Talk Together on the Road

International Peace Award Ceremony

Keynote
by Ela Gandhi
April 12, 2002

Community of Christ President W. Grant McMurray presented Ela Gandhi with the Community of Christ International Peace Award.

President McMurray, revered members and friends of the Community of Christ from all over the world, and peace and justice activists from the Kansas City area, never in my wildest dreams did I think that I would one day be receiving such a prestigious award. So indeed this is an exciting moment for me, for my people out in South Africa, and for Africa as a whole. On behalf of all of us I would like to thank you for bestowing this honor on me and on my country. I would also like to thank your staff here at your world headquarters for their constant support and encouragement through the last few months. 

Indeed I was sorry to hear from one of them about the heavy snowfalls in this area and the damage it has caused. I would like to take this opportunity to extend my solidarity with those families who were subjected to this terrible ordeal. May I also assure you that I shall continue to try, in the spirit of what we in South Africa call Ubuntu or true humanity, to ensure that my services continue to benefit the poorest of the poor in our country, and towards our combined efforts to bring peace in our troubled world.

But perhaps many of you may be wondering why I am here as an African and not an Indian. My story is linked to the story of my grandfather Mahatma Gandhi who stayed in South Africa for just under 21 years.

Within a few days after landing on the shores of Durban in 1894, Gandhiji experienced blatant racism which triggered the turning point in his life. He was thrown out of a court for refusing to remove his turban; he was thrown off a train for refusing to move out of a first class compartment; he was assaulted for refusing to sit on the foot board of a horse carriage. He chose to stay on in South Africa and fight this racism, but with non violence as his weapon.

In April 1895 he visited a Trappist Monestary in Marianhill, a few kilometers to the west of Durban. He described the monastery in an article in The Vegetarian as,

“a quiet little model village; owned on the truest republican principles. The principles of liberty, equality and fraternity is carried out in its entirety. Every man is a brother, every woman a sister.”

M. Thomson who wrote about Gandhi’s ashrams says,

“In the midst of the racism that permeated South African society Gandhi was overjoyed at discovering a multiracial community devoid of tensions and prejudices. The population of the mission included 120 monks, 60 sisters, and 12,000 Africans mostly children, who impressed Gandhi as being “patterns of simplicity virtue and gentleness.”

This inspired Gandhiji to set up a settlement on similar principles, which he called the Phoenix Settlement, in Inanda. It was a kind of “zionic” community. It was also adjoining another “zionic” community, the Shembe settlement and the Dube Farm, established by Dr. John Dube the first president of the African National Congress.

He returned to India in 1914 and in 1916 he sent his second son, Manilal Gandhi, my father, back to South Africa to continue the work he had started in South Africa. This is how my father and my mother Sushila became South African citizens. We, my late sister, Sita, my brother Arun Gandhi whom some of you may know from The Christian Brothers University in Memphis, and I, were born at the Phoenix Settlement.

The Phoenix Settlement and other ashram communities that Gandhiji founded might be described as “zionic communities” where justice and right living were modeled by those living together. All work was dignified and all are important. It was a “zionic” community which was also a base to go out from to work for justice in the wider society.

In the Phoenix Settlement I grew up in a home where we had no electricity or running water. In our form of “Zion” it was not that we had no poor among us, we were all poor! We had a well from which water had to be carried and a water tank to conserve rain water. My parents also believed that the racially segregated government schools were not good and so I received my education at home. As I was growing up my neighbor’s children were all going to school and I was not. This was unacceptable to me.

So at the age of 10 I began my first protest with my parents and insisted that they send me to school, even if it was not a good school. And here I would like to observe that the courage to protest, the will to persist, and the ability to discriminate were all lessons I believe I learnt in the first 10 years of my life in my education at home. It is this lesson that helped me from being brainwashed by apartheid education. Coming back to my story, my parents eventually humored me thinking that I will soon get tired of walking the long distance of about two and a half miles each way, and the terrible conditions at the school, but I persisted.

My school was a little wood and iron shed with wooden partitions to separate the classrooms. It was hot in summer and cold in winter, and the classrooms were noisy. There were deep pit toilets a little distance away. We had to clean our own classrooms and sometimes the yard as well. As there was no high school in Phoenix which I could attend, I had to go to a high school in Durban. I had to walk two and half miles to get a bus to the station, take a train from there, and walk from the station to the school another approximately three miles. I survived that for four years and went on to University which was situated in an old warehouse. Our classes were held in the evenings as the lecturers lectured to the white students at the University of Natal during the day and then came to us in the evenings.

This perhaps is a relatively better life than most black South African children have had to lead. Nevertheless this is what made me an African, a patriot, and an activist.

Something that has driven my comrades in the struggle in South Africa and myself can be summed up in the following quotation from “Our Daily Bread”:

Our walk of faith can be challenging and sometimes scary. But because God is powerful and present, we can step out in confidence today. 

This belief gave us the inspiration to continue to fight the wicked racist oppression which was called apartheid. My father together with other prominent leaders participated in the defiance campaigns and was imprisoned several times. We abstained from buying potatoes when there was a call for the boycott of potatoes because the white farmers were exploiting the black laborers and the laborers were on strike. We marched with the people against various laws. We demonstrated with placards against exploitation. We called on people not to accept the brutal behavior of the racist government, such as forced removals, relocations, separate education, pass laws, separate graduation ceremonies, and many other discriminatory practices. We picketed these events, and organized sit ins. For this work many of us were arrested, imprisoned, banned, house arrested, and even killed. But we continued and so today we can be proud South Africans, having achieved our goal of a free South Africa relatively peacefully.

A reflection of the past millennium and the present reality reveals a litany of violence, crime, corruption, wars, terrorism, and exploitation of people of animals, of our environment, and of science. The need for ethics for a return to God’s given path is so great that we cannot emphasize sufficiently the work we need to do to take this message out to the world.

How can we change attitudes customs and behavior which are rooted in the community? How can we help people on the path, to have faith to be able to walk the extra mile, to develop a communal spirit, and to care? This is a question that faces the world today, amidst the self-centered individualistic scramble for power and wealth, amidst the specter of wars, violence, terrorism, biological and chemical weapons.

I would like to share a little anecdote told to me by my mother.  I believe it very beautifully illustrates both the need to lead a simple life and the power of persuasion.

Gandhiji, on one of his train journeys in South Africa read a little book by a famous English author John Ruskin entitled Unto This Last. Gandhiji later wrote in his autobiography, My Experiments With Truth, that he was so inspired by this little book that he decided that he had to put into practice what he had read. Basically the book as he summarized it says:

That the good of the individual is contained in the good of all.

That a lawyer’s work has the same value as the barber’s, inasmuch as all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work.

That a life of labour, i.e., the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman, is the life worth living.

This revelation in fact had the effect of triggering the transformation of an ordinary man into the Mahatma (a great soul). He immediately decided that he would renounce all worldly possessions and live a simple life, living off the soil, or by the “sweat of his brow.”  With this in mind therefore, he went to his wife Kasturba and said to her that she must give back to the community all the beautiful jewelry she was given by friends in South Africa. This caused great consternation for poor Kasturba who could not understand what had happened to her husband who was yesterday so particular about his attire and today wanted to discard everything including her jewelry. She therefore demanded an explanation. In very simple terms Gandhiji told her what he had read and that what he had read made a great deal of sense to him.

Kasturba said immediately without hesitation that this was acceptable to her.  However, she asked, “But what about our daughter-in-law? Are we going to make her into a nun as well?” His simple response was to ask her whether she had lost faith in God. Should we not place our lives and trust in the loving hands of God? If we have faith then why must we worry about the future? Gandhiji had struck the right chord and so that was the end of all arguments from Kasturba. Both Gandhiji and his wife Kasturba had come to South Africa in starch and silk, and left in simple hand sewn cotton.

Gandhiji’s message of simplicity, caring, interfaith solidarity, and a value-driven life, is more relevant today than ever before. His message of persuasion through self sacrifice and activism rather than killing and destruction is even more important now in the midst of ongoing wars in the world. He called on people to work to uplift the community. A quote from Our Daily Bread by apostle Paul says,

Work with your own hands…that you may lack nothing…. Whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men.

Selfless service, hard work, and development of the community is the message of this quotation. I want to highlight three important messages from Gandhiji’s life which relate closely to the messages from the holy scriptures of many religions. They are Satyagraha, Swadeshi, and Sarvodaya.

Satyagraha has been popularly known as the nonviolent struggle that he waged to free India from British colonial oppression. The term means Truth Force. It however does not represent only the struggle for liberation but it in fact advocates a nonviolent way of life, requiring people to live by truth, to pursue truth, to actively oppose untruths and evil, in a loving nonviolent nondestructive way. Satyagraha could also be called a form of restorative justice, for it differentiates the person from the deed. Love the person but not the deed and try to change the other to the extent that s/he would be able to see that what s/he is doing is wrong, and so that the person would be prepared to correct the wrong through reparation and repentance. This is such a powerful message for us today in the midst of the deadlock in the Middle East, in India, in Afghanistan, in the USA, and in every country of the world.

Swadeshi literally means love that which is ours. This concept is based on his simple theory of economics, which devolves to the local level. He said,

I have no doubt in my mind that we add to the national wealth if we help the small-scale industries. I have no doubt also that true Swadeshi consists in encouraging and reviving these home industries.

Any country that exposes itself to unlimited foreign competition can be reduced to starvation and therefore subjection if the foreigner desires it.

While this advocates a strong spirit of nationalism it is by no means a destructive nationalism but rather a spirit that fosters love from the local level. It empowers each person to be gainfully employed and live a good, dignified life. Such an economy can help to avoid the devastating effects of globalisation that we are seeing all over the Third World or the South. At the same time it can help organisations in the North to make a commitment to stop the exploitation of the South. Already this is happening but we need to make sure that this does not become a violent confrontation. Violence is self defeating.

Swadeshi cannot be separated from the spirit of interfaith respect and promotion of interfaith worship. It also cannot be viewed in isolation from Gandhiji’s belief in the essential equality among all human beings regardless of caste, colour, creed, religion, or the kind of work one does. The message of understanding and respect among the different faiths is so important in our world divided by fundamentalist tyranny.

From a very early age Gandhiji learnt to love people as people and not as seen through the narrow walls of beliefs, caste, class, etc. A story he recalls of his childhood was about his friend Uka.

Uka was the son of a street sweeper. It was customary in India, that a street sweeper would usually hail from a very low caste family. Uka used to accompany his father through the streets of Porbundar the town where Gandhiji grew up. He was about the same age as Gandhiji. Gandhiji used to wait for him daily in order to play with him. One day Gandhiji’s mother saw them playing together and sharing sweets. She was quite incensed and immediately summoned her son to go indoors. She chided him for playing with this little low-caste child and sharing sweets with him. Gandhi was upset by this chastisement. He immediately asked for an explanation as to how his mother reconciled her belief that we are all God’s children when she differentiated between Uka and himself. “We are both God’s children so why can’t we play and share with each other,” he asked. This was the first of Gandhiji’s encounters with the vicious caste system that even today hounds people with untold misery and discrimination, even though it is declared illegal.

Sarvodaya is the other concept and this concept was coined after rejecting the Bentham philosophy of the good of the majority, or majoritarian, utilitarian idea, and replacing it with the idea of the good of all, not a few, not the majority but all, including the poorest of the poor, and those marginalised by the system.

A votary of Ahimsa (non violence) cannot subscribe to the utilitarian formula (of the greatest good of the greatest number). He will strive for the greatest good of all and die in the attempt to realise the ideal.

Our knowledge can only grow by sharing and learning from each other and from God. The materialism in the world today has caused us to become impersonal and we are fast losing our faith, our values, and our spirituality. We need to make every effort to move away from the scourge of materialism, fanaticism, and intolerance. We have to reclaim our basic values of life which are common to all of us.

In the aftermath of September 11, this message is even more powerful. How does one stop violence? Is it by matching violence with violence? Is elimination of people going to solve the problem or is it in fact going to cause more ill will, more violence, more destruction? Is might the answer to every problem? These are questions that we have to contemplate. They are questions on which we need to also begin to talk, and to listen to God’s message, and then walk the talk.

We are living in the midst of violence and destruction. Let us in our various countries, regions, and localities carefully listen, look for the truth so that we can renew our faith, and truly “talk together on the road,” even as Gandhiji when he felt the divine intervention, and Martin Luther King when he said, “I have a dream,” and Nelson Mandela when he stood in the dock during the treason trial and said,

During my lifetime I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against White domination, I have fought against Black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for, and to see realised. But, my Lord, if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Our world is troubled. Violence, destruction of the environment, use of weapons of mass destruction, intolerance, hatred, and lawlessness is rife in the world today. We have a cause. Let us commit ourselves to fighting poverty and diseases, criminality and corruption, and dedicate ourselves to peace.