The Indian poet who scared white South Africa – and changed it | History

One hundred years ago, on February 28, 1924, a four-foot-10-inch woman of colour gave a speech at the Wanderers Hall in Johannesburg. Despite speaking at the home of both rugby and cricket in the Transvaal province, she poured scorn on the British, writes historian Goolam Vahed, for thinking “they were the ‘masters’ and the Indians the ‘menials’.” She parodied the British attitude as follows: “We conquer, we rule, we trample down, we make graveyards where there were gardens, we rule with the iron heel, we flash the sword and daze the eyes of those who would look us in the face.”

And she ended with a warning. If the British thought they had successfully “fettered and manacled and trampled” Indians, this was “[their] illusion. In the end, the land goes back from the conquered to the true inheritors.”

Sarojini Naidu, the 45-year-old Indian poet-politician, had arrived in Johannesburg a few days earlier, via Kenya and Mozambique. She had come to protest Prime Minister Jan Smuts’s Class Areas Bill, which proposed “compulsory residential and trading segregation for Indians throughout South Africa.”

Nicknamed the Nightingale of India by her mentor and champion, Mahatma Gandhi, words did indeed tumble out of Naidu’s mouth for the duration of a two-month sojourn in which she addressed packed venues in all of South Africa’s main cities. But not everyone who heard them found them mellifluous. Despite being a dark-skinned visitor in a white man’s land, Naidu spoke her mind. And her ideas – regarding race, empire and women – were well ahead of their time.

While Naidu was vehement in her criticism of the Bill, she went to great pains to stress that South African Indians should oppose any legislation that discriminated on racial grounds, as historian Goolam Vahed has shown (PDF). The struggle in South Africa was, she said, “only one incident in the whole struggle which is taking place … Oppressed [Black] people of the world are linked together in the brotherhood of suffering and martyrdom”.

In Durban, a couple of weeks after she tried to mimic the British in the Johannesburg speech, Naidu spoke directly to Indian women: “I never hope to hear an Indian woman say, ‘I am different from the white women, the coloured women, the Native women’. I do not care what your religion is, you are women, and women were meant to lead the earth, and when women do that the world will become good. Do not think only of yourselves, but fight for your rights because you are women.”

When she left, many white South Africans were glad to see the back of Naidu. The Cape Times had accused her of “stirring up mischief” and the Natal Advertiser argued that her visit had led to “a resurgence of aggressiveness in the Asiatic temper”.

But 100 years after her visit, her dramatic impact on the country’s Black population – and in particular, its women – remains undiminished.  Before Naidu’s visit, opposition politics was segregated along racial lines and almost exclusively male. After her visit, women took a leading role in opposition politics and people of different races began to work together in their struggle against the white minority government. As the Anglican missionary CF Andrews, a close friend of Gandhi’s, wrote, “Naidu’s visit has done one thing for which I bless her every day. She has finally cemented the Native cause with that of the Indian as one cause.”

Her influence on Cissie Gool, a young Muslim woman from Cape Town, was particularly important. As historians Patricia van der Spuy and Lindsay Clowes write, “It was what Naidu did – and what she told women to do – that was critical. Sarojini Naidu’s visit reveals a ‘light bulb’ moment for Cissie Gool, the realisation that women could inhabit the closely guarded citadel of ‘malestream’ politics, that gender need not stifle their political ambitions.”

Gandhi and the India-South Africa connection

In its first 180 years, colonial South Africa was heavily reliant on imported slave labour. The abolition of slavery in 1834 forced farmers to look elsewhere for unskilled workers. From 1860 onwards more than 150,000 indentured Indians would arrive in South Africa on five-year contracts, mainly to work on sugar cane plantations. These indentured labourers were treated badly, paid abysmally and granted zero political rights, but still about two-thirds of them made homes in South Africa after their contracts had expired. In addition to these indentured Indians, several thousand “passenger” Indians came to South Africa voluntarily – some of whom became successful businesspeople.

In 1893 a young Indian lawyer by the name of Mohandas (“Mahatma”) Gandhi arrived in South Africa to handle a legal matter for a wealthy Indian trader. The painfully shy young lawyer wore a three-piece suit and tie – coupled with a turban. Twenty-one years later, Gandhi left the country in the sandals and robes of an indentured labourer. But the changes were not only cosmetic. Gandhi arrived in South Africa an enthusiastic emissary of the empire and a racist. He left it an anti-imperialist and a supporter of Black unity. Even his policy of satyagraha or passive resistance was forged in South Africa.

South Africa – and particularly the injustices he witnessed there – had a profound impact on Gandhi’s politics. But he too made his mark on South African politics: the African National Congress – the party of Mandela, Sisulu and Tambo, which has just lost its grip on power in the 2024 elections – was in many ways inspired by Gandhi’s Indian National Congress, which has long since lost its grip on power in India.

Gandhi’s great woman disciple

By the time Sarojini Naidu arrived in South Africa, she was a seasoned politician with decades of public oratory under her belt. Born in Hyderabad in 1879, to a college principal father (who dabbled in science and poetry) and a singer mother (who dabbled in poetry) she qualified for university at the age of 12 and went on to study at King’s College in London and the University of Cambridge. While in the UK she got to know the renowned poetry critics Edmund Gosse and Arthur Symons, who helped her to hone her craft and develop a distinctly Indian voice.

Returning to Hyderabad in 1898 she married Govindaraju Naidu, a physician she’d met in England. Their inter-caste marriage was considered “groundbreaking and scandalous” by some, but both their families approved it. At the urging of the political reformer Gopal Krishna Gokhale, she launched her public speaking career in 1902. Her elegant addresses on topics like Indian independence, women’s rights and women’s education soon earned her invites to increasingly prominent political gatherings.

As journalist Nazma Yeasmeen Haque writes, “Sarojini Naidu’s early speeches, whether addressing students, women in general, purdanashin women [cloistered women who have almost no contact with the outside world], communities of Muslims [or] Hindus or any other religion were electrifying. She was a leader who inspired people and like a psychologist understood mass behaviour.”

Shortly after World War I broke out, in 1914, Naidu met Gandhi in London, and quickly became a fervent disciple of the “small, droll man” who, she said, “looked exactly like a bat”. The appreciation was mutual. As Vahed notes, “Gandhi wrote in Young India in 1920 that no praise of Naidu was ‘overdone  … She has wonderful charm of manner and is tireless in her duties … God alone knows from where she gets the strength.’”

When, in 1924, Gandhi asked Naidu to visit South Africa as his emissary she could not refuse – even if it meant “leaving my little child who is dying because the needs of the children of our nation are greater than the needs of one child.” One of her sons was often ill.

The Gool in the crown of District 6

After addressing crowds in Johannesburg and Durban, Naidu headed south to Cape Town, the seat of South Africa’s parliament, to attend the debates around the Class Areas Bill. The white government pulled out all the stops to appease her: She travelled to Cape Town in a special train bearing her name and was garlanded wherever she went.

But instead of being numbed into silence, Naidu called out the special treatment, “When I am garlanded and given presents during my mission I realise that my people are indivisible whether born in India or being the children and grandchildren of the indentured labourers … Therefore, I must be full of sorrow and of shame because I, too, being of my people, soul of their soul, blood of their blood, bone of their bone, am a helot and slave standing before you, though you garland me.”

While in Cape Town, it was assumed that Naidu would stay where Gandhi always stayed in the Mother City: with a wealthy Indian trader called Yusuf Gool. But Gool’s daughter-in-law, Zainunissa ‘Cissie’ Gool “put her foot down” and insisted that Naidu stay with her. Van der Spuy and Clowes argue that the three weeks Naidu spent in Gool’s home were crucial in Cissie’s political development.

Born in 1897, to Dr Abdullah Abdurahman and his Scottish wife Nellie James, Cissie Gool had a lot in common with Sarojini Naidu. She grew up in “the most prestigious mansion in the whole of District Six”, a mixed-race suburb that was famously bulldozed by the apartheid government in the 1970s, and, due to her father’s position at the helm of the African Political Organisation, was exposed to the ideas of many leading liberals – including Gandhi – during her childhood.

Gool, like Naidu, excelled academically. She was the first woman of colour to enrol at the University of Cape Town and had a way with words: She won a literary competition when she was just fifteen years old. But when Naidu visited in 1924, Gool had not so much as contemplated a career in politics.

Gool’s father may have been ahead of his time when it came to educating women, but he was also a staunch patriarch who hadn’t yet acknowledged that women had much role to play politically. Her mother was a more progressive role model, but even she restricted her activities to the Women’s Guild of the African Political Organisation (APO). Naidu, however, had no qualms about wading into the male world of politics – in fact, she seemed to relish it.

Gool made a point of attending all of Naidu’s Cape Town speeches, and she was clearly awestruck. When the Cape Times misogynistically accused Naidu of “emotional, ill balanced harangues”, Gool could maintain her silence no longer. In her letter to the editor, which was published on April 1, 1924, Gool wrote that the paper’s “virulent attack” on Naidu compelled her to give her “impression of her speeches and the good work she has done” while in South Africa:

“You are absolutely wrong when you say that her ‘motives underlying all her speeches are to raise prejudice and to damage relations of white and black in South Africa’. Let me, a non-European woman who has … watched the trend of political affairs in South Africa, especially the relationship between white and black, give you my view of Mrs Naidu’s visit and her speeches … Mrs Naidu is a great guiding star that has loomed on our horizon pointing out the way … She has been a warning to Europeans, a lesson to the non-European, and a glorious inspiration to the dark races of Africa.”

“Mrs Z. Gool” – it’s important to note that she did not use her husband’s initial – signed off her letter with a flourish. “The world needs more of such women. Mrs Naidu is a living testimony of the heights to which a woman can rise.”

Gool was not the only one whose outlook was turned on its head by Naidu’s visit. In April 1924, despite being a foreigner, Naidu was elected president of the South African Indian Congress, as van der Spuy and Clowes put it, “by men who had not previously imagined women as members, let alone accepted one as leader”.

The Nightingale and The General

General Jan Smuts, South Africa’s prime minister at the time and a key figure in the formation of the League of Nations, the precursor to the UN, had a long history with Gandhi and the so-called Indian question. Smuts double-crossed Gandhi on several occasions, but Gandhi could never bring himself to disregard the South African leader completely. Gandhi wrote in 1908 that Smuts took “a high place among the politicians of the British Empire and even of the world”. He did however add that “there is room in his politics for cunning and on occasions for perversion of truth.”

When Gandhi left South Africa for the last time, he gave Smuts a pair of handmade sandals. It is said that Smuts could never bring himself to wear them as they reminded him of his own duplicity.

When Gokhale, Naidu’s first mentor, visited South Africa in 1912, writes Yogesh Chada, “the wily Smuts” made him “a state guest, and showered him with flattery and adulation with a view to dulling the edge of his resentment.” While these tricks partly worked on Gokhale, he did get a major concession out of Smuts, but Smuts reneged on it, Naidu was made of sterner stuff.

When a journalist warned Naidu that Smuts would be a tough nut to crack, she replied, “Undoubtedly General Smuts is a strong man, but he will be confronted by a woman who is not afraid because she has the support of a united India behind her.” When she met the “strong man” she told him to his face that he should leave his “little prejudices in the rag-bag”.

After their meeting, Naidu wrote to Gandhi that Smuts was “designed by nature to be among the world’s greatest, but he has dwarfed himself to be a small man in robe of authority in South Africa; it is the tragedy of a man who does not or cannot rise to the full height of his predestined spiritual stature.”

What happened to the Bill?

The Class Areas Bill was put on hold when, spooked by the loss of a by-election in April 1924, Smuts called a general election for June. When Smuts lost the election to a racist coalition led by General JBM Hertzog, the Bill was shelved forever. Sadly, things would only get worse for the Black and brown people of South Africa under the arch-segregationist Hertzog. The laws he passed in the 1920s and 30s would lay the foundations for the system of apartheid, implemented by DF Malan in 1948.

Sarojini Naidu returned to India in May 1924, and the following year she became the first female president of the Indian National Congress. In 1930 she persuaded Gandhi to allow women to participate in the Salt Satyagraha (Salt March), an act of nonviolent civil disobedience – he’d felt it would be too gruelling; when Gandhi was arrested midway through the march he appointed her as the campaign’s new leader.

After India achieved independence in 1947, Naidu was made governor of the United Provinces (now known as Uttar Pradesh), a position she held until her death in March 1949, 13 months after Gandhi’s assassination.

When news of her death spread, cities throughout India were “paralysed” by grief.

South Africa’s ‘inalienable gift and possession’

On her departure from South Africa in 1924, Naidu gave an emotional farewell speech in which she said, “My body goes back to India but that part of me that belongs to you remains with you your inalienable gift and possession.”

This “inalienable gift” would find fertile ground in the body of Cissie Gool. Gool did not launch her political career immediately, but when she did, she followed Naidu’s “great guiding star” closely.

Gool’s first public appearance, on April 27, 1931, saw her rail against Prime Minister Hertzog’s plan to grant white – but not coloured (in South Africa, “coloured” was a distinct category for people of mixed race who didn’t fit into other racial boxes) – women the vote. As the Cape Times reported: “She denounced the failure to include coloured persons in the franchise legislation. ‘Perhaps their voices at the meeting would only lift to the ceiling and die in echoes,’ she said, ‘but perhaps a more constructive policy might be evolved. The whole basis of the Nationalist reasoning on the franchise legislation was fraudulent and false.’” She concluded her speech by insisting “a civilised people is being ruled by an ignorant oligarchy.”

Next on the podium was Gool’s father, Dr Abdurahman, who’d also been changed by Naidu’s visit: “Here you have a coloured lady and I say it not because she is my daughter, whom you have heard speak, and she speaks better than 99 percent of white women in this country. Not only does she speak better, but she has more brains than the majority of the white women in South Africa. There she sits and yet by this Act she is put down lower than the ordinary uneducated white domestic scullery maid.”

In 1938, Gool ran for the Cape Town city council on a 10-point programme that included calls for “decent housing and sanitation” and “more creches and clinics for the poor”. Point nine was written in a bigger and bolder font. It stated in no uncertain terms that there was to be “NO RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION”.

Cissie won the election by an impressive 370 votes, making her the first woman of colour to serve on the city council. Being elected to office seemed to inspire Gool to act ever more radically. One of the first things she did as a councillor was to arrange for dozens of poor kids from District Six to gatecrash a Children’s Day parade organised by a white women’s group. To really hammer home her point, Cissie gave the children banners bearing slogans such as “We want food” and “We want to go to school”. As her niece, Naz Gool-Ebrahim noted, “the organisers were furious, but Cissie didn’t care because she felt discrimination hit underprivileged children the hardest.”

Cissie never relinquished her seat on the city council. And no matter how many times she was knocked down, she always got up again. She was imprisoned several times in the 1950s and in 1963 – at the age of 66 – she qualified as an advocate. This posed an unusual problem, as her niece remembers: “As Cissie prepared for her first briefing with great fervour, advocates discovered the robing room was for men only. One of the rooms was converted for Cissie, accented with a mirror to make it ‘more comfortable for a lady’. While Cissie related this story to me, she laughed and said, ‘Isn’t that fun!’”

Tragically, Cissie never argued that first case in court. She died of a stroke on July 1, 1963. The people of Cape Town came out in their thousands to catch a glimpse of the coffin as it made its way to the Muslim cemetery in Mowbray, where she was buried next to her father.

As Nadia Davids, who has written two plays about Gool, puts it: “Cissie Gool was, by birth (and often by self-definition) a Muslim woman, and it is difficult to explain what her story has come to mean to me and to other women in my community. She read, she smoked, she danced, she sang, she loved performance, she wrote, she refused to be bullied, she loved whom she chose, she demanded equality in public and in private, she studied, she mocked, she lived. When we Muslim girls from Cape Town growing into womanhood needed an alternative story and a different logic for a different life, one freed of that awful intersection between systemic historic patriarchy, and wilful contemporary caricature, we looked to Gool.”

Just as Gool had looked to Naidu before her.