Natal Indian Congress

• 1. Introduction

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  The Natal Indian Congress was born on the 22nd of August 1894, and for exactly one hundred years it shaped the fate of Indian South Africans. Its founder was a young lawyer named Mahatma Gandhi, then working as an attorney in Natal. What prompted Gandhi to act was a piece of discriminatory legislation threatening Indian merchants in the colony, and the organisation he built to fight it would outlast his departure from South Africa by decades.

  By the time the first post-apartheid elections arrived in 1994, the NIC had passed through phases that read almost like geological strata: bold origins, a sharp leftward turn, the terror of apartheid repression, a decade of near-extinction, a dramatic revival, and finally a quiet dissolution into the broader liberation movement. Along the way it built a pact between African and Indian political leaders, sheltered activists in a foreign consulate, and placed its members into the first democratically elected parliament. The questions worth asking are how a narrow merchants' lobby became a force in the struggle against apartheid, why it nearly ceased to exist in the 1960s, and what it chose to do when South Africa at last moved toward democracy.

• 2. Merchants and Petitions

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  Abdoola Hajee Adam Jhaveri, known as Dada Abdulla, became the inaugural president when the NIC was formally established, while Gandhi took the role of honorary secretary. Membership in those early years was deliberately restricted. A joining fee of three pounds kept the organisation confined to the educated class of Indian traders and property-owners.

  The organisation's primary method was the petition. Rather than confrontation, the NIC sought to protect the economic and political standing of Indian merchants through extra-parliamentary protest and appeals to authority. Critics noted that Gandhi's NIC was highly reluctant to cooperate with other racial groups, a stance that would mark the organisation for decades.

  The NIC did affiliate with Indian organisations in other provinces during the early 1920s, when an umbrella body called the South African Indian Congress was established. That connection gave the NIC a wider platform, but the character of the organisation remained cautious and class-bound. A more radical challenge was building from within, and it would arrive from a rival body formed outside the NIC's walls.

• 3. The Coup of 1945

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  The rival organisation was called the Natal Indian Association, and within it sat a loosely constituted grouping known as the Nationalist Bloc, shaped by the ideology of socialism and racial liberation. When the NIA merged into the NIC in 1943, this bloc did not dissolve. It formed a pressure group called the Anti-Segregation Council, led by a doctor named Monty Naicker.

  On the 21st of October 1945, at the NIC's annual elective conference, Naicker's faction moved decisively. The moderate leadership under A. I. Kajee and P. R. Pather was ousted, and Naicker was installed as president. Others associated with the political coup included Doctor Goonam, I. C. Meer, George Ponnen, H. A. Naidoo, and Marimuthu Pragalathan Naicker.

  The shift was not a complete break from the NIC's past. Naicker's more confrontational approach was still framed within Gandhi's programme of satyagraha, the discipline of non-violent resistance. What had changed was the target. The new leadership did not just want better treatment for Indian merchants. It wanted to engage the structure of racial oppression directly, and it would do so in ways that brought unprecedented alliances into view.

• 4. The Ghetto Act Campaign

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  The Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Act was the trigger. Critics called it the Ghetto Act, and the South African Indian Congress led a campaign of passive resistance against it beginning on the 13th of June 1946. In Natal, the NIC spearheaded the effort.

  The campaign ran for two years and resulted in nearly 2,000 related arrests. Alongside the defiance came a historic diplomatic initiative. In March 1947, Naicker joined his counterpart in the Transvaal Indian Congress, Yusuf Dadoo, in signing a tripartite cooperation agreement with Alfred Xuma, president of the African National Congress. All three signatories held medical degrees, and the document became known as the Doctors' Pact. Its language promised "the fullest co-operation between the African and Indian peoples".

  The pact was a landmark. For an organisation that had begun as a merchants' lobby resistant to cooperation with other racial groups, committing to joint action with the ANC represented a fundamental shift in purpose. That alliance would be tested repeatedly in the years ahead, beginning with the introduction of formal apartheid by the National Party government elected in 1948.

• 5. Defiance and Alliance

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  The NIC joined the 1952 Defiance Campaign through the South African Indian Congress, alongside the ANC and the Coloured Franchise Action Council. NIC offices were raided alongside those of the ANC, and NIC leaders submitted for arrest as acts of deliberate civil disobedience.

  At the ANC's conference in November 1952, the president of the Natal ANC, James Njongwe, told his party that the "greatest achievement of our Defiance Campaign has been the welding of a... singleness of purpose and the development of a common South African outlook between Indians and black Africans". The SAIC signed the Freedom Charter at the 1955 Congress of the People, and several NIC leaders, including Naicker and Billy Nair, became defendants in the Treason Trial that followed.

  Those years forged bonds that would prove durable even across periods of suppression. Billy Nair's name would appear again decades later, in another moment of peril, in a British consulate in Durban.

• 6. The Years of Fear

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  After the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, the apartheid government banned the ANC and conducted mass arrests across the country. The NIC itself was not banned, but its membership was gutted. Billy Nair and Ebrahim Ebrahim were imprisoned for their dual membership of Umkhonto we Sizwe. M. P. Naicker, H. A. Naidoo, and George Ponnen, who were members of the South African Communist Party, went into exile. Monty Naicker, Dawood Seedat, J. N. Singh, and I. C. Meer faced prolonged banning orders under the Suppression of Communism Act. Forced removals of Indians under the Group Areas Act fractured the civic networks that had sustained political mobilisation.

  Mewa Ramgobin later described the organisation as having been "dormant and moribund, a harsher term would be defunct". Ela Gandhi, granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi and wife of Ramgobin, recalled the period: "really dark years when we felt complete disillusionment. The bannings took place in 1963, the arrests took place within 3 years and there was a deep sort of gloom and unhappiness. There was a lot of fear in the community... People didn't know what was legal and what was illegal and that fear of being banned or being arrested was there because of the uncertainty."

  The NIC entered a decade of dormancy. What would pull it back from extinction was not internal momentum but a threat from outside: the apartheid government's creation of the South African Indian Council, a body activists feared would be used to co-opt Indian political dissent.

• 7. Revival and Tension

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  Mewa Ramgobin and several colleagues discussed the danger posed by the South African Indian Council in June 1971. That conversation led to a community meeting later that month at Bolton Hall in Durban, where those present agreed to revive the NIC and set up an ad hoc committee, chaired by Ramgobin, to do it. Within a month, twenty-nine NIC branches had been established across the province.

  The NIC was officially relaunched on the 2nd of October 1971, at a convention held at the Phoenix Settlement. The date was Gandhi's birthday. Albert Luthuli's widow, Nokukhanya Bhengu, opened the convention. Two weeks before the event, Ramgobin had been banned and could not attend. George Sewpersadh took the presidency in his place, though Sewpersadh himself was banned from 1973 to 1978.

  The revival sparked immediate controversy. Activists from the Black Consciousness movement protested outside Bolton Hall, arguing that reviving an organisation built on Indian identity would undermine solidarity among all oppressed non-white groups, as defined by Steve Biko's philosophy. Two prominent Black Consciousness activists of Indian descent, Saths Cooper and Strini Moodley, opposed the revival but joined the NIC executive anyway. In Moodley's words, it was "primarily because we wanted to change the way in which they were thinking". Cooper resigned from the executive in June 1972.

  Farouk Meer, brother of Fatima Meer, admitted that in 1971 the NIC was "nothing more than a protest voice", raising issues through petitions and press statements and was "certainly not mass-based". That began to change from the late 1970s, when younger activists including Pravin Gordhan, Yunus Mohamed, Zak Yacoob, Charm and Maggie Govender, and Roy Padayachie brought civic organisations like the Chatsworth Housing Action Committee and the Durban Housing Committee into the NIC's orbit.

• 8. United Front, Final Act

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  In June 1975, the NIC resolved formally that it opposed the South African Indian Council and participation in apartheid structures. It formed the Anti-South African Indian Council Committee in November 1977, chaired once again by Monty Naicker. When the Tricameral Parliament was established under the 1983 constitution, creating an Indian-only House of Delegates, the NIC extended the same boycott stance to the new body.

  In January 1983, the NIC responded positively to a call from the Transvaal Indian Congress for a broad popular front. When the United Democratic Front was launched later that year, the NIC was a founding affiliate, with three NIC members on the inaugural UDF regional executive in Natal. The NIC's campaign to boycott the 1984 Tricameral elections drew the attention of apartheid security forces. Four NIC members, Sewpersadh, Ramgobin, Naidoo, and Billy Nair, were among the Durban Six who evaded arrest by taking refuge in the British consulate in Durban. All but Nair were later charged with treason in the Pietermaritzburg Treason Trial and subsequently acquitted.

  In the late 1980s, Nair and Pravin Gordhan became operatives in the ANC's Operation Vula. When the ANC and SACP were unbanned in 1990 and negotiations began, the NIC and its Transvaal counterpart held discussions with the ANC about their future. In June 1990, the NIC and TIC decided at a joint meeting to disband and join the ANC. Both were represented independently at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa in 1991, but in March 1993 they jointly reversed the disbandment decision to help mobilise minority support for the ANC in the approaching election.

  During the 1994 general election, which fell within months of the NIC's own centenary, many of its leaders, including Ela Gandhi, Gordhan, Ramgobin, Yunus Carrim, and Nair, were elected to represent the ANC in the National Assembly or provincial legislatures. The NIC never formally disbanded. It simply, in the words of those who remembered it, "faded into the folds of history".