather than universal equality. However, historian Ramachandra Guha has also noted that the types of discrimination burdening Indian immigrants would subsequently be applied more systematically to Black Africans under apartheid. Gandhi’s legacy thus occupies a difficult space: architect of a powerful resistance philosophy, yet one whose moral vision during his South African years was far from universal.

What is not in dispute is the long-term influence of his methods. The first major mass movement against apartheid – the Defiance Campaign of 1952 – used methods pioneered by Gandhi, with African and Indian protesters defying racial laws together. The tools of nonviolent resistance outlasted the contradictions of their originator.

Under apartheid: legal segregation and resistance 🔗

When the National Party came to power in 1948 and formally instituted apartheid, Indian South Africans were legally classified as a separate racial group. The Group Areas Act of 1950 forcibly relocated Indian families into designated townships – South African Indians living in KwaZulu-Natal were uprooted from their communities and moved 20-30 km away to Indian-only townships. The Population Registration Act categorised everyone by race, and this categorisation dictated where people could live, study, and work.

Indians were often in direct economic competition with Africans, usually receiving comparatively favourable treatment in wages and opportunities, which contributed to ongoing tensions between the two communities. In January 1949, anti-Indian riots erupted in Durban, leaving 142 people dead – a stark indicator of how strained inter-communal relations had become under colonial and early apartheid conditions.

Yet Indian political leaders increasingly moved toward solidarity with the African majority. The Congress Alliance – bringing together the ANC, the South African Indian Congress (SAIC), and other groups – became the backbone of organised anti-apartheid resistance. In June 1955, the ANC and the SAIC joined other organisations to sponsor the Congress of the People, where 3,000 delegates gathered at Kliptown and adopted the Freedom Charter, declaring that South Africa belonged to all who lived in it, regardless of race.

Indian leaders at the forefront of the struggle 🔗

Several figures of Indian descent became central to the anti-apartheid movement. Dr. Yusuf Dadoo, Monty Naicker, and Ahmed Kathrada – the last of whom was imprisoned alongside Nelson Mandela on Robben Island – played leading roles in the ANC and the broader liberation movement. The Indian community was also active in trade unions, helping mobilise labour resistance against exploitative working conditions. Many Indians came to identify with broader anti-apartheid and liberation politics, mounting substantial boycotts against the tricameral elections of 1983, which had been designed to co-opt Indians and Coloureds into the ruling structure. Their refusal to participate strengthened solidarity with Black South Africans.

India’s international response: from trade embargo to UN diplomacy 🔗

The activism of Indian South Africans was not fought in isolation. The government of India played a pivotal role in internationalising the struggle against apartheid – and it did so earlier than almost any other country. India became the first country to sever trade relations with South Africa for its apartheid policies in 1946, when Jawaharlal Nehru’s interim government did so.

Under Nehru’s leadership, India imposed sanctions on South Africa, arguing that its apartheid regime directly violated the UN Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights. This was not merely a symbolic stance. India’s first UN resolution, introduced in 1946 under the title “Treatment of Indians in the Union of South Africa,” became an annual agenda item for seventeen years, during which Indian diplomats worked to galvanise global opinion against racism at the United Nations. The item was eventually merged in 1962 with a broader resolution on apartheid itself.

India co-sponsored a 1962 UN resolution calling for sanctions against South Africa, and the UN simultaneously established a Special Committee against Apartheid. India worked consistently to put the issue of apartheid on the agenda of the UN, the Non-Aligned Movement, and other multilateral organisations, and supported the imposition of comprehensive international sanctions. The ANC maintained a representative office in New Delhi from the 1960s onward.

India severed full diplomatic relations with South Africa in the early 1950s, and those ties were only formally resumed after Nelson Mandela’s release in 1990. India and South Africa signed a Strategic Partnership agreement in March 1997 during Mandela’s visit to India, called the Red Fort Declaration – making South Africa India’s first strategic partner.

Post-apartheid South Africa: representation, tensions, and identity 🔗

The end of apartheid in 1994 and the election of Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s first democratically chosen president opened a new era. For Indian South Africans, it brought both genuine opportunities and new complications.

Politically, the community found representation through the ANC’s non-racial framework. Leaders of Indian descent such as Pravin Gordhan and Essop Pahad served in post-apartheid governments, and the community’s historical alignment with the Congress movement gave them a degree of political visibility. The political, religious, cultural, and linguistic rights of South African Indians after apartheid remain legally and constitutionally well-protected.

However, full integration has proven elusive. Indian South Africans in the post-apartheid era find themselves sandwiched between an economically dominant white class and the Black African majority – a position that creates persistent social friction and political vulnerability. Despite over 150 years of presence in the country, Indians are still sometimes viewed as a foreign presence and find themselves having to justify their belonging to South Africa as a homeland.

The question of identity and belonging 🔗

Perhaps the most complex challenge for Indian South Africans today is one of identity. The apartheid system imposed rigid racial categories that, paradoxically, also created dense, tight-knit communities built around religion, language, and shared experience. The post-apartheid state has encouraged a “rainbow nation” vision of inclusive national identity – but moving from legal non-racialism to lived belonging is a different matter.

In the post-apartheid period, Indian identities have been further complicated by external factors such as the rise of the BJP in India, the struggle of Tamils in Sri Lanka, and the Global War on Terror, all of which reframe how the community is perceived internationally and domestically. By 1960, 95% of the South African Indian population had been born in South Africa – yet many continue to experience what scholars describe as the tension of being neither fully “Indian” nor fully recognised as South African.

The greater challenge lies in reshaping how communities come to think about each other and themselves – colonial constructions of hierarchy that have become embedded in social dispositions and are amplified by ongoing economic inequality. Post-apartheid South Africa remains, in many respects, still working through the long aftermath of three centuries of racial engineering.

A diaspora that shaped a nation – and international diplomacy 🔗

The history of Indian South Africans is inseparable from some of the most significant political developments of the twentieth century. Their community produced Gandhi’s first experiments in nonviolent resistance; their leaders helped draft the Freedom Charter; their diplomats built the first international anti-apartheid coalition at the United Nations. And in the post-apartheid era, they continue to navigate questions about belonging, representation, and cultural survival that are relevant to diaspora communities everywhere.

This is not a history of a marginal community on the edges of South African life. It is a history woven into the very foundations of the country’s political identity – complicated, contested, and still unfolding.

What do you think? Given that Gandhi’s methods of nonviolent resistance inspired the anti-apartheid struggle decades after his departure, how do we weigh a historical figure’s ideological contributions against the racial blind spots of their time? And in a post-apartheid South Africa still marked by racial inequality, what would genuine integration – rather than legal inclusion – actually look like for minority diaspora communities?

References

1. https://minorityrights.org/communities/indians/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_South_Africans
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7. https://cedar.wwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1023&context=politicalscience_facpubs
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during_apartheid
9. https://eng.globalaffairs.ru/articles/india-sanctions-fomin-kryuchkova/
10. https://soas-repository.worktribe.com/output/347239/the-hardy-annual-a-history-of-indias-first-un-resolution
11. https://gldc.ukzn.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/2015-Nehru-Alternation.pdf
12. https://cgidurban.gov.in/india-south-africa-relations
13. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19438192.2017.1319098
14. https://gldc.ukzn.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/2010-Indians-in-Post-Apartheid-South-Africa-JSS.pdf
15. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0016718503000605
16. https://africasacountry.com/2018/06/being-coloured-and-indian-in-south-africa-after-apartheid