The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

extended to other arenas of public culture. In 1999, MuseumAfrica embarked on another
stage in its transformation process, when it unveiled a new permanent exhibition that
focused on more than thirty sites in Johannesburg associated with Gandhi’s politics and
philosophy. Gandhi’s Johannesburg: Birthplace of Satyagraha “trac[ed] Gandhi’s footsteps”
through the “buildings and places associated with the passive resistance leader”. It was
from Johannesburg where “ideas of peaceful struggle” came, which then “spread across
the world”. Gandhi’s philosophy of Satyagraha was formed in Johannesburg in the first
decade of the 20 th Century, and it was his experiences there “which helped shape his
ideas”. The exhibition was completed by a display mounted by the Durban Local History
Museums on the “Gandhi sites” of Durban, “the other main centre where Gandhi was
active”. 81 “Considered as a whole”, Eric Itzkin (the curator) suggested in an accompanying
book, “these sites and the events surrounding them [were] an essential part of the Gandhi
experience”. 82
The exhibition and book were part of a recuperative exercise in documentation, to place
on public record actual material sites associated with an aspect of black social experience
and resistance leadership. Part of the empirical intention was also corrective, to give
public effect to research by James Hunt in accurately identifying sites and to point out
where the National Monuments Council in declaring sites had committed errors in
identification. This was the case with No 19 Albermarle Street in Troyville, which had
been identified in haste as a site where Gandhi lived, and erroneously declared a National
Monument in 1994. The Gandhi association had been made especially since this site was
the area’s “most exotic home” and “its curved balconies” had associations with “Oriental
splendour”. Itzkin’s research, following that of Hunt, firmly established that it had been
the “more conventional Victorian” No 11 Albermarle Street where Gandhi had lived. 83 By
81 ‘MuseumAfrica Programme of Events’, May, June, July 1999 (flyer); ‘Gandhi’s Johannesburg:
Birthplace of Satyagraha’ (Poster, MuseumAfrica, Johannesburg, 1999); Paul Tichman, Gandhi Sites in
Durban (Durban: The Local History Museums, 1998).
82 Eric Itzkin, Gandhi’s Johannesburg: Birthplace of Satyagraha (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University
Press in association with MuseumAfrica, 2000).
83 Eric Itzkin, Gandhi’s Johannesburg, pp 61‐63. The outcome of this heritage focus on Gandhi in
Johannesburg was the unveiling of a Gandhi statue in that city in October 2003. By then Itzkin had
been employed as Johannesburg’s deputy director of Immovable Heritage.
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