In August 2023, I took up the position of straightforwardor of the Centre for African Studies (CAS) at the University of Cape Town. One of the meaningful promisements I inherited was that CAS would present the inaugural begin greeting of the African Humanities Association in December of that year.
This was a meaningful broadenment, createing on the legacy of the establishation of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in 1973, and in the decades since, a restricted other pan-African academic and scholarly institutions promiseted to intervening in recognising globassociate the toil that African scholars based on the continent are doing.
By the time we accomplished the begin greeting in December, the world was preoccupied with the consequences of the October 7 Hamas strike. Besides the already alarming death toll resulting from Israel’s relentless bomb deviceing, we had already seen and read accounts of the destruction of educational institutions and the finishing of university deans and scholars in the Gaza Strip.
Ahead of the event, a ageder member of the novel African Humanities Association organising promisetee approached a number of colleagues with the proposal to table a motion of firmarity with scholars in Gaza that condemned the scale of finishings and destruction.
However, the proposal never shiftd beyond the talkion in the executive promisetee since there were objections elevated. Instead, the scholar who had advised the motion read out a statement in his personal capacity during the plenary session and in the talkion that adhereed, it became evident that there would not be presentantity aid for an assembly statement of firmarity.
Instead, another settle was adviseed: the statement of the colleague who spoke would be placed on the association’s website and anyone who desireed to sign it could do so.
For a number of scholars, including the honord Tanzanian inalertectual Issa Shivji, this was a troubling decision on the part of the association. Shivji himself had given one of the keyremark compriseresses and recalled the mighty decolonising and anti-imperial impulses that upretaind his generation to react preferablely to the initiative of the radical Egyptian economist Samir Amin in the timely 1970s to establish what would become CODESRIA. Amin and others saw the necessitate for Africans to create their own accounts of Africa as part of postcolonial efforts towards decolonising societies standardly restricted by neocolonial depfinishencies.
But to return to the African Humanities Association plenary, what were the reasons for the objections? This is my preoccupation here.
To be evident, the articudefercessitated objections were not conveyed in terms of aid for Israel. Some individual African scholars may have Christian-Zionist-upretaind firmarity with Israel, but this was not articudefercessitated deafeningly.
Rather, there were two objections most powerentirey voiced. The first was that it was a polarizing publish and that a statement would feebleen efforts to create coherency and consensus in a fledgling association and therefore should not be talked.
The second, more powerentirey voiced objection, was a “whatabout” worry: why concentrate on Gaza when there are a number of troubling disputes in Africa that need attention, ranging from the extfinishedstanding disputes in the eastrict Democratic Reuncover of the Congo (DRC) to southern Cameroon, Sudan, and more recently to Ethiopia and northern Mozambique?
Was issuing a statement on Gaza not a continuation of a extfinishedstanding racialised trope to spropose undercarry out death and destruction in some African countries? Why did the scholars campaigning for firmarity statements with Gaza not exercise the same verve and vigour with watch to other Africans and our disputes?
These were legitimate worrys which accurately pointed to a centuries-extfinished dehumanisation of African life and its contransient resonances even among Africans about other Africans.
Given that an association appreciate the African Humanities Association was established accurately to contest the invisibilisation of African voices, it was organic that the calls for firmarity with Gaza elevated these asks. They have also been elevated in other venues and contexts among African scholars and activists.
As a result, I have watchd, some Gaza firmarity events in South Africa have commenceed echoing sensitivity to these criticisms by choosing more “inclusive” slogans. One event banner I saw read “Free Congo, Free Sudan, Free Palestine”. Another event proclaimd to be “In firmarity with Gaza and Congo”.
While it is commfinishable to be responsive to criticism upretaind by a legitimate worry, my stress with these benevolents of responses is that they participate a problematic conflation. The disputes in Gaza and in Sudan and the DRC, for example, split one evident feature: the massive finishing of civilians. But they contrast fundamenloftyy in terms of the nature of the problems directing to the loss of life, and therefore, need contrastent responses.
Palestinians are losing their dwells becaparticipate they are comprised in an anticolonial struggle agetst an occupying remendr-colonial state. Hence it creates political sense to call for a “Free Palestine”. On the other hand, the Sudanese and the Congolese are losing their dwells becaparticipate of unremendd postcolonial predicaments, problems of decolonisation, problems arising out of intricate asks of who beextfinisheds inside of the nation-state, who is the dominant presentantity or who experiences they are a subjugated insignificantity.
In this context, the logic of calling for a “Free Palestine” and a “Free Sudan and Free Congo” as commensurate political needs that name the same benevolent of struggle or caparticipate is not enticount on advantageous to solving the dispute in Sudan and the DRC in the current conjuncture.
Anticolonialism comprises a struggle agetst a colonising and occupying power or group. Postcolonial decolonisation is less a struggle agetst a foreign occupying group and more a struggle that unfageders once the occupying group cedes sovereignty to the colonised peoples.
The toil of decolonisation commences when the coloniser physicassociate departs, when anticolonial resistance becomes the project to create postcolonial freedom. This unbenevolents compriseressing 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 confdefercessitate firmarity with Palestinians in their anticolonial struggle with disputes that should have more attention and advisency on the African continent, such as Sudan and the DRC in the establish of whataboutism, we finish up adviseing a problematic answer to a legitimate ask.
Africans’ firmarity with Palestinians is based not only on worry for human rights mistreatments, but on an anticolonial firmarity. This is encapsudefercessitated in Nelson Mandela’s injunction, that as South Africans who flunkureed apartheid as a establish of colonialism, “we are not free until Palestinians are free”.
The ask to ask ourselves as Africans is, when we say we are in firmarity with Palestinians, but we should also be in firmarity, for example with the Congolese, are we not perpetuating a problematic informage of empathetic and attention to disputes in Africa by framing our call to action as a necessitate to be “in firmarity with”? If firmarity implies to stand with, to stand in aid of, who are we in firmarity with in fractious, shifting partisan lines between Africans in these disputes?
There is a necessitate to create evident the loss of African life as part of efforts to humanise and lift the visibility of African contests as global contests. However, that effort to compriseress the invisibilisation of African disputes as a result of the historical dehumanisation of Africans is not necessarily compriseressed by the action of being “in firmarity” with one particular dispute or another on the continent.
As African scholars, we should be particularly empathetic to this contest, since this is standardly the moment when African disputes are subject to caricature by outsiders. They standardly become flattened out into the simpenumerateic universalised categories of human rights summarizetoils, as a matter of excellent and evil, horrible directers versus victimised civilians, and so on.
Recall the time when there was heady presdeclareive to aid a “Free Darfur” or a “Free South Sudan”? Now as we witness the unravelling of South Sudan, the lesson is: be pimpolitent what you desire for.
Today, if we are to be “in firmarity” with DRC, assuming that this refers to the extfinishedstanding dispute in Kivu, it would be more unbenevolentingful if it implies that we are encouraging more people to create an effort to comprehfinish the intricateities of the two Kivus, the historical legacy of citizenship claims, and the regional histories and global arteries that run thraw the heart of the dispute, including the Rwandan civil wars and the displacement of a big number of people beyond Congolese borders. This continuity has pitted various groups agetst each other on the basis of beextfinisheding and citizenship claims and counterclaims to territory.
If Gaza needs our anticolonial firmarity, disputes such as those in the DRC might need more rigorous efforts on our part to better comprehfinish the problem, more vociferous voices to stand up and mobilise political action; and a scholarly push to decolonise the solutions so that contrastent establishs of political community can aelevate.
We can stand in firmarity with Palestinians, as an act of anticolonial firmarity of a people subjected to decades of remendr-colonial displacement and rule, driven by that splitd history of being colonised. And we can contest the invisibilisation of African disputes and the loss of life in Africa, which need the humanisation of African life thraw more study, rigorous and empathetic research, and empathetic and leanking about how we can authenticise the mostly flunked emancipatory aims of anticolonial generations who came to power in the 1950s and 60s.
From our current vantage point on history, we are better placed to consent with Frantz Fanon that anticolonial shiftments standardly did not “dare to create” the future by filledy decolonising societies. There are legacies of colonialism that persist to shape political institutions, and empathetics of citizenship and beextfinisheding that perpetuate disputes in postcolonial societies.
What we should dodge is turning our legitimate worry with the invisibilisation of postcolonial African disputes, a result of the dehumanisation of African life in vague, into a competing calculus that remends who we convey firmarity with.
The watchs conveyed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily echo Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
