Joseph John Doke was an English Baptist Minister, artist and author who arrived in South Africa with his family in 1903 by way of New Zealand. He lived the last decade of his life in a country in which he was renowned for two reasons. The first one is that his book, M. K. Gandhi: An Indian Patriot in South Africa (Madras, 1919), was the first biography ever written of the great man. It was originally published as a series of articles in 1909 in the London-based publication The London Indian Chronicle. The second reason is that son Clement Martyn Doke (1893-1980) was to become arguably the greatest South African scholar in the twentieth-century. It is because of these two reasons that Joseph John Doke has not been completely forgotten in South African intellectual history. Had his reputation been solely the product of his two novels, The Secret City: A Romance of the Karroo (1913) and The Queen of the Secret City (1916), in all probability he would be today a forgotten man. His having been an editor in 1911 for a short time of Gandhi's newspaper Indian Opinion, would possibly enabled him to be mentioned only in the footnotes of this intellectual history. Mahatma Gandhi in his autobiography has left for posterity a permanent sketch of Joseph John Doke. The circumstances of it coming into being are interesting and fascinating, though perhaps sadening because of the circumstances of its occurrence. On a particular occasion carrying out his Satyagraha civil disobedience, Mahatma Gandhi was seriously assaulted by other Indians who disagreed with his Tolstoyan philosophy. It was Joseph John Doke and his family that nursed him into full recovery. In Satygraha in South Africa (1928), recalling this incident of 1908, Gandhi wrote these moving words in gratitude to the Doke family: "Mr Joseph Doke was a Baptist minister then 46 years old and had been in New Zealand before he came to South Africa. Some six months before this assault, he came to my office and sent in his card. On seeing the word 'Reverend' before sis name, I wrongly imagined that he had come, as some other clergymen did, to convert me to Christianity or to advise me to give up the struggle or perhaps to express patronizing sympathy with the movement. Mr Doke entered, and we had not talked many minutes before I saw how sadly I had misjudged him and mentally apologized to him. I found him familiar with all the facts of the struggle which were published in newspapers. He said, 'Please consider me as your friend in this struggle. I consider it my religious duty to render you as such help as I can. If I have learnt any lesson from the life of Jesus, it is that one should share and lighten the load of those who are heavily laden.' We thus got acquainted with each other, and every day marked an Advance in our mutual affection and intimacy. The name of Mr Doke will often recur in course of the present volume, but it was necessary to say a few words by way of introducing him to the reader before I describe the delicate attention I received at the hands of the Dokes. Day and night one or other member of the family would be waiting upon me. The house became a sort of caravanserai so long as I stayed there. All classes of Indians flocked to the place to inquire after my health, and when later pernitted by the doctor, to see me, from the humble hawker basket in hand with dirty clothes and dusty boots right up to the Chairman of the Transvaal British Indian Association. Mr Doke would receive all of them in his drawing room with uniform courtesy and consideration, and so long as I lived with the Dokes, all their time was occupied either with nursing me or with receiving the hundreds of people who looked in to see me. Even at night Mr Doke would quietly peep twice or thrice into my room. While living under his hospitable roof, I never so much as felt that it was not my home, or that my nearest and dearest could have looked after me better than the Dokes. And iy must not be supposed that Mr Doke had not to suffer for according public support to the Indians in theor struggle and for harbouring me under his roof. Mr Doke was in charge of a Baptist church, and depended for his livelihood upon a congregation of Europeans, not all of whom entertained liberal views and among whom dislike of the Indians was perhaps as general as among other Europeans. But Mr Doke was unmoved by it. I had discussed this delicate subject with him in the very beginning of our acquiantance. And he said, 'My dear friend, what do you think of the religion of Jesus? I claim to be a humble follower of Him, who cheerfully mounted the cross for the faith that was in Him, and whose love was wide as the world. I must take a public part in your struggle if I am at all desirous of representing Christ to the Europeans who, you are afraid, will give me up as punishment for it. And I must not complain if they do thus give me up. My livilihood is indeed derived from them, but you certainly do not think that I am associated with them fo living's sake, or that they are my cherishers. My cherisher is God; they are but the insdtruments of His Almighty will. It is one of the unwritten conditions of my connection with them, that none of them may interfere with my religious liberty. Please therefore stop worrying on my account. I am taking my place beside you in this struggle not to oblige the Indians but as a matter of duty. The fact, however, is that I have fully discussed this question with my dean. I gently informed him, that if he did not approve of my relations with the Indians, he might permit me to retire and engage another minister instead. But he not only asked me not to trouble myself about it but even spoke some words of encouragement. Again you must not imagine, that all Europeans alike entertain hatred against your people. You can have no idea of the silent sympathy of many with your tribulations, and you will agree with me that I must know about it situated as I am.' After this clear explanation, I never referred to the subject again. And later on when Mr Doke died in the pursuit of his holy calling in Rhodesia, at a time when the Satyagraha struggle was still in progress, the Baptists called a meeting in their church, to which they invited the late Mr Kachhalia and other Indians as well as myself, and which they asked me to address. About ten days afterwards I had recovered enough strength to move about fairly well, and I then took my leave of this godly family. The parting was a great wrench to me no less than to the Dokes" (p.171-173). Written fifteen years after the death of Joseph John Doke, this is a remarkable tribute to this extraordinary man by Mahatma Gandhi. In his book M. K. Gandhi: An Indian Patriot in South Africa, Joseph John Doke makes the following appraisal of Gandhi: "Two wnterprises will always be associated with Mr. Gandhi's name and work in South Africa. One is the propaganda, commenced in 1903, among his own people, by means of a weekly journal called Indian Opinion; the other, that little Tolstoyan Colony in Phoenix, where Indian Opinion is now published. Both of them have exerted a great influence on the Indian community. Mr. Gandhi is a dreamer. He dreams of an Indian community in South Africa, welded together by common interests and common ideals, educated, moral, worthy of that ancient civilisation to which it is heiry remaining essentially Indian, but so acting that South Africa will eventually be proud of its Eastern citizens, and accord them, as of right, those privileges which every British subject should enjoy. This is the dream. His ambition is to make it a reality, or die in the attempt. And this is the motive that forms the foundation of all his efforts to raise the status of his people, and to defeat everything that would tend to degrade his brethren or hold them in a servile condition. But Mr. Gandhi is a practical dreamer. As his life-work took shape, he realised that his plans could only be materialised by the creation of some medium of constant intercourse with Indians throughout the South African Colonies, and after mature thought Indian Opinion was launched" (p.80). Both Joseph John Doke and Mahandras Karamchand Gandhi were instrumental in making modern South Africa possible.