Gandhi’s racist past

by Letters Editor · December 14, 2009

I’ am dismayed by your report “Gandhi’s Satyagraha similar to the Gospel” (October 28) which quotes Fr Noel Peters OMI as saying that there were many similarities between Mahatama Gandhi and Our Lord Jesus Christ.

What a gross distortion of the truth by an ordained minister of God! Gandhi was never a saint to be canonised by the media in order to salve their conscience at the expense of many, many Zulus who suffered through this man’s duplicitous and cunning nature. He lacked scruples and relished the publicity he received to stroke his egotistic propensities.

He was a master of self-aggrandisement who fine-tuned that art of self-ingratiation in order to please those who were in power, namely the British, the masters he was supposed to oppose and fight for what he called “the British Indians”.

Gandhi was also openly antagonistic and disparaging to black people, especially Zulus, in his racist newspaper Indian Opinion. He contemptuously called our great chief and revolutionary, Bhambatha ka Mancinza ka Zondi, a “raw kaffir” during the 1906 revolt against the tyranny of taxation without representation. Bhambatha (two of whose Catholic grandsons I attended St Joseph’s Inkamane school with in the 1950s), was murdered by the British, with Gandhi as an accomplice, for fighting for justice for his people.

Fr Peters claims that Gandhi’s “abandonment of the splendid habits of a barrister in favour of the spare accoutrements of an ascetic was not precipitated by any sudden moral conversion”. To the contrary, Gandhi was a firm believer in the Hindu dogma of Verna, on which the caste system is based to create human beings who are called “Untouchables”.

He was a social climber and status seeker of the lowest degree. He sought and found an exclusive residence in Bertrams/Judith Paarl, far from the teeming slums of Malay Camp, Fordsburg and Vrededorp, where poor Indians, coloureds and Africans lived in horrible conditions.

In the Indian Opinion of September 4, 1904, Gandhi wrote: “Under my suggestion, the Town Council of Johannesburg must withdraw the Kaffirs from the Location. About this mixing of the Kaffirs with Indians I must confess I feel most strongly. I think it is very unfair to the Indian population, and it is an undue tax on even the proverbial patience of my countrymen.”

On the contentious question of gun ownership, the so-called man of non-violence proclaimed in Indian Opinion of March 25, 1905: “In the instance of firearms, the Asiatic has been most improperly bracketed with the natives. The British Indian does not need any such restrictions as are imposed on the natives regarding the carrying of firearms. The prominent race can remain so by preventing the native from arming himself. Is there the slightest vestige of justification for so preventing the British Indians?” In 1906, Gandhi posed for a photo in his splendid uniform as sergeant-major in the British army in Zululand.

All these facts and more are updated in the United States Congress Records as recently as May 26, 2009 for research scholars and other interested parties.

Dr Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali, Soweto