THE UNDESIRABLE ASIATIC

 A NATAL PEN PICTURE

(BY W A. SQUIRE.)

Natal, the garden colony, since the latter sixties, has encouraged and aided the importation of some of the lowest specimens of humanity from the teeming bazaars of India. Outcasts in all senses of the word without a habitation, and with no country to call his own, he is now knocking with grimy barbarian fingers at the door of civilisation demanding equal rights with British South Africans.

 The master men in the garden blest,

 Loved the white man well but the black man best.

 The colony of Natal is nearly half populated by Indians of the lowest type, controlled by savage instincts and subject to the most infamous of criminal impulses. The statisticians have lost count of the number the colony holds, and cannot find means to-morrow to trace or identify those it has publicly examined to-day. Criminals are at large, and uncontrolled disease is being spread to a degree that has at length caused the authorities to hasten to the aid of the Chief Health Officer of the colony.

 The arrest of seven Indians in Pretoria and Mr. Ghandi and five of his wealthy followers in Johannesburg marks a break in the continuity of the policy of drift into which the Asiatic problem has been allowed to drift in the past. The Transvaal has been brought face to face with the fact that the lip loyalty of the Indian coolie is a dangerous matter to accept, and that, beneath the oily subservience and cringing exhibition of Baboo-English jingoism that impelled Mr. Ghandi to seek a bubble reputation by organising a useless corps of Indian stretcher-bearers for General Buller's army corps, lie the ill-expressed aspirations to equal rights with civilised British subjects. It is like linking the barbaric Dravidian priest who sat his midnight vigil in the heights of the Himalayas to the frock-coated legislator in his seat beneath the clock at Westminster. Oil and water do not mix, and no country has yet been successful that let a majority of individuals rule a maximum of brains.

 The Transvaal calls upon all Indians in their boundaries, some 12,000, to register their names, and for purposes of identification leave their fingerprints with the Indian Immigration office. The Chinese mine coolies do not come into question, the system of identification so far as they are concerned is completed before they leave China. To fully appreciate the position, it must be thoroughly understood that the system of census taking throughout South Africa has been a very incomplete and thoroughly ineffectual one. Indian coolies of the lowest criminal castes, or of no caste at all, after terminating their articles of indenture in the tea or sugar plantations or coal mines of Natal, have crossed the border at Charlestown, and settled in the Transvaal towns, without the slightest possibility of the authorities discovering  their whereabouts should they or their friends, for any reason, of crime, wish to conceal them. The Indian merchant has control of the whole of the native trade. The Kafir prefers the Banyian storekeeper, who is of his colour, and but little above himself as to habits, to the European, some of whom he has, unfortunately, learned to distrust. These Indians have accumulated large landed possessions, and much wealth, and have been admitted far too much liberty in Natal. The Transvaal does not wish to repeat evils that to-day convert Natal into a questionable white colony. The seeds of sedition sown by natives in the stores of the Indian must, so far as the Transvaal Government is concerned, fall on barren soil, and the Botha Government has faced the question none too soon. How far the colony can demand fellow British subjects to submit to conditions of colonisation that amount to class legislation is a matter, that will in all probability be faced by the Colonial Office and the British Cabinet. The arrest of the ringleader, Mr. Ghandi, has brought about the climax. In any event, however, it will be found that with such horror does the Transvaal view the encroachment of the Asiatic, and the overrunning of its cities, towns, and villages with the scum of India, that measures of the greatest importance will be adopted and carried into force in face of any Anglo-Indian opposition that may be organised. The Asiatic sore now festering on the face of Natal can never be healed, but the infection may be prevented from spreading across the Drakenberg along the high veldt of the Transvaal.

 Mr. Ghandi, a Parsee barrister-at-law, is the leader of the South African Indian progressive movement. His ideas of black and white equality, and the brotherhood and fellowship of all British subjects, are founded upon effete and decayed notions, promulgated by Max Muller, and long ago discarded by scientists. The Indian coolie, in South Africa, whose battle is being fought by Mr. Ghandi, is a descendant of the Drairdian, who, with a spoonful of brains, hid in terror from the cave bear and tiger in the rock slopes of the Himalayas, what time the earth was young, and Israel had not evolved a prophet. Mr. Ghandi wishes to take him from his fetid slime, enlarge his pigmy brain by Act of Legislature and place him proudly upon a pedestal in equal footing with "the heir of all the ages," a dual monument of his own cupidity and oily jingo flag-wagging. "Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." Yes, better even the native we know and can regulate as a savage and hold dominion over as an inferior than a horde of barbarian, evil, disease-spreading Asiatics, who claim the protection of the British flag as a means for the pollution of other colonies, and defy authority in scorn of consequences from a misapplied idea of martyrdom to the cause of Empire. Mr. Ghandi, from his self-elected position of South African dictator of laws, has disregarded the mandate that the developed brains of Europeans must of necessity dominate over the barbaric and semi-civilised intelligence of the undesirable Asiatic.

Australian Star (Sydney, NSW ), 18 January 1908 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article229926483