I Met Gandhi

(5-minute read) – It was a bitterly cold winter morning in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa when I met Gandhi. The steel rails below the concrete platform of the station were icy cold like the hearts of the officials on the train the night before. The hues of wintery foliage in the pot plants out the front matched the orange face bricks of the quaint railway station building.

In a waiting room inside, sat a young man foreign to those parts. He had been freezing all night, without even a jacket to keep him warm. The icy cold-hearted officials had taken that along with his dignity. It was June 1893.

I stood in front of the station one hundred and twenty three years later. In my mind’s eye I watched as local Indian merchants arrived at the railway station. A wealthy Indian businessman had sent them to help the young man.

I imagined I knew one of the merchants from the market. So I greeted him and followed them inside.

The man they were sent to help sat in the passenger waiting room just to the left of the main entrance. His name was Mohandas K. Gandhi. We all stood around him as he told his story.

“An official on the train came to me and said I must go to the van compartment. I told him I had a first class ticket but he said that didn’t matter. When I refused to move he said he would call a police constable to move me by force. So I said go ahead and do that. The constable came, took me by the hand and pushed me out of the train. I spent the whole night here in this waiting room.”

The merchants all had stories to relay of similar mistreatment they’d experienced solely due to their race. It was the norm, not the exception. The typically friendly Indian merchants gave their countryman the support and warmth he needed.

Gandhi sat quietly and resolutely on a bench most of the time while they spoke. He was considering what his response should be to the injustice he’d suffered. Once they’d left, he started drafting a letter.

Now, all these years later, the bench was empty. I sat on it where I imagined he might have sat. It was cold and hard. I looked to my right and saw his young figure standing arms-folded in a blue suit. His hair was neatly combed above wide-set, intelligent eyes and a thick black moustache. It was as if he was really standing there.

But he wasn’t. What I saw to my right was his picture on the wall. There were timelines, quotations and interesting facts alongside it and on all the walls of the small room. The room he’d sat in all those decades ago was now a museum.

The small scale of it didn’t do justice to the significance of what had happened there. I felt hurt that I was the only person there – that no one seemed to know or care about the place.

He changed the world

It was right there that Gandhi planted the seed of his Satyagraha, or ‘truth force’ – one of the most, if not the single most, influential approaches to mass civil disobedience in the history of the world. Satyagraha is the suffering of one’s own self in order to conquer opponents. It rests on the precept that real suffering bravely borne melts the heart of even the hardest oppressor.

Gandhi and his disciples proved it works over time. Many oppressive rulers have been shamed by voluntary suffering, when resistors sought out beatings and imprisonment by breaking laws in a non-violent, yet totally determined manner. This approach has proven even more effective in our age of social media where the plights of resistors are spotlighted from across the world within seconds.

No one remembers the oppressors Gandhi has faced. There is no museum to the cold-hearted officials that threw him from the train. Our world has come a long way thanks to the occurrences of that night – thanks to the presence of a special soul at the right time and place. And you have to be pretty uninformed not to know the name Gandhi.

He has had massive indirect influence through his effect on some of the most important figures of the twentieth century.

Great minds have said great things of him

Martin Luther King Jr said, “To other countries I may go as a tourist but to India I come as a pilgrim… if this age is to survive, it must follow the way of love and non-violence that Gandhi so nobly illustrated in his life.”

Albert Einstein said, “Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.”

Nelson Mandela said, “Gandhi threatened the South African Government during the first and second decades of our century as no other man did.”

I stood and read these quotations and more on beautiful plaques on the walls of that waiting room. But still no one else came to visit the place.

By the time I left the museum the sun had risen in the sky and warmed the rails.

I had met Gandhi. I looked up and the sun’s warmth bathed my soul.

In the bright light of the sun shining down on my eyelids, the image of his gentle face appeared. It reminded me it is not helpful to fight. It is best to peacefully stand for what you believe even against the most violent odds. There is hope in this world. There is love.

As much as racism still exists and injustice abounds, we have come a long way since those brutish bigots threw Gandhi from the train at Pietermaritzburg and got away with it.

We have come a long way… but we still have a long way to go.

Find out more about the Gandhi museum at Pietermaritzburg Railway Station at http://www.sa-venues.com/attractionskzn/pietermaritzburg-railway-station.php

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