In 1893 Gandhi went to South Africa to prosecute a legal case. The racism that he found there shocked him, he saw it as a colonial aberration of the “British notion of fair play”. As he tried to reverse the racism, he developed the ideas and tactics that he would later use in India.
The young Boer General, Jan Smuts, did not think the British ever played fair. After the Boer War, he began the process of uniting South Africa. Smuts subscribed to the radical idea of the time that there should be universal male suffrage. Trouble was, he and his white colleagues would form a minority in their newly formed nation. It was inevitable that Gandhi and Smuts would clash ideologies as South Africa was formed.
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