What's interesting is that a lot of what motivated Gandhi's civil rights work in India was the time he spent living in South Africa-- the first satyagraha actually took place in Johannesburg in 1906 after the government demanded that Indians living in South Africa subject themselves to a racist registration policy.
I think the thing in South Africa is that originally, the reasons for European settlement and oppressive law were similar to those in other places that Europeans colonized-- for example, the laws that demanded Africans to dress in a particular way when they did business in the Dutch settlements caused a large trade in the appropriate fabric...from, of course, Europe. The Europeans instituted taxes on the Africans that forced them to go into day labor in mines instead of keeping up their previously agrarian society-- and thus giving the Dutch miners in South Africa a cheap source of labor for their own industry. But I think the history in South Africa from that point forward progressed very differently-- you had the war between the Dutch and the English and I think the result put them on a very different course than many other countries from that point on.
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Date: 2010-06-01 03:10 pm (UTC)I think the thing in South Africa is that originally, the reasons for European settlement and oppressive law were similar to those in other places that Europeans colonized-- for example, the laws that demanded Africans to dress in a particular way when they did business in the Dutch settlements caused a large trade in the appropriate fabric...from, of course, Europe. The Europeans instituted taxes on the Africans that forced them to go into day labor in mines instead of keeping up their previously agrarian society-- and thus giving the Dutch miners in South Africa a cheap source of labor for their own industry. But I think the history in South Africa from that point forward progressed very differently-- you had the war between the Dutch and the English and I think the result put them on a very different course than many other countries from that point on.