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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 liberatory movements in both colonial theaters.
He is the
archetypal anticolonial revolutionary. His
strategy of noncooperation, his assertion that we
can be dominated only if we cooperate with our
dominators, and his nonviolent resistance inspired
anticolonial 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
nonviolence 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 nonviolence
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 sacerises 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
nonviolence (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. |
