Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs In August 2023, I took up the position of director of the Centre for African Studies (CAS) at the University of Cape Town. One of the important commitments I inherited was that CAS would host the inaugural launch meeting of the African Humanities Association in December of that year.
This was a significant development, building on the legacy of the formation of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in 1973, and in the decades since, a few other pan-African academic and scholarly institutions committed to intervening in recognising globally the work that African scholars based on the continent are doing.
By the time we reached the launch meeting in December, the world was preoccupied with the consequences of the October 7 Hamas attack. Besides the already alarming death toll resulting from Israel’s relentless bombing, we had already seen and read accounts of the destruction of educational institutions and the killing of university deans and scholars in the Gaza Strip.
Ahead of the event, a senior member of the new African Humanities Association organising committee approached a number of colleagues with the proposal to table a motion of solidarity with scholars in Gaza that condemned the scale of killings and destruction.
However, the proposal never moved beyond the discussion in the executive committee since there were objections raised. Instead, the scholar who had proposed the motion read out a statement in his personal capacity during the plenary session and in the discussion that followed, it became clear that there would not be majority support for an assembly statement of solidarity.
Instead, another compromise was offered: the statement of the colleague who spoke would be placed on the association’s website and anyone who wished to sign it could do so.
For a number of scholars, including the renowned Tanzanian intellectual Issa Shivji, this was a troubling decision on the part of the association. Shivji himself had given one of the keynote addresses and recalled the strong decolonising and anti-imperial impulses that motivated his generation to respond positively to the initiative of the radical Egyptian economist Samir Amin in the early 1970s to form what would become CODESRIA. Amin and others saw the need for Africans to write their own accounts of Africa as part of postcolonial efforts towards decolonising societies often limited by neocolonial dependencies.
But to return to the African Humanities Association plenary, what were the reasons for the objections? This is my preoccupation here.
To be clear, the articulated objections were not expressed in terms of support for Israel. Some individual African scholars may have Christian-Zionist-motivated solidarity with Israel, but this was not articulated loudly.
Rather, there were two objections most strongly voiced. The first was that it was a divisive issue and that a statement would weaken efforts to build coherency and consensus in a fledgling association and therefore should not be discussed.
The second, more strongly voiced objection, was a “whatabout” concern: why focus on Gaza when there are a number of troubling conflicts in Africa that require attention, ranging from the longstanding conflicts in the eastern Democratic Republic 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 longstanding racialised trope to simply underplay death and destruction in some African countries? Why did the scholars campaigning for solidarity statements with Gaza not exercise the same verve and vigour with regard to other Africans and our conflicts?
These were legitimate concerns which correctly pointed to a centuries-long dehumanisation of African life and its contemporary resonances even among Africans about other Africans.
Given that an association like the African Humanities Association was formed precisely to challenge the invisibilisation of African voices, it was natural that the calls for solidarity with Gaza raised these questions. They have also been raised in other venues and contexts among African scholars and activists.
As a result, I have noticed, some Gaza solidarity events in South Africa have started reflecting sensitivity to these criticisms by choosing more “inclusive” slogans. One event banner I saw read “Free Congo, Free Sudan, Free Palestine”. Another event declared to be “In solidarity with Gaza and Congo”.
While it is commendable to be responsive to criticism motivated by a legitimate concern, my worry with these kinds of responses is that they use a problematic conflation. The conflicts in Gaza and in Sudan and the DRC, for example, share one obvious feature: the massive killing of civilians. But they differ fundamentally in terms of the nature of the problems leading to the loss of life, and therefore, require different responses.
Palestinians are losing their lives because they are involved in an anticolonial struggle against an occupying settler-colonial state. Hence it makes political sense to call for a “Free Palestine”. On the other hand, the Sudanese and the Congolese are losing their lives because of unresolved postcolonial predicaments, problems of decolonisation, problems arising out of complex questions of who belongs inside of the nation-state, who is the dominant majority or who feels they are a subjugated minority.
In this context, the logic of calling for a “Free Palestine” and a “Free Sudan and Free Congo” as commensurate political demands that name the same kind of struggle or cause is not entirely useful to solving the conflict in Sudan and the DRC in the present conjuncture.
Anticolonialism involves a struggle against a colonising and occupying power or group. Postcolonial decolonisation is less a struggle against a foreign occupying group and more a struggle that unfolds once the occupying group cedes sovereignty to the colonised peoples.
The work of decolonisation begins when the coloniser physically leaves, when anticolonial resistance becomes the project to create 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 conflate solidarity with Palestinians in their anticolonial struggle with conflicts that should have more attention and urgency on the African continent, such as Sudan and the DRC in the form of whataboutism, we end up offering a problematic answer to a legitimate question.
Africans’ solidarity with Palestinians is based not only on concern for human rights abuses, but on an anticolonial solidarity. This is encapsulated in Nelson Mandela’s injunction, that as South Africans who defeated apartheid as a form of colonialism, “we are not free until Palestinians are free”.
The question to ask ourselves as Africans is, when we say we are in solidarity with Palestinians, but 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 framing our call to action as a need to be “in solidarity with”? If solidarity implies to stand with, to stand in support of, who are we in solidarity with in fractious, shifting partisan lines between Africans in these conflicts?
There is a need to make visible the loss of African life as part of efforts to humanise and elevate the visibility of African challenges as global challenges. However, that effort to address the invisibilisation of African conflicts as a result of the historical dehumanisation of Africans is not necessarily addressed by the action of being “in solidarity” with one particular conflict or another on the continent.
As African scholars, we should be particularly sensitive to this challenge, since this is often the moment when African conflicts are subject to caricature by outsiders. They often become flattened out into the simplistic universalised categories of human rights frameworks, as a matter of good and evil, bad leaders versus victimised civilians, and so on.
Recall the time when there was heady pressure to support a “Free Darfur” or a “Free South Sudan”? Now as we witness the unravelling of South Sudan, the lesson is: be careful what you wish for.
Today, if we are to be “in solidarity” with DRC, assuming that this refers to the longstanding conflict in Kivu, it would be more meaningful if it implies that we are encouraging more people to make an effort to understand the complexities of the two Kivus, the historical legacy of citizenship claims, and the regional histories and global arteries that run through the heart of the conflict, including the Rwandan civil wars and the displacement of a large number of people beyond Congolese borders. This continuity has pitted various groups against each other on the basis of belonging and citizenship claims and counterclaims to territory.
If Gaza requires our anticolonial solidarity, conflicts such as those in the DRC might require more rigorous efforts on our part to better understand the problem, more vociferous voices to stand up and mobilise political action; and a scholarly push to decolonise the solutions so that different forms of political community can emerge.
We can stand in solidarity with Palestinians, as an act of anticolonial solidarity of a people subjected to decades of settler-colonial displacement and rule, driven by that shared history of being colonised. And we can challenge the invisibilisation of African conflicts and the loss of life in Africa, which require the humanisation of African life through more study, rigorous and sensitive research, and understanding and thinking about how we can realise the mostly failed emancipatory aims of anticolonial generations who came to power in the 1950s and 60s.
From our present vantage point on history, we are better placed to agree with Frantz Fanon that anticolonial movements often did not “dare to invent” the future by fully decolonising societies. There are legacies of colonialism that continue to shape political institutions, and understandings of citizenship and belonging that perpetuate conflicts in postcolonial societies.
What we should avoid is turning our legitimate concern with the invisibilisation of postcolonial African conflicts, a result of the dehumanisation of African life in general, into a competing calculus that determines who we express solidarity with.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
