Accra academics win removal of Mahatma sculpture after petition
denouncing Indian leader and saying African heroes ‘come first’
A statue of Mahatma Gandhi will
be removed from a university campus in Ghana after professors launched a
petition claiming the revered Indian independence leader and thinker was
racist.
The statue of Gandhi was unveiled
in June at the University of Ghana campus in Accra by Pranab Mukherjee, the
president of India,
as a symbol of close ties between the two countries.
But in September a group of professors
started a petition calling for the removal of the statue, saying Gandhi was
racist and that the university should put African heroes and heroines “first
and foremost”.
The petition states “it is better
to stand up for our dignity than to kowtow to the wishes of a burgeoning
Eurasian super power”, and quotes passages written by Gandhi which say Indians
are “infinitely superior” to black Africans.
More than 1,000 people signed the
petition, which claimed that not only was Gandhi racist towards black South
Africans when he lived inSouth Africa as a young man, but that he campaigned for the
maintenance of India’s caste system, an ancient social hierarchy that still
defines the status in that country of hundreds of millions of people.
Ghana’s foreign ministry said it
had followed the controversy with “deep concern” and wanted to relocate the
statue.
“The government would therefore
want to relocate the statue from the University of Ghana to ensure its safety and to avoid the
controversy.” it said. “While acknowledging that, human as he was, Mahatma
Gandhi may have had his flaws, we must remember that people evolve.”
Statues on university campuses
have recently prompted bitter arguments in Africa as students wrestle with the
legacy of colonialism and history of racism on the continent. Last year
students in South Africa successfully campaigned for the removal, from the
University of Cape Town campus, of a statue of Cecil Rhodes, a notoriously racist
mining magnate who died in 1902.
Gandhi, who lived in South Africa for 21 years, has long been a more
controversial figure, both in his homeland and elsewhere, than many admirers
around the world are aware. A hero for his role in the movement that won
independence for India from Britain, Gandhi’s vision of non-violent protest
inspired rebels and revolutionaries around the world. His thinking was a key
influence on leaders of the African National Congress and others engaged in the
struggle against apartheid, and his tolerance for all faiths in his homeland
led to his assassination by a Hindu fanatic in 1948. But his more conservative
views, and early apparent racism, still anger some.
Opponents of the statue in
Ghana quoted several of Gandhi’s early writings in which he referred to black
South Africans as “kaffirs” – a highly offensive racist slur – and complained
that the South African government wanted to “drag down” Indians to the same
level as people he called “half-heathen natives”.
One Gandhi quote was: “Ours is one
continual struggle against a degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the
Europeans, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw kaffir whose
occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number
of cattle to buy a wife with and then pass his life in indolence and
nakedness.”
A statue of Gandhi in the centre
of Johannesburg not far from the office where he worked as a lawyer, triggered a similar row in 2003.
Gandhi has also been frequently
criticised in his homeland. In 2014 the novelist Arundhati
Roy accused him of
perpetuating a discriminatory caste system.
Prof Mridula Mukherjee, an expert in modern Indian history at
Jawaharlal University, in Delhi, said at the time that Roy’s criticism was
misplaced. “Gandhi devoted much of his life to fighting caste prejudice. He was
a reformer not a revivalist within the Hindu religion. His effort was in
keeping with his philosophy of nonviolence and bringing social transformation
without creating hatred.”
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