Like New Delhi in 2023, the city of Johannesburg recently repaired its potholes, cleaned up its streets, adorned its pavements with fresh coats of paint and got rid of the homeless people, just in time for the G-20 bandwagon to roll into town. Reading this in a local paper in South Africa, where I have been with my family for the last five months, gave me an ironic feeling of being at home. I noticed the same political impulses — jugaad over systemic action; the same citizen grievances—things get done only when VIPs come to town; and a familiar sense of disappointment at the gulf between what the nation was imagined to be post-Independence and how it has turned out in reality.
But that is where the similarities ended. Strangers said hello to us on the streets, everyone followed rules on the road, and people hadn’t lost their basic sense of civility towards others in their desperation to secure a better life for themselves. Sample this: whenever the traffic light near my house in Stellenbosch broke down, unlike in Delhi where I live (where this happens often and always results in a free-for-all, ending up in an almighty lock-jam), cars moved in an orderly fashion, one car from each of the four sides at a time. I had come to South Africa having read all the statistics on high crime in the country. I expected to find a people afraid of one another and constantly on edge. What I encountered instead was friendliness, civility and decency.
The paradox of South Africa was that these fundamental elements of human goodness had somehow managed to coexist in a society that was shattered by apartheid. Apartheid’s shadow hung long, particularly over Stellenbosch —a predominantly White town with the Black population still concentrated in the adjoining township of Kayamandi. While everyone was equal in law and there was freedom of movement, it appeared that there was an invisible line through the middle of the city, either side of the Eikestad Mall at its centre. On one side was the Apple store and the Starbucks where White people were running for exercise and Black people walking to work. On the other side were the unnamed groceries and the minibus rank where only Black and Coloured people could be seen. Nelson Mandela had dreamed of South Africa as the rainbow nation where people of all races would mingle and live together. In Stellenbosch, the rainbow was obscured by a pall of melanin hanging over the town.
Despite this, after three centuries of deprivation and half-a-century of arguably the worst form of racism the world has ever witnessed, that there hasn’t been a civil war yet in South Africa is nothing short of a miracle. If Mandela is the messiah who delivered this miracle, Mahatma Gandhi is its creator-philosopher.
“You gave us Mohandas; we returned him to you as Mahatma.” Mandela’s words are a testament to the profound influence that South Africa had on Gandhi and vice-versa. Intellectually, Gandhi’s Phoenix Settlement outside Durban, his first site for experimentation with community living, had a deep influence on his neighbour, John Langalibalele Dube, the founder of the African National Congress, who set up the Ohlange Institute in the same area. Politically, Mandela recognised Gandhi’s leadership of a march of 5,000 indentured coal miners in Natal in November 1913 as “the beginning of marches to freedom and mass stayaways from work which became so characteristic of our freedom struggle in the apartheid era.”
Neither did Gandhi’s influence wane over time, nor did it stay limited to politics alone. In Stellenbosch, my carwash was emblazoned with a quotation — “A customer is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it.” The quote was attributed to Gandhi. When I asked the manager about it, he spoke passionately about how Indians and South Africans are similar in so many ways. When I was telling him a bit more about growing up in Calcutta and living in Delhi, his face nearly fell out when he heard that all Indians were various shades of brown — “The White people did not stay on in India after Independence?” he asked with a bewildered look. ‘Precious’ (his English name, the one he gave me) could not believe that there could be a country without White people. Quite differently, neither could Mandela imagine a South Africa without them.
Today that dream of the rainbow nation is in serious jeopardy. On the one hand is the unfinished business of ending the deep-rooted inequalities and the racism of the apartheid era. 7.3% of the population is White and they own over 70% of private farm land in the country. Many of the biggest public schools remain predominantly White, as do a disproportionate number of positions in the university and in professions. On the other hand is the perception of the capture of the ANC by Black elites and their cronies. Nothing encapsulates this better than the rise and the fall of the Guptas, unknown businessmen from Saharanpur, who cornered a significant number of government contracts during the presidency of Jacob Zuma. ‘From Gandhi to the Guptas’ is an unfortunate metaphor for Indians and how they have been viewed in South Africa.
Crony capitalism in the country is coupled with alarmingly high levels of crime, particularly in the townships which were formerly non-White neighbourhoods during apartheid. Gauteng, the province where the capital, Pretoria, and the major hub of Johannesburg are located, had 6,411 murders in 2022/23. In comparison, West Bengal, with approximately six times the population, had 1,696 murders in a similar period. Something seems like it is going to give in South Africa’s major cities.
Admittedly, the country is at a different stage of its journey as an independent nation than where India finds itself today. It has only been independent for three decades and neither has the hope of the founding been fully extinguished, nor is the resignation to an unholy status quo final. At around a similar time in India’s history (in the mid-1970s), the nation was hurtling towards Emergency when freedoms were suspended and populism reigned supreme. South Africa may be reaching a similar inflection point soon. When it does, it is unlikely to be pretty.
It should really not have come to this. As Gandhi wrote, “Nature has not been stingy in beautifying South Africa with a fine landscape.” My family and I have been struck by how magically beautiful this country is. I came here as legal scholar, but I return as a proficient travel agent specialising in South African itineraries. We drove around the country to find the Milky Way glowing above us in Cape Agulhas, the southernmost tip of Africa where the Indian and the Atlantic Oceans meet, tracked a lioness out to kill a zebra in the Addo Elephant National Park in the Eastern Cape, spotted ‘Port’ and ‘Starboard’, two ferocious killer whales near Gansbaai in the Western Cape, were mesmerised by the rolling hills of the Drakensberg in KwaZulu Natal, and awed by the endless miles of purple spring flowers amidst the indigenous fynbos on the wild West Coast, all of it with my two children, aged four and two, sitting in their car seats rendering the first few lines of the South African national anthem in near-faultless isiXhosa. “Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika”, they sang. May god indeed bless Africa and may the rainbow nation one day find its true colours.
For myself, as I leave this wondrous land, I can only echo what Gandhi said when he journeyed away: “I have left South Africa but not my connection with that country.”
Arghya Sengupta is a Visiting Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, South Africa. Views are personal