Ghana to remove Gandhi statue over ‘racist’ remarks

Dakar, October 7

Ghana will move a statue of Mahatma Gandhi from its main university because of his “alleged past racist comments”, the foreign ministry said, while paying tribute to Gandhi's role as a civil rights leader.

A group of lecturers and students began campaigning for the Indian nationalist leader's statue to be removed shortly after it was installed at the university in June as a symbol of friendship between Ghana and India. They argue that Gandhi made comments that were racist about Africans and that statues on the Accra campus should be of African heroes. In a statement late on Thursday, the ministry said it was concerned by the acrimony the campaign had generated.

A senior Indian diplomat,  Amar Sinha, said the statue would be moved from the university to a safer place. He said the comments interpreted by some as racist had been made relatively early in Gandhi’s life. 

Inspired by Gandhi, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah in 1957 managed to persuade the British to grant Ghana independence. — Reuters 

Allegedly referred to black people as ‘kafirs’

In his book, Gandhi: the True Man Behind Modern India, broadcaster Jad Adams quotes him as referring to black people as “kafirs”, a deeply offensive term, in a speech in 1896: “Ours 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 kafir.” He later seems to have changed his views, saying stereotypes of Africans as “barbarians” are wrong, the author writes.