JOIN USThe year 2014 marked the centenary of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s departure from South Africa after he had lived and worked there for 21 years, during which he had faced racial discrimination but had vowed to fight against the injustice legally and through the passive-resistance movement, Satyagraha.
My recent visit to Johannesburg (Joburg) in South Africa gave me an idea about how Gandhi had used Satyagraha as a weapon of protest that had enthused African leadership.
To honour his memory, the Johannesburg City Council has named one of its important city squares as ‘Gandhi Square’. Here stands a statue of a young Gandhi in his lawyer robes, with a book under his arm and looking determinedly forward. Called M K Gandhi Attorney At Law, it was unveiled on October 2, 2003.
The 2.5-metre bronze statue, placed on a plinth, is sculpted by Tinka Christopher. Around the plinth are benches that have made the surrounding people-friendly.
Also, the plaques put up on the four sides of the plinth make for interesting reading. One plaque reads that the statue and square is a tribute to M K Gandhi, a person who has done so much for the city. This is because, among those brought to trial here were South Africans, Indians and Chinese who offered non-violent resistance to discrimination. Later, Gandhi defended the accused in court. Gandhi also stood trial here for political offences and was sentenced to his first term of imprisonment in 1908. Gandhi’s ideas of Satyagraha spread across the world from Johannesburg.
Another plaque says it’s a tribute to a person who fought for equal rights for all races and his dedication towards public service. Gandhi was a familiar figure at Johannesburg’s first law courts located on Government Square (now renamed Gandhi Square) and he kept offices there from 1903 to 1910, at the corner of Rissik and Anderson streets. Here he challenged racially discriminatory enactments.
On the third side of the pedestal is the following message that Gandhi painfully stated about Indians who were despised as ‘coolies’: “I was, with my countrymen, in a hopeless minority but a despised minority. If the Europeans of South Africa will forgive me for saying that we are all coolies. I was an insignificant coolie lawyer. At that time we had no coolie doctors. We had no coolie lawyers. I was the first in the field. Nevertheless I was a coolie.”
Another plaque states Gandhi’s thoughts while leaving it: “I learnt during all those years to love Johannesburg even though it was a mining camp. It was in Johannesburg that I found my most precious friends. It was in Johannesburg that the foundation for the great struggle of passive resistance was laid in the September of 1906... Johannesburg, therefore, had the holiest of all the holy associations that Mrs Gandhi and I will carry back to India.”
I realised that this city square is surrounded by high-rise buildings and that it’s the starting point for Metro bus routes now. It must have looked quite different when Gandhiji landed in the city from Durban, where he had worked briefly before shifting his law offices to Joburg.