(currently out of stock)

Author
Edited by Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie

Foreword by
Denis E Hurley OMI Archbishop Emeritus of Durban

Published by
SAHO & Durban Local History Museum

INTRO

Message: eThekwini Heritage

Notes from a Daughter

SITA'S STORY

Childhood: Phoenix Settlement

In India with Bapuji

Blessings from Bapu 

A gallery of images

It is a delightful privilege to have been invited to write this foreword. When I was a young boy Mahatma Gandhi appeared a troublesome person to me. Though of Irish descent I was being thoroughly steeped in the belief of the civilizing force of the British empire, as it was taught to us in school. I resented the words and actions of a person who appeared determined to disrupt the great empire.
   
After seven years of philosophy and theology in Rome I was much less empire minded, especially after witnessing the extension of the Italian empire through the conquest of Ethiopia and Albania. Back in South Africa and becoming more and more uneasy at the segregation that dominated the South African scene and took on more and more unacceptable dimensions, through the formulation and development of apartheid, my imperial instincts evaporated as colonial empires themselves evaporated after World War II. In the course of this evaporation I began to read the Indian Opinion and came to know and love its editor, Manilal Gandhi, and his daughter, Ela, to meet and appreciate many other leading figures in the Indian community, particularly, from members of the Catholic contingent.  

Then the day came when I was asked to participate in a symposium on the great Mahatma on the occasion of the centenary of his birth in 1969. By this time I had come to know quite a lot about him, and his life a little more intensely. This led to one of those cultural shocks we experience from time to time and which are truly gifts from God.  Gandhi appeared to me now as the greatest soul the world had seen since Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth century. 

In this volume his granddaughter, Sita, tells of encounters with him in the early 1940s. What a privilege, what an extraordinary enrichment of life after the limitations of childhood and youth experienced under South African segregation. Those of us who never experienced those limitations find much that is poignant in these memoirs but much that transcends those limitations in the family, community and religious life of the Indian people of Natal. 
 
It gives me a special joy to read of the happy part played in the life of the author by St Anthony’s School and the Holy Family sisters who owned and staffed that school.   

May these memoirs enjoy the success they deserve. 

gallery

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