Gandhi statue pulled down in Ghana over racist views

UNIVERSITY DECRIES HOMAGE TO INDIAN ICON WHO SAW AFRICANS AS ‘NAKED SAVAGES’

Another marker has been felled in the intense argument over whether historic figures with racist histories should be honoured. The University of Ghana in Accra no longer has a statue of India independence leader Mohandas K. Gandhi.

To much of the world Gandhi is remembered for his peaceful protests in his efforts for Indian sovereignty, but in Africa, where Gandhi worked as a lawyer for two decades, he is seen through a different lens. And in 2016, the Ghana statue was dedicated by then-Indian President Pranab Mukherjee as a symbol of strengthening ties between the two nations.

But professors, students and Ghanaians immediately railed against the statue, calling it a homage to a racist who thought of Africans as naked savages who were beneath both Britons and Indians, using Gandhi’s early writings from his two decades in Africa to bolster their arguments.

Gandhi’s Indian empowerment argument, critics said in a petition to remove the statue, appeared to be that the British colonial government treated Indians a “little better, if at all, than the savages or the Natives of Africa.”

He spoke of the “half-heathen Native” and said that treating Indians like Africans would “degrade us.” The sole occupation of “raw” natives is hunting, he said and their “sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and, then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness.”

He also made liberal use of the word “kaffir,” considered in South Africa a racial slur so offensive that it’s rarely spoken aloud in polite company or written in print. Simply uttering it in South Africa, where Gandhi lived and worked from 1893 to 1915, can be viewed as a hate crime.

The Ghana University petition cited other protests against — and removal of — tributes to historic but controversial figures at universities around the globe. The protests against Gandhi also are not limited to Africa: In Davis, California, a similar statue has been protested, and plans to honour Gandhi with a statue in London have also met opposition.