The whataboutery in African debates on solidarity with Gaza is misplaced
In August 2023, I took up the place of director of the Centre for African Research (CAS) on the College of Cape City. One of many vital commitments I inherited was that CAS would host the inaugural launch assembly of the African Humanities Affiliation in December of that yr.
This was a major growth, constructing on the legacy of the formation of the Council for the Growth of Social Science Analysis in Africa (CODESRIA) in 1973, and within the a long time since, a couple of different pan-African tutorial and scholarly establishments dedicated to intervening in recognising globally the work that African students based mostly on the continent are doing.
By the point we reached the launch assembly in December, the world was preoccupied with the implications of the October 7 Hamas assault. Moreover the already alarming dying toll ensuing from Israel’s relentless bombing, we had already seen and browse accounts of the destruction of academic establishments and the killing of college deans and students within the Gaza Strip.
Forward of the occasion, a senior member of the brand new African Humanities Affiliation organising committee approached a lot of colleagues with the proposal to desk a movement of solidarity with students in Gaza that condemned the size of killings and destruction.
Nevertheless, the proposal by no means moved past the dialogue within the government committee since there have been objections raised. As a substitute, the scholar who had proposed the movement learn out a press release in his private capability through the plenary session and within the dialogue that adopted, it grew to become clear that there wouldn’t be majority help for an meeting assertion of solidarity.
As a substitute, one other compromise was provided: the assertion of the colleague who spoke can be positioned on the affiliation’s web site and anybody who wished to signal it might achieve this.
For a lot of students, together with the famend Tanzanian mental Issa Shivji, this was a troubling determination on the a part of the affiliation. Shivji himself had given one of many keynote addresses and recalled the robust decolonising and anti-imperial impulses that motivated his technology to reply positively to the initiative of the unconventional Egyptian economist Samir Amin within the early Nineteen Seventies to type what would develop into CODESRIA. Amin and others noticed the necessity for Africans to write down their very own accounts of Africa as a part of postcolonial efforts in direction of decolonising societies usually restricted by neocolonial dependencies.
However to return to the African Humanities Affiliation plenary, what have been the explanations for the objections? That is my preoccupation right here.
To be clear, the articulated objections weren’t expressed by way of help for Israel. Some particular person African students might have Christian-Zionist-motivated solidarity with Israel, however this was not articulated loudly.
Reasonably, there have been two objections most strongly voiced. The primary was that it was a divisive challenge and {that a} assertion would weaken efforts to construct coherency and consensus in a fledgling affiliation and due to this fact shouldn’t be mentioned.
The second, extra strongly voiced objection, was a “whatabout” concern: why concentrate on Gaza when there are a variety of troubling conflicts in Africa that require consideration, starting from the longstanding conflicts within the japanese Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to southern Cameroon, Sudan, and extra not too long ago to Ethiopia and northern Mozambique?
Was issuing a press release on Gaza not a continuation of a longstanding racialised trope to easily underplay dying and destruction in some African international locations? Why did the students campaigning for solidarity statements with Gaza not train the identical verve and vigour with regard to different Africans and our conflicts?
These have been respectable considerations which appropriately pointed to a centuries-long dehumanisation of African life and its up to date resonances even amongst Africans about different Africans.
Provided that an affiliation just like the African Humanities Affiliation was fashioned exactly to problem the invisibilisation of African voices, it was pure that the requires solidarity with Gaza raised these questions. They’ve additionally been raised in different venues and contexts amongst African students and activists.
In consequence, I’ve seen, some Gaza solidarity occasions in South Africa have began reflecting sensitivity to those criticisms by selecting extra “inclusive” slogans. One occasion banner I noticed learn “Free Congo, Free Sudan, Free Palestine”. One other occasion declared to be “In solidarity with Gaza and Congo”.
Whereas it’s commendable to be conscious of criticism motivated by a respectable concern, my fear with these sorts of responses is that they use a problematic conflation. The conflicts in Gaza and in Sudan and the DRC, for instance, share one apparent function: the large killing of civilians. However they differ essentially by way of the character of the issues resulting in the lack of life, and due to this fact, require totally different responses.
Palestinians are dropping their lives as a result of they’re concerned in an anticolonial wrestle towards an occupying settler-colonial state. Therefore it makes political sense to name for a “Free Palestine”. However, the Sudanese and the Congolese are dropping their lives due to unresolved postcolonial predicaments, issues of decolonisation, issues arising out of advanced questions of who belongs within the nation-state, who’s the dominant majority or who feels they’re a subjugated minority.
On this context, the logic of calling for a “Free Palestine” and a “Free Sudan and Free Congo” as commensurate political calls for that title the identical sort of wrestle or trigger will not be totally helpful to fixing the battle in Sudan and the DRC within the current conjuncture.
Anticolonialism includes a wrestle towards a colonising and occupying energy or group. Postcolonial decolonisation is much less a wrestle towards a international occupying group and extra a wrestle that unfolds as soon as the occupying group cedes sovereignty to the colonised peoples.
The work of decolonisation begins when the coloniser bodily leaves, when anticolonial resistance turns into the challenge to create postcolonial freedom. This implies addressing colonial legacies within the financial system, within the concepts of a society, within the political and institutional lifetime of the group, and within the conception of citizenship.
If we conflate solidarity with Palestinians of their anticolonial wrestle with conflicts that ought to have extra consideration and urgency on the African continent, akin to Sudan and the DRC within the type of whataboutism, we find yourself providing a problematic reply to a respectable query.
Africans’ solidarity with Palestinians is predicated not solely on concern for human rights abuses, however on an anticolonial solidarity. That is encapsulated in Nelson Mandela’s injunction, that as South Africans who defeated apartheid as a type of colonialism, “we’re not free till Palestinians are free”.
The query to ask ourselves as Africans is, once we say we’re in solidarity with Palestinians, however we also needs to be in solidarity, for instance with the Congolese, are we not perpetuating a problematic lack of awareness and a spotlight to conflicts in Africa by framing our name to motion as a have to be “in solidarity with”? If solidarity implies to face with, to face in help of, who’re we in solidarity with in fractious, shifting partisan strains between Africans in these conflicts?
There’s a have to make seen the lack of African life as a part of efforts to humanise and elevate the visibility of African challenges as international challenges. Nevertheless, that effort to handle the invisibilisation of African conflicts on account of the historic dehumanisation of Africans will not be essentially addressed by the motion of being “in solidarity” with one specific battle or one other on the continent.
As African students, we ought to be notably delicate to this problem, since that is usually the second when African conflicts are topic to caricature by outsiders. They usually develop into flattened out into the simplistic universalised classes of human rights frameworks, as a matter of fine and evil, dangerous leaders versus victimised civilians, and so forth.
Recall the time when there was heady stress to help a “Free Darfur” or a “Free South Sudan”? Now as we witness the unravelling of South Sudan, the lesson is: watch out what you want for.
Immediately, if we’re to be “in solidarity” with DRC, assuming that this refers back to the longstanding battle in Kivu, it will be extra significant if it implies that we’re encouraging extra folks to make an effort to grasp the complexities of the 2 Kivus, the historic legacy of citizenship claims, and the regional histories and international arteries that run by way of the center of the battle, together with the Rwandan civil wars and the displacement of a lot of folks past Congolese borders. This continuity has pitted numerous teams towards one another on the idea of belonging and citizenship claims and counterclaims to territory.
If Gaza requires our anticolonial solidarity, conflicts akin to these within the DRC may require extra rigorous efforts on our half to raised perceive the issue, extra vociferous voices to face up and mobilise political motion; and a scholarly push to decolonise the options in order that totally different types of political group can emerge.
We are able to stand in solidarity with Palestinians, as an act of anticolonial solidarity of a folks subjected to a long time of settler-colonial displacement and rule, pushed by that shared historical past of being colonised. And we will problem the invisibilisation of African conflicts and the lack of life in Africa, which require the humanisation of African life by way of extra examine, rigorous and delicate analysis, and understanding and interested by how we will realise the principally failed emancipatory goals of anticolonial generations who got here to energy within the Fifties and 60s.
From our current vantage level on historical past, we’re higher positioned to agree with Frantz Fanon that anticolonial actions usually didn’t “dare to invent” the longer term by totally decolonising societies. There are legacies of colonialism that proceed to form political establishments, and understandings of citizenship and belonging that perpetuate conflicts in postcolonial societies.
What we must always keep away from is popping our respectable concern with the invisibilisation of postcolonial African conflicts, a results of the dehumanisation of African life normally, right into a competing calculus that determines who we categorical solidarity with.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
