Eternal rights champion
In their book Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed claim he was a racist who ignored the plight of Africans. Jonathan Jack counters that view
IT HAS become fashionable for certain writers and academics to challenge prevailing views of what many people believe are icons and heroes. For example, Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa have been labelled racists. These two remarkable individuals sacrificed their so-called privileged lives in Europe to help the underprivileged in Central Africa and India respectively.
Schweitzer was already an acclaimed concert pianist in Europe, theologian and philosopher, writer and organ builder. (He already had a PhD in theology.) He gave all this up and entered medical school in his 30s to become a doctor so that he could help the people of Gabon.
Benjamin Franklin is not famous for his views on race relations, but early in his life he owned several slaves who worked in his general store. Later his views began to change and he ended up becoming one of the strongest proponents of the abolition of slavery.
I am not aware of when Desai developed his views on non-racism, freedom and equality; nor do I know when Vahed adopted his views on equal rights for men and women or whether he believes the Holocaust ever occurred or whether that event is the figment of the imagination of some historians. I do not really care.
What matters is what they believe now about freedom and universal human rights. If their current views evolved over some time, these have to be respected.
If they were born with liberal views embracing people of all castes, races and religions, they are two lucky individuals.
Many a mortal is born with flaws and the environment in which they are nurtured influences their thinking and shapes their attitudes.
But over time, through education, life experience and interaction with their fellow human beings, they evolve into individuals who embrace universal ideals of freedom, liberation and equality. Gandhi might have been one such lucky human being.
When he arrived in South Africa, he was 24. A young, newly qualified lawyer, he was no politician or activist.
His first experience of racial discrimination was in South Africa. This is well documented.
He became aware of the trials and tribulations of the indentured Indian labourers and fought the authorities for justice for them.
As he was consumed with anger against the government of the day, his time and efforts were expended in the fight for justice for his fellow Indians.
Was there anything wrong with this? I do not think so. Should he also have aligned himself with the cause of the Africans at the time? Maybe he should have.
Is he a racist for not doing so? I do not think so.
Gandhi emerged firstly as a leader of the Indian community and tried to secure some measure of racial and political justice for his fellow Indians.
He founded the Natal Indian Congress in 1894, then immersed himself in Indian politics, which he regarded as a priority then.
Betty Govinden, in her critique of Desai and Vahed’s book, refers to John Dube and his role in the struggle for African political rights.
Govinden asserts Gandhi and Dube “understood and responded to the challenge that confronted each at the same historical moment but, ironically in spite of their physical proximity, in vastly different political spaces”.
She “ferrets” out instances when Gandhi and Dube met. The fact that Dube used the Phoenix printing press (where Gandhi printed Indian Opinion) for a while to print llanga is hardly evidence of a racist attitude.
According to Govinden, both opposed the 1913 Native Land Act and “were eloquent in denouncing it”, reflecting the “seeds of a slow evolution from parochial to nationalist sympathies were beginning to take root”.
Gandhi certainly had his Damascus moment in South Africa. After returning to India in 1914, he got involved in the struggle against the British that finally led to India gaining independence in 1948.
Larry Collins and Dominique Lappierre in Freedom at Midnight (1975) state: “The Gandhi who left South Africa in July 1914 was a totally different person from the timid lawyer who’d landed in Durban.”
From his experience he had evolved the two doctrines of nonviolence and civil disobedience with which over the next 30 years he would humble the world’s most powerful empire.
This is the Gandhi the world has come to respect and admire. This is the Gandhi Albert Einstein held in such esteem as to say: “Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.”
Rabindranath Tagore wrote that Gandhi “stopped at the threshold of the huts of the thousands of the dispossessed, dressed like one of their own. He spoke to them in their language; here was living truth at last and not quotations from books… At Gandhi’s call India blossomed forth to new greatness, just as once in earlier times”. ( A Study in Revolution, Geoffrey Ashe, 1968).
In that work R Palme Dutt referred to Gandhi as “the prophet who by his personal saintliness and selflessness could unlock the door of the hearts of the masses where the moderate bourgeoisie could not hope for a hearing”.
Henry Thoreau (1817-62) coined the phrase “civil disobedience” in the title of his essay. For years he would not pay taxes in protest against the institution of black slavery and US war against Mexico.
Gandhi also used mass civil disobedience in South Africa, but most tellingly in India where in 1930 he organised a cross-country march to the sea to manufacture salt, an illegal activity at the time.
That campaign, and a similar one a decade later, contributed significantly to undermining British authority in India.
Gandhi, together with Martin Luther King, is remembered as one of the foremost civil disobedience activists of the 20th century.
In chapter one of Tutu – The Authorised Portrait, Allister Sparks and Mpho Tutu (2011) state: “South Africa has a way of producing exceptional individuals. It is no small miracle that in the space of a single century it has produced three such figures, in Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu: men assured of immortality in the history of humankind’s long and unfinished struggle to free the wretched of the Earth of colonialism, racism, poverty and prejudice.”
Including Gandhi in this exclusive list is a recognition of his struggle for human rights in his 21 years in South Africa.
When he was assassinated in 1948, Bernard Shaw reacted with the words: “It shows how dangerous it is to be too good.”
This is the Gandhi Desai and Vahed tried to portray as a racist. History has decided otherwise.
Jonathan R Jack was a principal of Crossmoor Secondary, Chatsworth, and superintendent of the KwaZulu Department of Education. He is an English teacher and examiner for various schools in Essex, the UK.