{"id":37475,"date":"2013-12-16T12:00:03","date_gmt":"2013-12-16T12:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=37475"},"modified":"2015-05-05T22:20:13","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T21:20:13","slug":"nelson-mandela-and-mahatma-gandhi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2013\/12\/nelson-mandela-and-mahatma-gandhi\/","title":{"rendered":"Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mandela\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"gandhi\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The death of Nelson Mandela at the age of 95 has moved people all over\u00a0the world. The outpouring of grief is similar to the one when Mahatma\u00a0Gandhi died. It is one of those inexplicable quirks of history that\u00a0both these giants who shaped the modern world started their long march\u00a0for justice in South Africa.<\/p>\n

As a young man looking for a better\u00a0future Gandhi could have found any of the many countries of South and\u00a0East Africa that he could have settled in as did many Indians in\u00a0Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe. But it seems\u00a0some divine force brought Gandhi to South Africa which at the time\u00a0epitomized the oppression of a people in their own country in the form\u00a0of apartheid. It is in South Africa that Gandhi started a struggle\u00a0against injustice and his experiences there were of immense importance\u00a0in his strategy to confront the British Raj in India.<\/p>\n

Gandhi\u2019s nascent\u00a0movement for justice in South Africa inspired and galvanized a whole\u00a0generation of South African freedom fighters like Walter Sisulu,\u00a0Oliver Tambo, Desmond Tutu and many others. After Gandhi departed for\u00a0India he left his son Manilal back in South Africa to continue the\u00a0struggle. Manilal was present at a crucial meeting of the ANC in 1949,\u00a0where he pressed the party to unconditionally adopt nonviolence but\u00a0with little success. The attitude of the party toward the Gandhian ideal\u00a0of nonviolence was in subsequent years best summarized by Desmond\u00a0Tutu. He said: \u201cGandhi was to influence greatly Martin Luther King\u00a0Jr., the leading light in the American Civil Rights Movement, as well\u00a0as the South African National Congress of Nelson Mandela.<\/p>\n

So many,\u00a0many people expected our country to go up in flames, enveloped by a\u00a0catastrophe, a racial bloodbath. It never happened. It never happened\u00a0because in the struggle against an evil of injustice, ultimately it\u00a0did not take recourse to violence, and because you and so many others\u00a0in the international community supported the struggle.\u201d Nelson Mandela\u00a0wrote a wonderful article for the 3rd January 2000 issue of TIME\u00a0magazine. The issue celebrated People of the Century. Mandela wrote\u00a0about one of his teachers: Gandhi. His story was called The Sacred\u00a0Warrior and shows some of the ways Gandhi influenced him. This is what\u00a0he wrote:<\/p>\n

\u201cGandhi dared to exhort nonviolence in a time when the\u00a0violence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had exploded on us; he exhorted\u00a0morality when science, technology and the capitalist order had made it\u00a0redundant; he replaced self-interest with group interest without\u00a0minimizing the importance of self. India is Gandhi\u2019s country of birth;\u00a0South Africa his country of adoption. He was both an Indian and a\u00a0South African citizen. Both countries contributed to his intellectual\u00a0and moral genius, and he shaped the liberation movements in both\u00a0colonial theatres. He was the archetypal anticolonial revolutionary.\u00a0His strategy of noncooperation, his assertion that we can be dominated\u00a0only if we cooperate with our dominators and his nonviolent resistance\u00a0inspired anticolonial and antiracist movements internationally and in\u00a0our century. Both Gandhi and I suffered colonial oppression and both\u00a0of us mobilized our respective peoples against governments that\u00a0violated our freedoms. The Gandhian influence dominated freedom\u00a0struggles on the African continent right up to the 1960s because of\u00a0the power it generated and the unity it forged amongst the apparently\u00a0powerless. Nonviolence was the official stance of all major African\u00a0coalitions, and the South African ANC remained implacably opposed\u00a0to violence for most of its existence. Gandhi remained committed to\u00a0nonviolence; I followed the Gandhian strategy for as long as I could\u00a0but then there came a point in our struggle when the brute force of\u00a0the oppressor could no longer be countered through passive resistance\u00a0alone. We founded Unkhonto we Sizwe and added a military dimension to\u00a0our struggle. Even then we chose sabotage because it did not involve\u00a0the loss of life and it offered the best hope for future race\u00a0relations. Militant action became part of the African agenda\u00a0officially supported by the Organization of African Unity (OAU)\u00a0following my address to the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and\u00a0Central Africa (PAFMECA) in 1962, in which I stated, \u201cForce is the\u00a0only language the imperialists can hear, and no country became free\u00a0without some sort of violence.\u201d Gandhi himself never ruled out\u00a0violence absolutely and unreservedly. He conceded the necessity of\u00a0arms in certain situations. He said, \u201cWhere choice is set between\u00a0cowardice and violence, I would advise violence\u2026 I prefer to use\u00a0arms in defense of honour rather than remain the vile witness of\u00a0dishonour \u2026\u201d Violence and nonviolence are not mutually exclusive; it\u00a0is the predominance of the one or the other that labels a struggle.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

Nelson Mandela was indeed a great soul as even though his people\u00a0suffered so much under the apartheid regime and he himself spent 27\u00a0years in jail in conditions that could destroy most people, he was able\u00a0to forgive the oppressors and establish a rainbow nation of peace and\u00a0harmony. It is the small and often many insignificant episodes in the\u00a0lives of great souls that separates them from the rest and here is one\u00a0such moving incident in the life of Nelson Mandela. In around June\u00a01961 Mandela spent some time in a farm at Liliesleaf in Rivonia a\u00a0suburb of Johannesburg. His then wife Winnie brought him an old rifle\u00a0for target practice. One day he shot a sparrow with it and was\u00a0mortified when the five year old son of a friend rounded on him\u00a0saying: \u201cWhy did you kill that bird? Its mother will be sad\u201d. Mandela\u00a0said, \u201cMy mood immediately shifted from one of pride to shame. I\u00a0felt this small boy had far greater humanity than I did.\u201d It was an odd\u00a0sensation for a man who was the leader of a nascent guerilla army.<\/p>\n

That regret he felt at his action and his willingness to learn from a\u00a0five year old is the making of a great man. It is a matter of great\u00a0pride for Indians that Mahatma Gandhi has had such a enormous impact\u00a0on so many people all over the world. Mahatma Gandhi was able to\u00a0articulate the glorious heritage of India which had been stifled by\u00a0invading armies for around a thousand years. Newly independent India\u00a0also played an active role in bringing freedom to other numerous\u00a0colonized countries.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 gandhifoundation.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The death of Nelson Mandela at the age of 95 has moved people all over the world. The outpouring of grief is similar to the one when Mahatma Gandhi died. It is one of those inexplicable quirks of history that both these giants who shaped the modern world started their long march for justice in South Africa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[197],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-special-feature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37475\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}