Johannesburg | An international conference in South Africa pondered upon the issues that can be addressed using the principles of non-violence advocated by Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King.
The three-day Gandhi-King-Mandela International Conference on the African continent that concluded on Friday agreed to continue networking and taking forward the message of non-violence by putting pressure on institutions such as the UN and the African Union to step up their efforts in terms of human rights, David Gengen, the chairperson of the Pietermaritzburg Gandhi Foundation, which hosted the conference in partnership with the University of KwaZulu-Natal, said.
“The year 2023 is the 130th anniversary of the eviction of young lawyer Mohandas Gandhi from a train at Pietermaritzburg Station (which sparked his path to developing Satyagraha and leading the struggle against oppression and discrimination in both South Africa and India). It is also the 120th anniversary of ‘Indian Opinion', the first newspaper established by Gandhi in 1903,” Gengen said, explaining the significance of this year's conference on the three iconic leaders of the last century.
Joint Secretary for External Affairs Puneet Kundal said this year also marked the 30th anniversary of the resumption of diplomatic relations between India and South Africa after a break of almost four decades because of apartheid.
Kundal also shared Gandhi's role in ending British rule in India.
“India needed some kind of a beacon; some kind of hope for them to get together and fight the colonial masters. That one man who had the courage and the conviction to bring that empire to its knees is who we celebrate today." “It is Gandhi's blessing that really drives not only India, but I can say with great confidence South Africa as well because icons of South Africa such as Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu all looked up to him for inspiration,” Kundal said.
Ela Gandhi, the granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi, who continues to lead the work at the Phoenix Settlement started by him during his tenure in Durban, said he, King and Mandela all upheld the principles of non-violence and the Biblical spirit of treating your neighbour as you would want to be treated yourself.
She called on the delegates to come up with a blueprint to address the issues of climate change, environmental degradation, inequality, poverty, crime, corruption and wars.
Keynote speaker Clayborne Carson, professor of history at Stanford University and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, called on the delegates to not just repeat the words of Gandhi, King and Mandela, but to emulate their deeds.
“We have to build the movements of the 21st century. That will not happen by looking at the past. We have to use the technology of today to move into the 21st century,” Carson said as he appealed to the youth to build such a movement, though not necessarily from all the advice of older people.
“Build your own movement, build your own ideas. In that way the 21st century is going to be the greatest movement in human history because it will deal with the problem of what rights does every human being have,” Carson said.
Decolonisation of educational curricula across the globe was also deemed to be a critical issue by the 400 academics, community leaders and youth from more than a dozen countries who attended the conference.
“Even in the British system, the issues of Gandhi and the freedom struggles and so on don't receive attention. In South Africa, we get a watered-down version of the real history of our country, but more about the Dutch colonists such as Jan van Riebeek than the role of Gandhi, for example,” Gengen said.
In a youth symposium that was part of the conference, delegates agreed that the youth in generations to come must be educated on how governments work.
“This is because many young people aspire to be in government, but they don't know how it works, leading to chaos and mistakes of the kind we have in South Africa," Gengen said.
“The symposium said the thought processes of children in this regard should be changed by teaching the principles of non-violence and justice for all while they are still in school, not when they reach university,” Gengen added.
“One of the decisions was also that we need to facilitate a stronger civil society because this gives rise to good democratic processes,” Gengen said.
Deputy High Commissioner Banu Prakash handed over a large collection of books to be added to the 100 volumes of Gandhi's writings that are already in a Gandhi Corner in the Pietermaritzburg municipal library.
The Gandhi-King Foundation from Hyderabad suggested that the next conference be hosted in India, as this would follow logically because the first conference was held in King's native US and this one in Mandela's South Africa, so the next should be in Gandhi's country of birth. A date has not been confirmed yet.
