Atlanta Daily World

Gandhi Sees Negroes Being Treated Like "Beast"

NEW YORK - (ANP) - Manilal Gandhi, a recent inmate of two South African jails for defying jim crow laws, last week said non-white prisoners "are being treated not as human beings but as beasts."

A bulletin issued by the Americans for South African Resistance quoted Gandhi as saying not only were Negro prisoners treated harshly, they were denied wholesome food and healthful conditions at the prisons.

Gandhi, the son of the late Mohandas K. Gandhi, was commenting on his experience at Germiston and at Pretoria. He served 38 days of a 50-day sentence at the two jails for defying the Malan segregation laws by joining an interracial group which in December 1952 entered a Negro section of Germiston without passes to hold a meeting.

"My heart is sore at the treatment meted out to the non-white prisoners in general and the African prisoners in particular," he said. "It is not an exaggeration to say they are being treated not as human beings but as beasts."

"While I was in Germiston I was horrified to see one morning an African warder within less than a minute strike three African prisoners on their heads with a stick, making their heads bleed just because unknowingly they were standing in the wrong queue. The African warder was not checked for this action."

Commenting on food served, Gandhi said: "The food is not clean, nor is it served in clean dishes. Mealie meal porridge and boiled mealies are about the only things which might be said to be properly cooked—though there, too, the porridge is sometimes too salty and sometimes there is very little salt in it. In mealie rice and beans you invariably find stones and dirt."

On other conditions at the prison, he said: "Clean mats hardly ever come to the non-European prisoners, and if they do, they are not allowed to remain with them long. The blankets in Germiston were decent, but in Pretoria they were thin and tattered and what was more, they were so full of lice that I suffered 15 sleepless nights scratching my whole body. I got sores all over."