Pietermaritzburg’s missed opportunity

‘City failed to capitalise on Gandhi’s train experience’

THE government woke up late about luring tourists from India.

That is the opinion of Dick Jones, Pietermaritzburg’s former director of publicity.

This was after a recent announcement that efforts would be made to encourage Indian tourists to visit South Africa.

Jones, 87, from Howick, recalled that he visited India 25 years ago as a member of a tourism promotion group organised by Satour.

“All the Indian tour operators I met in four cities in 1994 believed that Pietermaritzburg could become a place of pilgrimage for Indian tourists because of the Gandhi connection,” he said.

“As I own the Mahatma’s book Satyagraha in South Africa, published in 1926, I was well aware of the immense contribution Gandhi made to our country’s history, but I was annoyed and embarrassed by the fact that there was nothing at Pietermaritzburg’s railway station to indicate where the young lawyer’s demeaning experience in 1893 occurred, an incident that launched his political career.”

Gandhi had boarded a Natal Government Railways train en route from Durban to Pretoria to appear in a court case when, in his own words, “I was pushed out of the carriage by a police constable and spent the night in the station waiting room, shivering in the bitter cold.”

His crime was to sit in a first-class compartment reserved for whites.

Jones said that, after arriving in Mumbai, the South Africans were taken to the Gandhi museum in Laburnum Road where the great man lived and worked after he returned to India from South Africa in 1914.

“In one section of the museum was a feature showing highlights of the Mahatma’s life – and there in three-dimensional form was a model of him being ejected from a train in Maritzburg,” Jones said.

“The exhibit proved that our city obviously enjoyed a certain notoriety that could be exploited to attract some of the three million wealthy Indians who travelled abroad every year. But how could this be achieved when there wasn’t even an ‘X marks the spot’ painted on the station platform?”

After returning to Natal, Jones wrote to the regional public affairs manager of Spoornet in Durban, Selby Msimang, asking if the Railways could erect a brass plaque at the station to honour Gandhi.

When he agreed, Jones invited

Latha Reddy, India’s first consulgeneral to South Africa, to unveil the plaque, and a date was set.

On November 7, 1994, foreign dignitaries and local personalities gathered in Pietermaritzburg’s railway station foyer to finally recognise a historic happening that the Nationalist government had ignored for racial reasons.

In her speech, Reddy said that Gandhi had come face to face with the ugliness of racial discrimination in Natal and the experience had a profound effect on him.

He had dedicated his life to the cause of justice and freedom on the night he sat in the cold waiting room and pondered over the cruelty and injustice of a system based on racial prejudice.

Jones added that India’s tourism minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad, had visited the city in January 1994 and had predicted that tourists from India would find much to interest them in