The whataboutery in African debates on solidarity with Gaza is misplaced

In August 2023, I began my tenure as the Director of the Centre for African Studies (CAS) at the University of Cape Town. One of the significant tasks I inherited was that CAS would host the inaugural launch conference of the African Humanities Association in December of that year.

This was an important development, building on the legacy of the establishment of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in 1973. In the decades since, several other pan-African scholarly bodies have also worked towards the global recognition of the work of scholars on the continent.

The December launch conference took place as the world was grappling with the aftermath of the Hamas attacks of October 7th. In addition to the staggering death toll caused by the relentless Israeli bombing, we had seen and read reports of the destruction of educational institutions in Gaza, and the killing of university presidents and scholars.

Prior to the conference, a senior member of the organizing committee of the newly formed African Humanities Association put forward a motion to some colleagues calling for solidarity with scholars in Gaza and condemning the mass killings and destruction. However, due to objections raised, the motion never made it beyond the executive committee’s discussions. Instead, the scholar who had proposed the motion read out a statement in their individual capacity during the plenary session. Subsequent discussions revealed that there would not be majority support for a statement of solidarity from the conference.

As a compromise, an alternative was proposed: that the statement of the colleague who had spoken be placed on the association website, where anyone who wished to could sign it. For many scholars, including the prominent Tanzanian intellectual Issa Shivji, this was a troubling decision for the association to make. Shivji himself, who had given a keynote address, recalled the strong decolonial and anti-imperialist motivations that inspired his generation when they responded to the initiative of the radical Egyptian economist Samir Amin in the early 1970s to establish what became CODESRIA. Amin and others argued that Africans needed to write their own African narratives as part of a postcolonial effort to break free from neocolonial dependency.

But back to the plenary session of the African Humanities Association, what were the reasons for the objections? This is what I focus on here. To be clear, the objections that were explicitly voiced were not in support of Israel. Some African scholars may well be in solidarity with Israel for Christian Zionist motivations, but this was not voiced out loud. Rather, there were two most strongly expressed objections. The first was that this was a divisive issue, and that a statement would undermine efforts to build cohesion and consensus in a newly formed association, and therefore should not be discussed.

The second, and more strongly voiced objection, was a ‘whataboutism’ concern: why focus on Gaza, when there are so many troubling conflicts in Africa that need attention, from the long-standing conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, to Southern Cameroon, Sudan, and more recently, Ethiopia and northern Mozambique? Would issuing a statement on Gaza not be perpetuating the long-standing racist trope of merely paying lip service to the deaths and destruction in some African countries? Why had those scholars who were making statements in solidarity with Gaza not shown the same energy and passion for other Africans and our conflicts?

These are legitimate concerns, and they correctly point to the centuries-long dehumanization of African lives and its contemporary resonance among Africans with regard to other Africans. Given that the African Humanities Association was formed precisely to challenge the invisibilization of African voices, a call for solidarity with Gaza would naturally raise these questions. These questions have also been raised in other fora and among African scholars and activists.

Thus, I have noted that some of the solidarity with Gaza activism in South Africa has begun to reflect a sensitivity to these critiques by choosing more ‘inclusive’ slogans. I saw one activist banner that read, ‘Free Congo, Free Sudan, Free Palestine’. Another declared, ‘Solidarity with Gaza and Congo’. While it is laudable to respond to critiques that are borne out of legitimate concerns, my worry with these responses is that they employ a problematic conflation. For example, the conflicts in Gaza, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo have an obvious commonality: large numbers of civilians are being killed. But they are fundamentally different in the nature of the issues that lead to the loss of life, and therefore require different responses.

Palestinians are losing their lives as they are engaged in an anti-colonial struggle against a settler colonial state of occupation. Thus, a call to ‘Free Palestine’ makes political sense. On the other hand, Sudanese and Congolese are losing their lives as they face the unresolved postcolonial predicaments, the problems of decolonization, and the complexities of who belongs within the nation state, who is the dominant majority or who feels like an oppressed minority. In this context, a call to ‘Free Palestine’ and ‘Free Sudan and Free Congo’ as equivalent political demands for the same kind of struggle or cause, is not entirely helpful in addressing the conflicts currently in Sudan and the DRC.

Anti-colonialism concerns struggles against colonial and occupying powers or groups. Postcolonial decolonization is less a struggle against foreign occupying groups than it is a struggle that unfolds once occupying groups have ceded sovereignty to the colonized people. The work of decolonization begins when the colonizers have actually left, when anti-colonial resistance becomes the project of creating postcolonial freedom. This means addressing the legacies of colonialism in economic, social ideas, community politics and institutional life, and concepts of citizenship.

If we conflate solidarity with the anti-colonial struggle of Palestinians with the conflicts in the continent that should be getting more attention and urgency, such as Sudan and the DRC, in the form of ‘whataboutism’, we end up providing a problematic answer to a legitimate question. African solidarity with Palestinians is based not only on concerns about human rights abuses, but also on anti-colonial solidarity. This is captured in Nelson Mandela’s admonition that as South Africans who had overcome apartheid, a form of colonialism, ‘we are not free until the Palestinians are free’.

The question that we as Africans need to ask ourselves is, when we say we stand in solidarity with Palestinians, but we should also stand in solidarity with Congolese, are we not perpetuating the problem of the under-understanding and under-attention to African conflicts by framing our calls to action as requiring ‘solidarity’? If solidarity means standing with someone, supporting someone, then who are we standing in solidarity with in these conflicts, given the ever-shifting partisan lines among Africans?

It is necessary to make the loss of African lives visible, as part of the effort to humanize African challenges and raise their visibility as global challenges. However, the invisibilization of African conflicts that results from the historical dehumanization of Africans, is not necessarily addressed by ‘standing in solidarity’ with one conflict or another on the continent.

We as African scholars should be particularly sensitive to this challenge because this is often the moment that African conflicts are caricatured by outsiders. They are often reduced to simplistic categories of universal human rights frameworks, as matters of good versus evil, bad leaders versus victimized civilians, and so on. Recall the moment when there was a desperate desire to support ‘Free Darfur’ or ‘Free South Sudan’? The lesson now, as we witness the collapse of South Sudan, is: be careful what you wish for.

Today, if we ‘stand in solidarity’ with the Democratic Republic of Congo, assuming this refers to the long-standing conflict in the Kivus, it would be more meaningful if it meant that we encourage more efforts to understand the complexities of the two Kivus, the historical legacies of citizenship claims, and the regional histories and global arteries that run through the heart of the conflict, including the Rwandan civil war and the mass displacements of populations across the borders of the DRC. This continuity sets different groups against each other based on claims of belonging and citizenship, and counter-claims to territory.

If Gaza needs our anti-colonial solidarity, then conflicts like those in the Democratic Republic of Congo probably need more effort on our part to better understand the issues, to raise our voices more loudly to stand up and mobilize for political action; and to push for decolonized solutions from academia so that different forms of political community might emerge. We can stand in solidarity with Palestinians, as an act of anti-colonial solidarity with a people who have been subjected to decades of settler colonialism, which is rooted in our shared history of being colonized. We can challenge the invisibilization of African conflicts and the loss of African lives, which requires more research, rigorous and sensitive scholarship, and understanding and thinking through how we might realize the liberation goals of the anti-colonial generations who came to power in the 1950s and 60s, to humanize African lives.

From our vantage point in history now, we are more aligned with Frantz Fanon’s point that anti-colonial movements often did not ‘dare to invent’ the future by fully decolonizing societies. The legacies of colonialism continue to affect political institutions, and understandings of citizenship and belonging that perpetuate conflicts in postcolonial societies.

What we should avoid is turning our legitimate concern about the invisibilization of postcolonial African conflicts, which is a result of the generalized dehumanization of African lives, into a competitive calculus of deciding who we stand in solidarity with.