Srila Prabhupada had said it would be fine for us to close the Cape Town temple and to do traveling sankirtan.
Riddha das : The next sequence we have here is Srila Prabhupada arriving in Jan Smuts Airport, Johannesburg, at midday on the 14th of October. Outside we had a rented yellow Mercedes car, and a South African policeman opened the door and saluted Srila Prabhupada. Johannesburg was much more relaxed. And then once Srila Prabhupada arrived at the Yeoville temple in Johannesburg, there was a full house of devotees and a few trusted Life Members. Obviously, we couldn't invite hundreds and hundreds of people because it was a small place. Apartheid was still in full force. Mr. Parekh, he secured the visa for Srila Prabhupada, which took many years.
Pusta Krishna das : We took Srila Prabhupada to our temple in Yeoville, which is a suburb of Johannesburg, and there Srila Prabhupada met a whole other group of Hindus that helped us and also our first temple which really was a temple in the true sense of the word. We had opened one temple in Cape Town, but we were really struggling at the time and I had asked Srila Prabhupada if we could close this temple and just do traveling sankirtan and sell books and introduce people to Krishna consciousness in a wider way because we didn't feel that we were making the kind of progress in Cape Town that we had wanted. Srila Prabhupada had said it would be fine for us to close the Cape Town temple and to do traveling sankirtan. So we had gone back to Durban, and from there several of the bhaktas from the Nairobi temple had come down to help us. We learned how they had been having big programs in Nairobi amongst the Indian community, and they really stimulated us to start a really wonderful traveling sankirtan program whereby we went from town to town throughout South Africa having at least 1,500 people per program and really introducing Krishna Consciousness in such a wonderful way to the Indian community there. We also did preaching programs regularly at the Western universities, and so we had developed a very nice preaching mission in South Africa. When Srila Prabhupada came to the temple in Yeoville, we had programs every morning at the temple and we had programs at Witwatersrand University and also in Pretoria.
Reference: Following Srila Prabhupada-A Chronological Series by Riddha Dasa
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