Lawley (F 9)

Name: Lawley

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Historic fact:

Since the centre of the campaign was in the Transvaal, the farm had to be close to Johannesburg. Herman Kallenbach, an architect until he became Gandhi's ardent follower, came to the rescue. A man of some means, Kallenbach bought a piece of land from Town Councillor Partridge, and officially placed it on May 30, 1910, at the disposal of the satyagrahis as long as the campaign lasted. Gandhi praised Kallenbach's action as one "calculated to bring East and West nearer in real friendship than any amount of rhetorical writing or speaking".

The distance of 22 miles between the location of the farm and Johannesburg, one would have thought, was a disadvantage. And yet, Gandhi must have weighed this against its many advantages: it was but a mile or two from the nearest railway station of Lawley; on its 1,100 acres of land there were nearly 1,000 fruit-bearing trees; and water was supplied from two wells and a spring. True, there were at the time no more than a "shed and a dilapidated house containing four rooms". But its open spaces - it was about two miles long and three-quarters of a mile broad - provided the opportunity for leading a simple life, and its distance from Johannesburg freed it possibly from "the varied distractions of a city".

The settlement was called the Tolstoy Farm at the suggestion of Kallenbach. Gandhi stated in his letter to Tolstoy that the former worldly architect had gone through most of the experiences that Tolstoy had so graphically described in his work My Confession: "No writing has so deeply touched Mr. Kallenbach as yours; and as a spur to further effort in living up to the ideals held before the world by you, he has taken the liberty, after consultation with me, of naming his farm after you."

The Tolstoy Farm offered him an opportunity to experiment with the implementation of his ideas. His challenge was the greater because the settlement consisted of men, women, and children for short, long, and irregular intervals, who were Hindus, Muslims, Christians or Parsees, white or Indians, people who spoke one or more from among Gujarati, Hindi, Tamil, and English. Gandhi recalls that there were 70 to 80 residents - 40 "young men", 2 or 3 "old men", 5 women, and 20 to 30 children - although the number must have varied from time to time in the course of the farm's existence. It was a heterogeneous microcosm in which his leadership would prepare him for his role in the macrocosm of his battles in India later.

In running the settlement, Gandhi worked from the basic premise that the prime goal in an individual's life was the self-realisation that can come from the search for truth (satya) in specific instances and Absolute Truth (satya) as an ultimate reality. To reach the Absolute Truth, or God as Gandhi perceived it, an individual must determine what truth meant for him and practise it with single-mindedness.

Read more:
http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/people/gandhi/bhana.html

Other interesting info:
Lawley is also the name of a steam locomotive!
Read more: http://www.steam-in-action.com/pdf/NG_97_Lee_Gates.pdf
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