Alex Dodd LANDMARKS
Strange how we love to attach distinctive things to remarkable people. With Nelson Mandela it’s his flamboyant shirts. Jackie O will always be remembered wearing those deliciously elusive dark glasses. Marilyn Monroe had her platinum locks (even though she was really a brunette), and Mao Zedong is clothed in our memories in those signature high-necked suits.
Mention the Mahatma Gandhi to anyone in Johannesburg and conversation instantly turns to a certain rare and exotic house that lends an air of distinction to the raggedy eastern suburb of Troyeville.
Driving around the area it would be hard to miss “the Gandhi house” with its national monument plaque attached brightly to the front wall. Indeed, this is no straight up- and-down, blocky pedestrian pad. With its Eastern dome-like entrance, curved balcony and arched windows, the building has an almost princely air about it.
This is number 19 Albermarle Street – a house seemingly befitting of the great Mahatma, the man who rose above discrimination, beatings, vilification and imprisonment to convince the world that real social change can be actualised without resorting to violence.
Because of its supposed value as a Gandhi site, number 19 was declared a national monument in 1994. But the house we all know and love (like Mandela’s shirts and Monroe’s hair) is not the house in Troyeville the great leader in fact inhabited. Not according to Eric Itzkin, the curator behind the gripping exhibition, Gandhi’s Johannesburg: Birthplace of Satyagraha, currently on show at MuseuMAfricA in Newtown.
Number 19’s claim as a Gandhi house has also been challenged by Professor James Hunt, a renowned scholar of Gandhi sites. Hunt points out that the house, designed for the Swiss architect Eugene Metzler, was built too late for Gandhi to move in. The plans for Metzler’s house were passed on May 20 1905, and the foundations were only inspected on March 15 1906. How long Metzler lived in the house is uncertain. But there would scarcely have been time for Gandhi to stay there, as he left the area by June 1906.
Itzkin feels so strongly about the issue he recently made a passionate public plea to the National Monuments Council to “review the position and re-examine the evidence”.
Troyeville’s real Gandhi house, he contends, is at number 11 Albermarle Street, one block up from Metzler’s house. Like number 19, it is a double-storey house with an upstairs balcony, but it is a more conventional Victorian design – “a simpler style of house, more appropriate to Gandhi’s basic lifestyle”. AMr J Elles submitted plans for the house on July 7 1903, and they were approved on July 10, so the house was practically brand new when Gandhi moved there in 1904.
For his first few years in Johannesburg, after the better part of a decade in Natal, he lived a bachelor existence. Despite earning up to 4 000 or 5 000 a year (a whacking salary at the time), he slept in the back room of his law office on the corner of Rissik and Anderson streets, true to his growing ideals about living a simple, healthy, unextravagant life.
But in 1904 he rented a house which was large enough to accommodate his wife, Kasturba, and three of their sons, Manilal, Ramdas and Devdas, when they came out from India to join him. As with many social visionaries, his family life and his activism were frequently incompatible. Oprah Winfrey would no doubt have had a field day with his children.
Henry Polak, an attorney in his law firm and an active supporter of passive resistance, also lived with them, in one of Ghandhi’s many communal living arrangements. Polak’s wife, Millie Graham, joined them in 1905, arriving from England on December 30 and marrying Polak the same day. Their marriage certificate states that they were living in Albermarle Street, but gives no street number.
“The house was situated in a fairly good middle-class neighbourhood, on the outskirts of town,” she wrote. “It was a double-storeyed, detached, eight-roomed building of the modern villa type, surrounded by a garden, and having, in front, the open spaces of the kopjes. The upstairs veranda was roomy enough to sleep on it, if one wished to do so, and indeed, in warm weather, it was often so used.”
In 1952 Manilal Gandhi visited number 11 with Homer Jack, an American clergyman and Gandhian activist. Manilal, then 60 years old, walked through the house room by room. Having lived there as a teenager, he remembered it well. He pointed out the places “where father and mother slept”, observing that the house had not really changed much.
He pointed to the alcove off the kitchen where “Mr Polak, father and I would grind our own flour”. He told how the living room was used for the reception after the Polaks’ marriage, and how, when a painter dirtied all the walls while painting the ceiling, his father testily ordered the walls done within 24 hours.
Itzkin wants the council to look seriously at the new claim for number 11 Albermarle Street, where artist Kay Hassan now lives.
“It doesn’t exclude 19 Albermarle retaining other monument status or some special status,” he says. As an example of the European art nouveau style in South Africa, number 19 is architecturally important.
“I accept fully that it needs to be preserved and protected, but I have a serious problem with it being regarded as the Gandhi house, not just because it’s a falsification of history, but also because it distorts the truth about Gandhi and his lifestyle.”
Itzkin’s knowledge about Gandhi is encyclopaedic. When I ask why a man so committed to social equity chose to live away from the squalid Indian location to the west of Johannesburg and put up with the uppity neighbours in a white middle- class suburb, his answer is considered and complex.
Talking to Itzkin is like talking to a friend of Gandhi’s. But when he gets into the nitty-gritty historical details about which document was signed on which date and which letter to whom says what, my mind reluctantly begins to wander. I am tempted into the thought that this whole debate might all be rather pedantic.
“Does it really matter whether Gandhi lived in number 11 or number 19?” I wonder sinfully. Surely, while Johannesburg rings with gunshots and women’s screams at night, it’s Gandhi’s ideas about non-violence we should be struggling to keep alive, not fussing over one of his addresses.
But the point is if missions like Itzkin’s are not taken seriously, what monuments will exist to enshrine our history? Not the truthful traces of great lives lived, but big sweeping shrines to ideology and ego. Is that the history we want to make?
You can read as much as you like about his frugal lifestyle, about how he’d walk huge distances across the bare veld to get to his downtown office and to make his statement about the segregation that existed on the horse-drawn trams of the time. But there’s nothing quite like standing on the stoep at The Kraal, 15 Pine Road, Orchards and getting that strange sense that this was the very stoep upon which Gandhi rolled out his sleeping mat to dream at night. This was the very house Gandhi once shared with his dear friend Hermann Kallenbach, a German-Jewish architect, who shared his deep commitment to the principles of satyagraha (passive resistance).
Looking out at the trees and hedges that separate one house from another in the suburb only metres away from the mad traffic of Louis Botha Avenue, you can’t resist casting yourself back to the time when this was a simple, isolated farmhouse. Nancy Bell, who lives in The Kraal today, describes it as “genius loci” – the spirit of the place. It’s the spirited places that should be maintained.
John Matshikiza is on assignment in Congo. His column, With the Lid Off, will return next week