Estate Living Magazine New Beginnings - Issue 37 January 2019 | Page 64

g o o d
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Sometimes we travel to relax, to eat, to see great art, beautiful scenery, or amazing animals. Sometimes to
hear great music – whether it’s a rock concert in a football stadium, or an opera at La Scala. But sometimes –
sometimes – we travel to look at things afresh, to get a totally new perspective on life.
Inanda is about 20 kilometres north of Durban CBD, but it’s worlds away
from the high-rise hotels and the beachfront – and it was even further
away more than a hundred years ago.
In the early 20 th century, even though grand apartheid had not been
dreamt of, the British colony of Natal was pretty darn segregated, and
the closest to Durban that people who were ‘not white’ could own land
was in Inanda. It was wild country – undeveloped and untrammelled –
and that’s where, in 1903, Mohandas K Gandhi bought a derelict farm
portentously called Phoenix, and built an Ashram.