[The liberator of South Africa looks at the seminal work of the liberator of
India]
- Nelson Mandela
India is Gandhi's country of birth; South Africa his country of adoption. He
was both an Indian and a South African citizen. Both countries contributed to
his intellectual and moral genius, and he shaped the libratory movements in
both colonial theaters.
He is the archetypal anti-colonial revolutionary.
His strategy of non-cooperation, his assertion that we can be dominated only if
we cooperate with our dominators, and his non-violent resistance inspired anti
colonial and antiracist movements internationally in our century.
Both Gandhi and I suffered colonial oppression, and both of us mobilized our
respective peoples against governments that violated our freedoms.
The Gandhian influence dominated freedom struggles on the African continent
right up to the 1960s because of the power it generated and the unity it forged
among the apparently powerless. Nonviolence was the official stance of all major
African coalitions, and the South African A.N.C. remained implacably opposed to
violence for most of its existence.
Gandhi remained committed to nonviolence; I followed the Gandhian strategy
for as long as I could, but then there came a point in our struggle when the
brute force of the oppressor could no longer be countered through passive
resistance alone. We founded Unkhonto we Sizwe and added a military dimension to
our struggle. Even then, we chose sabotage because it did not involve the loss
of life, and it offered the best hope for future race relations. Militant action
became part of the African agenda officially supported by the Organization of
African Unity (O.A.U.) following my address to the Pan-African Freedom Movement
of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA) in 1962, in which I stated, "Force is
the only language the imperialists can hear, and no country became free without
some sort of violence."
Gandhi himself never ruled out violence absolutely and unreservedly. He
conceded the necessity of arms in certain situations. He said, "Where
choice is set between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence... I
prefer to use arms in defense of honor rather than remain the vile witness of
dishonor ..."
Violence and non-violence are not mutually exclusive; it is the predominance
of the one or the other that labels a struggle.
Gandhi arrived in South Africa in 1893 at the age of 23. Within a week he
collided head on with racism. His immediate response was to flee the country
that so degraded people of color, but then his inner resilience overpowered him
with a sense of mission, and he stayed to redeem the dignity of the racially
exploited, to pave the way for the liberation of the colonized the world over
and to develop a blueprint for a new social
order.
He left 21 years later, a near maha atma (great soul). There is no doubt in
my mind that by the time he was violently removed from our world, he had
transited into that state.
No Ordinary Leader - Divinely Inspired
He was no ordinary leader. There are those who believe he was divinely
inspired, and it is difficult not to believe with them. He dared to exhort
non-violence in a time when the violence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had exploded
on us; he exhorted morality when science, technology and the capitalist order
had made it redundant; he replaced self-interest with group interest without
minimizing the importance of self. In fact, the interdependence of the social
and the personal is at the heart of his philosophy. He seeks the simultaneous
and interactive development of the moral person and the moral society.
His philosophy of Satyagraha is both a personal and a social struggle to
realize the Truth, which he identifies as God, the Absolute Morality. He seeks
this Truth, not in isolation, self-centeredly, but with the people. He said,
"I want to find God, and because I want to find God, I have to find God
along with other people. I don't believe I can find God alone. If I did, I would
be running to the Himalayas to find God in some cave there. But since I believe
that nobody can find God alone, I have to work with people. I have to take them
with me. Alone I can't come to Him."
He
sorceries his revolution, balancing the religious and the secular.
Awakening
His awakening came on the hilly terrain of the so-called Bambata Rebellion,
where as a passionate British patriot, he led his Indian stretcher-bearer corps
to serve the Empire, but British brutality against the Zulus roused his soul
against violence as nothing had done before. He determined, on that battlefield,
to wrest himself of all material attachments and devote himself completely and
totally to eliminating violence and serving humanity. The sight of wounded and
whipped Zulus, mercilessly abandoned by their British persecutors, so appalled
him that he turned full circle from his admiration for all things British to
celebrating the indigenous and ethnic. He resuscitated the culture of the
colonized and the fullness of Indian resistance against the British; he revived
Indian handicrafts and made these into an economic weapon against the colonizer
in his call for swadeshi--the use of one's own and the boycott of the
oppressor's products, which deprive the people of their skills and their
capital.
A great measure of world poverty today and African poverty in particular is
due to the continuing dependence on foreign markets for manufactured goods,
which undermines domestic production and dams up domestic skills, apart from
piling up unmanageable foreign debts. Gandhi's insistence on self-sufficiency is
a basic economic principle that, if followed today, could contribute
significantly to alleviating Third World poverty and stimulating development.
Gandhi predated Frantz Fanon and the black-consciousness movements in South
Africa and the U.S. by more than a half-century and inspired the resurgence of
the indigenous intellect, spirit and industry.
Gandhi rejects the Adam Smith notion of human nature as motivated by
self-interest and brute needs and returns us to our spiritual dimension with its
impulses for nonviolence, justice and equality.
He exposes the fallacy of the claim that everyone can be rich and successful
provided they work hard. He points to the millions who work themselves to the
bone and still remain hungry. He preaches the gospel of leveling down, of
emulating the kisan (peasant), not the zamindar (landlord), for "all can be
kisans, but only a few zamindars."
He stepped down from his comfortable life to join the masses on their level
to seek equality with them. "I can't hope to bring about economic
equality... I have to reduce myself to the level of the poorest of the
poor."
From his understanding of wealth and poverty came his understanding of labor
and capital, which led him to the solution of trusteeship based on the belief
that there is no private ownership of capital; it is given in trust for
redistribution and equalization. Similarly, while recognizing differential
aptitudes and talents, he holds that these are gifts from God to be used for the
collective good.
He seeks an economic order, alternative to the capitalist and communist, and
finds this in Sarvodaya based on non-violence (AHIMSA).
He rejects Darwin's survival of the fittest, Adam Smith's laissez-faire and
Karl Marx's thesis of a natural antagonism between capital and labor, and
focuses on the interdependence between the two.
He believes in the human capacity to change and wages Satyagraha against the
oppressor, not to destroy him but to transform him, that he cease his oppression
and join the oppressed in the pursuit of Truth.
We in South Africa brought about our new democracy relatively peacefully on
the foundations of such thinking, regardless of whether we were directly
influenced by Gandhi or not.
Gandhi remains today the only complete critique of advanced industrial
society. Others have criticized its totalitarianism but not its productive
apparatus. He is not against science and technology, but he places priority on
the right to work and opposes mechanization to the extent that it usurps this
right. Large-scale machinery, he holds, concentrates wealth in the hands of one
man who tyrannizes the rest. He favors the small machine; he seeks to keep the
individual in control of his tools, to maintain an interdependent love relation
between the two, as a cricketer with his bat or Krishna with his flute. Above
all, he seeks to liberate the individual from his alienation to the machine and
restore morality to the productive process.
As we find ourselves in jobless economies, societies in which small
minorities consume while the masses starve, we find ourselves forced to rethink
the rationale of our current globalization and to ponder the Gandhian
alternative.
At a time when Freud was liberating sex, Gandhi was reining it in; when Marx
was pitting worker against capitalist, Gandhi was reconciling them; when the
dominant European thought had dropped God and soul out of the social reckoning,
he was centralizing society in God and soul; at a time when the colonized had
ceased to think and control, he dared to think and control; and when the
ideologies of the colonized had virtually disappeared, he revived them and
empowered them with a potency that liberated and redeemed.
|