In the article below, Lucille Davie unpacks the story of Kirti Menon, activist, educator and great granddaughter of Gandhi. Davie is a researcher, writer and passionate Joburger. Click here to view more of her work.
Main Pic: Kirti (centre) with her brother Satish and sister Uma, at Phoenix
“There wasn’t a point in my life when I didn’t know who I was,” says Kirti Menon. “How we saw things, how we did things, whether we participated in things or not. It was a ticket to seeing the world differently.”
Menon is the great granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi. She and her extended family, which reaches across the world, walk his path. His principles are seemingly in their DNA, three generations down the line.
Menon was born and raised in Durban. In the 1960s and 70s she spent weekends at Phoenix, the historic settlement that Gandhi established just outside the city in 1904. Phoenix was his experiment in simple, communal, and self-sufficient living, replicated 25km south of Johannesburg, at Tolstoy farm.
At Phoenix Menon was immersed in her great-grandfather’s spirit, his teachings and his message of being an activist for human rights, almost 70 years after he left South Africa in 1914.
Kirti Menon
Arrival in South Africa
The lawyer Gandhi arrived in South Africa in 1893, to take up a case for a Joburg-based Indian businessman. He ended up...
