Durban, October 1
On the eve of Gandhi Jayanti, it was a momentous occasion for the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, to visit the small four-room house in the Phoenix settlement, half an hour’s drive from Durban, where Mahatma Gandhi stayed with his family.
The Phoenix settlement was an idea that occurred to the Mahatma when he read Ruskin’s “Unto This Last” during a train journey from Johannesburg to Durban. It taught him that the “good of the individual is contained in the good of all, that a life of labour is the life worth living and that a lawyer’s work has the same value as the labour’s inasmuch as all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work.”
For a person who preferred to wear a three-piece suit with a European hat and travel only in first class, it was transformation in the real sense of the term. In order to realise his ambition of setting up a colony where everybody lived by the sweat of his labour, Gandhiji purchased 100 acres at a cost of £1000 about 103 years ago.
Fourteen miles from Durban and half a mile from the Phoenix station, the settlement was indeed a revolutionary concept, particularly in a country where the black majority and Indians were not allowed to walk on the roads frequented by the whites.
Gandhiji shifted the printing press of the Indian Opinion, which was gaining in popularity as the mouthpiece of the Indians in South Africa, to the settlement. In his autobiography, he mentions that there were a few mango and orange trees in the farm when he bought it. People were initially reluctant to move to the settlement but today it is a thickly-populated area.
A large number of children, poor and ill-clad, were in front of the International Printing Press from where the Indian Opinion was brought out at the settlement to see the Prime Minister’s arrival. They live in the settlement, which got a boost when in 1990 the Government of India assisted the Phoenix Settlement Trust to develop it as a heritage centre after Gandhiji’s original house was destroyed in apartheid-related violence in 1985.
A small mango tree full of mangoes stood in the compound of Gandhiji’s house as if it was there to witness and rejoice in the visit of Dr Manmohan Singh. Before he reached the house, he garlanded the statue of the Mahatma.
In his address, the Prime Minister said as a child he was introduced to Gandhiji’s autobiography by his parents but he had never imagined that he would one day be able to visit the Phoenix settlement, on which is modeled the Sabarmati ashram in India.
Speaking on the occasion, the President of South Africa, Mr Thabo Mbeki, said India and South Africa were unique in having
a common leader like Mahatma Gandhi who was revered in both countries.
Earlier in the day, the Prime Minister visited the Resistance Monument at Umbilo Park which commemorates the 1946 Passive Resistance campaign against racism. “I could not but admire the courage of the brave men and women who gathered at the whites- only park in 1946 and defied injustice and violence with just and non-violent means, thereby practising the Gandhian values to the very letter and spirit. They proved that Satyagraha remained the golden path to follow even 40 years after its birth,” he said.
In the afternoon, a large function was held at Kingsmead Stadium to celebrate the centenary of Satyagraha. The Prime Minister stressed on the timelessness of Gandhian values and said “every generation has rediscovered the relevance of Gandhiji’s message. I was heartened to see recently that back home in India the most popular movie this festival season is a film about a young man’s discovery of the universal and timeless relevance of the Mahatma’s message.” It was obviously a reference to the success of the film “Lage Raho Munnabhai.”
Dr Manmohan Singh said: “In an age when people worry about the so-called ‘clash of civilisations,’ Gandhiji’s message would have been that it is indeed possible for us to work for the confluence of civilisations.”
In a prepared speech, the South African President recalled the contributions of the Mahatma to the freedom movement in South Africa. He particularly mentioned the Bambatha Uprising in 1906—the centenary of which is being celebrated this year—in which Gandhiji led an ambulance corps to help the wounded among the Zulu people.
One of the major highlights of the function was a multi-faith prayer and a rich cultural programme in which artistes of South African and Indian origin participated. Mahatma Gandhi’s granddaughter Ela Gandhi, who is Chairperson of the Gandhi Development Trust, was present on all occasions, attracting a fair amount of attention.
