Mahatma Gandhi

It was June 1893, at the station in Pietermaritzburg, in Natal.

A young Indian lawyer was travelling to Pretoria. He held a first-class ticket. He was ordered to move to the van compartment.

He refused. He was pushed off the train.

His name was Mohandas Gandhi. He was twenty-three years old.

Later, he called it his "moment of truth." He resolved to fight injustice. To defend his rights, as an Indian and as a man.

Mohandas was born on October 2, 1869, in Porbandar, India, into a Hindu family. At eighteen, he had left to study law in London.

Back in India, he had not succeeded as a lawyer in Bombay. So he had accepted a one-year contract in South Africa, for a merchant in Durban.

The journey to Pretoria did not get better. On a stagecoach, a conductor beat him because he refused to give up his seat.

His contract was to end in 1894. He stayed. A bill threatened to take the vote away from Indians in Natal. On August 22, 1894, he founded the Natal Indian Congress to defend their rights.

He started a newspaper, Indian Opinion. He created a farming community near Durban, at Phoenix.

Then came 1906.

In the Transvaal, the government was preparing a new law. Every Indian, even a child over eight, would have to register. Give fingerprints. Show a certificate whenever asked.

On September 11, 1906, thousands of people gathered at the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg.

In the hall, those present vowed not to obey that law. Together, and without violence.

It was the beginning of satyagraha, non-violent resistance to injustice.

The struggle lasted years. From 1908 on, Gandhi was jailed several times. In 1910, he founded Tolstoy Farm, to shelter the families of resisters in prison.

In late 1913, he led a march from Newcastle. He was arrested. In January 1914, an agreement with Smuts finally abolished the three-pound tax.

In July 1914, he left South Africa.

But his South African story also has a shadow, which historians Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed recall. In South Africa, he referred to Black Africans with a contemptuous term. His campaigns defended Indians only.

And yet in 1906, during the Bambatha rebellion, his ambulance corps nursed sick and dying Zulus whom white doctors refused to treat.

The man was not made of one piece. That can be said without judging him, and without forgetting.

Back in India in 1915, he was called Mahatma, the "great soul." By 1920, he was leading the independence movement. The British jailed him several times.

On January 30, 1948, in New Delhi, Nathuram Godse killed him during a prayer vigil.

His non-violence crossed the oceans. In the United States, Martin Luther King Jr. drew on it.

Gandhi came from a Hindu tradition, not from Ubuntu. But his satyagraha echoes it: people resist injustice together, without striking anyone, because a people's strength lies in that bond.

What remains of him is the image of a station, in June 1893. A young man on the platform, a valid ticket in his hand, deciding never again to give up his place.