# Johannesburg meeting adopts satyagraha against the Asiatic Registration ordinance

Date: 1906

## The fact

On 11 September 1906 a mass meeting at Johannesburg’s Empire Theatre, with Gandhi as the principal speaker, pledged resistance to the Transvaal Asiatic Registration ordinance requiring certificates and fingerprints of Indians. He later called the method satyagraha.

## Context

The ordinance was a pass law for a trading minority. Gandhi’s campaign still spoke, in these years, in language that distanced Indians from Africans. That racial hierarchy in his prose is a separate worsening Fact.

[Mahatma Gandhi](/people/mahatma-gandhi) is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

SAHO and the Gandhi Heritage Portal independently treat 11 September 1906 as the satyagraha founding meeting in the Transvaal.

Official or archival record: South African History Online — Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/mohandas-karamchand-gandhi; South African History Online).

## Significance

Democratic-resistance path. High confidence on the meeting.

A pledge is not a repealed statute. Smuts’s later negotiations are another row.

## What is established and what is not

Established: the 1906 Johannesburg meeting pledged resistance to Asiatic registration. Not established: that the word satyagraha was already on every banner that night.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.
Later competitions, monuments, translations, UNESCO listings, and museums are not converted into extra lifetime acts. The attached driver is [democratic-resilience](/drivers/democratic-resilience). The welfare reading used in this dossier is improving. That reading is an impact-path choice, not a property stored on the Fact itself. Confidence is stated on the impact path. A later English edition is not a recovered autograph. If a number is not in the two records named above, it is not supplied here.

## People

- Mahatma Gandhi: https://factrail.ai/people/mahatma-gandhi

## Drivers

- Democratic Resilience: https://factrail.ai/drivers/democratic-resilience

## Sources

- https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/mohandas-karamchand-gandhi
- https://www.gandhiheritageportal.org/

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/ga-black-act-satyagraha-1906