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The South African Gandhi - Stretcher-Bearer of Empire (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,476
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The South African Gandhi - Stretcher-Bearer of Empire (Hardcover)
Series: South Asia in Motion
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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In the pantheon of freedom fighters, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has
pride of place. His fame and influence extend far beyond India and
are nowhere more significant than in South Africa. "India gave us a
Mohandas, we gave them a Mahatma," goes a popular South African
refrain. Contemporary South African leaders, including Mandela,
have consistently lauded him as being part of the epic battle to
defeat the racist white regime. The South African Gandhi focuses on
Gandhi's first leadership experiences and the complicated man they
reveal—a man who actually supported the British Empire. Ashwin
Desai and Goolam Vahed unveil a man who, throughout his stay on
African soil, stayed true to Empire while showing a disdain for
Africans. For Gandhi, whites and Indians were bonded by an Aryan
bloodline that had no place for the African. Gandhi's racism was
matched by his class prejudice towards the Indian indentured. He
persistently claimed that they were ignorant and needed his
leadership, and he wrote their resistances and compromises in
surviving a brutal labor regime out of history. The South African
Gandhi writes the indentured and working class back into history.
The authors show that Gandhi never missed an opportunity to show
his loyalty to Empire, with a particular penchant for war as a
means to do so. He served as an Empire stretcher-bearer in the Boer
War while the British occupied South Africa, he demanded guns in
the aftermath of the Bhambatha Rebellion, and he toured the
villages of India during the First World War as recruiter for the
Imperial army. This meticulously researched book punctures the
dominant narrative of Gandhi and uncovers an ambiguous figure whose
time on African soil was marked by a desire to seek the integration
of Indians, minus many basic rights, into the white body politic
while simultaneously excluding Africans from his moral compass and
political ideals.
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