views


He was staunchly racist for at least much of his adulthood.
Before leading his historic push for India's independence from the British Empire, Gandhi famously led civil rights movements in South Africa, another British colony, between 1893 and 1915, when he was in his mid-20s through his mid-40s.
While Gandhi's time fighting for the rights of Indians in South Africa is often now mythologized as the heroic precursor to his later efforts in India, the dark side of this tale reveals that Gandhi's motivations in South Africa included his strident racism against the local black populations there.
"Ours is one continual struggle against a degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the Europeans, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir [a slur now classified as hate speech and generally considered to be the equivalent of "nigger" in the United States] whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and, then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness," Gandhi said during an address in Bombay in 1896.
"Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilised—the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live almost like animals," he wrote in Indian Opinion in 1908.
Facebook Conversations
Disqus Conversations