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[1]. The Two Faces of Mahatma Gandhi By Nhlanhla Hlongwane

his Day lifted the Gandhi piece from the Kush website and covered it as their first cover piece for their Review-Arts section. The piece prompted a lot of dialogue both in the following editions of the arts section and also on several local radio talk shows, for which I am grateful. I was also on Tim Modise’s talk show and I will never forget, a white woman called and asked me “what I was doing”. She continued to badger me saying she sat at the feet of this man and so on. Most of Tim’s callers had me rattled here and there, but I came away at the end of it understanding more how people come to romanticize things and events and people. She was really emotional and during the interview I just couldn’t understand why. I kept wondering if I was upset because I never got to sit at the feet of Gandhi, and had him cast his shadow over me. At any rate, I continue to search for the truth. Africa First!!

I am in touch with Mr. GB Singh the scholar I quoted from his forth coming book, ‘Behind the mask of Divinity’. He physically exists, and his book is currently at the printers. Included in it also is a discussion of Gandhi’s racism experience on a train in Piertermaritzburg. New information reveals that the incident as Gandhi recalled it, never happened. “He lied,” Mr. Singh told me in recent e-mail. A film based on the book is also in the pipeline. Watch this space and or your local best seller for more info!

What follows bellow is my response to those who criticised me and my piece on Mahatma Gandhi’s early racist attitudes toward Africans he encountered while here in South Africa. Kirti Menon, Gandhi’s great, great granddaughter had some particularly hateful things to say about me in particular, and we don’t know each other. Some professor wrote at length explaining how I was a “hate monger”. For a short moment they had me feeling bad…. Here’s what I wrote in response to them. My response was the last comment on the issue.

Dearest Editor; Firstly I would also like to congratulate This Day for not only an engaging publication, but also for your courage in printing my piece first titled “Two faces of Mahatma Gandhi” on the Kush Kollective website [www.kush.co.za] archives. I have since been reading with great interest some your readers' responses to the article which appeared on your first Review Arts insert on October 10th as “Behind the Mask of Divinity” (the title of GB Singh’s’ forthcoming book).

I would first like to respond to Kirti Menon, Gandhi great-granddaughter’s comments (October 24th). I was a little disappointed by her take on the matter and also by the focus of Prof Uma Dupelia-Mesthrie’s lengthy response which similarly also tried to dismiss me as a misguided “hate monger”.

As a Pan Africanist, I was initially inspired to write the article because of what appeared to me to be a glitch in our collective memory as a people. That the early Gandhi harbored anti-African views was and is of great interest to me as an African youth today. To chart his growth into one of the world’s most respected human forces is equally fascinating to me as a student of history. What I have found intolerable however is how those who have lined up behind Menon in defense of Gandhi, have while correctly alluding to the fact that Gandhi was a product of his times, they have yet however to share with the other students of history the depths from which Gandhi himself rose to finally recognize the humanity of us Africans. To inquire after that out is not to take anything away from the man. He like all of us was fallible. To begin to recall him as otherwise is also then the beginning of the problem.
Although Gandhi is dead and gone, those who hide behind his name today are none the wiser from his struggle, teachings and life sacrifice. No Kirti, I am not after your great-grandfather as it were, I am after you and your generation of “Indian” South Africans. I was merely using Gandhi to show some of your’ll up for not having risen yourselves from the depths from whence he rose.

I wrote "Two Faces" for free for the Kush Kollective website with the hope that perhaps some of my observations might be of interest to earnest Indian youth today who aspire to a political career. I think that the pedistilling of Gandhi along with the many romantic attempts to parrot and chorus his achievements, nogal within a political hollow, has done his legacy a great disservice. I have found that people who ride the Gandhi bandwagon tend to peruse over reality. They are so full of Gandhi that they never stop to think. I agree that the world is in need of the spirit, sentiment and intent that Gandhi expressed later on in his life, but we also need to check the reality of our socio-political situation today. We may even look at it in relation and in contrast to the early Gandhi. Perhaps there might be some lessons for all of us in that?

I feel it is important to look into the men who champion our hopes and summaries our aspirations, in as much as Kirti Menon feels that “a public figure like Gandhi has been barred to scrutiny from all angels” Perhaps precisely because of such veiled and loaded sentiment, the national “issue of Indians is still up for debate” today. Menon took exception to my suggestion that “the Indian has no future in Africa that is separate from that of the Africans”. How are we the African youth meant to interpret this? She sounded hurt even as our feelings have been consistently hurt. I am wondering if I meant to overlook the early Gandhi I stumbled on and instead wallow in his praises? Are New South African youth of today meant to allow the early Gandhi to go unvisited? What is so wrong with me encouraging and urging Indian youth to be more African? I would really like to know what is wrong with me suggesting to Indian youth that they should make a commitment to the continent? Especially since you the older Indian generation never saw the value of telling and showing your youth that?

Malcolm X, when he was Little was a hustler. He used drugs, ran with White women and was involved in petty crime. In death today he epitomizes a Black man’s struggle for freedom and justice in a racist and adverse world, even as he had a reactionary past. There was even a time when a lot of us believed that Nelson Mandela was the worst terrorist on the face of the earth, who when dead should be buried under the jail, and now he is the darling of the world. It’s like nothing happened! I say that to say this: history, and all it’s holy cows, must always be interrogated. If they are not, then this inaction might in time distort the lessons that future generations are meant to lean in order to evolve the struggle. If history is not on occasion interrogated in relation to the times, it will invariably rob us all of the lived wisdom needed to advance our struggle toward the absolute. We will be all left blind as Gandhi suggested, especially since it is known that history has a tendency of repeating itself.

What good is a legacy if it cannot be lived out as a blue-print for coming generations to trampoline off and add to? If Gandhi’s’ squeaky clean political legacy has robbed South African Indian youth of a thoroughgoing legacy to emulate and advance, then those among us of who appreciate the value of our history in relation to the quality of our freedom, need to attempt to wrestle Gandhi the man from the myth of Gandhi. Where the total liberation of Africa is concerned, there cannot be any sacred cows. Homie can’t afford to play that! Until Africa is free, the best is still yet to come!
Nhlanhla Hlongwane [(BA) Political Science & Communications, (MA) Media Studies] is a Freelance Filmmaker (Director, Camera person) and Writer. He is www.kush.co.za editor and a founding member of Kush Kollective.