websites related to the Order of the Companions of OR Tambo<\/a> that it recognises three categories of eminent foreign nationals for friendship shown to South Africa.<\/p>\n\u201cIt is therefore concerned primarily with matters of peace, cooperation, international solidarity and support and is integral to the execution of South Africa\u2019s international and multilateral relations,\u201d the Presidency states on its website.<\/p>\n
In the year following the revamp and the awarding of the Order, the South African government \u2014\u00a0and Nelson Mandela in particular \u2014 welcomed a 2.5m high bronze statue of Gandhi in the square.<\/p>\n
What, then, could Gandhi have said or done to deserve the ire of South Africans to the point that they would put themselves on the wrong side of the law?<\/p>\n
Gandhi a racist?<\/h3>\n
To understand where this comes from, you have to dig into Gandhi\u2019s past.<\/p>\n
In the collected works of Gandhi, in his early years as an activist, one will find letters and speeches where he liberally used a highly charged racial slur (the \u201ck-word\u201d), and referred to black South Africans in a derogatory fashion.<\/p>\n
\u201cOurs is one continual struggle against a degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the Europeans, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw K***** whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and, then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness,\u201d Gandhi said in a 1896 speech in Bombay attributed to him.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere, the deliberately expressed object is not to allow the Indian to rise higher in the scale of civilization but to lower him to the position of the K*****,\u201d Gandhi said.<\/p>\n
When he shared a prison cell with black people, he wrote: \u201cMany of the native prisoners are only one degree removed from the animal and often created rows and fought among themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
These statements are unequivocal. There is no excusing them.<\/p>\n
At the time, Gandhi must have believed that Indians were superior to native-born black South Africans, or why would he have said or written things like those quoted above?<\/p>\n
The impossibility of living up to \u201cMahatma\u201d<\/h3>\n