Mahatma Gandhi (1869 – 1948) (foreground, second right with walking staff) and his followers during the Salt March protests, India, March or April 1930.
Satyagraha in South Africa
The ‘Black Act’–1906-1914
In August of 1906 Mohandas Gandhi picked up one of the local newspapers and read the draft of an ordinance proposed by Transvaal Government. (At the time of the Black Act Transvaal was a province that included Johannesburg and the capital, Pretoria.) The official name of the Ordinance was the Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance [1], but became known as the ‘Black Act’. ‘I shuddered as I read the sections of the Ordinance one after another. I saw nothing in it except hatred of Indians. It seemed to me that if the Ordinance was passed and the Indians meekly accepted it that would spell absolute ruins for the Indians in South Africa’ [2].
Indian statesman and activist Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869 – 1948), circa 1940.
The Birth of Satyagraha
Truth (Satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement ‘Satyagraha’, that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence…This then was the genesis of the movement which came to be known as Satyagraha, and of the word used as a designation for it. — Mohandas K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa. [1]
After a long and introspective journey for Truth, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi originated a philosophy of non-violence and non-cooperation to counter social injustice and civil rights abuses in South Africa and in India. Decades later, civil rights movements used techniques patterned after Gandhi’s philosophy to address social injustice and civil rights abuses around the world. Continue reading Gandhi’s Experiments with Truth – Part I→
The violence we preach is not the violence of the sword, the violence of hatred. It is the violence of love, of brotherhood, the violence that wills to beat weapons into sickles for work —Archbishop Oscar Romero, November 27, 1977 [1].
Archbishop Oscar Romero (1917 – 1980) at home in San Salvador, 20th November 1979.
We follow the nun down a narrow street as her habit, a shimmering, heavenly white, flutters in the breeze. She opens what appears to be a large, old, wooden door. Inside is a small courtyard. She gestures to a wall covered with numerous plaques dedicated to the late Archbishop, Oscar Romero. “These plaques were on his grave because people asked for favours from God through Monsenor,” she says. She leads us to a library, where his homilies are kept, as well as four pastoral letters, and his identification cards.
The Carmelite nun is demure but her smile, as well as her voice, is fixed with a resolve and a gentle confidence as she describes the home of the Archbishop. “Here is his bedroom,” she says. We enter and the camera pans right and reveals a small bed, a cot, really, against the wall. “He would offer this little bed to visitors to stay the night. He would tell them ‘Stay the night, don’t leave this late! The neighbourhood is a bit dangerous. You could get mugged. I will sleep in the other room. I have my hammock.’”
In another corner, under a window, there is a tiny desk with a washed-out green IBM Executive typewriter, a cassette recorder that resembles a portable radio, and a telephone. “On that typewriter he wrote all his documents, his homilies…and he recorded his diary every night on that tape recorder.”
‘I Believe’ is a music video on YouTube, based on one of my songs, that looks at the struggles people have faced for as long as we have been on this earth. It also imagines the positive things that are possible if we can somehow, someday, get it right.
I Believe
Please check it out on my YouTube channel.
Next month, ‘Romero’– an article on Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of El Salvador. Hero, martyr, a voice for the voiceless in a time of oppressive government rule.
It was a wildly unexpected and incongruous rant, head-snapping from its bizarre perspective. The host of a primetime show on the left-leaning U.S television news network, MSNBC, publicly excoriating a film by an African-American director and boasting a primarily black cast, Selma—a film that presented the story of one of the pivotal chapters in the American struggle for civil rights. [1] Continue reading Selma→
A Paraphrase in Modern English of a Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christianity in the Higher and Middle Classes in This Century, Contrasted with Real Christianity
Published in 1797
By William Wilberforce
Revised and Updated by Dr. Bob Beltz, 2006
203 pages
Published by Regal Books
William Wilberforce was born in August of 1759 into a prosperous British merchant family. He entered the British House of Commons in 1780, and three years he was elected a Member of Parliament and later went on to a career in politics that lasted almost forty five years.
He converted to evangelical Christianity in 1784 to 1785 but was beset with doubts about his political future not knowing how a Christian could serve God in politics. With the friendship and guidance of John Newton, the former slave ship captain who converted to Christianity and wrote the hymn Amazing Grace, Wilberforce came to see how his Christianity could not only coexist with his political life, but could influence it.
One of the areas in which his Christian beliefs was put to work, if not the preeminent cause for which he would fight, was in the abolition of the British slave trade, and subsequently, the abolition of slavery throughout the British empire itself. The battle to abolish the slave trade was not neither easy quick, requiring a full twenty years before success was finally achieved.
The Mountaintop
By Katori Hall
Presented by the Shaw Festival
In association with the Obsidian Theatre
July 16 — September 7, 2014
Katori Hall was born in 1981 and grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. As a child her mother related stories of the Civil Rights Movement and of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr in particular. She is a graduate of The Julliard School, with an MFA in playwrighting. Before she turned 30 The Mountaintop had been performed in London, England, and in several cities in the United States.
The Mountaintop is a one-act play set in Martin Luther King’s room at the Lorraine motel, in Memphis, Tennessee, the night before he was assassinated. He had just delivered the speech in support of the city’s sanitation workers, the speech where he famously and presciently spoke of the ‘mountaintop’, where he said he ‘might not get there with you’, but he is not afraid of ‘any man’, because ‘mine eyes have seen the glory of the promised land’. Continue reading The Mountaintop→
