Johannesburg: Statues and busts of Mahatma Gandhi commemorating the key role he played in helping fight the oppression and discrimination in South Africa during the apartheid era are abound across the country, inspiring the younger generations to imbibe his ideals.
While most of his statues in South Africa show Mahatma Gandhi’s traditional bald-headed, bespectacled, dhoti-clad image, the most significant ones that reflect his arrival in the country as a young lawyer are in Pietermaritzburg and in this city.
Pietermaritzburg is the place where Mahatma Gandhi as a young lawyer was unceremoniously thrown off a train compartment reserved for white people, inspiring his path of ‘Satyagraha’.
In June 2018, late Sushma Swaraj, who was then External Affairs Minister, unveiled a unique two-side bust of Gandhi in Pietermaritzburg.
“One side of (the bust) features Gandhi the lawyer in the Western attire he wore when he came to South Africa, while the other side shows Mahatma Gandhi in his Indian dress in which he left South Africa after 21 years, returning to transform India,” India’s High Commissioner Ruchira Kamboj explained.
“Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela gave hope to those facing injustice and discrimination,” Swaraj said on the occasion as she recalled India’s role at international fora to help South African people in their fight against apartheid.
In the heart of this city’s central business district, a public transport hub was renamed Gandhi Square in 1999. The square features a life-size statue of Mahatma Gandhi, resplendent in his legal robes. The statue is opposite the building which housed the legal office he once had in the city.
A bust of the legendary leader at the ‘Phoenix Settlement’, started by Gandhi, is a popular tourist attraction.
In May 2012, a bust of Gandhi was unveiled by the then Indian President Pratibha Patil and South African Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng at the Constitution Hill here. It was built on the site which was once the Fort prison, where both Gandhi and Nelson Mandela were once imprisoned.
“This is the place where Gandhiji served four terms of imprisonment between 1908 and 1913, including his very first sentence in South Africa in this Number Four Cell,” Patil told the gathering of veteran activists and leaders from the community.
The Trade Route Mall in the sprawling largely Indian township of Lenasia, south of Johannesburg, is believed to have the only statue of Gandhi anywhere in the world that is situated right inside the centre of a shopping mall.
Originally installed there as a temporary measure in 2011, the management of the mall decided to make it a permanent feature. Thousands of shoppers of all communities pass the statue every day.
The latest bust of Gandhi has been installed at the ‘Tolstoy Farm’ by the ‘Gandhi Remembrance Committee’, headed by veteran community worker Mohan Hira, who has spearheaded the revival of the once-thriving area that left desolate after decades of vandalism and neglect. The bust of Gandhi shares space alongside one of Mandela.
PTI