Gandhi and the Global Satyagraha

More than 70 years after Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s death, opinions and view about his person and his non-violent technique of struggle remain deeply divided. For some, he was a puritanical, conservative critique of modernity. For them, he created and perpetuated unrealistic and confused ideas about economic development and technological progress. However, for his admirers Gandhi was a man of spiritual truthfulness and democratic action, both at public and personal levels with a unique method of struggle that combined political pragmatism and ethical integrity. Some, among these admirers, evaluate Gandhi’s impact on human history as significant as that of Jesus, Buddha and Karl Marx. Thus, in the minds of many people, Gandhi represents two different and contradictory characters. The first, Gandhi is the political Gandhi who fought against British colonialism and is the father of the modern Indian nation. This is the man whom Albert Einstein lauded as ‘a leader of his people, unsupported by any outward authority, a politician whose success rests not upon craft nor mastery of technical devices, but simply on the convincing power of his personality’ (Sanghvi, 2006, p. 29). The second, Gandhi is the ashram-type Gandhi who is more of a mystic than a politician and uses fasting as a method of struggle, whom Rabindranath Tagore considered as the ‘Mahatma’, the ‘Great Soul’.

To be sure, Gandhi certainly deserves the accolade as a courageous fighter, a deep thinker and a great leader of men and ideas. But if anything, he was a man of experimentation who insisted on truth. Therefore, it should not come to us as a surprise that the literal meaning of satyagraha is ‘asserting for truth’. One does not have to go far to find in Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, the idea that life was nothing but a spiritual experience with truth and a struggle against all forms of untruth and injustice. As such, Gandhi claims that his life was his message, simply because he extended his practice of satyagraha to all walks of life. Gandhi, in short, was a leader looking for a spiritual cause. He found it, of course, in satyagraha and ultimately in Independence for India.

During the key part of his life, Gandhi devoted a great deal of time explaining the moral and philosophical meanings of satyagraha. In Gandhi’s value system, ahimsa occupied the first place. He wrote:

Literally speaking ahimsa is non-killing. But to me it has a world of meaning and takes me into realms much higher, infinitely higher than the realm to which I would go, if I merely understood by ahimsa, non-killing. Ahimsa really means that you may not offend anybody, you may not harbour an uncharitable thought even in connection with one who may consider himself to be your enemy…. For one who follows the doctrine of ahimsa, there is no room for an enemy, he denies the existence of an enemy…. If we return blow for blow, we depart from the doctrine of ahimsa. (Mazmudar, 2003, p. 9)

Gandhi however was aware of the fact that he needed a vehicle of civic struggle and mass action for his philosophy of ahimsa. While in South Africa, he launched his movement of disobedience, but he was not happy with the English name of ‘passive resistance’ given to his Indian struggle. He therefore decided to call it satyagraha. As Gandhi puts it, the principle of satyagraha was coined before the word itself. According to him,

I can now see that all the principal events of my life, culminating in the vow of Brahmacharya, were secretly preparing me for it. The principle called satyagraha came into being before that name was invented. Indeed, when it was born, I myself could not say what it was. In Gujarati also we used the English phrase ‘passive resistance’ to describe it. When in a meeting of Europeans, I found that the term ‘passive resistance’ was too narrowly construed, that it was supposed to be a weapon of the weak, that it could be characterised by hatred, and that it could finally manifest itself as violence, I had to demur to all these statements and explain the real nature of the Indian movement. It was clear that a new word must be coined by Indians to designate their struggle. But I could not for the life of me find out a new name, and therefore offered a nominal prize through Indian Opinion to the reader who made the best suggestion on the subject. As a result, Maganlal Gandhi coined the word ‘Sadagraha’ (Sat = truth, Agraha = firmness) and won the prize. But in order to make it clearer I changed the word to ‘satyagraha’ which has since become current in Gujarati as a designation for the struggle. (Gandhi, 1927, pp. 294–295)

As such under the leadership of Mohandas K. Gandhi, satyagraha turned into an instrument of non-violent public dissent and a pragmatic tool of the powerless against the powerful. However, in the eyes of Gandhi, while being an instrument of conflict resolution and civic protest, satyagraha was also essentially spiritual. What Gandhi called the ‘soul force’ was actually ‘firmness in truth’ and a spiritual mode of conduct. Distinguishing satyagraha from passive resistance, Gandhi suggested that the success of a satyagrahi was because of the appeal to her own conscience. Apart from resistance to wrong-doing, Gandhi seems to explicitly assume a fundamental moral distinction between political dissent and satyagraha. Gandhi viewed satyagraha essentially as an ethical commitment and a constructive political action. For Gandhi, the spiritual and the political were the same. Therefore, the struggle against unjust laws was the soul force to uplift others. He saw the emancipation of one as the emancipation of all. He maintained that it was the duty of each individual to transform himself or herself by attempting to live following the principles of truth and non-violence. In order to achieve this, one had to develop a spirit of selflessness and simplicity.

Gandhi had a profoundly ethical view of life: he recognised neither the infallible authority of texts nor the sanctity of religious traditions, but he was also the foremost critic of modern politics and its authoritarian practices. That is to say, reading Gandhi today is unavoidably to rethink politics as a relationship between power and people and as a way of transcending the conventional liberal distinction between civil society and the state. It is a move towards a politics of the future, where solidarity of differences is not compromised by mere multiculturalism and democratic action is not limited by mere constitutionalism and representation. Working in this perspective, the Gandhian philosophy of satyagraha finds the conventional meaning of power as incomplete, while problematising democratic politics as a way of assigning a duty to citizens to be vigilant about the abuses of power by the state and to struggle against the concentration of power in civil society. On the social side, Gandhi envisioned an ideal society where justice is done ‘unto the last’ and in which institutions aim to get the best out of man. The entire Gandhian thought in the realm of religion and politics also revolves round the establishment of a just society.

Gandhi’s satyagraha hinges on moral growth in man where an unrestricted individualism gives its place to a civic humanism. Similarly, while speaking on religion Gandhi wanted to develop certain qualities like fearlessness, non-possession and humility in man. The main aim was to restructure man to suit to non-violent society. Gandhi’s repeated emphasis on service to human beings as the essence of religion is intertwined with his pluralistic understanding of humanity. In this pluralistic approach to the dialogue of cultures and faiths, Gandhi was far ahead of his time. Indeed, Gandhi’s politics of satyagraha is still far ahead of our time even three generations after his death.

Gandhi’s ideas evolved through experience from a highly simplistic view to more mature, sophisticated and relevant propositions. Gandhi was not a system builder. He was essentially a pathfinder towards social and individual goals. Therefore, Gandhi’s philosophy is neither utopian nor eschatological. It is simply a critical view which tells us what we need to do in order to go forward on the path of liberation, from selfishness and injustice to selflessness and welfare of all. More importantly, Gandhi’s attachment to religion is limited. Religion for Gandhi is identified with ethics rather than theology. Therefore, most of Gandhi’s major concepts and methods of struggle, including satyagraha, are not absolutist concepts. Gandhi believes that human destiny has constantly been on the move towards non-violence. Gandhi was a person who pursued justice in all aspects of life and who encouraged others to join him in this pursuit.

Perhaps the key factor in his struggle was the fact that he attempted to put his non-violent convictions into practice far more radically than most of his contemporaries. Where did Gandhi get his main inspirations for this belief that beyond all their differences all human beings are good? Gandhi himself speaks of Indian influences, especially that of the Bhagavad Gita, a text that he nurtured throughout his life, and of non-Indian influences such as Leo Tolstoy, John Ruskin and Henry David Thoreau. Many may find it difficult to see all these figures and texts as true inspirations for a life of non-violence. Yet the fact must be recognised that though Gandhi’s foremost inspirations are Hindu, he has shown the world how after conscientiously reading through other religious texts and original writers it is possible to find the true meaning of non-violence that is relevant to our times. As such, his claim to have discovered a way of action that is valid for other cultures and nations gives to his non-violence and concept of satyagraha a universal significance that is inescapable in today’s world.

Growing up as a child in the province of Gujarat where Jainism had a strong influence, Gandhi was constantly exposed through his pious mother to the Jain doctrine of ahimsa. Although Gandhi forged his philosophy of non-violence on these same lines, his passionate search for truth took him through the readings of Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You in 1894, John Ruskin’s Unto this Last while on a journey in South Africa and Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience when he was a student in London. Gandhi’s experience of satyagraha, therefore, is partly due to his exposure to these intellectual influences, but it is also a natural outcome of his commitment to a life of service and struggle for justice. Gandhi’s personal experience of discrimination in South Africa, including the incident where he was thrown out of a train at Maritzburg in spite of having a valid ticket, made him more sensitive to the cause of non-violence. Gandhi was imprisoned on 10 January 1908 by the South African authorities. During imprisonment, he wrote to his ailing wife Kasturba: ‘I have sacrificed all in the satyagraha struggle… I love you so much that even if you are dead, you will always be alive in me. I repeat what I have told you that I shall never marry again. You should depart with faith in God… My struggle is not merely political; it is also a righteous struggle and is, therefore, entirely pure’ (Haley, 1965). As we can see, Gandhi’s vision of satyagraha was far from being utopian. He considered it as a dynamic element in the ethical becoming of human civilisation.

Gandhi’s effort to bridge the religious divides between different faiths was matched in many ways by his re-interpretation of the fundamental Jain principle of the many-sidedness of truth. Gandhi does not reject traditions; he simply affirms what he considers to be authentic in them and thinks of bringing them together in the realisation of a deeper truth. This enables him to maintain that it would not be possible to understand the concept of truth without having some understanding of the tradition in which it is nurtured. Gandhi, therefore, speaks of ahimsa and satya as two sides of the same coin. He explains this two-way movement in the following way: ‘When I look for Ahimsa, Truth says, “Find it through me”. When I look for Truth, Ahimsa says, “Find it through me”’ (Sheshagiri Rao, 1978, p. 64). Gandhi equates non-violence with the search for Truth and in his early attempt to define satyagraha he mentions: ‘Satyagraha is literally holding on to truth and it means, therefore, Truth-force’ (Tilley, 1995, p. 147). From these words we can understand that truth seeking is a cardinal feature of satyagraha. In other words, holding on to Truth necessitates the exclusion of violence to ensure the supremacy of the ethical over the political. This has to do with the fact that, according to Gandhi, the grasp of Truth is always fragmentary. ‘What may appear as truth to one person will often appear as untruth to another person. But that need not worry the seeker…What appears to be different truths are like apparently different leaves of the same tree….Hence, there is nothing wrong in every man following truth according to his own lights. Indeed, it is his duty to do so’ (Gandhi, 2005, p. 47). To acknowledge the partiality of one’s own truth Gandhi finds some common elements among the diverse expressions of truth in different religions. The fact is that we are never in a position to have absolute knowledge of truth, and therefore we can never be absolute in our expression of God. That is why Gandhi believes that epistemic humility is needed in every religion. Gandhian humility negates claims to absolute power and emphasises the need for dialogue with others. As such, political action is a way of discovering truth by requiring a need for self-limiting applications of power and openness to the other. So, tolerance is a means to strive toward truth, mainly because no one is born non-violent, but everyone can become non-violent by daily practice of satyagraha.

Gandhi’s pedagogy of relying on satyagraha both as a philosophy of life and as a method of conflict-resolution opened new practical dimensions to the identification of social issues and unjust social situations and structures and at the same time articulating non-violent solutions both at the personal level and at the social level. As we can see, satyagraha is not a theoretical construct but also a mode of direct action in the pursuit of moral-political truth. Gandhi provides us with a mode of action that will enable us to live with the plurality of ideas and values. Gandhi defined himself as ‘an essentially practical man dealing with practical political questions’ (Veeravalli, 2014, p. 14). In 1938, he said to a group of missionaries:

I could not be leading a religious life unless I identified myself with the whole of mankind and that I could not do unless I took part in politics. The whole gamut of man’s activities today constitutes an indivisible whole… I do not know of any religion apart from activity. It provides a moral basis to all other activities without which life would be a maze of sound and fury signifying nothing. (Pandikattu, 2001, p. 64)

In the satyagraha mode of conflict resolution, the refusal to eliminate the opponent but to bring both parties to realise a heightened reciprocity or moral interdependence is most important. Through satyagraha, the victims of injustice not only seek justice, but also ensure social harmony. The satyagrahi, therefore, assumes that his opponents are also capable of changing and emancipating from their self-deceptive, truth-denying beliefs and actions. To quote Gandhi: ‘The basic principle on which the practice of non-violence rests is that what holds good in respect of oneself equally applies to the whole universe. All mankind in essence are alike. What is, therefore, possible for one is possible for everybody’ (Dhiman, 2010, pp. 85–86). Hence, according to Gandhi, we must act in the public sphere on the basis of the assumption that there is a plurality of views and opinions. The result of this plurality would be a detachment from self through engagement with the other and a tolerance that allows both the inclusion of values and the more comprehensive idea of a rational-consensus model of truth. As Gandhi puts it:

Even as a tree has a single trunk, but many branches and leaves, so is there one true and perfect Religion, but it becomes many, as it passes through the human medium. The one Religion is beyond all speech. Imperfect men put it into such languages as they can command, and their words are interpreted by other men equally imperfect. Whose interpretation is to be held the right one? Everybody is right from his own standpoint, but it is not impossible that everybody is wrong. Hence the necessity for tolerance, which does not mean indifference towards one’s own faith, but a more intelligent and purer love for it. (Sheshagiri Rao, 1978, p. 99)

As such, for Gandhi, the possibility of arriving at a rational consensus on truth and rightness in a given socio-historical context needs more than a simple effort of argumentative reasoning. We must, according to Gandhi, test the truth or rightness of non-violence through direct action techniques such as acts of non-cooperation, acts of civil disobedience and constructive programmes.

Satyagraha worked in India because Gandhi underlined the general qualities of transformative non-violence. Therefore, his ability to invoke satyagraha as a transformative and emancipative philosophy was largely responsible for his success. Gandhi’s demonstration of the power of satyagraha as an ethic of individual transformation could be considered as his greatest contribution to the precepts of the contemporary global non-violent movement. Intriguingly, however, there is another important aspect of satyagraha which makes it universally applicable as a method of action. In this regard, it is a common view to say that satyagraha was conducted by a person like Gandhi who was brought up in a cultural setting familiar with the concept of self-suffering and non-violence. But it would be a mistake to judge the Gandhian satyagraha in terms of cultural background. The recent history of non-violent action around the world has shown us clearly that satyagraha is a seed that can grow and flourish in other cultures and religions other than in Hindu society.

We can refer here to several successful experiences of satyagraha over the past fifty years. Among the followers of Gandhi in the twentieth century who successfully launched their own satyagraha against racial, religious and economic injustice and struggled for human rights, one could mention names like: Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Benigno Aquino and Aung San Suu Kyi. In more than half a century, many around the globe have drawn inspiration from Gandhi’s method of satyagraha. The trans-Indian experience of satyagraha assumes, therefore, that non-violence in its broadest sense remains exemplary as a political action and is transferable as a human experience from one tradition of thought to another. Satyagraha was already invoked during Gandhi’s lifetime by Ghaffar Khan, also known as the Frontier Gandhi. Few people know about Ghaffar Khan as a Muslim proponent of non-violence who stressed the compatibility of Islam and satyagraha. Unlike Gandhi, who was largely influenced by the Bhagavad Gita, the Sermon on the Mount, Ghaffar Khan drew his primary inspirations from the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad. As such, he started elaborating his principles of non-violence and social reform before he came into contact with Gandhi. Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s secretary, once described Ghaffar Khan in the following manner:

The greatest thing in him is, to my mind, his spirituality––or better still, the true spirit of Islam––submission to God. He has measured Gandhiji’s life all through this yardstick and his clinging to Gandhiji can be explained on no other ground. It is not Gandhiji’s name and fame that have attracted him to Gandhiji, nor his political work, nor his spirit of rebellion and revolution. It is his pure and ascetic life and his insistence on self-purification that have had the greatest appeal for him, and his whole life since 1919 onwards has been one sustained effort for self-purification. (Easwaran, 1984, p. 143)

Ghaffar Khan’s followers, known as the Khudai Khidmatgars or Servants of God, pledged themselves to non-violence as an ethics of conviction and as a political means to independence and freedom. Under the influence of Ghaffar Khan, the movement found the basis for self-restraint, self-reliance and self-discipline, which enabled them to be fearless, patient and tolerant even in the face of oppressive violence. Hence the unique place of Ghaffar Khan in the history of non-violence. He proved Gandhi’s claim that the imperative of satyagraha integrates everyday politics within ethical values and anticipates a form of public life in which truthfulness and rightness are the grounds of anti-tyrannical experience. The true influence of Ghaffar Khan can never be measured. Nevertheless, the unmistakable portrait of this great man in the great struggle against violence was drawn by Gandhi himself when he described Ghaffar Khan as a Pathan ‘who deliberately asked his Khudai Khidmatgars to shed all weapons when he asked them to join the satyagraha against the Rowlatt Act’ (Gandhi, 2004, p. 131). It is no accident that Ghaffar Khan believed firmly in Islam as a religion of truth, love and service to humanity. This is indeed fundamental to the whole mentality of non-violence, with its active non-violent resistance to evil and its concern, its deep faith that justice will eventually win.

Martin Luther King’s world was built on these two principles. In him, we find a similar experience of the Gandhian satyagraha. For King, non-violent resistance was the most effective weapon against a racist and unjust social system in the United States. Though King was deeply influenced by the Black church heritage and evangelical liberal Christianity, his two principal tactics of non-cooperation and civil disobedience against racist laws in the US were primarily influenced by Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha. In King’s thought, ‘Non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good’ (Carson, 2000, p. 72). King went to great lengths to make it clear that non-violence was not a method for the cowards or a method of achieving change through physical coercion, but a way of demonstrating one’s just cause by converting the opponent. According to King,

If you confront a man, who has long been cruelly misusing you, and say, ‘Punish me, if you will, I do not deserve it, but I will accept it so that the world will know I am right and you are wrong’, then you wield a powerful and a just weapon. This man, your oppressor, is automatically morally defeated, and if he has any conscience, he is ashamed. Wherever this weapon is used in a manner that stirs a community’s or a nation’s anguished conscience, then the pressure of public opinion becomes an ally in your just cause. (Haley, 1965)

It seems, therefore, that King stands in the long tradition of spiritual understanding of non-violence: he speaks of love (agape) as the central dynamic of non-violent action, based on the Christian conviction that God is on the side of those who love their enemies and struggle for justice. Non-violent action was related, in King’s mind, to a permanent struggle in human nature between good and evil. King wrote:

There is within human nature an amazing potential for goodness. There is within human nature something that can respond to goodness. I know somebody’s liable to say that this is an unrealistic movement if it goes on believing that all people are good. Well, I didn’t say that. I think … that there is a strange dichotomy of disturbing dualism within human nature. Many of the great philosophers and thinkers through the ages have seen this… Plato, centuries ago, said that the human personality is like a charioteer with two headstrong horses each wanting to go in different directions, so that within our individual lives we see this conflict and certainly when we come to the collective life of man, we see a strange badness. ¹

As such, King considered satyagraha as a process, never as an achievement. As King became more deeply involved with the Gandhian satyagraha against segregation in America, his understanding of non-violence as a moral commitment to God and to other human beings was raised to an ultimate and absolute principle of social and political action.

King never concealed his debt to Gandhi for his method of satyagraha as well as his refusal to separate the political from the ethical and the religious from the secular. To discover more about Gandhian philosophy, he travelled to India from 2 February to 10 March 1959. And so, King not only read about Gandhian satyagraha, he also tested the very ground that Gandhi had practiced his philosophy of satyagraha. The genius of King’s action was to unify his Christian conception of love and Gandhi’s thought on satyagraha. Actually, King came to regard the Gandhian moment of non-violence as an intrinsic continuation of the sayings of Jesus. For him, the practical consequence of the belief in Gandhian satyagraha was an active application of the two concepts of love and community in terms of the concrete realities of the Black experience in America. In fact, King came to believe that all the laws of the universe went in the direction of achieving the Beloved Community which was reminiscent of Gandhi’s Ramrajya. Gandhi defined Ramrajya as a ‘moral government based upon truth and non-violence’. He added:

We call a State Ramrajya when both the ruler and his subjects are straightforward, when both are pure in heart, when both are inclined towards self-sacrifice, when both exercise restraint and self-control while enjoying worldly pleasures, and when the relationship between the two is as good as that between a father and a son. It is because we have forgotten this that we talk of democracy or the government of the people… In my Ramrajya, however, public opinion cannot be measured by counting of heads or raising of hands. (Mukherjee, 1993, p. xv)

Though King did not attempt to define his notion of a Beloved Community, he nevertheless constantly stressed his solidaristic approach to the idea of human community as an effort towards the realisation of his conception of the Beloved Community. King affirmed: ‘We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality’ (Hill, 2007, p. 125). This idea of an inclusive human community tied to a vision of total connectedness was the description of King’s adaptation of the Gandhian satyagraha to the context of elimination of racial injustice in the American society.

In the same manner as for King in America, the Gandhian experience of satyagraha found its most authentic exemplification in the African continent with Nelson Mandela. His hope was coming true in South Africa and in the person of Mandela. ‘There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death, again and again, before we reach the mountain top of our desires’ (Cohen & Battersby, 2009, p. 23). These are the words of Mandela who fought for non-violence and democracy in South Africa. Mandela’s imprint and influence on our world and times as a non-violent leader remain as powerful as that of Gandhi.

Perhaps no leader in recent times has symbolised better the Gandhian moment as Mandela did––going beyond all distinctions of colour, creed and class. His release from the Victor Verster prison in Paarl on 11 February 1990, after having served 27 years in prison and spending many of these years on Robben Island, was celebrated as the triumph of human dignity and non-violence over injustice and repression in South Africa. With Mandela assuming office as president in 1994, South Africa started looking beyond its own violence and humiliations suffered for ages to heal the national and racial divide. Effective non-violent actions played a crucial role in crippling down the brutal and racist apartheid regime in South Africa, helping establish a legitimate democratically elected black majority government. Despite ongoing arguments that an armed-violent struggle was catalytic and vital in befalling the charge South African apartheid society, one should not forget that the largely non-violent strategies carried out by Black leaders, like Mandela and Tutu, and white sympathisers brought about internal resistance and international pressure forcing the apartheid government to negotiate a peaceful transfer to the people of South Africa. In addition to traditional non-violent tactics, such as protests and boycotts, the anti-apartheid movement also developed alternative institutions, effectively creating a ‘situation of dual power in South Africa, where institutions affecting the daily lives of blacks… came to be managed by black South Africans themselves’ (Dudouet, 2015, p. 116). These civic type institutions became the de facto government and in the process delegitimised traditional governments. The fact that many of the non-violent movements were effectively educated, empowered and mobilised, stresses that the resistance consisted of both principle and tactic. The non-violent activists in South Africa were gradually trained to anticipate losses to achieve a wider goal of determination––a determination as strong as violent resistance, to risk one’s life in pursuit of justice and non-violence. However, due to constant violent uprisings and guerilla warfare carried out by armed factions, this internalising process of non-violence continued to be disrupted.

In the years preceding Mandela’s arrest and long internment, ‘the communists’ enthusiasm for armed struggle had a marked influence on Mandela’s own outlook, making it seem more feasible than would have been the case’ (Meredith, 2010, p. 199). What further convinced Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) leaders of using the guerilla warfare against the apartheid regime in South Africa were the anti-colonial examples of Cuba and Algeria. ‘To make up for his own lack of knowledge, Mandela read everything he could lay his hands on about guerilla warfare and war history: authors like Guevara, Mao Tse-tung, Castro and Clausewitz; books on Algeria, Cuba, Israel, Kenya and the Anglo-Boer War’ (Meredith, 2010, p. 201). It was decided that Mandela would form Umkhonto we Sizwe (The Spear of the Nation) and engage in careful sabotage operations against apartheid institutions. Predictably, the armed struggle led to greater support for the apartheid regime and its repression of terrorism. It became clear that violence, even that which specifically targetted governmental institutions was not effective. A decade later, in the mid-1970s, Mandela admitted his mistake in establishing Umkhonto and abandoning the work of political organisation. He wrote: ‘We, who formed Umkhonto, were all members of the African National Congress and had behind us the ANC tradition of non-violence and negotiation as a means of solving political disputes. We believed that South Africa belonged to all people who lived in it, and not to one group, be it black or white. We did not want an interracial war and tried to avoid it to the last minute’ (Meredith, 2010, p. 262). As such, Mandela and the ANC recognised that, rather than armed struggle, it was non-cooperation of the people that was more critical.

A major revitalisation of the non-violent resistance movement again spurred up in the 1970s through the Black Consciousness movement and inspired by Steve Biko. The aim of the group and the late leader Biko was to ‘rebuild and recondition the mind of the oppressed… [and] to demand back what was rightfully theirs’ (Zunes, 1999). The tactical advantages of non-violent resistance gained wide support through the Black Consciousness movement while inspiring different social groups to join in to the non-violent struggle for freedom. These groups consisted of churches, civil associations, trade unions, and student organisations. From the early 1970s until the end of apartheid rule, these organisations carried out various types of non-violent tactics to bring about change. To try to halt the challenges of the non-violent movement, the South African government was forced to impose a strict state of emergency in 1985 which was meant to deal with curbing the unarmed resistance. The emergency call by the government only intensified the non-violent resistance and galvanised the international system in imposing economic sanctions. This combined with a new defiance campaign in 1989 with millions marching across the country from Durban to Johannesburg and the increasing costs of internal security from the non-violent struggle led South Africa into an economic crisis which forced many of the country’s elites to advocate a peaceful transfer of power. Mandela’s step to freedom on 11 February 1990, and him becoming the country’s first Black President on 10 May 1994 with the National Party’s de Klerk as his first deputy and Thabo Mbeki as the second in the Government of National Unity, brought the new South Africa into being. In his inaugural address as the president, Mandela emphasised the need for South Africa to build a new society based on non-violence and peace:

The time for the healing of the wounds has come. The moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come. The time to build is upon us. We have, at last, achieved our political emancipation. We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discriminations…We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity—a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world. (Clark & Worger, 2016, p. 196)

Mandela’s intention in practicing non-violence was to establish national reconciliation in South Africa. But to succeed in this, he knew well that South Africa had to listen to its violent past and to heal it. As an institution of forgiveness, the truth and Reconciliation Commission acted on behalf of the South African state in order to try to heal the wounds of many who suffered from violence. ‘We may never forget, but we must forgive’ (Dodamgoda, 2015), underlined Mandela. And he added: ‘To make peace with an enemy, one must work with that enemy, and that enemy becomes your partner’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2016, p. 106). This is the clue to Mandela’s Gandhian moment which puzzled some in the black and in the white communities within South Africa and elsewhere who took a long time to put their hearts into believing the non-violent process of nation-building. One thing is certain: by not letting up on non-violence in politics, Mandela, together with the South African people, became one of the key models for non-violent action in the twenty-first century. Mandela strengthened the institutional bases of the Gandhian satyagraha by engaging his moral capital in the direction of civic participation and democratic deliberation in South Africa.

The Gandhian satyagraha remains today a universal matrix for all the political thinking of our age. As a great insight and a valuable instrument of emancipation, Gandhi’s satyagraha continues to represent the basis of all non-violent struggles against injustice. Gandhi’s logic was his satyagraha. He lived this logic by cutting his wants to the minimum, self-suffering and service to mankind. Yet, more than anything, Gandhi highlighted the need for struggle against all forms of injustice. If this is so, those who hurt others put into question their own human dignity and integrity. Satyagraha, therefore, is an art of living together. For this very reason, as heirs of this art, we need to take care to educate humanity towards the consciousness of what is due to her by virtue of a superior example of human achievement. Gandhi did not expect all human beings to become satyagrahis: ‘The [practice] of Satyagraha by the vast mass of mankind will be impossible if they had all to assimilate all of its implications’ (Pföstl, 2014, p. 67). However, he did not despair, since he knew well that ‘civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to human beings the path of duty’ (Bilgrami, 2011, p. 7).