It is in the details that the spirit of the Mahatma lives on in Johannesburg
The name rang a faint but distinct bell. Familiar, but why? The photograph shows a dapper young man wearing a buttoned-down jacket with angled lapels, hair parted neatly on the left, head tilted ever-so-slightly to the right. This was Nagappen Padayachee, from 1909.
An immigrant to South Africa from Tamil Nadu, Padayachee was arrested in June that year for hawking without a permit. His sentence: 10 days in prison with hard labour. With the conditions, and then being forced to walk to a camp 26 km away, Padayachee fell ill. Six days after he was released, he was dead. “Warders had ignored his illness,” said the few lines beside the photograph, “and forced him to continue with hard labour, as the bruises and weals on his body attested.”
Five years later, a man called Mohandas Gandhi unveiled memorial tablets to Padayachee and a woman called Valliamma Munusamy at Johannesburg’s Braamfontein Cemetery. The tablets remembered both as martyrs to the struggle for equal rights in South Africa. For Gandhi, they were inspirations, “like a lighted match to dry fuel”.
Dead at 18, remembered by his home country’s most famous son: This dapper youth must have been quite a figure among Indians in South Africa in the early 20th century. But I had never heard of him. So why did “Padayachee” ring a bell?
It came to me several minutes later, and I actually ran back to look closely at the photograph. Usually spelled “Padayachi”, it’s my Tamil grandfather’s caste name. Here it was, in a museum in Johannesburg. Given how these things work, it’s even possible that I am related to this young martyr. Was he a cousin once-removed, something like that? No way to answer that, of course. Nevertheless, I stood there a long time, transfixed. What a thought. A possible personal connection, going back a century, to the battle against apartheid: What a thought.
Yet this wall was about so much more than skin colour and apartheid, while drawing nevertheless from the lessons of that dark past. It’s not just racism that South Africa is trying to awake from. Take for example the board titled “Landmark Case: Hoffman v South African Airways, 2000”.
It also underlines what Gandhi meant to this country.
(This story appears in the 26 August, 2011 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)