September 6, 2006
By Lucille Davie
AN unconfident Mahatma Gandhi landed in Durban in 1893. Ten years later a much changed man stepped off a train at Park Station in Joburg, already on the way to developing a philosophy that would touch the world.
By the time he left South Africa for his native India, in 1914, at the age of 46 Gandhi's philosophy of Satyagraha, or passive resistance, was fully realised.
This year marks the centenary of the beginning of his Satyagraha movement, originated in the city on 11 September 1906. The philosophy was born out of his experiences while living in Johannesburg with his family from 1903 to 1914.
The City is planning to honour Gandhi's legacy with two events: a series of public lectures and the launch of the Gandhi Prison Exhibition at No 4 prison on Constitution Hill.
Gandhi leaves his gentle footprint around the town – from the house in Albermarle Street in Troyeville where he and his family stayed in the early 1900s; Victory House in the CBD, where Gandhi was refused entry to use the city's first lift; to the Old Fort prison where Gandhi served two prison terms of several months each in 1908.
But perhaps the most significant site was the Empire Theatre - long demolished but originally on the corner of Commissioner and Ferreira streets -where the Satyagraha movement was born.
On 11 September, Gandhi chaired a meeting of more than 3 000 there. The town's Indians were protesting against the Transvaal Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance, says Eric Itzkin in Gandhi's Johannesburg, birthplace of Satyagraha.
The ordinance required all Asians to obey three rules: those of eight years or older had to carry passes for which they had to give their fingerprints; they would be segregated as to where they could live and work; new Asian immigration into the Transvaal would be disallowed, even for those who had left the town when the South African War broke out in 1899, and were returning.
The meeting produced the Fourth Resolution, in which all Indians resolved to go to prison rather than submit to the ordinance.
Itzkin, the City's deputy director of immovable heritage, quotes Gandhi as saying: "Up to the year 1906 I simply relied on appeal to reason. I was a very industrious reformer … But I found that reason failed to produce an impression when the critical moment arrived in South Africa. My people were excited – even a worm can and does turn – and there was talk of wreaking vengeance. I had then to choose between allying myself to violence or finding out some other method of meeting the crisis and stopping the rot, and it came to me that we should refuse to obey legislation that was degrading and let them put us in jail if they liked. Thus came into being the moral equivalent of war."
Despite Satyagraha, the ordinance became law in 1907, and passive resistance was used by the Transvaal's Indians to oppose discrimination.
It spread to Natal in 1913 where Indian coal miners downed tools.
The African National Congress, founded in 1912, was also influenced and used the philosophy up until the 1960s when they switched to a policy of armed struggle to overthrow apartheid.
Satyagraha was also used by Martin Luther King in the US, who "accepted Satyagraha as the only morally sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom", says Itzkin.
These days 11 September has a more sinister meaning after two aeroplanes slammed into the World Trade Centre twin towers in New York in 2001. Another crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, and a fourth plane crashed in a field. In all around 3 000 people were killed.
Events
The Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research, together with the City, has put together a programme of public lectures, running from Thursday, 21 September, to Sunday, 24 September, concluding with a tour of Gandhi sites by Itzkin.
Click here for the full programme.
In October an exhibition telling the story of Gandhi's experiences in No 4 prison on Constitution Hill will open.
On 11 September, the SGI-South Africa and the Gandhi Development Trust will be holding a discussion entitled "The Other 9/11", which will include three topics: "Building peace in our communities"; "Gandhi's legacy in the 21st century"; and "Human revolution – be the change you wish to see in the world". This will take place at 6.30pm at the SGI-SA Community Centre, corner Wells and Dudley roads, Parkwood. Phone Loren on 083 267 2768 or e-mail jhb@gandhi100.org for more details.
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