Estate Living Magazine New Beginnings - Issue 37 January 2019 | Page 66

g o o d
l i f e
What’s in a name?
In 1985, at the height of the anti-apartheid struggle, Gandhi’s
house was burned to the ground, and many other buildings in
the settlement were damaged. But (what do you expect when
you burn a place called Phoenix?) they were rebuilt from the
ashes after the 1994 elections, and today stand as a symbol of
the birth pains of our democracy.
A place of pilgrimage and contemplation
There’s nothing passive about resistance
It was in South Africa that Gandhi developed the concept and
practice of satyagraha, which can – very loosely – be translated
as passive resistance, and which was put to effective use by
independence movements both in India and here in South
Africa. The power of satyagraha, Gandhi maintained, is that it
marshals the innermost resources of disenfranchised people,
thereby giving them the dignity their legal disabilities sought
to deny them.
‘Satyagraha,’ he said, ‘is soul force pure and simple. […] It is
not a weapon of the weak.’
I had visited Inanda on a guided tour soon after the reconstruction
of Phoenix, and I was keen to return, so I set off with a friend, who is
a Durban local. Despite my friend’s local knowledge and the GPS
on my phone, we struggled to find our first stop at Phoenix, but it
was worth the ever-decreasing circles we drove in. In contrast to our
usual nineteen-to-the-dozen chattering, we both fell silent when we
entered Gandhi’s house, which has been turned into a low-key but
evocative museum. We drifted apart – each of us connecting with
the spirit of the place in our own way.
Practical pilgrimage
And then ‘the lady who lives in my phone’ sent us round and round
the village, circling the high school like a dog at a bone, until we
gave up trying to find the entrance to the museum at Ohlange, and
headed back to Durban to do the full-on tourism thing by cycling
along the beachfront.
A guided tour is definitely the more practical way to explore Inanda,
but, we agreed, despite having lost our (physical, geographic) way
in GPS-led spirals, we had found something – something intangible
but very real. And that, after all, is what pilgrimage is about.
Bloemfontein to form the South African Native National Congress,
which was renamed the African National Congress (ANC) in 1923.
In 1919, the NIC morphed into the South African Indian Congress,
which – as apartheid started taking shape – worked closely with
the ANC and other liberation organisations to combat the growing
inequality in South Africa.
Famously, Gandhi did not stay in South Africa. He returned to India
in 1915, where he continued to refine the concept of satyagraha,
and played a huge role in the independence movement that, in
1947, freed the subcontinent from British rule.
On 27 April 1994, when South Africans joyously went to the polls
as one nation, Nelson Mandela chose to cast his vote at Ohlange
School – in recognition of the role that Dube (and his neighbours)
had played in getting us to that point.
Jennifer Stern