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| Mahatma Gandhi statue in the University of Ghana before it was pulled down following protests calling him a racist. (Photo: Twitter) |
To the rest of the world, Mahatma Gandhi is an apostle of peace, non-violence and fight for the right to equality but to some activists in Africa, he is a "racist". A campaign is going on originating in West African nation Ghana to South Africa. Hashtag Gandhi Must Fall is bringing these activists together. They have claimed their first victim in a university in Ghana.
A statue of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi best known as Mahatma Gandhi has been pulled down in the University of Ghana. Indians consider Mahatma Gandhi the Father of the Nation but to activists in Ghana he was a "racist".
The demolished Statue of Mahatma Gandhi had been inaugurated by then President of India Pranab Mukherjee in June 2016. This was the first visit to Ghana by an Indian President.
But only two months after the inauguration of the Statue of Mahatma Gandhi on the campus of the University of Ghana in capital Accra, a campaign was launched in Ghana by a group of professors and students, who called Mahatma Gandhi a racist based on his initial writing in South Africa.
Before taking the cudgels against the British colonial rulers in India in 1915-16, Mahatma Gandhi had lived for 21 years in South Africa and waged a struggle for the right to equality there. During this period - 1893 to 1914, Mahatma Gandhi developed his tools - Satyagrah and Ahimsa - for struggle against the repressive colonial government.
During the period of struggle, Mahatma Gandhi also shed his own notions about racial differences and resistance to simplest of modern technology including the railways.
However, the protesting professors and students, who got enforcements from activists, rejected the evolving views of Mahatma Gandhi and singled out his initial writings to wage a war against his statue on the campus of the University of Ghana.
The inauguration of the statue of Mahatma Gandhi might also have been ill-timed. Mahatma Gandhi was being debated and protested strongly in Ghana when the statue was inaugurated in its capital two years ago.
The protests flowed from a book written by two South African authors, who quoted from the letters of Mahatma Gandhi to proclaim that the man who provided basic tenets of civil struggle to the likes of Nelson Mandela in South Africa and Martin Luther King Jr in the US was a racist.
Two instances were most cited by the protesters. In one instance, Mahatma Gandhi in 1904 wrote to the British administration in South Africa using the word "Kaffirs" for native black people. The word was considered derogatory as a reference to the native black people. Today, this word as reference to the black people is compared with another derogatory word, "negros". Back then "kaffir" was the word used by the colonial rulers to refer to the black people in South Africa.
Two years later, in 1906, Mahatma Gandhi again used the same word to protest the treatment being meted out to the Indians living in South Africa. Mahatma Gandhi wrote, "The Boer government insulted the Indians by classing them with "kaffirs."
Protest against Mahatma Gandhi on the ground in Ghana soon found way to online campaign platform, change.org where a petition to pull down the statue was signed in large numbers. Mahatma Gandhi's quotes were circulated on social media and referred to in public meetings by the protesting activists to boost their campaign.
One of the oft-referred quotes of Mahatma Gandhi in Ghana was this: "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."
Finally on the intervening night of December 11 and 12, when the scores of Indians were hooked to screens watching the BJP versus Congress electoral battle in the Hindi heartland, the statue of Mahatma Gandhi was uprooted from the plinth in the University of Ghana.
#GandhiMustFall - Statue of Mahatma Gandhi removed from University of Ghana campus.— Tom Kavanagh (@_TomKavanagh) December 13, 2018
Thousand of students signed a petition to get rid of it because of Gandhi's litany of racist statements against black Africans.https://t.co/so2cfCyt23 pic.twitter.com/wiZJUPDDoQ
The Mahatma Gandhi statue was pulled down after Ghana's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration approved a petition by the university council. The government in New Delhi has not reacted to the development till the time of writing.
The successful protest against Mahatma Gandhi statue in Ghana has revived a campaign in South Africa, which withstood a similar protest in 2003-04. In South Africa, the campaign is against a statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Johannesburg, near an ashram where Gandhi lived. Hashtag Gandhi Must Fall is being pushed on social media.
My alma mater, the University of #Ghana was forced to pull down a statue of #Gandhi.— Benjamin Tetteh (@benjieluv) December 13, 2018
It followed the #GandhiMustFall campaign by lecturers & students who accused the #Indian Independence leader of using racist terms to describe black Africans.
I took this pics early this year pic.twitter.com/Adcq3rXVR4
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