Everything is racist these days.
'Racist' Gandhi statue banished from Ghana university campus
Accra academics win removal of Mahatma sculpture after petition denouncing Indian leader and saying African heroes ‘come first’
A statue of Mahatma Gandhi will be removed from a university campus in Ghana after professors launched a petition claiming the revered Indian independence leader and thinker was racist.
The statue of Gandhi was unveiled in June at the University of Ghana campus in Accra by Pranab Mukherjee, the president of India, as a symbol of close ties between the two countries.
But in September a group of professors started a petition calling for the removal of the statue, saying Gandhi was racist and that the university should put African heroes and heroines “first and foremost”.
The petition states “it is better to stand up for our dignity than to kowtow to the wishes of a burgeoning Eurasian super power”, and quotes passages written by Gandhi which say Indians are “infinitely superior” to black Africans.
More than 1,000 people signed the petition, which claimed that not only was Gandhi racist towards black South Africans when he lived in South Africa as a young man, but that he campaigned for the maintenance of India’s caste system, an ancient social hierarchy that still defines the status in that country of hundreds of millions of people.
Ghana’s foreign ministry said it had followed the controversy with “deep concern” and wanted to relocate the statue.
“The government would therefore want to relocate the statue from the University of Ghana to ensure its safety and to avoid the controversy.” it said. “While acknowledging that, human as he was, Mahatma Gandhi may have had his flaws, we must remember that people evolve.”
Statues on university campuses have recently prompted bitter arguments in Africa as students wrestle with the legacy of colonialism and history of racism on the continent.
Last year students in South Africa successfully campaigned for the removal, from the University of Cape Town campus, of a statue of Cecil Rhodes, a notoriously racist mining magnate who died in 1902.
Black students have celebrated the fall of a statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town, as some white groups protested at what they see as threats to their heritage.
Cheers went up as a crane removed the bronze statue from its plinth at South Africa’s oldest university after a month of student demonstrations against a perceived symbol of historical white oppression.
The university, which is regularly ranked as the best on the continent, was built on land donated by Rhodes, a notoriously racist mining magnate who died in 1902. A decision on the statue’s final destination is yet to be made, but it is likely to end up in a museum.
Earlier, the youth wing of white Afrikaner solidarity group AfriForum handed a memorandum to parliament in Cape Town to “demand protection” for their heritage.
Afrikaners are descendants of mainly Dutch settlers from the 17th and 18th centuries and dominated South Africa’s white-minority government before the end of apartheid in 1994. They are no fans of Rhodes, who was on the British side in the Anglo-Boer war at the turn of the 20th century, but have seen statues of their own forebears come under attack in the wake of the university protests.
Afrikaner men, some of them in quasi-military outfits, demonstrated on Wednesday at the statue in Pretoria of former president Paul Kruger – which had been splattered with paint – and at the monument to the leader of the first settlers, Jan van Riebeeck, in Cape Town.
“The Afrikaner is – from a historical perspective – increasingly being portrayed as criminals and land thieves,” AfriForum said in a statement. “If the heritage of the Afrikaner is not important to government, our youth members will preserve our own heritage.”
Their attitude is in contrast to that of the university council, which voted to remove Rhodes after accepting that his statue made black university students uncomfortable on campus.
Its disappearance is unlikely to end the debate over the pace of racial transformation, which goes beyond symbols to encompass economic and social divisions 21 years after the end of apartheid.
