Arriving here just as Nelson Mandela died, almost a century after Gandhi ended his 21-year sojourn in South Africa and left for India, it was inevitable that the anti-colonialist giants of the 20th century would entwine themselves in my mind.
Gandhi branded with the racist insult of "coolie lawyer" in South Africa; Mandela thrown into the same Johannesburg prison as Gandhi before him; both arriving by different roads at an idea put this way by Gandhi in his autobiography: "When we come to think of it, the distinction between heterogeneous and homogeneous is discovered to be merely imaginary. We are all one family."
Gandhi - ejected because of white objections from a first-class compartment on a South African train and galvanised into nonviolent resistance by the racist anti-Indian legislation in the Transvaal in 1906 - became the liberator of India in South Africa. Indeed, he is now also seen as a founding father of Mandela's rainbow South Africa of equal rights for all peoples.
This overlapping of two great men is a singular thing. South Africa is not the centre of the world, even if over the past week it has appeared so. The convergence should not blind us to the heroes' differences or stir only gooey reverence.
Gandhi, as chronicled in Joseph Lelyveld's fine book, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, took many years to embrace the black cause, only declaring on the eve of departure from South Africa that, "This land is theirs by birth." He was focused on Indians' rights. Mandela invoked Gandhi's nonviolent campaigns as a reference for mass action - up to a point. "I called for nonviolent protest for as long as it was effective," he noted. He had doubts about common cause with South African Indians because many of his supporters "saw Indians as exploiters of black labour in their role as shopkeepers and merchants."
Yet they came to a shared conviction that all suppressed people, whatever their differences of religion or ethnicity or caste, must stand together against their oppressors and, in Gandhi's words, "cease to play the part of the ruled." Only a changed mindset could change the structure of white, colonial power. They reached their convictions through deep inward journeys, undertaken in circumstances of humiliation or imprisonment, journeys that took them beyond instincts of violent reprisal, and ushered them to the inner stillness that is the very thing an agitated world finds most riveting. In both Gandhi and Mandela a light shines that is the fruit of inward-focused constancy of a kind that is a stranger to hyper-connected status anxiety. Through this they live.
The other day, I found myself jostled in a vast Delhi crowd wearing white pointed Gandhi caps inscribed with the words, "I am a common man." The caps are associated with the Aam Aadmi Party. Led by Arvind Kejriwal, it emerged from an anti-corruption street movement to upend the Congress Party's long dominance in Delhi state elections last Sunday. The party's symbol is a broom: Sweep out the corrupted.
One supporter, an accountant named Sanjay Kohli, told me: "It's back to Gandhi, Kejriwal is honest, austere, hardworking and creative." The truth is it is early days for the party. But its success is a reminder of Gandhi's words expressing his conviction of universal equality: "I delight in calling myself a scavenger, a spinner, a weaver, a farmer and a labourer."
Here is another link in the Gandhi-Mandela chain: The value of manual labour and what it teaches. Not for them the soft manicured hands of today's masters of the universe gliding from one financial transaction to the other, making money from money. Self-rule for the two men was a political goal; it was also an internal value.
South Africa is my parents' homeland. In the mid-1950's, my father, a young doctor, became dean of Douglas Smit House, the residence at Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand reserved for black medical students. A small number could still attend the university. They would soon lose that right as apartheid tightened its grip.
Mandela had been at Wits a few years earlier. In the late 1940s Indians and the mulatto South Africans known as "coloureds" were allowed on the same trams as whites as long as they sat upstairs in the rear section. Blacks were required to use separate trams that stopped running at night, unless accompanied by a white passenger. In Wits: The Open Years, Bruce Murray relates how one evening Mandela was travelling with three Indian friends on a "white" tram. The conductor tried to eject them: "You coolies are not allowed to bring a kaffir on the tram; only whites can do that."
Such were the squalid minutiae of South African policing by pigment. Such was the crucible that forged Gandhi and Mandela, captains of their souls who ceased to play the ruled and so captured the imagination of worlds they changed. Their nations, not for nothing, are two of the most hopeful on earth.
©2013 The New York Times News Service
