Lilongwe: A group of over 3,000 young activists in Malawi have signed an online petition calling for the Malawian and Indian governments to halt the construction of the Mahatma Gandhi statue. The group argues Gandhi has no direct connection to Malawians as he is not known to a majority of the locals. The group claims Gandhi, who is revered for his role in India’s independence, was a racist. “He (Gandhi) did not like the idea that Africans and Indians were given the same entrance at work. He actually fought for Indians to have their separate entrance away from Africans,” says the group.
Racist record
Gandhi’s legacy and track record on race relations has taken a beating over the last few years, particularly in Africa, even as the Indian government under Narendra Modi seems keen to champion his well-established reputation as an influential pioneer of peaceful protest and activism around the world. In a recent book by Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, professors at the University of Johannesburg and the University of Kwazulu Natal, reveal that Gandhi was an ardent racist who thought Africans were “Kaffirs.” Kaffir is a racial slur which was used to denigrate Africans during the colonial times. When Gandhi was in South Africa, in the early 1900s, he repudiated the colonialist structure that placed Indians and black Africans in the same class bracket apart from Europeans.
One of the local young activists against the erection of the Gandhi statue in Blantyre, Mkotama Willie Katenga Kaunda says he found it appalling the Malawi government disregards literature which paints Gandhi as a racist. The Malawi government released a statement insisting it is important to understand the construction of the Gandhi statue is aimed at recognizing the outstanding role that Mahatma Gandhi played in Malawi and India.
This is not the first time that a Gandhi statue has sparked controversy on an African soil, just two years ago, a Gandhi statue was banished from a Ghana university campus with similar sentiments that Gandhi was a racist. Back in April 2015, a Gandhi statue in Johannesburg’s Mahatma Gandhi Square was defaced with white paint. In South Africa, where as a young lawyer he started his early non-violent civil disobedience work (1893-1914), Gandhi’s statue was caught up in a wider movement against colonialist iconography such as Cecil Rhodes.
