Mahatma Gandhi created a symbiosis between India and South Africa.
This week (and more specifically) on the 2nd of October 2013, like in all other years, India and South African Indians celebrated the birthday date of one of the sons that India ever produced - Mahatma Gandhi. If he was still alive, he would have turned 144 years of age.
The history of the arrival of the indentured labour in South Africa and the process of their naturalisation to be South Africans cannot be explain without invoking the role Mohandas Mahatma Gandhi played in fighting for their liberties against the white racist minority rule that degraded their status to nothing less than almost kaffirs status. And so, the struggle of Indians in South Africa was in the most part, the same as the struggle waged by black Africans in general.
This explains why in later periods, many Indian leaders under Natal and Transvaal Indian Congress and later South African Indian Congress [SAIC] such as Dr Monty Naicker, Yusuf Dadoo [who was also SACP Chairman later], Ismael Meer, Ismael Cachalia, Ragombin, later we had Essop brothers etc. became prominent Congress movement leaders under the stewardship of the ANC. These leaders refused to be narrow in their struggle by only raising the Indian national question at the exclusion of the national question for all the oppressed.
Mahatma Gandhi played his legendary part in South Africa and put in particular the Indian question to the fore. The Satyagraha movement that got traction both in South Africa and India formed in 1919 marked the symbolical symbiosis between the Indian society and South Africa. This is a historic reality bequeathed upon us by history in the same way as the then Malay slaves.
Many critics have written about the strategic incorrectness of Ghandi's non-violent Satyagraha movement against the enemy [both South African white government and British rule in India] which, they argue, became an end in itself than a prong tactic in the broad streams within a larger strategy. That criticism notwithstanding, this movement did not regress the struggle but had some continuum towards irritating the system.