The pre-eminent political organisation among Indians in South Africa through the first half of the 20th century was the Natal Indian Congress (NIC), founded by Mohandas K. Gandhi in 1894. In the 1940s a battle for the soul of the NIC was fought between groups dubbed ‘moderates’ and ‘ radicals’. The latter group, under the leadership of Dr Monty Naicker, emerged victorious, with Dr Kesaveloo Goonam, a fellow student of Naicker's at Edinburgh University in the 1930s, becoming vice-president of the NIC, the first woman to hold this position. The NIC entered into an alliance with the African National Congress (ANC) in the 1950s. It was a dramatic move for the NIC, which, for the first half of the twentieth century, had shied away from alliances with Africans. In a series of momentous pioneering moves, the NIC joined with the ANC in the 1952 Defiance Campaign, and rallied behind the Freedom Charter adopted in 1955 at the Congress of the People in Kliptown. Through these actions, NIC leaders were pronouncing that the freedom of Indians was inextricably tied to the liberation of the African majority.

From 1960 the state went on the offensive, banning the ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). Although the NIC had not been declared illegal in this period, it had through the weight of ‘bannings, detentions and imprisonment … virtually folded up’, according to one of its executive members, Thumba Pillay.

Dr Goonam related an incident that vividly illustrates the weakness of the NIC at the time. Emerging from the home of a patient, she encountered a man sitting under a tree: