Gandhi Is Deeply Revered, But His Attitudes On Race And Sex Are Under Scrutiny



Gandhi was a racist

Last year, a Gandhi statue was removed from a university campus in Ghana. Activists there and in Malawi are using the hashtag #GandhiMustFall. They're angry about his early writings.

In 1903, when Gandhi was in South Africa, he wrote that white people there should be "the predominating race." He also said black people "are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals."

There's no way around it: Gandhi was a racist early in his life, says his biographer Ramachandra Guha.

"Gandhi as a young man went with the ideas of his culture and his time. He thought in his 20s that Europeans are the most civilized. Indians were almost as civilized, and Africans were uncivilized," Guha, 61, told NPR in an interview in May at his home in Bengaluru, India.
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/02/76608...under-scrutiny