#Gauteng52, Week 3: Communing with Gandhi at Tolstoy Farm

Welcome to Week 3 of my #Gauteng52 challenge, for which I will visit and blog about a new place in Gauteng Province every week for 52 straight weeks. This week I visit Tolstoy Farm, where Gandhi lived in the early 20th century, near the far-flung township of Lenasia.

Mahatma Gandhi lived in South Africa for more than 20 years, from 1893 to 1914, and he founded the Satyagraha (passive resistance) movement here. Gandhi spent much of those two decades in Johannesburg and there are monuments all over the place – in Gandhi Square, at Constitution Hill, and at the Gandhi museum in Satyagraha House. I’ve visited most of them but I’d never visited Tolstoy Farm. I couldn’t figure out where it was.

Gandhi lived at Tolstoy Farm (named for Russian author Leo Tolstoy) from 1910 to 1913. The land was purchased by Hermann Kallenbach, a close friend and follower of Gandhi’s, and they ran a commune of sorts on the farm.

The farm is located near modern-day Lenasia, the township 30 minutes south of Joburg where the apartheid government forcibly removed the city’s Indian South Africans in the mid-20th century. But this proximity is a coincidence; Lenasia wasn’t established until several decades after Gandhi departed the country. His history in the area has nothing to do with the government’s decision to dump thousands of ethnically Indian families, many of whom had thriving businesses in the city centre, into this backwater during the 1950s and 60s.

Tolstoy Farm Today

My friend Marie-Lais and I were going to Lenasia for something else and I threw out the idea of finding Tolstoy Farm. My feeble google searches yielded nothing. But Marie-Lais’ sleuthing led to Mohan Hira, a community leader in Lenasia who has been working for years to revive Gandhi’s legacy at Tolstoy farm.

Mr. Hira kindly offered to take us to the farm as we would never have found it otherwise. We met Mr. Hira outside Lenasia’s Trade Route Mall. The farm is 10-15 minutes from there by car.

There have been several plans announced over the years to build a Gandhi memorial and museum on the grounds of Tolstoy Farm: Read this article from 2003. But nothing much has happened for some reason, and Mr. Hira is now raising his own funds to lease the land from Corobrik and establish an on-site tribute to the Mahatma.

There’s not much to see at Tolstoy Farm other than grass, bricks, and a roaming herd of cows. (Oh, and a waist-high bush of dagga – marijuana – growing happily next to the farmhouse foundation.) But it was peaceful, and strangely comforting to look north toward the distant Jozi skyline peaking through the mid-morning haze.

Not much has changed at Tolstoy Farm over the last 100 years, and sometimes lack of change is good. I think Gandhi would approve.

Meeting Gandhi in the Mall

Mr. Hira accompanied us back to Lenasia’s Trade Route Mall, which – like all the malls I’ve been to in South African townships – is new, shiny, and full of enthusiastic shoppers. Hira wanted to show us the statue of Gandhi that he commissioned, which he originally intended to erect at Tolstoy Farm but later decided to put up in the mall. “It would get vandalized on the farm,” Mr. Hira explained.

We entered the mall through the main doors and turned down a corridor, just past the food court. There, we met Gandhi.

The statue is spectacular, adorned with scarves and plastic floral garlands that Mr. Hiro changes regularly. Somehow the bronze Gandhi fit right into this random mall corridor, amid post-New-Year holiday decorations and passing shopping carts.

Then Mr. Hiro took us for coffee at Wimpy.

If you’d like to visit Tolstoy Farm, there will be an open day on 28 January with a rededication to the memory of Gandhi. For more information and directions, call Mohan Hira at 083-501-1275.

Read all of my #Gauteng52 posts and check out the interactive #Gauteng52 map.