Building a new community (1/3)
June 22, 2023
In June of 1910, Gandhi began building a new community near Johannesburg, South Africa. Tolstoy Farm, as it became known, served to address some of his larger problems. It gave him practice integrating diverse people, and further enabled the living of a simple, self-sufficient life. Since many of these themes correspond to the 30-day Gandhi challenge, I’m going to explore the different aspects of Tolstoy Farm over a handful of posts. For those interested in the 30-day challenge itself (a month of sobriety and two 24-hour fasts) the next cohort begins July 1.
Many of Gandhi’s logistical problems in the spring of 1910 revolved around money. The Indian community had been engaged in a struggle against racist immigration laws with the white-controlled government of South Africa for several years. Brave men continually came forward to commit civil disobedience, willing accepting punishment. Some were deported back to India. Others, including Gandhi, were sentenced to months in jail, often at hard labor.
In his book, Satyagraha in South Africa, Gandhi explains how the open-ended campaign led to many financial hardships: “No one would employ a man who was constantly going to jail.” Donations had helped subsidize the living expenses for the families of the men while they were serving jail sentences, but it wasn’t a sustainable model. The preferred solution would involve bringing families together to form “a sort of cooperative commonwealth.”
A close friend, Hermann Kallenbach, made a generous offer at the end of May. He owned 1100 acres near Johannesburg, and was willing to make the farm and its resources available, rent free, until “the termination of the struggle.” Gandhi quickly accepted. The farm had about a thousand fruit trees bearing oranges, apricots, and plums, and construction began on simple houses for men and women.
The farm was named for Leo Tolstoy, the Russian author best known for works such as War and Peace and Anna Karenina. In the last third of his life, Tolstoy became a Christian anarchist and pacifist; Gandhi cited his book The Kingdom of God is Within You as one of the most influential in his life, even carrying it with him to jail. Kallenbach, too, Gandhi wrote, had “great faith in Count Tolstoy’s teaching and tries to live up to it.”
Tolstoy Farm was the second of Gandhi’s intentional communities. As it developed, there would be new challenges around religion, diet, language, transportation, and more. I’ll dig into some of those in the next two posts in this series.
What influential figure would you name a community after?