Alex Dodd
It’s a white-grey Monday and the mirrored facade of Diagonal Street cuts into the sky with all the geometry and logic of the capitalist pursuits it was built to house. Its endangered slickness is offset by the broken bricks and shattered windows of Turbine Hall, giant makeshift home to the homeless. Nearby the words “Music Academy” are fading from a corrugated roof along with a neighbouring advert for Visa, no longer the main currency of trade in these parts.
Human traffic is slim here: men pass wearing balaclavas or berets to protect their heads from winter and women carry big bags or babies on their backs. A huge Castle Lager truck whizzes past an old woman pushing an ice cream trolley.
This is the view from Museum Africa downtown on Bree Street, where an exhibition honouring Mahatma Gandhi is currently on show. What would the great man have thought of this Johannesburg? How would he have defined his struggle here in post-apartheid South Africa where freedom is entrenched, but the poor are still poor?
This is the city, described in the show’s pamphlet, as “the birthplace of Satyagraha” – the city in which the notion of passive resistance came into being at the dawn of this century and spread across the planet.
Strange to imagine that this philosophy of passivity, humility and non-violence was born in a city that at the end of the same century is one of the murder capitals of the modern world.
The opening of Gandhi’s Johannesburg was fittingly graced with the noble spirit of former president Nelson Mandela, who sat smiling like a child in an old man’s body alongside Nobel prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer and Harsh Basin, High Commissioner of India, among other important beings. You could tell by the hats that this was a non- partisan, multi-denominational affair. Yarmulkes, berets, turbans and furry Russian numbers bobbed atop the throng of Indian cogniscenti, intellectuals, eccentrics and Johannesburg stalwarts that attended Sunday’s event.
Gandhi lived in and around Johannesburg for 10 years from 1903 to 1913 and this exhibition coincides with India’s independence celebrations on August 15 as well as the 85th anniversary of Gandhi’s departure from South Africa. At his farewell banquet, held at Jeppe Street’s Masonic Hall in 1914, he made a speech in which he declared: “I learnt to love Johannesburg, even though it was a mining camp.
“Johannesburg,” he said, “had the holiest of all associations” which he would carry back to India with him. For it was in the midst of the gold-digging frenzy that shaped Johannesburg that Gandhi laid the foundations of the Indian passive resistance struggle. Spurred on by instances of gross discrimination that underscored the hurly burly of glitter and greed, the young lawyer’s campaign against racial prejudice was galvanised. A stormy mass meeting at Johannesburg’s Empire Theatre launched the movement on September 11 1906. Three thousand people from across the Transvaal protested against an ordinance requiring Asians eight years and elder to carry passes and register for them by giving fingerprints. Gandhi denounced the ordinance as “an insult to the entire Indian community in South Africa”.
In his speech Mandela emphasised that the importance of Gandhi’s role stretched way beyond the Indian community and that South Africa’s Defiance Campaign was directly influenced by the Indian passive resistance movement. But he began on a lighter note, with the touching humour for which he is globally renowned: “Had I known there would be so many distinguished visitors here today, I would have been frightened and remained home,” he said with the great humility he shares with the spirit of Ghandi.
The kinship between the two great leaders was celebrated in a short play called Mahatma- Madiba, written specially for the occasion by actor/playwright Rajesh Gopie. Although amusing and performed with great enthusiasm, the production lacked some gravity. This was more tangible in Gopie’s own performance of an extract from his play Out of Bounds in which the police evict him and his family from a “whites only” beach. Echoes of Ghandi’s experience at Heath’s Hotel, where the proprietors agreed to take him as a guest only if he agreed not to take his meals in the dining room, or when he was refused access to the lift in Permanent Buildings (now Victory House), 34 Harrison Street.
Tracing Gandhi’s footsteps, the exhibition, curated by Eric Itzkin, explores over 30 Johannesburg buildings and places associated with the Indian leader. It is a fascinating journey, and includes some affecting artefacts like one of Ghandi’s dhotis, the sandals he made while in prison and a thank you letter to one Reverend Doke typed on an old typewriter, the c’s replaced with v’s (no delete button or Tippex back then). But as Itzkin so poignantly stated: “This exhibition is not so much about artefacts as it is about ideals – the ideals of non-violent struggle and resistance that were developed in Johannesburg by one of the giants of the 20th century.” Johannesburg could do with a rekindling of some of those ideals.