Abstract:
On July 1, 1909, Gandhi was on board the liner Kenilworth Castle en route
from Cape Town to Southampton. The prosperous Johannesburg lawyer had
recently emerged as a noted figure in the politics of the British Empire, through
his leadership of the satyagraha of Indian immigrants in the Transvaal. The
union of the four self- governing British colonies in South Africa into a single
state under white control was now under way and awaited ratification by the
Westminster parliament. Gandhi’s aim was to lobby the British authorities for
the protection of the interests of the immigrant Indian population within this new
order. On the voyage, he spent some time talking to fellow passenger John X.
Merriman, the English- born, liberal political leader of the Cape Colony, who
gave him a sympathetic hearing. But Merriman was losing his battle with Afrikaner
General Louis Botha to become prime minister of the new state (Lewsen
1982: 300 – 301). And Merriman’s Gladstonian worldview was in any case a thing
of the past. The white men of South Africa had cut a deal among themselves
to create a racially defined nation, and Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government in
Westminster, feeling guilty about the suffering of the Afrikaners in the Boer War
and for the most part committed to defending the empire, wanted to allow them
to implement it.
