The problem is that Gandhi, like other great men of India's freedom movement, recorded whatever they did or thought. That gives way to very selective reading of an eclectic personality.

In his twenties, Gandhi was unquestionably a racist. However, by the time he was in his mid-thirties, Gandhi no longer spoke of Africans as inferior to Indians. That is growing up and correcting oneself 

You can read the speech by Gandhi at the Johannesburg YMCA in May 1908. He was participating in a debate on the topic: “Are Asiatics and the Coloured races a menace to the Empire?”

“Who can think of the British Empire without India. South Africa would probably be a howling wilderness without the Africans." 

In 1910 he remarked: “The negroes alone are the original inhabitants of this land... The whites, on the other hand, have occupied the land forcibly and appropriated it to themselves.” By now, Gandhi’s newspaper, Indian Opinion, was featuring reports on discrimination against Africans by the white regime. One such report dealt with an annual high school examination in Pretoria. In past years, African students were allowed to sit with their white peers. This time, the Town Hall — where the exams were held — barred them, passing a resolution that no African or any other person of colour would be allowed to enter the building. Gandhi thought this reason enough for non-violent protest. “In a country like this,” he remarked (Quoted by Gandhi's biographer, Ramchandra Guha among others). 


Gandhi returned to India in 1914. His views on race continued to evolve in a progressive direction. In his book Satyagraha in South Africa, published in the 1920s, Gandhi offered a spirited defence of African religion. In disputing the claims of European missionaries, Gandhi wrote that Africans had “a perfect grasp of the distinction between truth and falsehood”.