Goolam Vahed
Goolam Vahed is a Professor in the Department of History, University of KwaZulu-Natal. He completed his undergraduate research at the University of Durban-Westville, and his Masters and Doctoral degrees at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research interests include identity formation, citizenship, ethnicity, Islam, and transnationalism among Indian South Africans, as well as sport and transformation in South African society.
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Books by Goolam Vahed
The South African Gandhi focuses on Gandhi's first leadership experiences and the complicated man they reveal—a man who actually supported the British Empire. Ashwin Desai and Goolem Vahed unveil a man who, throughout his stay on African soil, stayed true to Empire while showing a disdain for Africans. For Gandhi, whites and Indians were bonded by an Aryan bloodline that had no place for the African. Gandhi's racism was matched by his class prejudice towards the Indian indentured. He persistently claimed that they were ignorant and needed his leadership, and he wrote their resistances and compromises in surviving a brutal labor regime out of history. The South African Gandhi writes the indentured and working class back into history.
The authors show that Gandhi never missed an opportunity to show his loyalty to Empire, with a particular penchant for war as a means to do so. He served as an Empire stretcher-bearer in the Boer War while the British occupied South Africa, he demanded guns in the aftermath of the Bhambatha Rebellion, and he toured the villages of India during the First World War as recruiter for the Imperial army. This meticulously researched book punctures the dominant narrative of Gandhi and uncovers an ambiguous figure whose time on African soil was marked by a desire to seek the integration of Indians, minus many basic rights, into the white body politic while simultaneously excluding Africans from his moral compass and political ideals
From the late nineteenth century, Gujarati Muslim traders settling in the colony of Natal built mosques and madressas; their progeny carried on the strong traditions of community patronage and leadership. Aligned to Gandhi’s Congress initiatives for Indian civic recognition, they worked across differences of political strategy, economic class, ethnicity and religion to champion modern education for a ghettoised Indian diaspora. In common was the threat of a state that, long before the legal formation of apartheid, managed diversity in deference to white racial hysteria over ‘Indian penetration’ and an ‘Asiatic menace’.
This is the story of confrontation, cooperation and compromise by an officially marginalized but still powerful set of ‘founding fathers’ who shaped local education and urban space as they integrated this region of Africa into the Indian Ocean world.
The South African Gandhi focuses on Gandhi's first leadership experiences and the complicated man they reveal—a man who actually supported the British Empire. Ashwin Desai and Goolem Vahed unveil a man who, throughout his stay on African soil, stayed true to Empire while showing a disdain for Africans. For Gandhi, whites and Indians were bonded by an Aryan bloodline that had no place for the African. Gandhi's racism was matched by his class prejudice towards the Indian indentured. He persistently claimed that they were ignorant and needed his leadership, and he wrote their resistances and compromises in surviving a brutal labor regime out of history. The South African Gandhi writes the indentured and working class back into history.
The authors show that Gandhi never missed an opportunity to show his loyalty to Empire, with a particular penchant for war as a means to do so. He served as an Empire stretcher-bearer in the Boer War while the British occupied South Africa, he demanded guns in the aftermath of the Bhambatha Rebellion, and he toured the villages of India during the First World War as recruiter for the Imperial army. This meticulously researched book punctures the dominant narrative of Gandhi and uncovers an ambiguous figure whose time on African soil was marked by a desire to seek the integration of Indians, minus many basic rights, into the white body politic while simultaneously excluding Africans from his moral compass and political ideals
From the late nineteenth century, Gujarati Muslim traders settling in the colony of Natal built mosques and madressas; their progeny carried on the strong traditions of community patronage and leadership. Aligned to Gandhi’s Congress initiatives for Indian civic recognition, they worked across differences of political strategy, economic class, ethnicity and religion to champion modern education for a ghettoised Indian diaspora. In common was the threat of a state that, long before the legal formation of apartheid, managed diversity in deference to white racial hysteria over ‘Indian penetration’ and an ‘Asiatic menace’.
This is the story of confrontation, cooperation and compromise by an officially marginalized but still powerful set of ‘founding fathers’ who shaped local education and urban space as they integrated this region of Africa into the Indian Ocean world.
to the then British colony of Natal to work primarily on the sugar
plantations. They were followed by free Indian migrants. White
settlers felt threatened by a settled Indian population and passed
legislation to curb their immigration, trading, employment and
residence rights. The struggle of Indians against this racist legislation
was spearheaded by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The
most contentious issues surrounding Gandhi’s South African stay
between 1893 and 1914 are his allegedly racist attitudes towards
Africans and his neglect of indentured migrants and their
descendants. This article examines Gandhi’s attitude to, and relationship
with, the indentured. While most academic studies have
argued that Gandhi was oblivious to them until 1913, this article
presents a nuanced picture, drawing on aspects of historical
archives that have not yet been fully drawn upon, or re-reading
those that have been consulted previously. It shows that Gandhi’s
views underwent an observable transformation during the time
that he was in South Africa, to the point that he came to describe
the system of indenture as ‘an evil thing’. However, his reasons
for wanting an end to the system were multiple and complex,
relating not just to the plight of the indentured, but also the utility
of ending indenture for non-indentured Indians.
what has become known as the ‘Durban moment’. This period also witnessed the
emergence of the Black Consciousness Movement and an independent trade union
movement inspired by the 1973 Durban strikes. Despite a government crackdown
and opposition from anti-apartheid groups that asserted that ethnic identities
were a relic of the past, the NIC attracted younger activists through the 1970s
and by the early 1980s, had survived the banning and detention of its
leadership to become involved in civic struggles over housing and education,
and in mobilizing against government-created political structures. It also
played a pivotal role in the United Democratic Front formed in 1983. This did
not mean that the NIC was monolithic. The 1980s spawned vibrant and often
vicious debates within the NIC over participation in government-created
structures, allegations of cabals and, as democracy dawned, differing opinions
of the future of an organization that first came into being in the last decade of
the nineteenth century. In critically interrogating this crucial period between
1980 and 1994, when mass-based struggle was renewed, two states of
emergency were imposed and apartheid eventually ended, this article adds to
the growing historiography of the anti-apartheid struggle by focusing on an
important but neglected aspect of that story. It focuses on the internal workings
of the NIC and the relationship between the NIC, the emergent Mass
Democratic Movement and the African National Congress (ANC) in the context
of broader political and economic changes.
This article examines the attempts in the 1940s of A.I. Kajee and the Orient Islamic Educational Institute to secure a site for a world-class, modern boarding school for Muslim children in Durban. While the Institute would eventually build a school in 1959 that fell far short of its original vision, their struggles highlight several key issues related to Indian minority politics and the racialised South African state in the 1940s. In a context where anti-apartheid historiography is dominated by those aligned to Congress traditions, this article explores the motivations and actions of ‘accommodationists’, who sought concessions from the state through conciliation at a time when their relationship with the central state conceded ground to rising populist politics around white fears of ‘Indian penetration’. Kajee's increasingly frustrated efforts to employ a once-successful cooperative strategy reveal the uneven course of change in the ideologies of racial rule in South Africa, from an incorporationist imperial paternalism to an expulsory race nationalism. The case also exposes competing interests between the different levels of government in the quest for a unified white nation-state, with pressure for segregation more virulent at local level than articulated by the Smutsian cabinet. It offers insight into the experiences of leaders whose basis of authority in politics, rooted in a tradition of patronage, was waning. Struggles for civic recognition were moving towards an emergent new leadership of professionals and trade unionists, who increasingly garnered support from a nascent urban working class.
labour movement later in the decade. This article examines the debates surrounding
the revival of the NIC, in particular whether this reinforced an exclusive ethnic identity
while dampening broader non-racial responses, and whether and how the NIC’s revival
impacted on debates about participation in government-created structures such as the
South African Indian Council (SAIC).