GANDHI, REVISITED

A court battle over a proposed statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Malawi has turned on whether the Indian liberation hero held racist views

Mahatma Gandhi’s reputation is in decline, at least outside India. And SA is playing a key role in this shift.

It was in SA that Gandhi first began to form the philosophies that would help make his name as a rare enlightened soul.

But according to two SA academics, Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, it was also here that he articulated racist views in relation to local black people and those local Indians he regarded as beneath him.

The impact of this revisionist history is spreading, however, and Gandhi’s reputation is now being called into question beyond SA.

One of the countries where his words are causing grave concern is

Malawi, where the problem of a proposed statue of

Gandhi in Blantyre has come to the high court.

In 2018,

Malawi’s courts ordered that work be halted on the statue. Now, high court judge Michael Tembo has delivered a judgment on the question of whether it should be allowed to continue.

Tembo was told that the Indian government approached the Malawian government in 2018 with a proposal for a statue of

123RF/vectomart

Gandhi in Blantyre. It would be paid for by India and would mark the “mutual respect and admiration” between the two countries. But there were two main problems. First, the city council had not met to consider the question of whether to put up the statue, or hear the views of residents.

Second, there was thus no proper council approval for the plan and the statue was being unlawfully erected, objectors argued.

It also turned out that no consideration had been given to the affront that such a statue could cause to people aware of Gandhi’s remarks about the inferiority of black people, and whether this would infringe their constitutional right to dignity.

Lytton Nkata, the hapless director of the Blantyre city council’s administrative services, tried to rescue the situation. He sang Gandhi’s praises, arguing that the culture of Malawi’s Indian people should be respected and that they were “entitled to practise their culture and honour Gandhi”. In his ruling, Tembo found that there had indeed been no lawful decision by the council to put up the statue, and that its construction could not lawfully continue. He went deeper, however, delving into the human rights issues implied in this standoff.

Malawi’s own constitution, not to mention international law covenants it had ratified, required that the dignity of the people of the country be protected, and that the government not take any action that infringes this dignity.

Clearly there was much anger in Malawi over the proposed statue. Almost 4,000 people signed a petition objecting to it, while more than 9,000 liked the “Gandhi Must Fall” Facebook page. As Tembo recorded, more than 80% of these people who objected were Malawians living in the country, “to whom the statue will be a constant mental torment”.

He also accepted the argument that leaders in India had made it clear that they would not tolerate statues of “foreign leaders” in their country. So it would be a “hypocritical double standard” and abuse of the “power differential” between the two countries for India to propose that Malawi accept a statue of an Indian leader.

If India’s sense of its own dignity led to it feeling that there was no place for statues of foreign leaders on its soil, Malawi too has a sense of dignity and also would have “no place for a statue of Gandhi, a leader foreign to Malawi”.

Tembo accepted that Gandhi “held and expressed views that disparaged black people” when he lived in SA, and there was no indication that he later retracted these offensive views.

As a result, a statue of him would be a constant reminder of these racist views and comments — regardless of the fact that Gandhi was a revered figure for the role he played in the struggle for Indian independence from British rule.

Gandhi ‘held and expressed views that disparaged black people’ when he lived in SA