Accra, Ghana, October 9, 2018//-Former Ghanaian President John Agyekum Kufuor has paid glowing tributes to Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Kofi Annan as the world marked International Day of Non-Violence recently.
Mr Kufuor eulogized the four iconic leaders when he spoke at an event to commemorate the 150th Birth Anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi and the International Day of Non-violence at the India House in Accra on 2nd October 2018.
In his own words: “As we commemorate today as the International Day of Non-Violence, we doff our hats to the Gandhis, the Luther Kings, the Mandelas, and the Kofi Annans”.
Mr Kufuor continued: “Let it be our prayer that leaders everywhere and anywhere would respond to non-violent protests with a sense not of foreboding, but that of an outstretched hand of dialogue and peaceful co-existence. May there be more Gandhis in this world to usher humanity, in dignity and peace, to global co-existence”.
Mr Kufuor who was the chief guest of the event organised by the Indian High Commission in Accra said Gandhi was greatly adored in his country, and in the eyes of millions of his fellow countrymen and women, was a great soul, for which the nation conferred on him the title, Mahatma, meaning “The Great Soul.”
“It is instructive that in his sojourns on this earth, it is here on this continent of Africa that his spirituality was first discovered in the early 1900s, when as a young lawyer he successfully adopted non-violent resistance to the beginnings of Apartheid policies. The impact of this great soul has since been reverberating throughout the world in all the continents”.
“Your Excellency, just a few weeks ago, we had the chance to celebrate the life of another great global icon here in Ghana, in the person of Busumuru Kofi Annan, the Seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations. He liked the great Gandhi whose 150th Birth Anniversary we celebrate today, worked for the betterment of our world without discrimination”.
Indeed, down history, only a few such visionary and spiritual individuals emerge to arrest the beliefs and attention of mankind, by sheer force of their sublime personalities, Mr Kufour added.
“They stress, in their transient existence, the essence of humanity and champion the struggle against poverty, ignorance, deprivation, disease, illiteracy, divisiveness, oppression, and injustice. Over the last two centuries, Mahatma Gandhi obviously leads the pack of such great leaders as Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Kofi Annan”.
Inspiration from his non-violent campaigns
It is, indeed, instructive to note that after Gandhi, the two most prominent world icons who obviously took their inspiration from his non-violent campaigns to seek political and social progress, were in the persons of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King and the Madiba, former President Nelson Mandela of South Africa, Mr Kufuor said.
“Such is the power of the positive resistance of these icons, who have shown such profiles in courage at the risk of their lives, and in contrast to what one would ordinarily expect of humans that, they could easily be conceived as the closest to saints to be recognized by all.
Indeed, it is also interesting to note that Gandhi’s refusal on 7th June 1893 to voluntarily depart the first-class section of a train coach which led to his booting from the first-class compartment when the train was in Pietermaritzburg, because of race, when he was travelling to Pretoria, is the same circumstance by which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus in December 1955 in the United States”.
Mr Gandhi’s train experience begun his consciousness for a non-racial society, and Rosa Park’s positive resistance in the bus is the epochal event that helped initiate the civil rights movement in the United States.
The Rosa Parks’ incident caused the leaders of the local black community to organize a bus boycott that began the day in Montgomery, Alabama, when Parks was convicted of violating the United States segregation laws. This boycott was led by a young Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, there is power in non-violence. It has the propensity to disarm the devil in the perpetrators of injustice, while bringing out the merciful God-nature in mankind and directing a shining light onto the soul of man, thereby getting him closer to providence”, Mr Kufuor stressed.
Gandhi
“Your Excellency, today, we celebrate the International Day of Non-Violence which rightfully can be said to owe its genesis and significance to this great leader of India’s independence movement, Mohandas Mahatma Gandhi.
This global icon, Mahatma Gandhi, born in the 19th Century, was relevant then, and is still relevant today”.
In his life on this earth, he cultivated a very powerful, effective, and consequential persona that was aptly captured by the British classical scholar, Gilbert Murray, in the Hibbert Journal in 1918.
Writing prophetically about Mr Gandhi and warning the British Empire, author Murray remarked: “Persons in power should be very careful how they deal with a man who cares nothing for sensual pleasure, nothing for riches, nothing for comfort or praise, or promotion, but is simply determined to do what he believes to be right. He is a dangerous and uncomfortable enemy, because his body which you can always conquer gives you so little purchase upon his soul.”
Mr Gandhi was born into a family which was steeped in a morally rigorous Indian religion whose chief tenets are nonviolence. It therefore came naturally to him, with him personally believing in not causing injury to not only humans, but also to all living beings, and advocating mutual tolerance between adherents of various creeds and sects.
It is said that his adolescent years were very normal and ordinary, with all the storms and adolescent indiscretions and transgressions that characterize young people.
Among Mr Gandhi’s main preoccupations were personal, as well as moral issues, and he always sought to improve himself and promised never to repeat his mistakes – a promise he dutifully kept. Thus, morality, which became bedrock of his character, is what drove him to reject the class system that prevailed in South Africa when he left India to live there after his legal studies in Britain.
His struggles in South Africa
In South Africa, he came face to face with the precursor of Apartheid policies in action. On 7th June 1893, Mr Gandhi was said to have been thrown out of first-class seating on a train in Pietermaritzburg while travelling to Pretoria, though he had a first-class ticket, because a white man thought he didn’t belong there.
Mr Gandhi was left shivering and brooding at the rail station. He was later said to have been beaten up by the white driver of a stagecoach because he would not acquiesce to make room for a European passenger to be more comfortable. He was also unwelcomed at hotels reserved “for Europeans only.”
Those humiliations and other injustices which were then experienced in the daily lives of South African Indian traders and labourers in Natal, made him decide never to acquiesce to injustice. It was to become his moment of truth and a resolve to defend the dignity of man.
“But, surprisingly, Ladies and Gentlemen, he resolved to do it with a non-violent tinge. Indeed, it was in South Africa in 1906 that Mr. Gandhi was to first put his non-violence campaign to test in reaction to new restrictions on the rights of Indians in the South African Transvaal government, including the refusal of the authorities to recognize Hindu marriages”, Mr Kufuor told participants at the well-attended event.
This led to Mr Gandhi’s imprisonment, but ultimately, he chalked a success in his campaign by obtaining the recognition of Hindu marriages and the abolition of poll taxes on Indians. It is in this campaign that he conceived his “devotion to truth” principle by which he advocated for the redressing of wrongs through inviting, rather than inflicting, suffering, and for battling foes without rancor, and fighting them without violence.
Such was the power of Mr Gandhi’s non-violent tactics that when ultimately, he left for India, his motherland, in July 1914, the South African statesman, General Jan Christian Smuts, had cause to write that “The saint has left our shores, [and] I hope forever.”
“Ladies and Gentlemen, the travails of the Mahatma in South Africa, in drawing him into the vortex of its racial problem, offered him with the ideal setting in which his peculiar talents could be put to the test, and unfold themselves in the events that will consume the rest of his life upon his return to India”, the Ghanaian former President stated.
He had thus been transformed into a leader of men by freeing him from bonds that make cowards of most men. For, he had learned to do without riches, and “to jettison the material goods that cramp the life of the spirit and to shake off the bonds of money and property.”
Politics
Mr Gandhi was to finally return to India in January 1915 to lead his first political agitation against the British colonial authorities which was caused by the passing of the Rowlatt Act of February 1919, which allowed the authorities to imprison those suspected of sedition without trial. He called for a campaign of peaceful protests and strikes.
Unfortunately, violence was unleashed by the British colonial authorities instead, which culminated on April 13, 1919, in the Massacre of Amritsar. British soldiers, led by British Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, killed nearly 400 people when they fired machine guns into a crowd of unarmed demonstrators.
From then on, Mr Gandhi became the leader of India’s independence movement. He assumed the leadership of the Indian National Congress and advocated a policy of non-violence and non-cooperation to achieve home rule.
Mr Gandhi’s chosen protégé was Jawaharlal Nehru, who, through many boycotts, non-cooperation, and mostly non-violent resistances, as well as many bouts of arrests and imprisonments, was to lead India to independence from British rule in August 1947 after Gandhi had left the Congress Party in 1934.
After stepping away from the Congress Party and politics, Gandhi shifted his focus to education, poverty and the problems afflicting India’s rural areas. Even away from politics, he played an active role in the negotiations that led to India’s independence, and his non-violent ways was the bedrock that broke the mighty Great Britain.
In commemorating the anniversary, the High Commission of India in Ghana has supported the 37 Military Hospital in Accra with medical supplies.
The medical drugs and food supplements worth several thousands of cedis were donated to Gandhi Ward of the hospital.
The Indian High Commission solicited the medical supplies from M&G Pharmaceuticals Limited, a leading Indian pharmaceutical giant operating in Ghana.
Donating the items to senior officials of the hospital, the Indian High Commission of India to Ghana, H.E Birender Singh Yadav, said the donation of the medical supplies would help improve the medical stocks of the hospital.
He said: “We are very happy to present these medical products to the ward named after Ghandi as we celebrate his 150th birth anniversary. Before that we also donated poly-tanks for restoration of water for use of the ward”.
We are very thankful to the management of the hospital for taking good care of the ward, Mr Yadav stated.
By Masahudu Ankiilu Kunateh, African Eye Report
