Nana Osei-Opare
Rice University
Independent African states and Africans seeking colonialism’s end have faced roadblocks. Through violent and repressive legal measures, white settler-colonial regimes sought to maintain their empires and power (Worger and Clark 2016; Schmidt 2013: 79-102). Different approaches to Africa’s postcolonial and colonial situation sowed and precipitated deep disharmony amongst African leaders (Apter 1996: 441-466; Daly 2020). With (tacit) support from the United Nations and the West, democratically elected African leaders like the Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba were assassinated, sending already fragile states into disarray (De Witte 2001; Gijs 2016: 273-290). In response to these crises, Agostinho Neto, the leader of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), asked: “Who is the Enemy and What is Our Objective?” (Neto 1974; Prosperetti 2018: 29-57)
I use Neto’s provocation in two ways. First, as pedagogical and theoretical frameworks to teach and understand the difficulties surrounding postcolonial and colonial African states. Second, as a problematic to situate Sam Dubal’s work alongside that of Steve Biko (1946-77) and Kwame Nkrumah (1909-72). Biko was the South African Black Consciousness leader, and Nkrumah was the Ghanaian head of state and intellectual. Biko’s ideas on white liberalism and Black Consciousness, Dubal’s critique of humanity and humanitarianism, and Nkrumah’s unmasking of neocolonialism and aid offer different but overlapping propositions to understand the challenges facing postcolonial and colonial Africa and how to overcome them. Through these scholars, I suggest that we can answer Neto’s sharp but prescient question. Placing Dubal’s work in such company, perhaps in a hagiographic manner, requires a disclosure of my relationship to him. On nomenclature, I use ‘Sam’ to refer to my friend, the person I watched soccer games and hung out with. ‘Dubal’ refers to the postcolonial theorist that I grapple with, study, and teach.
I met Sam in college in the Fall of 2007 as a wide-eyed first-year student while he was a fourth-year student. We lived on the same floor of the African American themed dormitory, Ujamaa, and became acquainted through soccer—our (first) loves. Not long thereafter, I became Sam’s student, enrolling in his Anthropology of Soccer class. Our paths diverged when he graduated and went to Harvard Medical School. A few years later, he informed me that he planned to track a notorious warlord, Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), and his followers in the lum (the bush) in Uganda. I thought he was mad. A few years later, we rekindled our friendship.
While pursuing my doctorate in history at UCLA, I took the elevator from the 6th floor of Ralph J. Bunche Hall to the ground floor. The elevator opened, and I saw Sam talking to someone who I now know as anthropologist and UCLA Professor Hannah Appel. From that moment, Sam and I attended soccer games and met for brunch and parties. Sam was in Los Angeles completing his medical residency. During this period, Sam’s book came out. It left me flabbergasted. I wondered: “How the hell did he write and publish this book while completing his residency?” The same awe I had of him as a first-year university student returned as a pre-field doctoral student in history. Turning to Dubal, the scholar and postcolonial theorist, I read Against Humanity and knew instinctively I would assign it in my African history course alongside Nkrumah, Biko, and Neto. But, why?
Biko, Dubal, Neto, and Nkrumah share biographical commonalities despite occupying different historical moments and geographic spaces. First, they were born in the twentieth century and lived within the confines of the British empire and its aftermath. Biko and Dubal were trained medical professionals. Neto and Dubal worked in a hospital. Dubal and Nkrumah pursued doctorate degrees in Africanist anthropology in the United States and wrote dissertations that some considered more political treatise than ‘academic’ enterprises (Osei Opare 2019: 45).[1] Tragically, Biko and Dubal died under mysterious circumstances in their early thirties.[2] Dubal’s historical positionality intersected with Africa’s leading thinkers in multiple axes, at times permitting them to ask and arrive at similar questions and conclusions. I return to Neto’s provocation—who is the enemy and what is our objective?
While Nkrumah argued that neocolonialism was the greatest threat to African independence, Biko suggested that it was white liberalism and white racism. For Nkrumah, neocolonial states were “cliental” and “puppet” entities that appeared sovereign but had their economy, military, and political policies directed by multinational corporations or foreign governments (Nkrumah 1966: ix & xvi; Nkrumah 1968: 15). To liberate themselves, Nkrumah concluded that Africans had to embrace continental unity and socialism. While agreeing with Nkrumah that “black independent countries” had not obtained “any real independence,” Biko offered another answer. He argued that white liberals and white racism were the most significant barriers to black liberation (Biko 2002: 49 & 23). Biko maintained that the myths of nonracialism and integration, pushed by white liberals, obstructed black liberation (Biko 2002: 22 & 64). He insisted that black people must embrace Black Consciousness—a subjectivity that dismantled the black inferiority complex, permitted blacks to reclaim leadership roles in their fight for independence, and allowed blacks not to “regard themselves as appendages to white society” in order to emancipate themselves (Biko 2002: 51). Dubal offered a similar conclusion.
Building on the works of Biko and Nkrumah, Dubal offered a twenty-first-century position that recast white liberal ideals, humanitarianism, and ideas of humanity as the problem afflicting black Africans. Dubal labeled “white liberal humanity” as Africa’s greatest enemy and called for its complete desecration (Dubal 2018: 11). Moreover, Dubal maintained that our concept(s) of humanity hinder rather than aid “ongoing struggles toward emancipation” (Dubal 2018: 9). Not only was humanity an enemy, but so were its spawn, humanitarian organizations and aid. Like Nkrumah, Dubal noted that humanitarian organizations and aid perpetuate ‘structural violence’ against Africans (Dubal 2018: 19). “‘Aid,’ in whatever guise it appears, Nkrumah argued, “is the most blatant proof of the anti-popular, aggressive and basically violent character of all neo-colonialist regimes” (Nkrumah 1966: 15). Nkrumah pushed a radical position that only neocolonial regimes received aid and that it unmasked that regime’s violent and unpopular character rather than its financial difficulties. Dubal went further, insisting that state-led structural violence against its citizens was possible because of humanitarian groups and aid. “The structural violence of the primary humanitarian-government apparatus,” Dubal wrote, “the so-called internally displaced persons camps, had inflicted deaths that, the numbers showed, far exceeded those caused by rebel violence” (Dubal 2018: 19). Consequently, Dubal and Nkrumah reframed aid, humanitarianism, and humanitarian groups as neocolonial instruments that supported neocolonial regimes, imperialism, and their atrocities. They suggest that these systems are irredeemable.
Biko, Dubal, and Nkrumah concluded that Africans can push for freedom by whatever means they deem necessary—whether by fighting in the lum, rejecting western concepts of rationality and science, or redeploying Christianity to embrace a pugnacious black God. “Freedom,” Biko wrote, “is the ability to define oneself with one’s possibilities held back not by the power of other people over one but only by one’s relationship to God and to natural surroundings” (Biko 2002: 92). “Our armed struggle for freedom,” Nkrumah wrote, “is neither moral nor immoral” (Nkrumah 1966: 19). Dubal’s depiction of current and former LRA rebels adheres to Nkrumah’s call to depict armed struggle as neither moral nor immoral. Moreover, he accepts Biko’s plea to think about Black people in relation to their natural surroundings and God. Dubal allows the LRA to define themselves in relation to their natural surroundings and beliefs. The rebels’ acts of violence against the state simply are—they are neither moral nor immoral. The former LRA members emerge from Dubal’s work as complex beings searching for freedom and dignity amidst suffering and widespread marginalization and condemnation from what Nkrumah calls neocolonial forces. These ideas have impacted today’s undergraduate students.
I paste below a response to Dubal’s work from one of my undergraduate students:
Before reading Sam Dubal’s work and listening to his lecture, I had never questioned what it meant to practice humanity. However, my perspective on this idea has been deepened and complicated by Dubal’s argument. Once again, a concept I had previously thought to be irrefutable and universally applicable has been exposed as an idea rooted in colonialism and Eurocentrism . . . . Maybe working against humanity is the only way for some groups to achieve justice. If we maintain our current definition of humanity, these efforts that are geared toward justice and the people who pursue them will continue to be vilified, often by those who want to continue to exploit or oppress them.
Against Humanity is a tour de force. It has and will continue to impact younger generations. As each generation continues to form their own consciousness, Dubal has pushed them and me to rethink what humanity means and does, and for whom.
Sam has been a teacher and friend for more than a decade. He was selfless and committed to everyone around him. It is strange to think that the last time I saw him and spoke to him in person was at my wedding celebration. I miss you, my friend. But, we will talk again. You can now communicate with the greats—Biko, Fanon, Neto, and Nkrumah. I cannot wait to be sitting with you all at that table.
Works Cited
Apter, Andrew. “The Pan-African Nation: Oil Money and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria,” Public Culture (1996).
Biko, Steve. I Write What I Like (UChicago Press, 2002)
Daly, Samuel Fury Childs. A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge, 2020).
De Witte, Ludo. The Assassination of Lumumba translated by Ann Wright and Renee Fenby (Verso, 2001).
Dubal, Sam. Against Humanity: Lessons from the Lord’s Resistance Army (UC Press, 2018)
Gijs, Anne-Sophie. “Fighting the Red Peril in the Congo. Paradoxes and Perspectives on an Equivocal Challenge to Belgium and the West (1947–1960),” Cold War History 16:3 (2016), pp. 273-290.
Neto, Agostinho. “Who is the Enemy What is Our Objective?,” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies 4, 3 (1974).
Nkrumah, Kwame. Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (International Publishers, 1966)
—–. Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare: A Guide to the Armed Phase of the African Revolution (Panaf Books, 1968).
Osei-Opare, Nana. “The Red Star State: State-Capitalism, Socialism, and Black Internationalism in Ghana, 1957-1966,” (Dissertation, UCLA, 2019).
Prosperetti, Elisa. “The Hidden History of the West African Wager: Or, How Comparison with Ghana Made Côte d’Ivoire,” History in Africa 45 (2018), pp. 29–57.
Schmidt, Elizabeth. Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror (Cambridge, 2013).
Worger, William H. and Nancy L. Clark, South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, Third Edition (Routledge, 2016).
Endnotes
[1] Frantz Fanon, of course, is another famous medically trained postcolonial theorist; Nana Osei-Opare, “The Red Star State: State-Capitalism, Socialism, and Black Internationalism in Ghana, 1957-1966,” (Dissertation, UCLA, 2019), pp. 45.
[2] It eventually came out that the South African police murdered Biko. Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Port Elizabeth, South Africa. December 11, 1997. https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/media/1997/9712/s971211c.htm