Ghana Univ Professors Call for Removal of ‘Racist’ Gandhi’s Statue

Representational statue of Mahatma Gandhi. (Photo: iStockphoto)

A statue of Gandhi’s, installed at the University of Ghana, has attracted an online petition calling for it to be removed, asserting that he was racist towards Africans.

The petition already has over 1,000 signatures and was started by the university professors.

The petitioners have quoted a series of statements by Gandhi which they say show that he was racist towards Africans.

The professors cited how Gandhi described Africans as “savages” and when Indians were clubbed with the “non-whites” in Africa, he strongly objected to it.

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 Kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and, then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness.

Gandhi, as quoted by petition.

Protest hashtags on social media like #GandhiMustComeDown, #GhandiForComeDown and #GandiMustFall have been used to voice distaste for the statue and call for its pulling down.

It has also been argued in the petition that the university has no statues of national heroes and the youth knows very little about the country’s important figures.

Why should we uplift other people’s ‘heroes’ at an African university when we haven’t lifted up our own? 

Petition

They also cited Ivy league colleges removing symbols of slavery from their campuses and replacing them with those that pay homage to black rights activists.

It also quoted instances of protests against Gandhi in various countries in the past and also stated that Gandhi helped in the establishment of the caste-like apartheid system.

Lastly, the faculty claims that there was no consultation on installing the statue, making it one of the tenets on which their campaign rests.