In August 2023, I took up the position of Director of the Center for African Studies (CAS) at the University of Cape Town. One of the important commitments I inherited was that CAS would host the inaugural kick-off meeting of the African Humanities Association in December of the same year.
This is an important development, building on the legacy of the establishment of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in 1973, and in the decades that followed, a few other institutions Pan-African academics and scholars have committed to intervening. by globally recognizing the work being done by African academics based on the continent.
By the time we reached the kickoff meeting in December, the world was preoccupied with the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack. In addition to the already alarming death toll from Israel’s incessant bombing, we had already seen and read accounts of the destruction of educational institutions and the assassinations of deans and academics in the Gaza Strip.
Ahead of the event, a senior member of the new organizing committee of the African Humanities Association contacted a number of colleagues to suggest they table a motion in solidarity with Gaza academics who were condemning the scale of the killings and destruction.
However, the proposal never progressed beyond discussion in the executive committee as objections were raised. Instead, the scholar who had proposed the motion read a statement in his personal capacity during the plenary session and in the ensuing discussion it became clear that there would be no majority support for a declaration of solidarity from the assembly.
Instead, another compromise was proposed: the statement of the colleague who spoke would be published on the association’s website and anyone wishing to sign it could do so.
For a number of academics, including the famous Tanzanian intellectual Issa Shivji, this is a troubling decision on the part of the association. Shivji himself had given one of the keynote speeches and recalled the strong decolonizing and anti-imperial impulses that motivated his generation to respond positively to radical Egyptian economist Samir Amin’s initiative in the early 1970s to create what would become CODESRIA. Amin and others saw the need for Africans to write their own narratives of Africa as part of postcolonial efforts to decolonize societies often constrained by neocolonial dependencies.
But to return to the plenary of the African Association for the Human Sciences, what were the reasons for the objections? That’s my concern here.
To be clear, the objections raised were not expressed in terms of support for Israel. Some African academics may have Christian-Zionist solidarity with Israel, but this has not been expressed loudly.
On the contrary, two objections were expressed most forcefully. The first was that it was a controversial issue and a declaration would weaken efforts to build coherence and consensus within a fledgling association and therefore should not be discussed.
The second, more strongly expressed objection was a question of “what about”: why focus on Gaza when there are a number of troubling conflicts in Africa that require attention, ranging from long-term date in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to long-standing conflicts in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). southern Cameroon, Sudan, and more recently Ethiopia and northern Mozambique?
Is the issuance of a statement on Gaza not a continuation of an old racialized cliché aimed simply at underestimating the death and destruction in some African countries? Why have academics campaigning for declarations of solidarity with Gaza not demonstrated the same verve and vigor towards other Africans and our conflicts?
These were legitimate concerns that rightly highlighted a centuries-long dehumanization of African life and its contemporary resonances, even among Africans, towards other Africans.
Given that an association like the African Humanities Association was created precisely to combat the invisibilization of African voices, it was natural that calls for solidarity with Gaza would raise these questions. They have also been raised in other places and contexts among African scholars and activists.
As a result, I noticed that some Gaza solidarity events in South Africa began to reflect a sensitivity to these critiques by choosing more “inclusive” slogans. One event banner I saw said “Free Congo, Free Sudan, Free Palestine.” Another event declared “in solidarity with Gaza and Congo”.
While it is commendable to respond to criticism motivated by legitimate concern, what concerns me about these types of responses is that they employ problematic confusion. The conflicts in Gaza, Sudan and the DRC, for example, share one obvious characteristic: the mass killing of civilians. But they differ fundamentally in terms of the nature of the problems leading to loss of life and therefore require different responses.
Palestinians are losing their lives because they are involved in an anti-colonial struggle against an occupying colonial state. It therefore makes political sense to call for a “free Palestine.” On the other hand, the Sudanese and Congolese are losing their lives because of unresolved postcolonial situations, problems of decolonization, problems born from complex questions: who belongs to the nation-state, who is the dominant majority or who feels part of the nation-state? a submissive minority.
In this context, the logic of calling for a “Free Palestine” and a “Free Sudan and a Free Congo” as proportionate political demands that denote the same type of struggle or cause is not entirely helpful for resolve the conflict in Sudan and the DRC at the moment. the current situation.
Anticolonialism involves a struggle against a colonizing and occupying power or group. Postcolonial decolonization is less a struggle against a foreign occupying group and more a struggle that takes place once the occupying group cedes its sovereignty to the colonized peoples.
The work of decolonization begins when the colonizer physically leaves, when anticolonial resistance becomes the project of creating postcolonial freedom. This means addressing colonial legacies in the economy, in the ideas of a society, in the political and institutional life of the community and in the conception of citizenship.
If we confuse solidarity with the Palestinians in their anti-colonial struggle with conflicts that should receive more attention and urgency on the African continent, such as in Sudan and the DRC in the form of “Whataboutism”, we end up offering a problematic answer to a legitimate question.
African solidarity with Palestinians is based not only on concern about human rights violations, but also on anti-colonial solidarity. This is summed up in Nelson Mandela’s injunction that, as South Africans who defeated apartheid as a form of colonialism, “we will not be free until the Palestinians are free.”
The question we must ask ourselves as Africans is this: when we say that we are in solidarity with the Palestinians, but that we should also be in solidarity, for example with the Congolese, are we not perpetuating a problematic lack of understanding and attention to conflicts in Africa by defining our call to action as a need to be “in solidarity”? If solidarity involves standing alongside, supporting, with whom do we stand in solidarity across the conflicting and shifting partisan lines among Africans in these conflicts?
There is a need to make the loss of African lives visible as part of efforts to humanize and increase the visibility of African challenges as global challenges. However, this effort to address the invisibilization of African conflicts due to the historical dehumanization of Africans does not necessarily translate into the action of being “in solidarity” with any particular conflict or another on the continent.
As African scholars, we should be particularly sensitive to this challenge, because this is often the time when African conflicts are the subject of caricatures by outsiders. They are often grouped into the simplistic and universalized categories of human rights frameworks, pitting good versus evil, bad leaders versus victimized civilians, and so on.
Remember when there was dizzying pressure to support a “Free Darfur” or a “Free South Sudan”? As we witness the collapse of South Sudan, the lesson is: be careful what you wish for.
Today, if we want to be “in solidarity” with the DRC, assuming this refers to the long-standing conflict in Kivu, it would make more sense if it implies that we encourage more people to make an effort to understand the complexities of both. Kivus, the historical legacy of citizenship claims, as well as the regional histories and global arteries that run through the heart of the conflict, including the Rwandan civil wars and the displacement of large numbers of people across Congolese borders. This continuity pitted various groups against each other on the basis of claims to belonging and citizenship and territorial claims.
If Gaza needs our anti-colonial solidarity, conflicts like those in the DRC may require more rigorous efforts on our part to better understand the problem, more vehement voices to stand up and mobilize political action; and a scientific desire to decolonize solutions so that different forms of political community can emerge.
We can stand in solidarity with the Palestinians, as an act of anti-colonial solidarity from a people subjected to decades of displacement and colonial rule, motivated by this shared history of colonization. And we can fight against the invisibilization of African conflicts and the loss of human lives in Africa, which requires the humanization of African life through more studies, rigorous and sensitive research, as well as understanding and reflection about how we can realize the mostly failed emancipatory goals of anti-colonial generations. who came to power in the 1950s and 1960s.
From our current perspective on history, we are better placed to agree with Frantz Fanon that anticolonial movements often did not “dare to invent” the future by completely decolonizing societies. Some legacies of colonialism continue to shape political institutions, and conceptions of citizenship and belonging perpetuate conflicts in postcolonial societies.
What we should avoid is transforming our legitimate concern about the invisibilization of postcolonial African conflicts, a result of the dehumanization of African life in general, into a competing calculus that determines with whom we express solidarity.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.