On June 7, 1893, a young Indian barrister Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi boarded a train at Durban to travel to Pretoria. A first-class seat was booked for him. The train reached Pietermaritzburg around 9 pm. There, a white gentleman took offence at a coloured man travelling in the same compartment. Gandhi was pushed out of the train, his luggage dumped and he was forced to spend the night on the platform. Later, Gandhi was to term it as the day on which his 'active non-violence began'.
A century later, in 1997, when Nelson Mandela conferred the Freedom of the City of Pietermaritzburg on Gandhi, Durban scholar Fatima Meer wrote the moving tribute: "We take this first opportunity to make amends; to beg forgiveness; to atone; to reconcile the past with the present."
While there have been a wealth of publications and films made on him in the past 100 years, the sites associated with his 20-year (1893-1914) stay in South Africa remain neglected and anonymous in the country where Gandhi evolved the concept of satyagraha. Little wonder that visiting Indian PMs consider Pietermaritzburg - where Gandhi's statue adorns the railway station - a regular pilgrimage. First I.K. Gujral and last fortnight Atal Behari Vajpayee, both visited the site. Vajpayee described it as a "pilgrimage to one of the defining locations of India's freedom struggle", one where such a simple incident as being thrown out of a train "catalysed Gandhi's transformation from the barrister to the Mahatma."
But clearly, one of the most neglected of such sites is Phoenix settlement - 26 kilometres from Durban - Gandhi's first experiment with community living and a precursor to Sabarmati Ashram. In 1904, he bought the 100-acre holding for £1,000. His basic purpose behind moving to the farmhouse was publishing Indian Opinion, a weekly which echoed the spirit of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC), a political organisation that remained the guiding spirit for the latter-day African National Congress (ANC). Even while its circulation and revenue had fallen, in Phoenix he saw the opportunity to revive the foundering publication.
What was the earlier Phoenix like? A Durban Metropolitan Council brochure says the farm was founded on ideas of simplicity and equality where Gandhi tried to persuade relatives who had come with him from India to settle down. None except two of his nephews, Maganlal and Chaganlal, stayed.
The brochure says: "The community was classified into daily wage workers and 'schemers' who were given an acre of land each, a house, a monthly allowance of £3 for working in the press and a share of profits, if any... Gandhi's house 'Sarvodaya' consisted of one big living-cum-dining room, two bedrooms, a kitchen and a rough bathroom." Besides printing and agriculture, education was vital. Gandhi set up a boarding school with the help of Pranjivan Mehta, a friend from his London days.
Wrote Gandhi: "The name Phoenix, for the present, serves the purpose quite well for we believe the aims of Phoenix will not vanish even when we are turned to dust." That could only be partially true. During the 1985 race riots in Inanda, the farm was looted, its buildings sacked and Sarvodaya stripped by the mob.
Since then, nothing very noble has risen from the dust. An Indian TV crew that went to the farm - or what's left of it - during the recent Durban summit had to conduct their interviews only after the police was informed and black settlers living there were convinced that their aims were purely journalistic. When Gujral visited the place, he promised Rs 60 lakh for resettlement of the site. That, subsequently, didn't happen.
Says Vinod Singh, an engineer and anc member: "It's time governments joined hands to preserve what's left of the Gandhi memorabilia. His stay formed the basis of his later leadership of the Indian National Congress. We should be inspired by the West which revere their icons."
If not neglect or vandalism, most Gandhian landmarks in Durban - where he launched his politics - have fallen prey to development. The family farm of Abdullah Hajee Adam Jhaveri of Dada Abdullah & Co., Gandhi's first benefactor in South Africa who familiarised him with the legal workings in a foreign country; the Durban magistrate's court where Gandhi was first noticed, albeit for not taking off his turban before the magistrate; the Beach Grove villa where he lived that now is a parking lot; the Wesleyan church he visited every Sunday with family friends which is a business complex; sites associated with physical attacks on Gandhi; they are all part of the tourist brochure. But then when the logic of money is accorded priority over history in India, proper preservation of Gandhian relics in far-flung South Africa is, surely, an irrational ambition.
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