It had been a commonplace incident in the year 1893. A young Hindu lawyer, riding the train from Durban to Pretoria, would insist on sitting in a first-class compartment. Provincial constables would restore the situation to normal by ejecting 24-year-old Mohandas K. Gandhi at the next stop, a dusty station near the remote Natal-Transvaal frontier.
Last week, 55 years later, provincial authorities at the same frontier faced a similar problem. For the third time in as many weeks, small groups of Indians had stepped across the border in deliberate violation of colonial "ghetto" laws. Sixty people were arrested; but...
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