When Gandhi battled an epidemic
the responsibilities of individuals and of society, he did not spare the municipality its share of the blame. The municipality’s allwhite officers believed and led others to believe that the spread of plague among the Indians was due to their insanitary ways — an impression that Gandhi sought strenuously to dispel by writing in the South African press and lobbying with members of the House of Commons and political leaders such as Dadabhai Naoroji in Britain and Gopal Krishna Gokhale in India.
The town council, at that time, had begun to take insensitive, callous and medicallyuncalled-for steps such as shifting patients to canvas sheds in an open field about 13 miles from the city. Gandhi pilloried the council for its initial sluggish response to the epidemic and — most important— its treatment of the spread (until Gandhi made it realise the error of its ways) as something to do with the colour of the sick man’s skin. He was fighting plague and prejudice. I must remind readers that Gandhi had, a little earlier, worked with chosen volunteers, to minister to 23 victims of the plague outbreak in that city. All the victims were of Indian origin, working in a gold mine just outside the city. Twenty one of the victims died, as did the sole nurse the municipality had provided. Rigorous hygiene and luck helped Gandhi and his colleagues, including a brave doctor, William Godfrey, to survive.
So, is this narrative merely a historical recall?
No historical allusion should be regarded as “merely” that, for history, when accurately and fairly recalled, without exaggeration or embroidering is not a story, but the living truth of the present in the past and the living past in the future.
But that truism apart, this narrative is vital for we can be sure that the world is going to live with this pandemic for a long while, as will the need to fight both the virus and, where they occur, our mistakes in handling it.