Durban - eThekwini Speaker, Logie Naidoo, announced on Monday that the Passive Resistance Park, at Umbilo Road, is to get an upgrade - after falling into a state of dereliction and becoming occupied by drug addicts and vagrants.
Naidoo was speaking at “Red Square” (now called Nicol Square), on Monty Naicker Road (formerly Pine Street) and Dr AB Xuma Street (formerly Commercial Road), at a flower-laying ceremony to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Passive Resistance Campaign.
On 13 June, 1946, about 25 000 passive protesters marched from “Red Square” to what is now the site of the Passive Resistance Park on Umbilo Road in defiance of the apartheid government’s Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Act of 1946.
The law prevented Indians from buying land from non-Indians, except in certain areas.
When the Daily News arrived at the park, a group of municipal workers had already started the refurbishment project. The workers were fixing the paved pathway, painting the steel fencing, and planting flowers.
“We have a budget for the Passive Resistance Campaign upgrade, which will capture the history of the campaign. We have also budgeted for the statue of the late baba Archie Gumede, a statue of Dr Monty Naicker, and another statue for the arrival of the Indian indentured labourers at Addington Beach,” said Naidoo.
Two veterans of the lauded campaign, Kay Moonsamy, 89, and Swaminathan Gounden, 89, made a poignant return to the departure site of their historic march, to lay flowers in memory of their fellow marchers.
The octogenarian duo laid red flowers in honour of march members from the South African Communist Party (SACP), while yellow flowers were laid in respect to members from the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) and the African National Congress (ANC).
KwaZulu-Natal MEC for Human Settlements, Ravi Pillay, said the two should never underestimate the strength and value of their undisputed contribution to the country’s struggle for freedom.
“They have also never been afraid to get us back in line, as leaders, when they feel that we have been out of order,” said Pillay.
“When the (Jan) Smuts government passed the Asiatic Land Tenure Act, we opposed it, and we said we wanted complete rights in our country, and that was the main purpose of the march and the campaign,” said Moonsamy, who was arrested on his 20th birthday for his part in the campaign, and sentenced to four months at the Durban Central Prison.
He said despite being harassed and attacked by white hooligans at Umbilo Road, where they had set up tents, they stood firm in the purpose of their march.
Retired former High Court and Electoral Court Judge Thumba Pillay (80), said when he was 10 years old his bus to school travelled along Umbilo Road and, seeing the Passive Resistance campaigners’ tents pitched there, sparked his interest in politics and finding out what the campaign was all about.
He started attending mass meetings at “Red Square”, and eventually joined the Natal Indian Congress.
“Swaninathan Gounden, Kay Moonsamy and I are the only three surviving executive members of Dr Monty Naicker’s NIC cabinet in 1961,” said Judge Pillay.
He said it was disappointing that 70 years on from the historic march there was widespread dissatisfaction with the conduct of the incumbent government.
He said extensive corruption, nepotism, cronyism, and the desire for wealth had overtaken the need to serve the people who voted the government into power.
“We are not in a happy place at the moment, and that can be seen from the service delivery protests, people fighting for jobs on the council, and the local elections being marred by violence so far. We can only hope that the violence would have subsided and people see sense by August 3,” he said.
He added the time had arrived for electoral reform, via constituency representation, and people in government would be responsible to the people who elected them.
“Right now there are people in Parliament and local council who are simply not answerable to the people who elected them,” said Judge Pillay.
Azeed and Zoni Seedat, the son and daughter of SACP activists Dawood and Fatima Seedat, also attended the event.
Azeed Seedat said his father was a 15-year-old schoolboy when he witnessed the assassination of Johannes Nkosi in 1930, an event that awakened his political consciousness.
“When my father started working, he saved his salary for three months and paid for Johannes Nkosi’s parents to travel from Johannesburg to Durban, where he erected the first tombstone at his grave,” said Seedat.
Seedat said his communist parents were heavily involved in mobilising people for the campaign, and his mother would go around Durban soliciting funds from local Indian businessmen.
“Comrades started giving up their personal possessions, and my mother decided on sacrificing wedding jewellery like her earrings to raise funds for the cause,” Seedat, the chairman of the SACP’s Dawood Seedat branch in Phoenix.
Retired former High Court Judge Thumba Pillay, left, Kay Moonsamy, and Swaminathan Gounden, paid a visit to the Passive Resistance Park on Umbilo Road on the 70th anniversary of the Passive Resistance Campaign march.
Daily News