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Gandhi - the sacred warrior
by Nelson Mandela in: "TIME",
december 31, 1999
Mandela served as South Africa's first democratically
elected President from 1994 to '99
The liberator of South Africa looks at the seminal work
of the liberator of India
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 anti-colonial and antiracist movements
internationally in our century.
Both Gandhi and I sufferecl 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
socalled 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 fiute. 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 job-less 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
em-powered them with a potency that liberated and redeemed.
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