Egypt's Revolution: Civil Disobedience Defies British Rule

A 23-year-old Indian lawyer was thrown off a first-class train car in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, on June 7, 1893, because a white passenger objected to sharing the compartment with a non-white person. Mohandas Gandhi had a valid first-class ticket. The conductor told him to move to the van compartment. Gandhi refused. A constable pushed him off the train at the next station, and he spent the night shivering on a bench in the waiting room, too proud to retrieve his luggage from the baggage claim. Gandhi had arrived in South Africa weeks earlier to handle a civil lawsuit for a Muslim Indian trading firm. He planned to stay for a year. The Pietermaritzburg incident, and the systematic racial discrimination he encountered throughout Natal and the Transvaal, transformed a shy, unsuccessful barrister into a political activist. Gandhi spent the next twenty-one years in South Africa, developing the philosophy of satyagraha, or nonviolent resistance, through campaigns against discriminatory laws targeting the Indian community. Satyagraha was not passivity. Gandhi organized strikes, marches, and mass civil disobedience that deliberately provoked arrest and imprisonment. The strategy depended on the willingness of protesters to accept suffering without retaliation, exposing the moral bankruptcy of the oppressor to public scrutiny. The method required extraordinary discipline and produced results that were neither quick nor guaranteed. Gandhi’s South African campaigns won modest legal reforms, but the racial structures of the colony remained intact. Gandhi returned to India in 1915 and applied satyagraha on a national scale against British colonial rule. The Salt March of 1930, the Quit India movement of 1942, and decades of organized noncooperation eventually made British India ungovernable. Indian independence came in 1947, though accompanied by the partition violence Gandhi had spent his life trying to prevent. The train platform in Pietermaritzburg, where a young man decided that injustice must be confronted rather than endured, became the origin point for a method of resistance adopted by Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and liberation movements across the world.