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By Anil Nauriya  Enuga Reddy was an unfailing guide in my study of certain aspects of South African history and in relation to African liberation struggles in general. I had become familiar with the byline “E.S. Reddy” much before I came in personal contact with Mr Reddy. The New Delhi-based journal Mainstream often carried his articles on African struggles, Indians in Africa and related themes. From these I had become aware also of his distinguished contribution in various capacities at the United Nations and of his close connection with the anti-apartheid struggle. More than a quarter century ago I came across his book, Gandhiji’s Vision of a Free South Africa (1995), published by Sanchar Publishing House, New Delhi. It carried the following dedication : “Dedicated to Nelson Mandela and his colleagues in the struggle for a new South Africa where, in the words of Gandhiji, ‘all different races commingle and produce a civilization that perhaps the world has not yet seen’”. A few years had passed since the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and the struggle for building a democratic South Africa was on. Enuga Reddy’s dedication and articles linked this struggle to the hope that Gandhiji had expressed in his speech in Johannesburg on 18 May 1908. As Enuga Reddy had been keenly associated with the anti-apartheid struggle since the 1940s and knew personally the front-ranking African leaders associated with this struggle, I could hardly have had a more systematic introduction to the Indian interface with the African struggle than through the writings of Mr Reddy. It was from his 1995 work that I learnt about Gandhiji’s interaction with John Dube (1871-1946). John Dube had been praised by Gandhiji in 1905 as an African one should know for the work that he was doing for his people. Seven years later, in January 1912, when the African National Congress (then known as the South African Native National Congress) was founded in Bloemfontein, South Africa, John Dube was chosen as its first President-General. Dube’s Ohlange institution was based in Inanda very close to where Gandhiji had established his Phoenix settlement near Durban. It was also through Mr Reddy’s work that I became aware of Gandhiji’s association with the writer Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), an early critic of racism in South Africa. Enuga Reddy’s book contained a systematic analysis of the evolution of Gandhiji’s relation with African and Coloured leaders and support to their aspirations. Since the usual narratives on Gandhiji and South Africa were confined to the leadership that Gandhiji had provided to Indians in South Africa, Enuga Reddy’s writings were for me new and refreshing both in content and approach. Later I came across several other works by Mr Reddy that further evidenced the quiet and solid scholarship on Africa and on Gandhi for both of which he is known and universally respected. The books written or edited by him and his other writings were focused on outstanding leaders in the South African struggle such as Albert Luthuli, Oliver Tambo, Dr Yusuf Mohamed Dadoo, Molvi Ismail Ahmad Cachalia, G.M. (Monty) Naicker and Nana Sita. He published papers relating to the Treason Trial and about Indian efforts against apartheid. In addition, he brought together the speeches of the late Swedish statesman Olof Palme on the liberation of southern Africa. It was an education to read these materials. Enuga Reddy's continual efforts in this field outpaced many younger writers. He contributed a very comprehensive note on “Gandhiji’s contemporaries during his South African Sojourn” to Fatima Meer’s The South African Gandhi, published in 1996 by the Institute of Black Research, University of Natal, Durban. In 1993, the Navajivan Trust published his nearly-500 page long edited work (prepared in collaboration with Gopalkrishna Gandhi), Gandhi and South Africa (1914-1948). This covered an often over-looked aspect of Gandhiji : his continuing involvement with South Africa even after his return from Africa in 1914. More recently, in 2014, the National Gandhi Museum and Library published Mr Reddy’s paper “Thambi Naidoo and his family” bringing to the fore the great contributions that Thambi Naidoo had made in Gandhiji’s South African years. On the Indian struggle in South Africa during these years he later completed a work along with Kalpana Hiralal which too would be published by Navajivan. What I have mentioned here covers but a fraction of Mr Reddy’s huge corpus of writings and collections which have been published over the years. Mr Reddy’s meticulous concern for factual accuracy, eye for detail and his fairness in judgment make his writings a delightful read and provide a standard to aspire to. His work on the Sabarmati Register, that is the indexes maintained in Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad of Gandhiji’s papers and correspondence has been a labour of love. When the National Gandhi Museum, New Delhi, sought to organize exhibitions to mark the centenary of the Gandhi-led 1913-14 struggles in South Africa, Mr Reddy sent long notes containing valuable information about the participants in these struggles and the various men, women and children who had been martyred or died in the course of the struggle. An affectionate and avuncular figure, ever helpful to younger scholars, Enuga Reddy has been more than willing to share information, answer queries, and educate, inform and guide those working on Africa and on Gandhi. My visits to South Africa were always preceded by exchanges with him in which he would make suggestions on who to meet and what to look for. There would be long lists of names of various remarkable people people in whichever city I was going to, complete with their backgrounds and the role they or their families had played in the anti-apartheid struggle, usually with addresses and phone numbers. Through these lists and notes he managed to convey to me some of the sacrifice and even thrill associated with the South African struggle. I had always envied Mr Reddy’s amazing energy and determined single-minded concentration on the work that occupied him at a given time. I had observed also his indifference towards those “chronophages” (to use Goethe’s term) who he considered undeserving of his time; naturally I was overjoyed and felt quite privileged when Enuga Reddy agreed to contribute a foreword to my little book, The African Element in Gandhi, published 17 years ago. I always rushed to him with my queries and he was always the first to whom I sent anything new I thought I found in the area of our interest, as in this extract from my mail sent to him in June 2007 : “ Meanwhile you'll be interested to know that I think I've solved the mystery of A Chessell Piquet's writings in Indian Opinion in 1911 etc. It happened by chance. I was re-reading Millie Polak's book and at one point she repeats H S L Polak's initials more than once. It then struck me : H S L ... H S L ...H S L ... A Chessell... As for Piquet, it is simply French for stake or Pole ... Polak. That also takes care of the articles signed A C P. Regards Anil PS: The interesting thing is that Polak was using A Chessell Piquet even in the late forties. A book review on the Indian question in South Africa in a scholarly journal in the forties is signed A Chessell Piquet.” I didn’t know Enuga Reddy was then recovering from a bout of chest pain, but he replied on the next day : “That is certainly strange and I did not know that you were a detective.” It must have amused him no end and before long he had told many others about my “discovery”. When I asked him about it later he wrote : “…I freely pass around my files.” That was so true and, having myself been a beneficiary of that trait of his, I could hardly complain! Anil Nauriya is a lawyer in the Supreme Court of India, a historian and writer.
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 Reddy with Oliver Tambo Text of Speech Given by Charge D'affaires, Mr Mashudubele Mamabolo, on the occasion of Centennial Tribute and Commemoration of Enuga Reddy, the anti-apartheid activists, 05 January 2024 in New Delhi.
On behalf of the South African High Commission to India, it is such a great pleasure to be invited to say a few words during this Centennial celebration of this great son of not only India, but the world. Indeed, a gentleman with a huge heart for humanity. Right in the beginning, I must make a confession that as I am only five-months old in India and have never worked on India or participated in any liberation struggle since I am part of the young generation, when I received the invitation to speak here, I stopped and wondered who was this man whom, a lowly diplomat is asked to talk about. I did not have the faintest idea who he was. However, as anyone would do, I went straight to the internet, and I was shocked by what I discovered. Lo and behold! While reading the first article I came across about Dr Enuga Reddy I could not help but be mesmerized by the incomparable contributions he made not only to the liberation of South Africa, but that of Africa in general. I kept on wondering if my democratic government had honored this giant of our struggle against apartheid. Remember at this moment of discovering, I had not yet discovered much about him, but already I had begun to entertain the idea that if my country had not honored Comrade Reddy, I was personally going to make a proposal right in this platform to have him honored posthumously. Just when I was beginning to put some notes down, I received a treasure trove of a Festschrift from Dr Borker which I perused with passion. It was in that tour de force that I discovered that indeed my government could not have committed an omission of not honoring this giant with the highest award named after his Comrade in arms and also a stalwart of our liberation struggle, Mr Oliver Tambo in the form the Order of the Companions of Oliver Tambo. This highest award was instituted on 6 December 2002, and is granted by the President of South Africa to foreign citizens who have promoted South African interests and aspirations through co-operation, solidarity, and support. You may already be asking yourself why did Dr Reddy deserve such a highest award granted by the highest office of the land in South Africa? Let me preface the answer of this question with the following quotation extracted from one of the speeches he made at the United Nations: “The destruction of apartheid is our goal as much as that of the people of South Africa. Mr. Chairman, I cannot feel free, as an Indian, until South Africa is free of apartheid. You can count on me as a volunteer in international campaign against apartheid until that great day” It is indeed gratifying that Dr Reddy who dedicated his life lived so long to see the great day which heralded the death of apartheid and he continued to live long until he was honored by our democratic government in 2013. To me there is no doubt that Dr Enuga Reddy was a selfless human being with a heart of Ubuntu- an African philosophy which implies that I am because you are! You would recall that he left India as a graduate of Mathematics heading to the US to study Chemical Engineering in Illinois. Owing to the fact that he had the highest level of political consciousness, his stopover in New York made him get involved in political activism. As such Dr Reddy never continued with a sojourn to Illinois to pursue his studies in Engineering. We know that a postgraduate degree in Engineering during those times would have earned what we regard as a better life these days- these are things like green card, a good job, house in a suburb, an expensive car and probably an American wife! However, the legendary Dr Reddy sacrificed all these to be on the right side of history. He chose to ground himself with the suffering masses of South Africans and the struggles of African people in general. I mention this because when you read the Festschrift you would come across his interaction with big names in the struggle of African people such as W.E.B DuBois, Nkrumah, Nnamdi Azikiwe and many others. Indeed, people of Dr Reddy’s caliber are rare to come by today. Today as we speak, the Palestinian people are under massive attack. How many of us are willing to sacrifice the so-called better life and stand with the Palestinians. I doubt if we still have people of Dr Reddy’s caliber in our midst. To further illustrate this, let me quote my President in his tribute, entitled A Champion of Justice, during the passing away of Dr Reddy and I quote: “ ES Reddy believed that speaking and acting against injustice was a normal duty and that we share a collective duty to strive towards a world free of oppression and discrimination; it is a struggle that continues today”. It is also crucial to note that Dr Reddy was not only a political activist but a scholar par excellence. In this regard, his corpus of work on anti-apartheid struggles will continue to be read and utilized by future scholars and generations of leaders so that we do not forget where we come from and what we should become to build a better world for humanity. As a scholar as well as a diplomat with the UN, he used his hard-earned education and a position in the UN to speak for the oppressed masses of South African people. Indeed, Dr Reddy should continue to rest in peace knowing fully well that his contributions towards a better life continues to inspire the approach of those who continue to chart a path to a better society. Nandita Chaturvedi  I. India and Palestine
We live in a world that undergoes moral upheavals daily. At this time any sensitive human being goes to sleep thinking of the children of the world -- suffering a slow death of spirit from poverty, or being massacred by war without being given a chance. Living in an Indian city means you come across examples of the former daily. Children sleep in the streets, even through the extreme winters of Delhi which many face without sweaters or socks. In the daytime you can see them sometimes outside cafes and restaurants which are monuments of wealth and opulence that the Delhi middle class frequents. They beg through the glass, making faces at the well fed and properly clothed versions of them across the window pane. On one side is all the civilization and finery of the West; chocolate, cream, cinnamon, marble and silk. On the other is the alleged barbarity of the Indian people, gray and brown, unwashed and haggard. When the people across the glass are young, you can see their inner world in turmoil. They laugh nervously at the children outside, but do not know how to confront their role in this injustice. As they grow older, many of them will learn how to shut down their moral instinct completely. It is this Indian middle class, formed in many of its aspects after the fall of the Soviet Union and liberalization in 1991, that must be held responsible for the erosion of the moral life world of India in this time. It is this class from which the mainstream of Indian intelligentsia, so eager to denounce the freedom struggle in this time, has arisen. The fact that the educated and stable middle class has turned away from the people of this nation expresses itself on the issue of Palestine. There is a section of the middle class that has dealt directly with the white world, is exposed to the Zionist propaganda in the West, and unashamedly supports Israel. Another section has elements of our Nehruvian tradition in their ways of thinking of the world, because of which they have to contort and twist in convoluted ways to support Western agenda. As in any revolutionary upsurge, they were the section who went along with lip-service to socialism without having to make significant sacrifices. After the assassination of Indira Gandhi, there was no moral leadership to keep them in check. They cry out in support of Ukraine, condemning the barbaric acts of the Asian despot Putin. Yet, on Palestine, they whisper in hushed tones about the cruelty of the terrorists, making parallels with terrorist attacks within India. When confronted with the logical implications of their argument, they cry out with self absorbed indignation, “I would never support Israel!” The suffering of Palestinian children washes over them with no effect on their moral life world, just like the suffering of children of the Indian poor. They are obsessed with their families and selfish gain, perpetually living in fear of scarcity, unable to deal with the slightest hardship. Their minds are full of obtuse calculations of how to maximize their pleasure, and the worry for its denial. James Baldwin was right, people pay for the choices they make very simply by the lives they lead. The lives of the Indian middle class are devoid of the beauty of art and music, only allowing them superficial engagement with their own culture. Their dependence on the poor for their own humanity mirrors Tolstoy’s depictions of Tsarist Russia, but maybe even he would be astounded by the irony and hypocrisy of their lives. They behave like children with each other, and are regularly shown kindness and understanding by the people who work for them. It is with this background that we are celebrating the centenary of the birth of ES Reddy this year. Young or middle aged educated people in India do not know his name, as he belongs to that inconvenient history of moral uprightness that they wish could be forgotten. Even as happenings at the UN are a subject of regular conversation, the greatest envoy of the Indian revolutionary tradition at the UN remains unknown. Yet, he must be known among all sections of the Indian people if we are to unite our nation and claim our moral inheritance once more. II. “I cannot feel free, as an Indian, until South Africa is free of apartheid.” ES Reddy was born in Pallapatti, Tamil Nadu. As a young student, he participated in the Indian freedom movement. Reddy came from a family that was politically active, and he imbibed the ideas of Gandhi and Nehru from them as well as his teachers at school. In 1946, after finishing his bachelors he traveled to the US to pursue higher education and came into contact with Kumar Ghoshal in New York. Through him, Reddy came to know and be a part of the African American community. In particular, he became intimate friends with Alpheus Hunton, and looked to W.E.B Du Bois and Paul Robeson. It was under Paul Robeson’s Council on African Affairs that Reddy first came form a picture of African liberation movements and came to be trained in political work. Thus, like Gandhi, Reddy was created in many ways by a confluence of India and Africa. E.S. Reddy found work in the UN, but he was hardly a career diplomat. As a worker in the UN, Reddy worked to bring African revolutionaries into the mainstream of world politics and give them a platform to voice the positions of the anticolonial movement. Being denied funding from the UN in many instances, Reddy funded meetings for this purpose from his own salary. He went on to become the head of the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid. He worked closely with Romesh Chandra, who was President of the World Peace Council, to merge the world movement for peace with the struggle against colonialism and racism. It was through him that Romesh would get to know the Black world within America, and Africa. Reddy knew and was intimate with all the leaders of the South African revolutionary movement, Oliver Tambo, Winnie Mandela, Chris Hani and Ahmed Kathrada. They considered him one of their own, the international wing of the ANC, fighting apartheid on the international level. Reddy was instrumental in shaping world opinion against apartheid South Africa. It is clear from his interviews and articles that Reddy saw himself carrying on the work of the Indian freedom movement, and of Gandhi in particular. He said, "In India, in our generation, we're all influenced by Gandhi. So there is Gandhi under the skin ... We're influenced by Nehru. ... We wanted to have a society which is socialist, like Nehru wanted to have. So it was that kind of a radical outlook. ... Coming from that background, with both Gandhi and Nehru, ... we had a duty, not only to get India's freedom, [but that] India's freedom should be the beginning of the end of colonialism." The close link between the Indian freedom struggle and the peace movement, which was its logical successor, becomes clear in the life of E.S. Reddy. Reddy was a true world citizen. He was comfortable among all the hues of Africa, Asia and America. In Reddy’s life we see that there is no contradiction between being an Indian patriot and nationalist, and being a citizen of all humanity. A complete recounting of his extraordinary life is beyond the scope of this article, but can be read about in the links given in Further Reading. III. Single Garment of Destiny: South Africa and Palestine Today, we are living in times that are historic. We have entered 2024 with a genocide in Gaza, and Western nations are in a state of crisis. South Africa has taken the cause of Palestine to the International Criminal Court, charging Israel with genocide. Reddy’s legacy remains a guiding light in this time. Indian society has moved away from the legacy of freedom fighters such as E.S. Reddy, and yet, we must remember. Freedom fighters of Reddy’s generation would be dismayed and shocked by India’s weak response to the human tragedy of Gaza. Among the people of India, the memory of Gandhi’s movement still remains. We must reignite this civilizational memory by carrying out campaigns of political education. The world campaign against apartheid in South Africa serves as a model for us in the struggle against Zionism today. Now with the end of apartheid in SA, younger generations take for granted the moral bankruptcy of the apartheid regime, and the historical fact of its end. It is important to know that this was not always the case. Western propaganda on behalf of apartheid South Africa permeated world media, much like it does in this time on behalf of genocidal Israel. The effectiveness of the boycott movement was continually brought into question to undermine the movement. Indian collaborators of the Apartheid regime too worked to sway the Indian people away from their moral stance and in favor of the white minority. The liberation forces in South Africa, the ANC, were painted as violent terrorists. The parallel of this is evident in the case of Palestine today. Yet, as leader of the ANC, Oliver Tambo had said of the ANC’s decision to take up armed struggle, “The stage that has been reached is that the methods that are available to us now, are those which we have tried to resist over a long period of time, they are the methods of violence. The worst of all horrors in the world is to live forever as a slave, as a hated, despised subhuman. And this, we reject.” Further, to understand South Africa’s courageous stand on Palestine, it is necessary to understand the history of the relationship of South Africa and Israel. Apartheid South Africa found in Israel an ally to continue the system of segregation. Israel consistently sided with the Apartheid regime in South Africa on international platforms along with the USA. The struggle against apartheid thus implicitly meant a struggle against the forces of world Zionism. It was through this struggle, as well as the efforts of the world peace movement that brought about the UN resolution to declare Zionism as a form of racism. Thus the people of South Africa were bound in a single garment of destiny with the Palestinian people, reflected in the warm brotherhood of Nelson Mandela and Yasser Arafat. India was a part of this emerging world anti-racist movement under the leadership of Indira Gandhi. The UN resolution against Zionism became historically the only resolution to be taken back because of campaigns by Western powers and the Zionist lobby. The youth of our nation must be reeducated to know of the figures produced by our struggle for freedom that can serve as models of a revolutionary life today. Educational programs must teach our people about the history of the Palestinian people, and of the close historic ties that bind us together. We must play our role in a new international movement against genocide and Zionism in Gaza. The memory of revolutionaries like Reddy has been ignored and misrepresented, appropriated by the Western liberal project even within India. When the life of Reddy is represented as that of a career diplomat, or merely as a ‘Gandhi scholar’, it ceases having relevance for the questions that face young Indians. E.S. Reddy was not simply a UN worker ‘interested’ in Africa. He was driven by the deepest quest for human freedom, the struggle to give oneself to the project of liberation. We must remember Reddy as he was, a revolutionary. He was a comrade to the South African revolutionaries, and to all revolutionaries. This is not for sentimental reasons, but for the future of our young. Through people like Reddy, one can see a direction for one’s own life that is beyond the narrow concerns of self and family, and reaches for the human universal. Further Reading: https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/enuga-sreenivasulu-reddy http://www.noeasyvictories.org/interviews/int03_reddy.php https://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article10074.html |
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