the Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh to the Phoenix Settlement
1 October 2006
Your Excellency's The Honourable President of South Africa, Mr Thabo
Mbeki
Our Distinguished guest The Honourable Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh
Honourable Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka
Honourable Minister in the Presidency, Essop Pahad
Honourable Minister of Arts and Culture, Dr Pallo Jordan
Honourable Members of the Executive Council
Senior Members of the delegation
Senior Officials,
Distinguished guests,
In performing my task of welcoming you, I am acutely aware of the incredible
historical legacy that I stand on. It was here at the Phoenix Settlement that
the Mahatma lived and worked. It was in this very place that his philosophy of
truth and justice, peace and compassion took shape.
What greater symbol of unity between India and South Africa then the
towering presence of the Mahatma. It is indeed historic that during the visit
of the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and in the presence of President
Thabo Mbeki that we have followed in the steps of the Mahatma.
I welcome you to a Settlement that has literally lived up to its name.
Destroyed in the 1980s it has risen once again from the ashes and takes its
rightful place in the pantheon of heritage sites that pay homage to our
liberation history.
Remembering Bhambatha, Remembering Gandhi
It is exactly a 100 years since two major resistances against colonial rule
in this province.
One has come to be known as the Bhambatha Rebellion. Led by Inkosi Bhambatha
it was a revolt in the first instance against the crippling taxes imposed by
colonial authorities. The revolt spread across the province and created panic
among the colonial authorities.
Today we salute Inkosi Bhambatha and his revolutionaries who laid down their
lives in the cause of freedom. Inkosi Bhambatha was carrying the flame of
resistance to foreign domination that had burnt throughout the nineteenth
century and the resisters around him carried the memory of the great victory at
Isandlwana in 1879. This victory eroded the confidence of the British army and
led to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli's famous comment on the
"remarkable Zulu people who convert our bishops, defeat our generals, and put
an end to a great European dynasty."
In the same year of the Bhambatha Rebellion, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi led
the 1906 Passive Resistance campaign. It was during this campaign that his
philosophy of Satyagraha began the first step in becoming a living reality.
What does this word mean - "Truth (Satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha)
engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force�the Force which is born
of Truth and love or non-violence."
With these simple but powerful tools Mahatma Gandhi developed the weapon of
Satyagraha. It is here, on this soil, the Phoenix Settlement that these ideas
were thought about and debated with those who lived on the Settlement.
Injustice
But these ideas were not developed in isolation. They were honed in the
context of the struggle against oppression and for justice. It helped Gandhi to
develop a philosophy of struggle that was to bring down the British Raj. It was
on African soil that Gandhi developed these ideas.
The embryo of the philosophy was incubated in the cauldron of 1906 in South
Africa. It was a way of conducting political struggles in South Africa that was
to echo through the twentieth century. The 1946 Passive Resistance Campaign,
the Defiance Campaign of the 1950s, the great Women's march of 1956 all had
echoes of 1906. When the resistance movement suffered reverses, when our
leaders were imprisoned, when our organisations were banned, when our comrades
were murdered, when exile meant you will never see your homeland again, we took
hope and courage from Gandhi's incredible maxim: "There is no defeat when you
fight for a just cause." It is with great pride that we can say that India gave
us a Mohandas and we gave them a Mahatma.
It is also time to remember the man who carried the inspiration of Bhambatha
and Gandhi. Like Bhambatha he was a chief who hungered for freedom. Like Gandhi
he was an apostle of peace. His name - Mvumbi Albert John Luthuli. This almost
mythical figure, who led African National Congress (ANC) during the 1950s, was
to go on to win the Nobel Peace prize. It was during this period of the 1950s
that the ANC linked with the Natal Indian Congress (NIC), the white Congress of
Democrats (COD), the Coloured People's Congress (CPO) and the South African
Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) to form the Congress Alliance. It was under
his leadership that the Freedom Charter was born.
History rewritten
When the detailed history of twentieth century South Africa is written, our
province will loom large as giving birth to some of the countries most fearless
and unrelenting freedom fighters. And when the contemporary conjuncture is
written, our contribution to pursue reconciliation, build communities of peace
and unite around development will be I am sure, appreciated by the generations
to come.
It is in this province that the overwhelming majority of Indian South
Africans live. A million people most, of whose descendants arrived here as
indentured labourers. Ripped from the familiarity of their village, quarantined
in the then Calcutta and Madras, packed into ships and landing in an alien
environment only to be dragooned onto plantations, these were the new slaves of
the mid-nineteenth century. They resisted, persevered and their history stands
tall in our province. Look around you and you will see the minarets of the Grey
Street mosque, the little Baptist Church in Kwa-Dukuza, the Lord Shiva standing
guard over the Umgeni Road Temple and if you drive past Blue Lagoon on a Friday
afternoon people eating a mutton bunny on the bonnet of their cars. Despite the
best efforts of colonialism and apartheid, this is a legacy that could never be
erased and never will be!
The visit of the Indian Prime Minister renews a long relationship with
India. Through trade, through cultural inter-changes, through our common vision
for a more democratic global order, the knot that is Indian-South African
relations gets bound ever more tightly. And here in this province
Indian-African relations are fast overcoming the divisions and suspicion that
is the legacy of apartheid. It is my commitment as Premier of this province to
see this relationship becoming a beautiful living reality of the new South
Africa.
Our communities have spilled too much blood in the struggle for freedom,
share so much through the philosophies of satyagraha and ubuntu for us not to
realise that to paraphrase the first Prime Minster of India Jahwarlal Nehru
that we share a common tryst with destiny. And that notion of a common destiny
was put succinctly by President Thabo Mbeki: "Outwardly we are people of many
colours, races, cultures, languages and ancient origins. Yet we are tied to one
another by a million visible and invisible threads. We share a common destiny
from which none of us can escape because together we are human, we are South
African, we are African."
I can think of no more appropriate place to give content and substance to
that common destiny then at the Phoenix Settlement - the home of that great son
of Africa and India - Mahatma Gandhi. It is time for all of us to celebrate
KwaZulu-Natal, celebrate our history of resistance, celebrate freedom.
Welcome to the home of the Mahatma
Issued by: KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Government
1 October 2006
