Gandhi Arrested in South Africa: Nonviolent Resistance Born

South African police arrested Mohandas Gandhi on November 6, 1913, as he led a column of over 2,000 Indian miners, their wives, and children across the border from Natal into the Transvaal in deliberate violation of laws restricting Indian movement between provinces. The march was the climax of a nonviolent resistance campaign Gandhi had been developing for two decades, the laboratory in which he refined the methods he would later use to dismantle British rule in India. Gandhi had arrived in South Africa in 1893 as a 23-year-old lawyer hired for a commercial dispute. The racial discrimination he encountered transformed him from a diffident barrister into a political organizer. In 1906, he coined the term satyagraha, meaning "truth-force," to describe his philosophy of resisting injustice through nonviolent non-cooperation. He led campaigns against registration requirements and organized the burning of registration certificates. The 1913 march was triggered by two grievances: a three-pound annual tax on former indentured laborers who chose to remain in South Africa, and a court ruling that invalidated Hindu and Muslim marriages, rendering thousands of Indian women concubines and their children illegitimate under law. The marchers, many of them coal miners who had gone on strike, walked from Newcastle in Natal toward Charlestown on the Transvaal border. Gandhi was arrested three times during the march and imprisoned. The government's harsh response, including mounted police forcing strikers back to work at gunpoint, generated international condemnation. Negotiations led to the Indian Relief Act of 1914, which abolished the tax and recognized Indian marriages. Gandhi left South Africa for India in July 1914, carrying a fully developed philosophy of nonviolent resistance that he would apply on a continental scale. The march proved that ordinary people, organized around moral principle and willing to accept suffering, could force a government to yield.