Gandhi’s Phoenix Settlement, the first ashram-like settlement established by Mahatma Gandhi, near Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Gandhi and his family made their home at the settlement from its founding in 1904 until his return to India in 1914.
Gandhi studied law in England in his youth before returning to India. Finding work hard to come by in his homeland, in 1893, in his early 20s, he went to South Africa to work as a lawyer for an Indian merchant firm. There was a substantial Indian population of close to 100,000 in South Africa by this time, based mainly in Natal. Gandhi soon opened his own law office in Durban. He helped to organize the Natal Indian Congress in 1894, and in 1903 he started a weekly paper, Indian Opinion. Increasingly interested in a communal life of self-supporting simplicity and inspired both by Trappist monasteries and John Ruskin’s book Unto This Last, the following year he bought some 100 acres (40 ha) near Phoenix station and there founded a community that he called Phoenix, and he moved the newspaper operations to the new setttlement.
He and his wife, Kasturba, lived there in a simple wooden house that he called Sarvodaya, “a place for upliftment for all,” where he had his newspaper’s printing press. The other inhabitants of the settlement were friends and relatives who built their own houses and started farming. It was at the Phoenix Settlement that Gandhi fully worked out his philosophy of nonviolent civil disobedience for tackling injustices and discrimination and continued campaigning for Indian rights. Though Gandhi left South Africa in 1914 and spent the rest of his life in India, the Phoenix Settlement continued, and his son Manilal returned to South Africa three years later. Manilal remained at Phoenix, running the newspaper, for the rest of his life. His wife, Sushila, remained there until her death in 1988.
A huge Zulu squatter camp called Bhambayi grew up close by at Inanda, originally a Zulu settlement founded in 1845, and during a period of violence in 1985 the Phoenix Settlement was raided by camp residents, who looted and destroyed it. Gandhi’s house and the Phoenix Settlement were restored and reopened in 2000 at a ceremony attended by President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and the Zulu king Goodwill Zwelithini. The Phoenix Settlement now includes a medical clinic, an HIV/AIDS center, and other facilities. The development is part of the Inanda Heritage Trail.