Pietermaritzburg

The Station Where Mohandas Gandhi Was Thrown Off A Train In June 1893 For Refusing To Leave A First Class Carriage, Which He Later Described As The Moment That Set The Course Of His Life In A Provincial Capital Of Red Brick Victorian Colonial Architecture, With The City Hall, The Tatham Art Gallery, The Start Line Of The Comrades Marathon And The Midlands In The Hills Above · Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal

On the night of 7 June 1893 a young Indian lawyer with a valid first-class ticket was ordered out of the carriage at Pietermaritzburg station, refused to go, and was put off the train with his luggage onto the platform. He sat in the waiting room through a cold Natal winter night and later said it was the moment that decided the course of his life. Mohandas Gandhi spent the next twenty-one years in South Africa working out satyagraha before he took it to India. There is a plaque at the station and a statue on Church Street and that is about all - the row says so plainly, because visitors arrive expecting a museum. The city around it is the KwaZulu-Natal capital: red brick Victorian colonial architecture, the City Hall, the Tatham gallery, the Comrades Marathon start line and the Midlands rising behind it. It is ninety kilometres inland from Durban and malaria-free, and the natural inland stop on any KwaZulu-Natal trip.

Ninety kilometres inland from Durban in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, with the railway station in the city centre, Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

A city. THE GANDHI SITE IS A PLAQUE AT THE STATION AND A STATUE ON CHURCH STREET, both open ground at any hour and free - there is no museum there and the row says so because the expectation is almost universal. The Tatham Art Gallery in the old Supreme Court building and the Natal Museum keep daylight hours and most close one day a week. The City Hall is a working municipal building seen from outside. The botanical gardens keep daylight hours with a small charge. The Comrades Marathon runs in June and starts here in alternate years, which fills the city completely. Load-shedding affects it as it does the rest of the country. Pietermaritzburg is ninety kilometres from Durban on the N3 with its own small airport, forty from the Mandela Capture Site, and it is MALARIA-FREE.

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