‘Behind God’s Back’: the swami and the sea

TO WRITE the biographies of activists rendered citizenless on the margins of empire is incredibly difficult. They often do not make the newspapers of the time, and when they do, it is in ways that caricature or vilify them. But sometimes one gets lucky and a world of diaries or contemporaneous notes is opened up.

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By working through this information, one gets rare insights into people who spent their lives at the service of the Indian community in South Africa, but of whom we know 50 little.

One such man is the Natal Indian Congress leader, Swami Bhawani Dayal (1892-1950), who spent his entire life trying to highlight the challenges faced by local Indian South Africans, and this turned him into one of the earliest transnational figures.

In this column, we present the work of United States journalist Negley Farson, who met Dayal on a ship. During this six-day journey, this chance meeting on a roiling ocean reveals the most intimate of details.

Farson toured the African continent in 1939 and met Dayal on a ship from Durban to Dares-Salaam.

Dayal was on his way to India to rally support against the impending segregationist measures in South Africa.

Farson was the correspondent for the Chicago Daily Sun.

Born in New Jersey, he enrolled for a degree in civil engineering, but his roving spirit saw him drop out and carve a dazzling career as a journalist and author.

Farson was in Russia when the Bolshevik Revolution broke out; he covered the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam; interviewed Gandhi in India and witnessed his arrest in Poona in 1932; and met Hitler and followed his rise to power.

Farson’s African visit saw him go to South West Africa, South Africa, Tanganyika, Kenya, Uganda, the Belgian Congo, French Equatorial Africa, Cameroon and the Gold Coast. He recorded his observations in the evocatively entitled Behind God’s Back.

The year 1939 was when the world teetered on the edge of war. But still there was hope that peace would hold and the Durban port bustled with the ships carrying the Empire’s loot.

Farson was on his way to Dates-Salaam. On board was Dayal. Farson, who had met many global figures, was clearly drawn to the swami and recorded his impressions on the six-day journey.