The Johannesburg Heritage Foundation will offer the chance to explore something of this great soul’s life in the city with a bus tour in May.
In 1914 Gandhi wrote, “I learnt during all those years to love Johannesburg even though it was a mining camp. It was in Johannesburg that I found my most precious friends. It was in Johannesburg that the foundation for the great struggle of Passive Resistance was laid in September of 1906… Johannesburg, therefore, had the holiest of holy associations that Mrs Gandhi and I will take back to India.”
The foundation’s Flo Bird said, “Those words were written 100 years ago, and it is fitting that we should take time to remember Gandhi’s involvement here and to understand how he could develop an affection for a place where he had endured racial discrimination, been imprisoned for his refusal to carry a pass, and beaten to a pulp when he accepted a compromise.”
The tour will be led by Eric Itzkin, author of Gandhi’s Johannesburg: Birthplace of Satyagraha.
Sightseers will visit places associated with Gandhi, including the forbidding Number Four prison at Constitution Hill and the serenely beautiful Satyagraha House in Orchards, where Gandhi lived with his friend Hermann Kallenbach.
“The small museum [at Satyagraha House] has an interesting collection, and Gandhi’s extremely modest quarters express his choice of a very simple, even humble life,” said Bird.
“It would be easy to forget that he was an advocate, but for the statue in Gandhi Square which reminds us of his distinguished legal career, defending often very poor clients.”
Copies of Itzkin’s book will be sold on the tour, and tea will be taken at Satyagraha House.
Booking is essential.
The Gandhi in Johannesburg bus tour will take place on 3 May, departing from Sunnyside Park Hotel, 2 York Road, Parktown, at 1.30pm.
Details: 011 482 3349; www.computicket.com; www.joburgheritage.co.za
