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often held in his shop in Field Street, the audience standing or sitting amidst the sacks of grain and bottles of pickle. On successive Sundays in September 1895, Gandhi – then just short of his twenty-sixth birthday – spoke to a mixed audience of Hindus and Muslims, outlining his plans for their future. A government spy, taking notes, reported Gandhi as saying:
I may go [to India] for a while, in five or six months, but then there will be four or five advocates like me, who will come here to watch over your interests … and they will see that Indians are treated on the same footing as Europeans. If you unite and we work together we shall be very strong … I am sorry that the Indians in Johannesburg have not someone now with them as I am with you, but that will come before long. 32
    Seeking to widen the Congress’s circle of patrons, Gandhi toured Natal in the company of other NIC workers. The police asked a plantation owner to monitor his movements. We know thus that in the first week of November, Gandhi and company crossed the Umgeni River, visited a couple of estates, and stopped at Verulam for the night. Here the collections were good – in the range of £50 – but the next day they met stiff resistance, when the Indians in the village of Victoria refused – perhaps out of fear of their white masters – to part with any money. Gandhi took out his turban and placed it at their feet. He and his colleagues refused to eat the dinner brought for them. The protests worked: one by one, the Indians reached into their pockets.
    Gandhi’s final stop was the Tongat plantation, where he addressed the indentured labourers. The verdict of the planter/police informant onthe lawyer was less than complimentary. Gandhi ‘will cause some trouble I have no doubt,’ he wrote: ‘But he is not the man to lead a big movement. He has a weak face. He will certainly tamper with any funds he has the handling of. Such at any rate is my impression of the man – judging him by his face.’ 33
    With a weak face, hesitant in court, polite in print and courteous in conversation, Mohandas Gandhi yet represented the first challenge to European domination in Natal. By the 1890s, Africans in the Cape had discovered modern forms of political expression. A Native Educational Association was formed in 1879, its members educated by missionaries and proficient in English. A South African Native Association and the Transkei Mutual Improvement Society were started soon afterwards. There were influential African reformers in the Cape, such as the teacher J. T. Jabavu, who edited a newspaper detailing acts of discrimination while urging closer bonds between blacks and whites.
    The Cape also had some precociously liberal whites, who allowed people of colour on to the electoral rolls, so long as they passed a property and literacy test. In Natal, however, the whites were more reactionary, and the Africans less educated. When the Natal Indian Congress was formed, there was no comparable Native Association in the colony. In 1894 and 1895, there was no African Gandhi in Natal, no black lawyer who appeared in court or wrote regularly for the newspapers. 34
    Despite their mildness and their moderation, Gandhi and his colleagues thus represented something quite radical in Natal’s modern history. The reaction they provoked is proof of this. A columnist in the
Natal Mercury
, signing himself as ‘H’, published periodic attacks on Gandhi and his work. In October 1895 he said Gandhi was ‘a paid agitator’ for the Indian merchants. ‘H’ called upon the Europeans to stand up and ‘capsize the little apple cart Messrs. Gandhi and Co. are wheeling along’. The attack prompted a rejoinder from Joseph Royeppen, a young clerk in Gandhi’s office. ‘Not a penny,’ said Royeppen, was ‘given Mr Gandhi in return for his valuable services to the [Natal Indian] Congress’. ‘H’ was unabashed. He had been told that ‘a list was made out and signed