I got behind in my email in the last week and ended up unintentionally ghosting out a person who queried me about the possibility of writing about the crisis in Sudan.
Had I responded in a timely fashion, however, I think it would have been to decline the request. I don’t write analyses about the politics of African countries that I only know in historical and comparative terms. I can explain a political crisis that’s in the news for students, colleagues, friends—I usually know enough to offer some perspective on the coverage and put it into context in various ways. I’m happy to do that if the occasion arises.
But going beyond the explanation of a political crisis, scandal or issue in a given African state to try and answer the question what is to be done? I have several basic objections to doing so. The first is not particular to African states. I am uncomfortable having opinions about internal political outcomes in nation-states that I am not a citizen of, as if I were a citizen, as if I were a participant in that politics. I’ll only slip into that mode if it’s a country I know really well, ideally one I’ve spent some time living in or visiting frequently (for me, that’s basically the United Kingdom, Zimbabwe and South Africa). Even then I want to heavily qualify any opinion I might offer, but at least at that point I know the players and the game in a much more situated, lived-in way. I know what’s possible, what’s likely, and what’s desirable for communities I identify with and interests that I favor.
I can have opinions of a sort about outcomes in countries where I lack that kind of perspective, but generally only by engaging in larger-scale comparative judgments. E.g., I’m perfectly comfortable having a negative political view of Viktor Orban, Narendra Modi or Silvio Berlusconi, but that is because of the kind of politics they represent, because I can evaluate their political actions against a wider backdrop of ethical and practical commitments. That’s different from offering an opinion about who ought to be in power instead in their countries, or having an opinion about political outcomes there within the available and possible options. Similarly, I can evaluate particular political initiatives of a national or regional leader against a wider backdrop of commitments I hold to. I have no trouble criticizing the intensification of homophobic policies by the Ugandan government, for example: here my expert understanding of the context and my political advocacy align perfectly well. I’m even comfortable in that case saying “Uganda’s government should not do what they’re doing, and should do the following instead”.
However, that’s where we get to the second kind of hesitancy I feel about evaluative commentary focused on sub-Saharan African politics. I don’t want to write as if I have an opinion about who should win or rule in most of those states, as if I were part of that polity, but I also often do not want to write in the mode that I think is exceptionally common in American and European public culture, which is approaching that politics as something that should be resolved by us, through some form of international policy-making or diplomatic engagement, as if we are the political agent that matters in shaping outcomes. Whether or not that is factually true—less often than critics of neocolonialism would say, more often than the Western powers themselves might claim—it is at least a bad habit that encodes a troubled positionality.
Meaning, let us say that I decide to have an opinion about what should happen in Sudan. Were I to think my way into a situated, experiential frame—what do people living in Sudan want?—the answer would be plainly that on one hand, at least some of the people of Sudan in 2018 and 2019 passionately demanded democratization and political reform and the other hand that for the time being, military rule and now conflict between two military factions has made that demand temporarily irrelevant as a practical political choice. The people of Sudan right now have to focus on surviving the murderous stupidity of two rival militaries: there are no marches, plebiscites, campaigns or petitions they can make just now. Having an opinion on what they should do in the circumstances is morally and politically stupid. Having an opinion that the military leaders in question should stop fighting and rapidly oversee a transition to civilian rule, on the other hand, is a no-brainer but it is a worthless opinion coming from me. I might as well wish for an end to hunger and a cure to cancer while I’m at it.
So mostly when outside observers comment on such a conflict or situation, even as experts, they are going to answer the question “What should be done?” not as if they were within that politics but from outside of it. That’s natural when you’re looking on a situation that is in every respect a disastrous affront to our common humanity. We aren’t indifferent to it, so we ask “What can we do?” in a way that seems realistically attached to our plausible capacity. In the case of Sudan, or much of sub-Saharan Africa, the answers that follow generate a kind of discursive frame, a debate about policy options: sanctions? diplomatic pressure? seeking trusted third-party mediators? providing intelligence or advice to one of the two factions in the hope of quickly consolidating peace with a possible quid-pro-quo of democratization in the future? vague saber-rattling about possible military intervention? Looking to the African Union for less vague saber-rattling? Massive increases in humanitarian aid to populations in Sudan and to any refugees fleeing to Chad and other neighboring countries?
Over the years, I’ve been in lots of conversations like this about Zimbabwe, a place I know quite well, where I’m somewhat comfortable having opinions about specific individual political actors and the likely and desirable outcomes of ongoing political processes. When the frame shifts to “what can external actors do?” I’m actually less comfortable even than I might be about Sudan, perhaps because most of my answers are variations on “there is nothing for you to do” or “speak out about injustice, that matters, but don’t think it’s your problem to solve”. There are outside interests that do matter—Mugabe back then and Mnangagwa now have cared a substantial amount about what the government of South Africa thinks and there are forms of pressure that South Africa can (and mostly hasn’t) brought to bear on Zimbabwe that can matter. But Zimbabwe is not a problem for American policy to solve, or even really international policy to solve in some decisive way. There are contributions we can make, but understanding what those are, and their limits, makes pretty clear that the political future of Zimbabweans is mostly in the hands of Zimbabweans. Or more’s the pity, mostly in the hands of a small number of powerful, corrupt and incompetent Zimbabweans who’ve seized the state and hold it tightly as a weapon against their own people.
If you want to see the difference involved, ask yourself how many people outside the United States have an opinion about American politics. A lot of them do, as they should, because political outcomes in the U.S. are global outcomes, directly and indirectly. Thus, many non-Americans also have political preferences about America elections and decisions. But they understand, too, that they are not in fact dispositive participants in American politics: they don’t vote, they don’t speak as citizens, they don’t act within national civil society as “speaking subjects”. It doesn’t matter that much in the end if 75% of voters across the EU hate Trump and are both baffled and enraged that he remains politically viable in the United States.
Which is not unlike the way I feel about many contemporary African heads of state and their close associates. Sudan, Eritrea, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Angola, both Congos, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea are all under the control of odious, oppressive rulers who don’t deserve to have power over anything. I’m not baffled: I understand why things are the way they are. Enraged? Sure.
But it would be expected and legible for me to shift into “What can we, my fellow Americans/Westerners/global citizens do about those countries?” It is not at all expected for the same menu of imagined, expected, familiar answers to “What is to be done?” to be looked over when non-Americans think about American politics. Sanctions? Third-party mediators? International observers of democratic elections? Vague saber-rattling about humanitarian intervention? America is not a problem in that way, even when it is in fact a problem.
That’s the key to this: it is the still-evergreen question W.E.B. DuBois asked so long ago: how does it feel to be a problem? And who doesn’t become one, no matter how much they trouble the world around them? You could chart that simply as an index of actual power and note that the kind of assumptions about possible or probable influence that international experts make when it comes to Sudan change in their tone and substance when the conversation shifts to states with much greater power of some kind or another: Saudi Arabia or China, for example. But there’s still a difference between how our pundit class talks about dealing with China under Xi and how our pundit class talks about what it might be like for France’s head of state to be Marine le Pen. The latter might be as much of a problem in its way as the former but it’s not imagined as a problem to be acted upon as much as accepted and lived within for what it is. It is that latter that is the essence of participatory politics, of being a constitutive part of something where you are affected by the actions you advocate, where you seek something for yourself and those you hold as your affines and allies. When you think about acting upon, you may be thinking about how to neutralize or repair something you fear might matter to you, but you are also generally free from any consequences. It’s not you that will have to live in an economy ruined by structural adjustment or in a new nation like South Sudan that was fiercely advocated for by outsiders as a solution to problems they didn’t understand. It’s not you that will have to breath the air when the politician the international community backs promises the winds of democracy but then only blasts out the sour farts of authoritarianism. Acting upon means never having to say you’re sorry for a mistake. Living within a politics means your mistakes and your aspirations stay with you all the time.
I don’t know in most cases how to have an opinion about contemporary African politics without slipping too easily into an imagination of acting upon in that way. Occasionally a narrow issue that is all about acting upon comes along; sometimes I’m close enough to the intimate and complex choices that real people are making every day that I feel I can venture an opinion about those choices. Most of the time, I feel that my best calling is to describe, to understand, to inquire. To see the problems without making a place into a problem.
Image credit: Photo by Mohammed Mojahed on Unsplash