Gandhi needs a revisit

Stalked by crime, perhaps a beautiful South Africa needs a bit more of Gandhi to come to peace with itself

Sanjay Kapoor Durban

Dusk is slowly settling on Church Street, one of the main thoroughfares of Pietermartizburg, capital of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. A 'whites only' area during the days when this country practised apartheid, Church Street now displays different colours even though still disunited. Glistening cars owned by the new class of blacks slowly weave their way through crowds of busy shoppers and jaywalkers who hang around on a little square on one side of the street. Here stands a dark bronze statue of an emaciated and bony Mahatma Gandhi.

A little distance down the road is the Pietermaritzburg railway station. It was here in May 1893 a young barrister from Porbander, on his way to Pretoria, was thrown out of the first class compartment for his colour. This, however, was an epoch-making incident for the young barrister. It flagged off his long journey to become a Mahatma.

In 1997, more than a hundred years later, Nelson Mandela conferred the 'freedom of Pietermaritzburg' to Gandhi.

The statue and its location are open to different interpretations. The statue looks out at the majestic City Hall, one of the biggest red brick structures in the southern hemisphere where Gandhi addressed a large congregation many years ago. Routinely, it gets vandalised by drunken revellers. Members of the Gandhian society have woken up to find Gandhi's outstretched hand holding a beer can and a cigarette between his fingers. Many a time, his trademark round glasses have gone missing. Acts such as these have caused anxiety amongst the old generation of South African Indians. They perceive this as an attempt by radical blacks to minimise their role in the fight against apartheid. Is there merit in this grievance?

A few months ago, a Union minister from Delhi had visited Pietermaritzburg - a pilgrimage that most visiting Indians undertake. After leaving a bouquet, which still lies dry and dusty after all these weeks, he met the city officials. Rather undiplomatically, he broached the issue of maintenance of the platform and other places linked with Gandhi. The city officials, it is learnt, did not take this advice kindly. Rather, they questioned why Church Street should have Gandhi's statue and not that of other black freedom fighters.

The minister, who gets elected from one of the dirtiest cities of India, had no credentials to upbraid the South Africans on how they interpret their history and treat their icons. Quite clearly, the minister was not nuanced in South African history and the efforts of the African National Congress (ANC) government to ensure the success of a tricky rainbow coalition that is constantly threatened by memories of another day when whites had played Indians against blacks and vice versa. Sitting atop a tinder box of racial tension and an unstable economy, the South African government could find the gains of the last few years getting squandered if there is mindless intervention by graceless visitors, in this case the Indian minister.

South Africans place Mahatma Gandhi high in the pantheon of top leaders who fought against the apartheid regime. At the Constitution Hill in Johannesburg, Gandhi figures prominently in a stark and gloomy museum which has emerged out of the feared Prison No. 4. It is located near the old fort prison where thousands of anti-apartheid activists and petty offenders were incarcerated before it was shuttered down in 1986. Here, the white warders methodically worked towards taking away the dignity of political prisoners by making them strip and forcing them to engage in acts that would make them difficult to look at themselves in the mirror. Gandhi has a permanent exhibit in Prison No. 4.