The whataboutery in African talks about unity with Gaza is wrong | The 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 most important commitments I received was that CAS would host the inaugural meeting of the African Union in December of that year.

This was an important 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 then, several other academic institutions and African studies have dedicated themselves to the intervention. for the world to see the work done by African scholars based on the continent.

By the time we arrived at the launch in December, the world was preoccupied with the aftermath of the Hamas attack on October 7. Apart from the alarming death toll caused by Israel’s relentless bombardment, we had seen and read accounts of the destruction of educational institutions and the killing of university teachers and students in the Gaza Strip.

Before this event, the senior member of the new organizing committee of the African Humanities Association spoke to many of his colleagues about the proposal to present a proposal of solidarity with academics in Gaza that criticizes the level of killing and destruction.

However, this proposal did not go beyond discussions in the executive committee since complaints were raised. Instead, the expert who proposed the proposal read the statement in his position during the session of the general meeting and in the discussion that followed, it was clear that there would not be much support for the statement of the joint meeting.

Instead, another compromise was offered: the statement of the colleague who spoke would be posted on the association’s website and anyone who wished to sign it could do so.

For many scholars, including the well-known Tanzanian thinker Issa Shivji, this was a worrying decision on the part of the organization. Shivji himself had given one of the keynote speeches and recalled the strong anti-colonial and anti-imperialist sentiments that inspired his generation to respond positively to the initiative of Egyptian economist Samir Amin in the early 1970s to create what would become CODESRIA. Amin and others see the need for Africans to write their own accounts of Africa as part of post-colonial efforts to end societies often determined by neo-colonial dependence.

But to return to the meeting of the African Humanities Association, what were the reasons for the opposition? This is my focus here.

To be clear, the objection stated was not expressed in support of Israel. Some African scholars may have Christian-Zionist-promoted solidarity with Israel, but this has not been voiced.

Instead, there were two strongly contested objections. The first was a divisive issue saying that the statement would undermine efforts to build unity and consensus in the nascent association and therefore should not be discussed.

The second, the most vocal objection, was the concern about “that”: why focus on Gaza when there are a number of troubling conflicts in Africa that need attention, from the conflicts in the East of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to the south of Cameroon, Sudan, and recently to Ethiopia and northern Mozambique?

Wasn’t issuing a statement on Gaza a continuation of the group’s long-term discrimination to bring death and destruction to other African countries? Why did academics campaigning for statements of solidarity with Gaza not use the same wisdom in relation to other Africans and our conflicts?

These were sound concerns that rightly pointed to the centuries-long destruction of African life and its echoes at that time even among Africans by other Africans.

Given that an organization like the African Humanities Association was founded precisely to challenge the invisibility of African voices, it was natural that calls for solidarity with Gaza would raise these questions. They were also raised in other places and situations among African scholars and activists.

Because of this, I have seen, some Gaza solidarity events in South Africa have started to show sensitivity to this criticism by choosing slogans that are “inclusive”. One banner of the event I saw read “Free Congo, Free Sudan, Free Palestine”. Another event announced is “Partnership with Gaza and Congo”.

While it is admirable to respond to criticism motivated by legitimate concerns, my concern with these types of responses is that they exploit problematic associations. The conflicts in Gaza and Sudan and the DRC, for example, share one obvious feature: mass killings 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.

The Palestinian people lost their lives because they participated in the struggle against the settler-colonial state. So it makes political sense to call it “Free Palestine”. On the other hand, the Sudanese and the Congolese are losing their lives because of unresolved postcolonial problems, problems of decolonization, problems arising from the complex questions of who is inside the nation, who has the majority or feels like it. a humble minority.

In this context, the idea of ​​calling “Free Palestine” and “Free Sudan and Free Congo” as the same political demands implying the same type of struggle or cause is not entirely helpful to resolve the conflict in Sudan and DRC in the current context.

Anticolonialism includes the struggle against domination and the seizure of power or group. Postcolonial decolonial is a small struggle against an outside group and a struggle that occurs when the host group relinquishes sovereignty to the people who were colonized.

The work of decolonization begins when the colonizer leaves physically, when anticolonial resistance becomes a project to create postcolonial freedom. This means dealing with the legacies of colonialism in the economy, in public opinion, in the political and institutional life of society, and in the memory of citizenship.

If we combine solidarity with the Palestinian people in their anti-colonial struggle with conflicts that should be considered more and more urgently on the African continent, such as Sudan and the DRC in a manner of speaking, we end up giving a problematic answer to a legitimate question.

African-Palestinian solidarity is not only based on concern about human rights abuses, but on solidarity against colonialism. This was emphasized in Nelson Mandela’s command, that as South Africans who defeated apartheid as a form of colonialism, “we are not free until the Palestinians are free”.

The question we should ask ourselves as Africans is, if 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 problem of lack of understanding and attention to African conflicts by framing them? our call to action as a need to be “in solidarity with”? If unity means standing with him, supporting, who are our allies in the different lines between Africans in these conflicts?

There is a need to make visible the loss of life in Africa as part of humanizing efforts and to raise the visibility of African challenges as global challenges. However, that attempt to deal with the misunderstanding of African conflicts due to the destruction of African humanity historically does not deal with the act of “collaboration” with one or the other conflict on the continent.

As African scholars, we must be very sensitive to this challenge, because this is often the time when African conflicts are attacked by outsiders. They are often expanded into simple universally used categories of human rights frameworks, such as the issue of good versus evil, bad leaders versus victimized citizens, and so on.

Do you remember a time when there was a lot of pressure to support a “Free Darfur” or a “Free South Sudan”? Now that we are seeing the unfolding of South Sudan, the lesson is: be careful what you wish for.

Today, if we are going to be in “unity” with the DRC, we think that this refers to the long-standing conflict in Kivu, it would be more meaningful if it means that we encourage more people to make an effort to understand the difficulties of these two. Kivus, the historical legacy of citizenship claims, and regional histories and global veins running through the conflict, including the Rwandan civil wars and the displacement of large numbers of people. people beyond the borders of the Congo. This continued to pit different groups against each other on the basis of citizenship claims and territorial claims.

If Gaza needs our pre-colonial solidarity, conflicts like those in the DRC may require strong efforts from us to better understand the problem, strong voices to stand up and mobilize political action; and the scholarly campaign to eliminate solutions to the emergence of different types of political society.

We can stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people, as an act of pre-colonial solidarity of a people subject to decades of displacement and settler-colonial rule, driven by that shared history of colonial rule. And we can challenge the invisibility of African conflicts and the loss of life in Africa, which requires the humanization of African life through more research, rigorous and critical research, and understanding and thinking about how to achieve the most failed liberation goals of the anti-colonial generations. who came to power in the 1950s and 60s.

From our current historical position, we are better placed to agree with Frantz Fanon that anti-colonial movements often did not “dare to invent” the future by completely eradicating communities. There are legacies of colonial rule that continue to shape political institutions, and understandings of citizenship and belonging that create conflicts in post-colonial societies.

What we must avoid is turning our official and invisible concern of Africa’s post-colonial conflicts, which are the result of the destruction of African life in general, into a competing figure that determines 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.