When the Indians at Durban were engaged in a stormy satyagraha campaign against the Ghetto Act, Mahatma Gandhi had felt induced to speak on the subject at length at a prayer meeting in New Delhi on June 28, 1946. While doing so, he fondly reminisced about his Natal and the Transvaal days and remarked that he was born in India bet was made in South Africa where he had passed twenty years of his life at its meridian.' He had, thus, re-confirmed the importance he attached to the period spent by him in the service of his countrymen in that subcontinent. It is a universally accepted fact now that whatever Gandhi had imbibed, practised or enunciated in South Africa holds the key to the entire spectrum of Gandhiarn thought and the pinnacle of greatness later attained by him as a man of action. This book aims at a more detailed and revealing treatment of his South Africa years than is available in most of his biographies wherein that part of his life gets overshadowed by the dazzling role played by him in India's fight for independence. The idea is to exclusively portray the South Africa period on a canvas large enough to satisfy the ever-so-curious among the Gandhi enthusiasts, anxious to understand precisely how an obscure young Indian lawyer striving for his livelihood, after reaching South Africa, gave a completely new direction to his life and slowly evolved himself into an eminent political leader and, later, a Mahatma.