Place · mining city · South Africa
Johannesburg
The gold-rush city where Gandhi kept a law office from 1903, published Indian Opinion, and in 1906 at the Empire Theatre took the mass oath of resistance to the Asiatic Registration Act that began satyagraha as an organised method.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- -26.204, 28.047
Worth knowing
The word satyagraha was chosen by competition in the pages of his own newspaper because he disliked passive resistance as a description — it sounded, he said, like the weapon of the weak. Maganlal Gandhi's suggestion was adapted into the term.
Connections (3)
- Life routeSabarmati Ashram
Gandhi kept a law office in Johannesburg from 1903, published Indian Opinion, and in September 1906 at the Empire Theatre took the mass oath against the Asiatic Registration Act that began satyagraha as an organised method. He chose the word by competition in his own newspaper because passive resistance sounded to him like the weapon of the weak. He brought the method back to India in 1915 and built Sabarmati around it; everything from Champaran to Dandi is a continuation of what was worked out in the Transvaal.
- Life routeMohandās Karamchand Gandhi
Everything Gandhi did in India had been tried first in the Transvaal: the newspaper, the settlement farm, the mass oath, the deliberate courting of arrest, the fast, and the word satyagraha itself, chosen by competition in his own paper because passive resistance sounded to him like the weapon of the weak. He arrived back in India in 1915 at forty-five with a complete method and a reputation, and spent a year travelling before using either.
- PrecursorDandi
Gandhi worked out satyagraha in Johannesburg between 1906 and 1914, running the Transvaal permit campaign against the Asiatic Registration Act that fingerprinted and registered Indians as a separate racial category. In September 1906 at the Empire Theatre he took the mass oath of refusal that founded the method, and the Transvaal campaign and the 1930 Salt March work identically: the law chosen was one an ordinary person could break in public without injuring anybody, the breach was announced in advance, and the arrests were the point. Three thousand men in a Johannesburg theatre in 1906 scaled to sixty thousand arrests across India in the three months after Dandi.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Johannesburg”. M.K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa; The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Publications Division).
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