In August 2023, I took up the position of Director of the Center for African Studies (CAS) at the University of Cape Town. One important commitment she inherited was for the Academy of the Humanities to host the inaugural meeting of the African Humanities Association 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 that followed, few other African academic and scientific institutions committed to intervention. In globally recognizing the work done by African scholars on the continent.

By the time we reached the launch meeting in December, the world was preoccupied with the consequences of the October 7 Hamas attack. In addition to the already alarming death toll resulting from the ongoing Israeli bombing, we have already seen and read accounts of the destruction of educational institutions and the killing of university deans and scholars in the Gaza Strip.

Prior to the event, a senior member of the new organizing committee of the African Humanities Society approached a number of colleagues with a proposal to submit a motion in solidarity with scholars in Gaza condemning the scale of killing and destruction.

But the proposal did not go beyond discussion in the Executive Committee due to objections to it. Instead, the researcher who proposed the motion read 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 a statement of solidarity in the Assembly.

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 famous Tanzanian intellectual Isa Shivji, this was a troubling decision on the part of the association. Shivji himself had given one of the keynote speeches and pointed to the strong impulses of decolonization and anti-imperialism that had motivated his generation to respond favorably to the initiative of the radical Egyptian economist Samir Amin in the early 1970s to form what became known as CODESRIA. Amin and others saw the need for Africans to write their own narratives about Africa as part of postcolonial efforts to decolonize societies often bound by neocolonial dependencies.

But returning to the plenary session of the African Humanities Association, what are the reasons for the objections? That’s my concern here.

To be clear, the clear objections were not expressed in terms of support for Israel. Some African scholars may have solidarity with Israel out of Christian Zionist motives, but this has not been expressed out loud.

There were two stronger objections. The first is that this is a contentious issue and issuing a statement would weaken efforts to build cohesion and consensus in a nascent association and should therefore not be discussed.

The second, more powerful, objection was the fear of “what’s going on”: why focus on Gaza when there are a number of troubling conflicts in Africa that demand attention, ranging from the long-running conflicts in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo to the protracted conflicts in Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Southern Cameroon, Sudan, and more recently to Ethiopia and northern Mozambique?

Wasn’t issuing a statement on Gaza a continuation of a long-standing racist trope that simply aims to downplay the death and destruction in some African countries? Why have scholars who campaigned for statements of solidarity with Gaza not exercised the same vigor and activism in relation to other Africans and our struggles?

These were legitimate concerns that correctly pointed to the centuries-old dehumanization of African life and its contemporary resonances even among Africans towards other Africans.

Given that an association like the African Humanities Association was formed specifically to challenge the invisibility of African voices, it was only natural that calls for solidarity with Gaza would raise these questions. It has also been raised in other places and contexts among African scholars and activists.

As a result, I have noticed that some Gaza solidarity events in South Africa have begun to reflect sensitivity to these criticisms by choosing more “inclusive” slogans. I saw one banner for the event that said “Free Congo, Free Sudan, Free Palestine.” Another event was declared “in solidarity with Gaza and Congo.”

While it is laudable to respond to criticism motivated by legitimate concern, my concern about this type of response is that it employs a problematic conflation. The conflicts in Gaza, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, share one clear feature: the mass killing of civilians. But they differ fundamentally in terms of the nature of the problems that lead to the loss of life, and thus require different responses.

Palestinians are losing their lives because they are participating in the anti-colonial struggle against the occupying settler colonial state. Hence, it makes political sense to call for a “free Palestine.” On the other hand, Sudanese and Congolese are losing their lives to unresolved postcolonial dilemmas, problems of decolonization, and problems arising from complex questions about who belongs within the nation-state, who represents the dominant majority or who feels they do? Subjugated minority.

In this context, the logic of calling for “Free Palestine” and “Free Sudan and Free Congo” as proportionate political demands carrying the same type of struggle or issue is not entirely useful for resolving the conflict in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2011. The current situation.

Anti-colonialism involves the struggle against a colonial and occupying power or group. Postcolonial decolonization is not so much a struggle against a foreign occupying group as it is a struggle that unfolds once the occupying group cedes its sovereignty to the colonized peoples.

The work of decolonization begins when the colonizer physically leaves, when anticolonial resistance becomes a project to create postcolonial freedom. This means addressing colonial legacies in the economy, in the ideas of society, in the political and institutional life of society, and in the concept of citizenship.

If we conflate solidarity with the Palestinians in their struggle against colonialism with conflicts that should receive more attention and urgency on the African continent, such as Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in some form, we will end up providing a problematic answer to a legitimate question.

The solidarity of Africans with the Palestinians is based not only on concern for human rights violations, but also on anti-colonial solidarity. This is summed up in Nelson Mandela’s commandment that, as South Africans who defeated apartheid as a form of colonialism, “We are not free until the Palestinians are free.”

The question we must ask ourselves as Africans is, when we say that we are in solidarity with the Palestinians, but we must also be in solidarity, for example with the Congolese, are we not perpetuating the problem of lack of understanding and interest in the conflicts in Africa by framing them? Our call to action as an imperative to “stand in solidarity with”? If solidarity means standing by and supporting them, with whom do we stand in solidarity across the divided and shifting party lines among Africans in these conflicts?

There is a need to make the loss of African lives visible as part of efforts to humanize African challenges and highlight them as global. However, this effort to address the invisibility of African conflicts as a result of the dehumanization of Africans throughout history is not necessarily addressed through “solidarity” with one or another conflict on the continent.

As African scholars, we have to be particularly sensitive to this challenge, because this is the moment when African conflicts are often ridiculed by outsiders. They are often simplified into simplistic universal categories of human rights frameworks, such as the question of good versus evil, bad leaders versus civilian victims, and so on.

Do you remember the time when there was intense pressure to support “Free Darfur” or “Free South Sudan”? Now, as we witness the disintegration of South Sudan, the lesson is: Be careful what you wish for.

Today, if we are to be “in solidarity” with the DRC, assuming this refers to the long-running conflict in the Kivu, it will be even more important if it implies that we encourage more people to make an effort to understand the complexities of the two countries. kifos, the historical legacies of citizenship claims, regional histories and global arteries that run through the heart of the conflict, including the Rwandan civil wars and the displacement of large numbers of people beyond Congolese borders. This continuity has pitted different groups against each other on the basis of claims of belonging, citizenship and counter-claims to land.

If Gaza needs our anti-colonial solidarity, conflicts like those in the Democratic Republic of the Congo may require tougher efforts on our part to better understand the problem, and louder voices to stand up and mobilize political action; and the scholarly push to decolonize solutions so that different forms of political community can emerge.

We can stand in solidarity with Palestinians, as an act of anti-colonial solidarity for a people subjected to decades of displacement and settler colonial rule, driven by a shared history of colonialism. We can challenge the invisibility of African conflicts and loss of life in Africa, which requires the humanization of African life through more careful and sensitive study, research, understanding and reflection on how to achieve the often failed emancipatory goals of anti-colonial generations. Who came to power in the fifties and sixties.

From our current view of history, we are better placed to agree with Frantz Fanon that anti-colonial movements often did not “dare to invent” the future by completely decolonizing societies. There is a legacy of colonialism that continues to shape political institutions, and notions of citizenship and belonging that perpetuate conflicts in post-colonial societies.

What we should avoid is turning our legitimate interest in the invisibility of post-colonial African conflicts, as a result of the general dehumanization of African life, into competing calculations that determine who we express our solidarity with.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.