Phoenix Community, Durban, 14 April 2009
Programme Director,
Deputy Mayor of Ethekwini Municipality, Councillor Logie Naidoo,
Distinguished guests,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Comrades and friends,
It is with a sense of awe, humility and gratitude that I stand here today on a spot blessed by the presence 105 years ago of one of the greatest men, if not the greatest, of modern times, Mahatma Gandhi.
I am delighted to be in Phoenix with you today. This township is one of the most important and historical townships in our country. It has been since the legendary Mohandas Karachmand "Mahatma" Ghandi established it in 1904.
Phoenix has played an instrumental role and has been an integral part of the history of our country within the Indian community in particular and all our people in general since those early days.
It is one of the oldest Indian settlements in South Africa, it was the first Ashram of Gandhiji in South Africa and in which indentured labourers from the sugar cane plantations made their home in 1904. It has also been instrumental in shaping the destiny of our country in so many ways.
We all know and have been inspired by the life of Gandhi. Mahatma Gandhi dedicated his entire life to fighting for liberation and truth through non-violent and peaceful means.
Archbishop Dennis Hurley speaking about Gandhi once said: "Mahatma Gandhi was a prophetic figure in the highest and noblest sense of the word, if we accept that the prophet enunciates truth that needs to be enunciated and illustrates what he says by the way he lives. For the Mahatma, truth, to be genuine truth, had to be lived. For all great religious figures it has been the same: the truth they proclaimed had to be lived, even though it might lead to their death, as happened in the case of him whom many of us regard as the incarnate Son of God, Jesus Christ".
In order to live the truth that Gandhi believed in he had to be part of the great historic moments of his adopted country South Africa. It was for this reason that Mahatma Ghandi found one of the first movements to fight for the rights of Indians in South Africa, the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) in 1894.
NIC and later the South African Indian Congress (SAIC) became one of the great allies of our liberation movement in their struggle against oppression.
This township of Phoenix where Mahatma Gandhi came from was also to play an instrumental role in the struggle against apartheid, we recall the way the Indian community fought and resisted the system of Tri-Cameral Parliament in the 1980's, and established this area as a hotspot of anti-apartheid resistance.
Those who resisted apartheid were inspired by the heroic slogans of our people under the umbrella of the United Democratic Front (UDF), when it said: "UDF Unites! Apartheid Divides!"
Our people whether Indian or African have always understood that what sought to divide us was apartheid, and their liberation movement was for the unity of both Indian and African in this province.
Our struggle for liberation was fought by both Indian and African patriots.
Many of our struggle heroes and icons who also came from this township were inspired by this vision of unity between Africans and Indians, among them we can count A.S. Chetty, Billy Nair, Curnick Ndlovu, Mewa Ramgobin and many others.
Today when we meet here, we remember the historic words Nelson Mandela said about Mahatma Gandhi when he said: (I quote)
"He dared to exhort non-violence 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. 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 that 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 theatres. He is the archetypal anti-colonial revolutionary. His strategy of non-cooperation, his assertion that we can be dominated only if we cooperate with our dominators, and his non-violent resistance inspired anti-colonial and antiracist movements internationally in our century. Both Gandhi and I suffered colonial oppression, and both of us mobilized our respective peoples against governments that violated our freedoms". (Close quote).
Those words remain true even today, Gandhi's passive resistance inspired the passive resistance struggle of 1946 in our country, which in turn inspired the 1950's ANC Defiance Campaign.
We learnt a lot about how to conduct our struggle in a non-violent and disciplined fashion from the seeds that Mahatma had planted both in our country and when he left for India to pursue the anti-colonial struggle there.
The ANC has since then built a strong connection not only with the Indian people in our country, but also with the Indian government.
We respect and salute the role that the Indian people and the successive governments of India played in our struggle against apartheid.
India was the first country in the world to declare South Africa a crime against humanity in international forums, for that we will forever be grateful to the Indian people for escalating the anti-apartheid struggle to an international scale.
As we meet here before the fourth democratic elections in our country, we are aware of the important role that the Indian community has played in the liberation struggle of our country fighting side by side with their African brothers and sisters.
We are aware that our struggle and our future was intertwined. You could not liberate Indians without liberating Africans and vice versa, you could not liberate Africans without liberating Indians.
As we move forward we must join hands in leading our country to greater heights. We must fight against poverty and joblessness together.
We must join hands in the struggle to build a truly non-racial, non-sexist and democratic country that we committed ourselves into.
We must join hands and work together to build a thriving economy that will generate better and sustainable jobs and employment.
We must join hands in eradicating the legacy of apartheid and inequality by equally contributing to the struggle for nation building, reconciliation and reconstruction.
That is the call we are making to all our people today, that together we can do more to make South Africa a better country.
I thank you.
Issued by:
African National Congress