Father of Apartheid: How Gandhi Dehumanized Black Africans

http://www.singhofjudah.com/20....18/04/12/father-of-a

For years, controversy has brewed around Gandhi statues placed outside India. On several continents — Europe, Africa, and North America — people of all backgrounds have stepped forward to protest the Indian political figure. In Ottawa, Canada at the University of Carleton, a statue installed in 2011 has galvanized student leaders to demand its removal.

In November 2017, an African student at Carleton published a letter in the student newspaper saying, bluntly, “Remove the Gandhi statue.” Kenneth Aliu, president of Carleton’s African Studies Student Association, believes history has been twisted to conceal Gandhi’s racist past. “His proximity to whiteness as one who continually espoused anti-Black rhetoric is, perhaps, one of the reasons behind his apotheosis,” writes Aliu. He explains, “For you to deify Gandhi, some people have to be erased from history. You don't engage with how his activism as a whole was detrimental to certain segments of society.”

Controversy centers around the argument that Gandhi was the “father of apartheid” — a shocking claim to make about a person who is sometimes valorized as “the greatest man who ever lived” — and that he systematically dehumanized black Africans while living in South Africa from 1893-1914.