Monty Naicker

Gangathura Mohambry "Monty" Naicker OLS (30 September 1910 – 12 January 1978) was a South African anti-apartheid activist. He is best known for his tenure as president of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) between 1945 and 1963. He also served as president of the South African Indian Congress.

A medical doctor by training, Naicker rose to political prominence in his hometown of Durban as a member of the NIC's left wing. After his election as NIC president in October 1945, he led the organisation in its campaign of passive resistance to the Ghetto Act from 1946 to 1948. He became an important proponent of the Congress Alliance and of the anti-apartheid movement's ascendant non-racialism, but he was a committed Gandhian and opposed the movement's turn to armed struggle in 1960.

Because of his activism, Naicker was jailed eight times, charged in the Treason Trial, and subjected to banning orders that lasted, cumulatively, 14 years. Most notably, he was banned between 1963 and 1973, during which time the NIC fell into dormancy. After his return to public life in 1973, he retired from politics, though he participated in the NIC's subsequent campaign against the South African Indian Council.

Naicker was born in Durban in the former Natal Province on 30 September 1910. He was the eldest of four siblings in a middle-class Indian family. His parents, Gangathura Papiah Naicker and Dhanam Pillay, were both descended from Indian migrants who had arrived in Natal via Mauritius in the 1880s; his father (commonly known as P. G. Naicker) was a prominent trader and banana exporter in Durban.

He attended the Carlisle Street Boys School from 1917 to 1922 and completed his matric education at the newly founded Marine College from 1923 to 1928. In March 1928, he left Durban for the first time to travel to the United Kingdom, where he passed university entrance examinations at Skerry's College in 1929. Thereafter he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where he was a member of the student representative council and a member of the anti-imperialist Edinburgh Indian Association. His contemporaries at Edinburgh included two other prominent South Africans of Indian descent, Doctor Goonam and Yusuf Dadoo.

Upon his return to Durban in 1934, Naicker established a medical practice, drawing the majority of his patients from the nearby Magazine Barracks. Initially attracted to community and civil organising, he joined the Hindu Youth Club. His involvement in Indian political activism came later through the Liberal Study Group, an organisation dominated by intellectuals and trade unionists, and through the so-called Nationalist Bloc, a left-wing faction of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC). Aged 29, he made his maiden political speech in February 1940 at Durban City Hall; in his autobiography I. C. Meer recalled that Naicker "took his stand clearly and forcefully".

In April 1944, Naicker became the founding chairperson of the Anti-Segregation Council, which was established by members of the NIC's Nationalist Bloc to pursue mass mobilisation against Indian segregation. The formation of the council was the result of the Nationalist Bloc's increasing frustration with the NIC's conservative leadership, and that frustration culminated at the NIC's congress in October 1945. In a coup for the left of the NIC, the congress elected Naicker as NIC president, with Doctor Goonam as his vice-president. Naicker served as president of the NIC for the next 18 years.

At its next congress in March 1946, the NIC committed itself to a major campaign of passive resistance to the Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Act, 1946, popularly known as the Ghetto Act. The campaign was coordinated at a national level by the South African Indian Congress (SAIC), with a joint Passive Resistance Council (PRC) composed of representatives from both the NIC and its Transvaal counterpart the Transvaal Indian Congress (TIC); Naicker and the TIC's Yusuf Dadoo (his classmate in Edinburgh) alternated in the presidency of the PRC.