Manilal Gandhi (1892-1956) was born in Rajkot, India. He was the second of four sons born to Gandhi and Kasturba. Manilal moved from India to South Africa as a child to join his father, where he was raised and educated at Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm. From an early age Gandhi began training Manilal and his elder brother Harilal to lead civil disobedience movements, and also prepared them to spend time in prison for anticolonial activism. In 1910, at the age of 17, Manilal served a three-month prison sentence with hard labor, his first imprisonment for civil disobedience. Gandhi praised Manilal for this, and upheld him as an example for the other children living in the community to emulate. Gandhi also praised Manilal and Harilal in his Indian Opinion newspaper, encouraging others to follow in their footsteps and flood the jails in protest of the discriminatory Asiatic Registration Act.

Whereas Harilal rebelled and left Gandhi’s communities, Manilal by contrast dedicated his life to Gandhi’s communities, and particularly Phoenix Settlement. Manilal returned to India with his parents when they departed South Africa, and briefly lived with the Sabarmati Ashram community in India (in Kochrab bungalow) from 1915-1917. In 1917, Manilal returned to South Africa to lead Phoenix Settlement and ensure that its mission carried on after Gandhi’s departure, and he remained in this role for the rest of his life. In 1920, Manilal also assumed the role of editor of the Indian Opinion newspaper that was printed at Phoenix Settlement.

Manilal married his wife Sushila Gandhi (nee Mashruwala) in 1927, and together they raised their children – Sita, Arun, and Ela – at Phoenix Settlement. There the family lived in “Sarvodaya House” until 1944, when they built a larger house of their own for their growing family, called “Kasturba Bhavan” (named after Manilal’s mother, Kasturba Gandhi). Under Manilal’s leadership, the Phoenix Settlement community engaged in a new round of nonviolent activism at Phoenix Settlement in response to increasing apartheid laws being enacted in South Africa after 1948. Before his death, Manilal actively defied these apartheid rules by entering places demarcated “Whites Only” and by participating in boycotts and other nonviolent acts of the Disobedience Campaign (1952) led by the African National Congress. Manilal was arrested and imprisoned numerous times for this activism. Manilal Gandhi died in 1956, at which time his wife Sushila became the leader of Phoenix Settlement.