Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (21 page)

At this point, though, things were not yet settled, and there was in fact some lobbying from non-whites in South Africa. In June Abdullah Abdurahman, a Cape Malay doctor trained in Glasgow who was president of the nascent African Political Organisation, wrote to Churchill from Cape Town, enclosing a petition addressed to the King. It argued that non-African ‘Coloured’ British subjects who had emigrated to the Transvaal and the ORC, and their descendants, were not ‘natives’ under the terms of Vereeniging. Therefore it would be wrong to deny them the franchise, especially given that several thousand of them had previously enjoyed voting rights in Cape Colony.
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(This was Milner’s interpretation too.) Abdurahman also led a deputation to Elgin in London, but the protests were to no avail.
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The ministers and officials were at one with the recent committee of inquiry, which had concluded that, as white South Africans took ‘natives’ to include all non-whites, it was politically impossible to proceed on the basis of a more legalistic interpretation. Hence Churchill’s defence of this aspect of the constitution in the Commons: ‘I am not going to plunge into the argument as to what “native” means or as to its legal or technical character [. . .] it is undoubted that the Boers would regard it as a breach of that treaty, if the franchise were in the first instance extended to any persons who are not white men’. He expressed some ‘regret’ at this situation, as did Elgin in the Lords, but in Churchill’s case at least it was of the mild rather than the tortured variety.
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It must be admitted that the difficulties of any other course of action would have been severe, and yet one cannot fail to understand Abdurahman’s sense that his people had been betrayed. In his Presidential Address to the African People’s Organisation, he launched a coruscating attack on the British record. Whereas Churchill had likened the ORC to a model republic, Abdurahman said, ‘it was far from that as Hell from Heaven [. . .] The best thing Mr Churchill could do was to draw a veil over this black page of South African administration.’ The Coloured people had been told that the resolution of the injustices they faced depended on British victory in the Boer War, he said: ‘Mr Chamberlain promised the franchise clearly and plainly in the name of the Imperial Government.’ But after exploiting their grievances the British had cast them aside.
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IV

In November 1906, following in the footsteps of Smuts and Abdurahman, Mohandas K. Gandhi arrived in London.
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He already knew the city well. Born in Western India in 1869 into a privileged Hindu family, he had been sent to Britain as a young man to study law. His three years in Britain made a profound impression. Late-Victorian London was a cosmopolitan place; it was not too difficult for him to find vegetarian restaurants. He became a member of the Vegetarian Society’s committee and made friends with a number of fringe religious thinkers. It was, in fact, his contacts with Eastern-influenced British esotericism that stimulated his serious interest in Hinduism, his understanding of which was unorthodox.
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He was not the first or last Indian student to find his return home a rude shock: accustomed to being treated on an equal basis in the free atmosphere of London, he found the attitude of the British sahibs insulting. Things were worse still when he arrived in South Africa in 1893 on a business mission. On the way to Pretoria he was ejected from his railway compartment, in spite of having a first-class ticket, because a white passenger refused to sit with an Indian. Rather than tolerate such treatment he spent most of the next two decades in South Africa fighting for the Indian community’s rights. His wartime ambulance work was motivated by the conviction – in spite of his sympathy for the Boer desire for independence – that it was his duty as a British citizen to help defend the British Empire. As he recalled in his memoirs, ‘I held then that India could achieve her complete emancipation only within and through the British Empire.’
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It was a new threat to the rights of Indians in the Transvaal that now brought Gandhi to London together with a Muslim colleague, H. O. Ally. This threat was the so-called ‘Black Ordinance’, proposed by the existing Crown Colony government, which would shut out new Indian immigration to the Transvaal and force Asians already living there to register themselves on pain of expulsion from the territory. These measures were a sop to Boer opinion; Smuts had spoken of eradicating the ‘Asiatic cancer’, and Louis Botha, the leader of his party, intended to ‘drive the coolies out of the country’.
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Gandhi and Ally arrived at pivotal moment, shortly before the new constitution came into effect; they hoped for London’s veto of the Ordinance. For his part, Churchill hoped that, if the Colonial Office could delay action sufficiently, responsibility for the controversial measure could be passed to the incoming elected Transvaal government. ‘The new parliament may shoulder the burden’, he minuted. ‘Why should we? Dawdle or disallow – preferably the former.’
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On 8 November Gandhi and Ally met with Elgin, who was not completely unsympathetic but gave them no indication of his decision.
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The Secretary of State had recently received a petition signed by 437 Indians in South Africa denying that Gandhi had any authority to speak for them, and he gave the startled delegates a hint of this.
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(Churchill was clearly informed as he subsequently gave details of the petition in a House of Commons answer.)
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A few days later, having obtained more information, Gandhi and Ally responded with the claim – which Colonial Office officials seemed to accept – that the signatures had been obtained under false pretences. Gandhi also suggested that William Godfrey, one of the petition’s organizers, was ‘ “touched” in the head’.
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Gandhi and Ally were not granted their request for a further interview with Elgin in order to put things straight, but at the end of the month they did see Churchill, who was still inclined to ‘dawdle’ with regard to the Ordinance.
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This meeting was significant as the sole occasion on which Gandhi and Churchill met. The only record was made by Gandhi:

We met Mr Winston Churchill at the time fixed by him. He spoke nicely. He asked both of us whether we were not afraid of responsible government in case the Ordinance were refused assent. What if a worse act were to be passed by the new Government? We replied that we could not imagine an act worse than the present Ordinance, and that we had asked for refusal of assent leaving the future to take care of itself.

After Churchill promised to think about it, Ally emphasized his own loyalty to the British, telling him that he had been present at Durban Point to welcome him after his escape from Boer captivity. ‘And it was with the same Mr Churchill that he now pleaded for redress on behalf of the Indian community.’ At this, Churchill ‘smiled, patted Mr Ally on the back, and said that he would do all he could’. Gandhi noted: ‘This answer added to our hopes.’
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Churchill seems to have made a generally good impression on Gandhi. In 1935 the latter remarked to a friend that he had ‘got a good recollection of Mr Churchill when he was in the Colonial Office and somehow or other since then I have held the opinion that I can always rely on his sympathy and goodwill’.
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This was a remarkably sunny comment, given the differences that the two had had in the meantime. Churchill, for his part, never made any reference to the meeting, and we cannot know for certain that it made any lasting impact on him. It may not have been insignificant for the future, though, that Gandhi had already been portrayed to him, via the apparently spurious petition, as a professional agitator who did not really speak for those he claimed to represent.

In the short term Gandhi and Ally’s mission appeared successful. When their boat stopped at Madeira on the way back to Africa, they received cablegrams telling them that Elgin had refused assent to the Ordinance.
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But it was not much of a victory. Contrary to British expectations, at the Transvaal election of February 1907 the Het Volk party under Botha secured a majority. Hardly had it taken office than it passed a new law, practically identical to the rejected Ordinance. In May Churchill announced that the Colonial Office declined to intervene.
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His attitude seemed to be one of resignation.
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Gandhi now fought the Transvaal government with his new weapon of satyagraha, or non-violent resistance, which he would later use to such effect in India itself. In response to Churchill’s declaration that the people of South Africa had the freedom to make whatever laws they wished to in respect of Asiatic immigration and the treatment of non-whites, he observed that ‘the local governments in South Africa will be able to attack the Indian community with impunity’. He added: ‘The only weapon with which to ward off the attack is our resolution on gaol-going.’
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In January 1908, having refused to register with the authorities as the law required, he was sent to prison for the first time. It fell to Smuts, as the Transvaal’s Colonial Secretary, to negotiate with him to reach a compromise solution whereby Indians would register voluntarily. Gandhi came to believe that Smuts had reneged on a promise to repeal the law in exchange for this concession; the situation reached a kind of stalemate in the years before Gandhi’s return to India in 1914. As for Churchill, at the time of Gandhi’s jailing, he cabled High Commissioner Selborne: ‘Please tell Botha I am going to support his Government most strongly on the Indian question and that I thoroughly understand the views of white South Africa.’
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After his bruising first months in office, Churchill increasingly emphasized the continuity between his and Elgin’s policies and those implemented earlier by the Conservatives: ‘The rotation of the crops, he urged, was highly beneficial to the soil, and the Liberal party were but garnering the fruits of their predecessors.’
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We need not conclude, though, that Churchill’s period at the Colonial Office saw him shifting from Radicalism to reaction (which were at any rate not simple categories). His bullishness about the Empire’s long-term prospects never wavered. In 1906 he rebuked an official who had predicted it would not last another hundred years: ‘such pessimism is unworthy of the C.O.’.
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But in spite of the strength of his commitment, others continued to regard him as reckless. Towards the end of Churchill’s tenure Selborne was still fulminating at his ‘mad and wicked’ speeches in the Commons, ‘goading at the British’. In fury, he wrote: ‘I see Winston veering round to a position in which he will say the whole Boer war was iniquitous!’
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On the face of it, Churchill’s positions sometimes seemed contradictory. Almost simultaneously with his reassurance to Botha that he understood the concerns of white South Africans, Churchill wrote a Colonial Office minute condemning British punitive raids against the rebellious Kisii tribe in East Africa: ‘It looks like a butchery [. . .] Surely it cannot be necessary to go on killing these defenceless people on such an enormous scale.’
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In Churchill’s mind, however, there was no inconsistency. He never questioned his belief in white racial superiority, but this did not mean that he felt that people of other races were undeserving of consideration, and if he discerned ill-treatment he could become genuinely angry (a feeling perhaps accentuated by the prospect of awkward questions in the House of Commons). In other words, he did not perceive that there was any necessary conflict between racial inequality and humanitarianism. The phrase ‘equal rights for all civilized men’ summed up his attitude effectively because – resting on a racially determined concept of ‘civilization’ – it squared his belief in equality before the law with an acceptance that in practice some racial groups were ‘more equal’ than others.

V

As the example of the Kisii revolt shows, Churchill’s activities at the Colonial Office extended far beyond South Africa. The diverse issues he dealt with included policy in West Africa, Newfoundland’s fishing dispute with the USA, and even such minutiae as petitions for reinstatement by dismissed employees of the Ceylon government railways. Disconcertingly for Elgin, he showed an obsessive interest in the latter, being much concerned with the rights of the underdog.
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With regard to Nigeria, he even demonstrated that he was prepared to consider scaling back the Empire, in order better to secure its overall future. In May 1906 Lady Lugard wrote to her husband that his pioneering work in the country appeared to be under threat. She had had long talks with Churchill at Blenheim and he had, she said, been ‘talking rank little Englandism’. She lamented to Lugard that:

He repeated all the foolish things you have ever heard about having gone too fast and added to them the extreme radical rubbish about holding innocent peoples tight in the grip of a military despotism. To abolish the Waff [the West African Frontier Force], to give up the greater part of Nigeria ‘which is much too big for us to hold’, put an end to the whole system of punitive expeditions and to be content with the peaceful administration of one small corner of the whole were the principal suggestions which he had to make.
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