Mahatma Gandhi as a law student, 1887 Henry Guttmann / Getty

Gandhi was 24 years old when he arrived in Natal, South Africa in May 1893, the month in which white settlers celebrated the 50th anniversary of Natal’s annexation by the British Crown. Gandhi was called to the Bar in June 1891 and was struggling to establish a law practice in Bombay when the firm of Dada Abdulla & Co., offered him a year-long contract to assist in a legal matter on the southern tip of Africa. Gandhi took up the offer consisting of a first class passage to Natal, living expenses and a fee of £105. When Gandhi landed at Port Natal there were roughly as many Indians as whites in the colony. Natal’s population was pegged at 584,326 in 1893. Whites numbered 45,707 (8 percent) and Indians 35,411 (6 percent). Zulus made up almost 85 percent of the population.

Central to the imperial project in this part of the British Empire was the subjugation of the Zulu. The Zulu kingdom rose to power during the reign of Shaka (1816–28) and his brother Dingane (1828–40), consolidated under their brother Mpande (1840–72), and collapsed during the reign of Mpande’s son, Cetshwayo (1872–84). The British contrived ways to separate Europeans from Africans. Administratively, they divided the colony of Natal from Mpande’s Zulu kingdom along the Thukela River in 1843 while tracts of land were granted to amakhosi (chiefs) in Natal who lived relatively autonomous lives in these reserves. The aim of this “ethnic transfer” was to separate white from black in order to achieve settler hegemony.

The discovery of diamonds in Kimberley in the late 1870s required a stable environment for white economic exploitation. British officials felt that some Zulu chiefs were becoming too independent and Sir Bartle Frere, British High Commissioner for South Africa from March 1877 onwards, set out to annex the Zulu kingdom. He found a pretext to declare war in 1879. The Zulus won the Battle of Isandlwana against the then greatest military power in the world but eventually succumbed. Cetshwayo was exiled to the Cape but Queen Victoria subsequently gave him permission to rule a portion of his former kingdom in the hope that he would restore order. Cetshwayo’s son Dinuzulu was proclaimed king when Cetshwayo died in 1884 but this position was largely ceremonial. With the power of the Zulu kingdom eroded, the pace of land dispossession by both British and Boer accelerated.

This is the canvas against which the arrival of Indians in Natal from 1860 must be viewed. The Indian population included indentured workers, “passenger” migrants who arrived at their own expense, and “time-expired” Indians who had completed their contracts of indenture and made Natal “home.” Larger wholesale traders like Dada Abdulla, who brought Gandhi to Natal, and smaller dukawallahs and hawkers, many of whom had just completed their indentures, were spread out across the city and countryside of Natal. A steady trickle of Indians followed the discovery of diamonds to Kimberley in the 1870s and then in the 1880s the gold rush into the Transvaal.

This dispersal of Indians across the colony, their trespassing into white trading and residential monopolies, and their ability to undercut prices and offer credit to white and black customers alike, raised the ire of many settlers. Harry Escombe, future Prime Minister of Natal, told the Wragg Commission of 1885–87 which had been established to investigate alleged abuses in the system of indenture, that the presence of Indian traders “entailed a competition which was simply impossible as far as Europeans were concerned, on account of the different habits of life.”