What is being said in African discussions about solidarity with Gaza is wrong | Israeli-Palestinian conflict
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 meeting of the African Humanist 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, several other pan-African academic and scientific institutions that have committed themselves to intervening in the global recognition of the work done by African scientists. on this continent.
By the time we got to the launch meeting in December, the world was preoccupied with the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack. In addition to the already alarming death toll as a result of relentless Israeli bombing, we have already seen and read reports of the destruction of educational institutions and the killing of university deans and scientists in the Gaza Strip.
Ahead of the event, a senior member of the new organizing committee of the African Humanist Association addressed numerous colleagues with a proposal to launch a solidarity movement with scientists in Gaza who condemned the scale of the killings and destruction.
However, the proposal did not go beyond the discussion in the Executive Committee because there were objections. Instead, the scientist who proposed the motion read the statement in his personal capacity during the plenary session, and in the ensuing debate it became clear that there would be no majority support for the assembly’s statement of solidarity.
Instead, another compromise was offered: the statement by the colleague who spoke would be posted on the association’s website and anyone who wanted to could sign it.
For a number of scholars, including renowned Tanzanian intellectual Issa Shivji, this was a worrying decision by the association. Shivji himself gave one of the keynote addresses and recalled the strong decolonization and anti-imperial impulses that motivated his generation to respond positively to the radical Egyptian economist Samir Amin’s initiative in the early 1970s to found what would become CODESRIA. Amin and others saw the need for Africans to write their own accounts of Africa as part of postcolonial efforts to decolonize societies often constrained by neocolonial dependence.
But to return to the plenary session of the African Humanist Association, what were the reasons for the objections? This is my preoccupation here.
To be clear, the objections articulated were not couched in terms of support for Israel. Some individual African scholars may have a Christian-Zionist-motivated solidarity with Israel, but this has not been vocally articulated.
Instead, there are two most strongly expressed objections. The first was that it was a divisive issue and that the statement would undermine efforts to build coherence and consensus in the fledgling association and therefore should not be debated.
Another, more strongly voiced objection was the “about what” concern: why focus on Gaza when there are a number of problematic conflicts in Africa that demand attention, ranging from protracted conflicts in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to southern Cameroon, Sudan, and more recently and Ethiopia and northern Mozambique?
Isn’t the release of the Gaza statement a continuation of a long-standing racial trope to simply downplay the death and destruction in some African countries? Why didn’t the scholars who campaigned for statements of solidarity with Gaza show the same fervor and ferocity in relation to other Africans and our conflicts?
These were legitimate concerns that rightly pointed to the centuries-long dehumanization of African life and its contemporary resonances even among Africans about other Africans.
Given that an organization like the African Humanist Association was founded precisely to counter the invisibility of African voices, it was only natural that calls for solidarity with Gaza raised these issues. They have also been raised elsewhere and in other contexts among African scholars and activists.
As a result, I observed, some solidarity events in Gaza, South Africa, began to reflect sensitivity to these criticisms by choosing more “inclusive” slogans. One event banner I saw read “Free Congo, Free Sudan, Free Palestine”. Another event declared “In solidarity with Gaza and Congo”.
While it’s commendable to respond to criticism motivated by legitimate concern, I worry that responses like this use a problematic conflation. The conflicts in Gaza, Sudan and DR Congo, for example, have one obvious feature: the mass killing of civilians. But they are fundamentally different in terms of the nature of the problems that lead to loss of life and therefore require different responses.
Palestinians are losing their lives because they are involved in the anti-colonial struggle against the occupying settler-colonial state. It therefore makes political sense to call for a “free Palestine”. On the other hand, Sudanese and Congolese are losing their lives because of unresolved post-colonial problems, problems of decolonization, problems arising from the complex questions of who belongs within the nation-state, who is the dominant majority or who feels a subordinated minority.
In this context, the logic of referring to “Free Palestine” and “Free Sudan and Free Congo” as comparable political claims citing the same type of struggle or cause is not entirely useful for resolving the conflict in Sudan and DR Congo in the current conjuncture.
Anti-colonialism involves the 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 after the occupying group cedes sovereignty to the colonized peoples.
The work of decolonization begins when the colonizer physically leaves, when anti-colonial resistance becomes a project of creating post-colonial freedom. This means dealing with the colonial legacy in the economy, in the ideas of society, in the political and institutional life of the community, and in the concept of citizenship.
If we equate solidarity with the Palestinians in their anti-colonial struggle with conflicts that should have more attention and urgency on the African continent, such as Sudan and DR Congo in the form of whataboutism, we end up offering a problematic answer to a legitimate question.
The solidarity of Africans with the Palestinians is not only based on concern about human rights violations, but also on anti-colonial solidarity. This is contained in the command of Nelson Mandela, that as South Africans who defeated apartheid as a form of colonialism, “we are not free until the Palestinians are free”.
The question we need to ask ourselves as Africans is, when we say we stand in solidarity with the Palestinians, but we should also stand in solidarity with, for example, the Congolese, are we not perpetuating the problematic lack of understanding and attention to conflicts in Africa by framing our call to action as the need to be “in solidarity with”? If solidarity means standing by, standing with support, with whom do we stand in solidarity across factional, shifting party lines between Africans in these conflicts?
There is a need to make visible the loss of life in Africa as part of efforts to humanize and raise the visibility of African challenges as global challenges. However, this effort to address the invisibility of African conflicts as a result of the historical dehumanization of Africans is not necessarily addressed by acting in “solidarity” with one 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 caricatured by outsiders. They are often flattened into simplistic universalized categories of the human rights framework, such as good versus evil, bad leaders versus victimized civilians, and so on.
Do you remember when there was a strong push to support a “Free Darfur” or “Free South Sudan”? Now that we are witnessing the unraveling of South Sudan, the lesson is: be careful what you wish for.
Today, if we want to be in “solidarity” with the DRC, assuming it refers to the protracted conflict in the Kivus, it would make more sense if it implies encouraging more people to make an effort to understand the complexities of the two Kivus, the historical legacies of citizenship claims and regional histories and global arteries that run through the heart of conflict, including civil wars in Rwanda and the displacement of large numbers of people beyond Congolese borders. This continuity pitted different groups against each other based on claims to belonging and citizenship and counterclaims to territory.
If Gaza requires our anti-colonial solidarity, conflicts like those in the DR Congo may require more rigorous efforts on our part to better understand the problem, louder voices to stand up and mobilize political action; and scientific impetus for decolonizing 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 of a people subjected to decades of settler-colonial displacement and rule, guided by that shared history of colonization. And we can cause the invisibility of African conflicts and the loss of life in Africa, which require the humanization of African life through more studies, rigorous and sensitive research, and understanding and thinking about how we can realize the largely unsuccessful emancipatory goals of the anti-colonial generations that came to power in the 1950s and in the 60s.
From our current vantage point on history, we are in a better position to agree with Frantz Fanon that anti-colonial movements often did not “dare to invent” the future by fully decolonizing societies. There are legacies of colonialism that continue to shape political institutions, and understandings of citizenship and belonging that perpetuate conflict in postcolonial societies.
What we should avoid is turning our legitimate concern about the invisibility of post-colonial African conflicts, the result of the dehumanization of African life in general, into a competitive calculus that determines with whom we express solidarity.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
