Gandhi’s Cardiff Bay statue among memorials in Wales ‘requiring a rethink’

UNCERTAINTY hangs over the future of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Wales after an official Welsh government review into Britain’s colonial and slave trading history drew up a list of memorials that require a rethink.

The Slave Trade and the British Empire: An Audit of Commemoration in Wales report released last week also shortlisted

Britain’s war-time prime minister Winston Churchill and Robert Clive, referred to as Clive of India for his role in establishing Britain’s colonial hold in India, as “persons of interest” to move to a second stage of the review process.

Wales has a bronze sculpture of Gandhi at Cardiff Bay, unveiled in 2017 to mark the 148th birth anniversary of the leader of the Indian national movement. He has been classified as a person of interest who “require examination as having been highlighted by campaigners”.

According to the audit, “His (Gandhi’s) comment in a speech in 1896 that whites were degrading Hindus and Muslims ‘to a level of kaffir’ is taken as suggesting that he believed Indians to be better than black Africans. Historians have taken a range of views of his culpability, saying it would have been premature to expect equality in turn-of-the-century South Africa or identifying Gandhi as having turned a blind eye to brutality against Africans,” the document said.

“Nevertheless, Gandhi’s later leadership in India inspired leaders in Africa, including Nelson Mandela. A statue of Gandhi in Pietermaritzburg was unveiled in 1993 by Desmond Tutu,” it added.

The inclusion of Gandhi on the list is mainly linked with online campaigns against similar sculptures in Leicester and Manchester. However, those campaigns have had widespread countercampaigns in favour as well.