We have seen statues of Lenin / Sadam Hussein fall ~ Berlin wall too stumbled but this statue on the university's Legon campus in Accra, Ghana removed overnight on Tuesday, by students and lecturers makes us feel sad. The head of language, literature and drama at the Institute of African Studies, Obadele Kambon, said the removal was an issue of "self-respect" !~"If we show that we have no respect for ourselves and look down on our own heroes and praise others who had no respect for us, then there is an issue," he said.~and can you remotely think that to be the statue of our National leader – Mahatma Gandhi – there are streets in every metropolis – there are hundreds of statues (the one featured here is in a shop in Mumbai airport) – we see the statue in Marina (Gandhi beach) sculpted by Devi Prasad roy Chowdhury.
In our school books
we read that on 7th June 1893, in South
Africa’s Pietermaritzburg – started a turn in Gandhi’s career, first
act of civil disobedience, which eventually led to the formulation of his
Satyagraha principles of peaceful resistance against the oppressive British
Raj. It was on that day, Gandhi was
evicted from a train in South Africa’s Pietermaritzburg station because the
compartment he was in was reserved for “whites only”.A white man had objected to Gandhi travelling
in the first class coach in spite of the latter possessing a valid ticket. When
Gandhi refused to move to the rear end of the train, he was thrown out. He had
stayed at the station that night shivering in cold and the bitter incident had
played a major role in Gandhi’s decision to stay on in South Africa and fight
the racial discrimination being faced by Indians there. His doctrine of Satyagraha
subsequently took shape during Gandhi’s stay in South Africa.
Sure
you know of Cocoa bean……..almostall of
us are addicted to chocolates. They are made of cocoa bean.... the dried and
fully fermented fatty seed of ‘Theobroma cacao’, from which cocoa solids and
cocoa butter are extracted. Republic of Ghana,located in Gulf of Guinea and Atlantic Ocean, in West Africa is famous
for cocoa beans.Ghana,is a sovereign multinational state, 82nd
largest country in the world and 33rd largest country on continental Africa by
land mass.The word Ghana means
"Warrior King".
From
Ghana comes that news of teachers and students ripping down statue of Gandhi
unveiled by Ghana's president - saying the independence leader was 'racist' as
a young man in South Africa – it was not sudden, but is the culmination of a
campaign for removal that started almost immediately as it was unveiled in
2016.
Media reports
suggest that after campaigning for the statue's removal for two years, teachers
at the University of Ghana in the country's capital Accra took matters into
their own hands on Wednesday.The statue
was unveiled in June 2016 by India's former President Pranab Mukherjee, who
also gave a speech encouraging students to 'emulate and concretise' Gandhi's
ideals.However shortly afterward
lecturers started a petition to get rid of the statue, which had been located
in the university's recreational quadrangle. According to the BBC, the petition
said that Gandi was 'racist' and called for African heroes to be honoured
instead.The professors said that the
fact that the only historical figure memorialised on the university campus was
not African was 'a slap in the face that undermines our struggles for autonomy,
recognition and respect', The Guardian reported. They also reportedly cited several of
Gandhi's writings which refer to black South Africans as 'kaffirs' (a highly
offensive racist slur), accuse the South African government of trying to 'drag
down' Indians to the level of 'half-heathen natives' and describe Indians as
'infinitely superior' to black people.
He is remembered
for his tactics of peaceful civil disobedience, which have inspired civil
rights movements throughout the world. From age 23, Gandhi spent two decades
living and working as a human rights lawyer in South Africa, where he developed
his political and ethical views. While there he also faced persecution because
of his race and served four prison terms totalling seven months for resisting
racially-biased laws. Nana Adoma Asare Adei, a law
student at the University of Ghana, told the BBC: 'Having his statue means that
we stand for everything he stands for and if he stands for these things [his
alleged racism], I don't think we should have his statue on campus.'The University of Ghana lecturers are
not the only group to have raised objections to honouring Gandhi on the grounds
that he was 'racist'.In October this
year, construction work was stopped on a statue of the Indian leader being
built in Malawi after more than 3,000 people signed a petition arguing against
the statue citing the fact Gandhi had referred to black people as 'savages'.
A judge granted an
injunction saying that construction should be halted until a hearing could be
carried out, or another court order was given.In their court application, activist group 'Gandhi Must Fall' said his
remarks on black people 'have invited a sense of loathing and detestation.' The
statue was being built in the city of Blantyre, Malawi's commercial capital, as
part of a $10million construction project in conjunction with the city of
Delhi. Malawai's foreign ministry
official Isaac Munlo previously defended the statue, saying 'Gandhi promoted
values of simplicity, fight against social evils'.
Statues
have sparked charged debates in Africa in recent years as the continent
wrestles with the on-going legacy of colonialism and history of racism. Students
in South Africa successfully campaigned in 2015 for the removal of a statue of
Cecil Rhodes, a notoriously racist mining magnate who died in 1902, from the
University of Cape Town campus.
Dead now for nearly
70 years, Gandhi did not leave behind precise solutions for such problems. But
his legacy will aid, not impede, efforts to find the solutions, even if we
assume for a moment that between 1893 and 1914, Gandhi was prejudiced about
Africa’s blacks and backed British imperialism. One needs to read history as a
whole and not in parts for sometime Gandhi supported Imperialism too - This is no “discovery”. In fact, as Gandhi put
it himself in his autobiography, the British Empire was one of his two passions
at the start of the 20th century. (The other was nursing the sick.) Hadn’t
Queen Victoria and other eminent Britons declared that in their empire, all the
races would be equal and everyone would enjoy the freedoms of belief and
expression and the rule of law? When Gandhi realised that the imperial claim
was false, he became, as Winston Churchill and a succession of viceroys
complained, the empire’s strongest foe, and India’s masses joined Gandhi in
rebellion.
As for world’s
black people, Gandhi nursed great expectations from them. In February 1936, he
said to Howard Thurman, the African-American thinker, who was calling on him in
Bardoli in Gujarat: “Well, if it comes true it may be through the African Americans
that the unadulterated message of non-violence will be delivered to the world”
(Harijan, March 14 1936). Nearly three decades later, when Martin Luther King
and his colleagues won their remarkable nonviolent triumphs for black rights in
the US, they did not hesitate to say that Gandhi and India had inspired them.But wasn’t the younger Gandhi at times
ignorant and prejudiced about South Africa’s blacks? He undoubtedly was,
especially when provoked by the conduct of black convicts who were among his fellow
inmates in South Africa’s prisons. A 1995 book contains this observation from
Nelson Mandela: “Gandhi had been initially shocked that Indians were classified
with Natives in prison… All in all, Gandhi must be forgiven these prejudices in
the context of the time and the circumstances.” (“Gandhi the Prisoner” by
Nelson Mandela in B.R. Nanda (edited), Mahatma Gandhi: 125 Years, ICCR, 1995.)
One is
free to draw their own conclusions.
With regards – S.
Sampathkumar
17th Dec
2018.
