From Suren Pillay
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. –FP
