Africa's debate on solidarity with Gaza is wrong for Israeli-Palestinian conflict

In August 2023, I will take up the post of Director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Cape Town. One of the key commitments I inherited was that CAS would host the first kick-off meeting of the African Humanities Association in December of that year.

This was a significant development, building on the establishment of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in 1973, and in the decades since, a number of other pan-African academic institutions have worked to intervene in African social science research globally Recognize the work of African scholars across the continent.

As we attend our kickoff meeting in December, the world is focused on the aftermath of the Hamas attack on October 7. In addition to the already shocking death toll from Israel’s relentless bombing, we have seen and read reports of the destruction of educational institutions and the murder of university deans and academics in the Gaza Strip.

Before the event, a senior member of the organizing committee of the New African Humanities Association suggested to some colleagues that they propose a motion of solidarity with Gaza academics and condemn the mass killing and destruction.

However, due to objections raised, the proposal never went beyond the scope of the Executive Committee. Instead, the academic who proposed the motion read a statement in his personal capacity during the plenary session, and in the ensuing discussion it became clear that the assembly's statement of solidarity would not receive majority support.

Instead, another compromise was proposed: Statements from speaking colleagues would be posted on the association's website, and anyone who wished to sign could do so.

For many academics, including prominent Tanzanian intellectual Issa Shivji, the association's decision was disturbing. Shivji himself gave a keynote address and recalled the strong decolonial and anti-imperial impulses that motivated his generation to respond to the work of the radical Egyptian economist Samir Amin in the early 1970s. Samir Amin's initiative, later CODESRIA was established. Amin and others argue that it is necessary for Africans to write their own accounts of Africa as part of postcolonial efforts to decolonize societies often constrained by neocolonial dependencies.

But back to the AHA plenary meeting, what was the rationale for the objection? This is my top priority.

To be clear, the opposition expressed was not intended to support Israel. Some African scholars may be motivated by Christian Zionism in solidarity with Israel, but this is not expressed loudly.

Instead, two objections are strongest. First, this is a divisive issue and a statement that would undermine efforts to build coherence and consensus within the emerging association should not be discussed.

The second, stronger objection is the “about what” concern: why focus on Gaza when there are many troubling conflicts in Africa that demand attention? These conflicts include the long-standing conflicts in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, southern Cameroon, Sudan, and most recently Ethiopia and northern Mozambique?

Isn’t issuing a statement about Gaza a continuation of long-standing racialized tropes that simply serves to downplay the death and destruction in some African countries? Why don’t the academics who campaign for solidarity with Gaza show the same enthusiasm and energy for other Africans and our conflict?

These are legitimate concerns that rightly point to the centuries-long dehumanization of African life and their contemporary resonance, even among Africans and to other Africans.

Given that associations like the African Humanities Association were founded precisely to challenge the invisibility of African voices, calls of solidarity with Gaza naturally raise these questions. These questions have also been raised in other venues and contexts by African scholars and activists.

Therefore, I have noticed that some Gaza solidarity events in South Africa are starting 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 was announced as “Solidarity with Gaza and Congo.”

While responding to criticism based on legitimate concerns is commendable, my concern with such responses is that they use a problematic mix. For example, the conflicts in Gaza, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are characterized by a clear feature: the mass killing of civilians. But they differ fundamentally in the nature of the problems that lead to loss of life, and therefore require different responses.

Palestinian lives are being lost as they participate in the anti-colonial struggle against the occupying settler colonial state. The call for a “Free Palestine” therefore has political significance. Sudanese and Congolese, on the other hand, are losing their lives because of unresolved postcolonial dilemmas, decolonization issues, and complex questions of who belongs to the nation-state, who is dominant or who sees themselves as such within the nation-state. problems arise. A conquered minority.

In this context, the logic of corresponding political demands calling for a “free Palestine” and a “free Sudan and a free Congo” as the same struggle or cause is not entirely useful for resolving the conflicts in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. current situation.

Anticolonialism involves the struggle against colonial and occupying powers or groups. Postcolonial decolonization is not so much a struggle against a foreign occupying group as it is a struggle after the occupying group cedes sovereignty to the colonized people.

The work of decolonization begins when the colonizers actually leave, when anticolonial resistance becomes a project for creating postcolonial freedom. This means addressing colonial legacies in the economy, social ideas, community political and institutional life, and notions of citizenship.

If we conflate solidarity with the Palestinians’ anti-colonial struggle with conflicts on the continent that deserve more attention and urgency, such as Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, we end up with a questionable answer to a legitimate question.

African solidarity with the Palestinians was based not only on concern over human rights violations but also on anti-colonial solidarity. This is reflected in Nelson Mandela's injunction that, as a South African who defeated apartheid as a form of colonialism, “we will not be free until the Palestinians are free.”

The question we have to ask ourselves as Africans is, when we say we stand in solidarity with the Palestinians, but we should also stand in solidarity with the Congolese etc., are we perpetuating a lack of understanding and concern for African conflicts by framing them change? Our call to action as a need for “solidarity”? If solidarity means standing with and supporting Africans, who do we stand with in these conflicts when party lines among Africans are elusive and ever-changing?

There is a need to draw attention to the loss of African lives as part of efforts to humanize Africa’s challenges and increase their visibility as a global challenge. However, efforts to address the invisibility of conflicts in Africa due to the historical dehumanization of Africans cannot necessarily be addressed through actions of “solidarity” with one or another specific conflict on the continent.

As scholars of Africa, we should be particularly sensitive to this challenge because this is often the moment when African conflicts are caricatured by outsiders. They are often reduced to simplistic universal categories of the human rights framework, such as good versus evil, bad leaders versus victimized civilians, and so on.

Remember the intense pressure to support a “free Darfur” or a “free South Sudan”? Now, as we watch South Sudan unravel, the lesson is: be careful what you wish for.

Today, if we are to “stand in solidarity” with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, assuming this refers to the long-standing conflict in Kivu, it makes more sense if it means that we are encouraging more people to make an effort to understand the complexities of both countries. . North and South Kivu, the historical legacy of citizenship claims, and the regional history and global arteries that run through the heart of the conflict, including the Rwandan civil war and mass displacement outside the Congo. This continuity pits different groups against each other based on claims to belonging and citizenship, as well as counterclaims to territory.

If Gaza needs our anti-colonial solidarity, conflicts like the Democratic Republic of Congo may require us to work harder to better understand the problem, speak out louder and mobilize political action; and academically push for solutions to decolonize so that they can emerge. Different forms of political community.

We can stand in solidarity with Palestinians as an act of anti-colonial solidarity for a people driven by a shared colonial history that has suffered decades of settler colonial displacement and domination. We can challenge the invisibility of African conflict and the loss of life in Africa, and this requires humanizing African life through more research, rigorous and sensitive research, and understanding and thinking about how to achieve the emancipatory goals that the anti-colonial generation has largely failed at. Coming to power in the 1950s and 1960s?

From our current historical perspective, we are more likely to agree with Frantz Fanon that anticolonial movements often did not dare to “invent” the future by fully decolonizing society. The legacy of colonialism continues to shape political institutions, while understandings of citizenship and belonging perpetuate conflicts in postcolonial societies.

What we should avoid is turning legitimate concerns about the invisibility of conflict in postcolonial Africa—a consequence of the pervasive dehumanization of African life—into competing calculations that determine with whom we express solidarity.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.