The Indian poet who scared white South Africa – and changed it

With her stirring speech 100 years ago, Sarojini Naidu inspired united opposition to empire and white minority rule.

One hundred years ago, on February 28, 1924, a four-foot-10-inch woman of colour gave a speech at the Wanderers Hall in Johannesburg. Despite speaking at the home of both rugby and cricket in the Transvaal province, she poured scorn on the British, writes historian Goolam Vahed, for thinking “they were the ‘masters’ and the Indians the ‘menials’.” She parodied the British attitude as follows: “We conquer, we rule, we trample down, we make graveyards where there were gardens, we rule with the iron heel, we flash the sword and daze the eyes of those who would look us in the face.”

And she ended with a warning. If the British thought they had successfully “fettered and manacled and trampled” Indians, this was “[their] illusion. In the end, the land goes back from the conquered to the true inheritors.”

Sarojini Naidu, the 45-year-old Indian poet-politician, had arrived in Johannesburg a few days earlier, via Kenya and Mozambique. She had come to protest Prime Minister Jan Smuts’s Class Areas Bill, which proposed “compulsory residential and trading segregation for Indians throughout South Africa.”

Nicknamed the Nightingale of India by her mentor and champion, Mahatma Gandhi, words did indeed tumble out of Naidu’s mouth for the duration of a two-month sojourn in which she addressed packed venues in all of South Africa’s main cities. But not everyone who heard them found them mellifluous. Despite being a dark-skinned visitor in a white man’s land, Naidu spoke her mind. And her ideas – regarding race, empire and women – were well ahead of their time.

While Naidu was vehement in her criticism of the Bill, she went to great pains to stress that South African Indians should oppose any legislation that discriminated on racial grounds, as historian Goolam Vahed has shown (PDF). The struggle in South Africa was, she said, “only one incident in the whole struggle which is taking place … Oppressed [Black] people of the world are linked together in the brotherhood of suffering and martyrdom”.