Who will be a stretcher-bearer for Gandhi’s legacy?
Last Wednesday was Mahatma (the great soul) Gandhi’s 150th birthday. He lived in SA for 21 years, from 1893 to 1914, when he honed much of his satyagraha passive resistance, civil-rights methods.
Gandhi’s beliefs inspired leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda as well as seven Nobel peace laureates of African descent: Ralph Bunche, Albert Luthuli, Martin Luther King jnr, Anwar Sadat, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama.
A 2015 book by two Indian SA scholars, Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, The South African Gandhi: StretcherBearer of Empire provided incontrovertible evidence of Gandhi’s collaboration with the British Empire as well as his disdain for SA’s black majority. During the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) and a war of dispossession of the Zulus in 1906, as well as at the start of World War 1 (1914-18), Gandhi mobilised Indian stretcherbearers as an ambulance corps to aid wounded British troops.
He fought parochially Indian civil-rights struggles in SA and ignored the black majority’s basic rights. Gandhi also engaged in what can only be described as vituperative “k **** r bashing”. In 1896, he complained that whites wished to “degrade us to the level of the raw K **** r whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness”. Gandhi also said “K **** rs are as a rule uncivilised ... They are troublesome, very dirty and live almost like animals.”
Even before the National Party enthroned apartheid, Gandhi was a staunch believer in social apartheid, launching campaigns that established separate public facilities for Indians and blacks.
Protesters defaced his statue in Johannesburg with white paint in 2015. A year later, staff and students at the University of Ghana successfully petitioned for the removal of his statue from the campus. In 2018, Malawian petitioners successfully opposed a statue of Gandhi being built in Blantyre.
After 1994, postapartheid SA was on a quest to create a rainbow nation. Its founding father, Nelson Mandela, embraced India’s founding father in saying: “It was here that he [Gandhi] taught that the destiny of the Indian community was inseparable from that of the oppressed black majority.” But as clearly demonstrated, Gandhi fought solely Indian struggles in SA.
There are parallels between Gandhi and the rehabilitation of the racist legacy of imperialist Cecil Rhodes. Mandela linked his name to Rhodes in the Mandela Rhodes Foundation in 2003, viewing this monstrous marriage as an act of reconciliation. There were clear parallels between Rhodes and Gandhi, both migrants who moved to SA seeking fame and fortune, whose legacies were re-examined and statues removed or defaced in Zimbabwe, Zambia, SA and Ghana. Even though Rhodes and Gandhi are often said to have been “men of their times”, there were surely many individuals, such as Olive Schreiner and Yusuf Dadoo, during the age in which they lived who acted and spoke with principle.
But Gandhi was no Rhodes. After leaving SA, he fought an ultimately victorious independence struggle in India. What somewhat redeems his legacy is that he was instrumental in destroying British imperialism, resulting in the liberation of Asia and Africa. Gandhi ended up on the right side of history; Rhodes did not.
Gandhi’s brand was, however, badly tarnished by recent disclosures of his racism.
The Indian government still, nevertheless, traverses the globe, offering his statue to other countries. New Delhi asked Cape Town to unveil a life-size statue of Gandhi in November to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his birth. A reported two-thirds of Cape respondents opposed the project.
Will the Gandhi statues in Pietermaritzburg and Johannesburg survive the harsh verdict of history? If both memorials are to remain intact, it may be prudent to erect a statue of ANC stalwart John Dube in conversation with Gandhi in Pietermaritzburg, and another of ANC leader-activist Lilian Ngoyi in dialogue with the mahatma in Johannesburg.
● Adebajo is director of the University of Johannesburg’s Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation.