The letters that almost reveal the leader
Gandhi’s African Legacy’, which charts the history of the Phoenix Settlement, is filled with original research
When in 1893 a young Mohandas Gandhi first landed in Durban from Rajkot, he was an unremarkable lawyer from a provincial backwater. SA, his home for the next 22 years, proved to be the crucible forging him into what he was to become.
The incipient Gandhi was unsure of his place in the world, hidebound to his caste and one whose perspectives were framed by a narrow legal framework of contracts and petitions. But the Gandhi who left was the discoverer of alchemy; he had identified the method by which subjugated masses could bring callous empires to their knees without a single shot being fired. It was to be an idea that revolutionised the 20th century...
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