African Arguments

Top Menu

  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

Main Menu

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Climate
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • Think African [Podcast]
    • #EndSARS
    • Into Africa [Podcast]
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Africa Science Focus [Podcast]
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Debating Ideas
  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

logo

African Arguments

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Climate
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • Think African [Podcast]
    • #EndSARS
    • Into Africa [Podcast]
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Africa Science Focus [Podcast]
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Debating Ideas
Politics
Home›African Arguments›Politics›Africa to Standing Rock: “It happened to us too. It is happening to us too.”

Africa to Standing Rock: “It happened to us too. It is happening to us too.”

By Abena Ampofoa Asare
December 9, 2016
4085
0

In the water protectors’ struggle, there are whispers of Saro-Wiwa, Biko and Sankara.

Credit: Leslie Peterson.

Marginalised communities from around the world have long been expected to sacrifice their land and resources to visions of progress that are both exclusionary and externally-defined. Credit: Leslie Peterson.

After facing attack dogs, tear gas, arrest, water cannons, and rubber bullets, the protesters at Standing Rock – known as “water protectors” – won a significant victory earlier this week. Following months of demonstrations, the Army Corps of Engineers, a US federal agency, rejected a permit for the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) from proceeding on its expected route under the Missouri River at Lake Oahe.

The companies behind the proposed oil pipeline immediately fired back, rejecting additional rerouting and blasting the US government for “abandon[ing] the rule of law…and currying favor with a narrow and extreme political constituency”. The water protectors, made up of thousands of Native American and environmental activists afraid that the pipeline would contaminate the waters and destroy sacred sites, finally celebrated.

Although taking place thousands of miles away, there is something very familiar about the standoff at Standing Rock from the vantage point of the African continent. Just a few weeks ago, more than 40,000 Nigerian citizens brought a case against Shell to the British High Court. The first exhibit? Four bottles of benzene-contaminated water from the Niger Delta.

[Shell tries to dodge responsibility for Nigeria oil spills…again]

The week prior, Suelma Beirouk, a political leader from occupied Western Sahara was detained by Moroccan police for attempting to attend the 2016 UN Climate Change Conference in Marrakesh. Presumably, the Moroccan government feared her message of occupation would disrupt its attempts to present itself as a global environmental leader.

For Jodi Gillette, former White House advisor for Native American Affairs, the growth of the #NoDAPL protests was a matter of spiritual solidarity. “Really awful things happen to different tribes; and it’s so deeply spiritually wounding that…when people see it happen to other tribes, our spirit is called to act, because it happened to us,” she said.

Indeed, we who identify with these generations of suffering are found beyond the borders of the Native American community and the US. Marginalised communities from around the world have long been expected to sacrifice their land and resources to visions of progress that are both exclusionary and externally-defined. In Africa, “development” has often been the mask pulled over economic and environmental violence.

[What if everything the SDGs are premised on is just wrong?]

And so Standing Rock echoes in our spirit because, as Gillette says, it happened to us too. It is happening to us too.

When proponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline insist that America’s freedom from foreign oil depends on this pipeline, one immediately recalls 1990s Nigeria. When Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) began to target Shell for its atrocities in the Delta, Nigeria’s government made “disturbing oil production” an act of treason. Pitting national economic progress against the lives of indigenous people is well-trodden ground.

Similarly, when North Dakota governor Jack Dalrymple claimed that evacuating the Standing Rock camps would protect the health and safety of water protectors, he sounded suspiciously like Cecil Rhodes declaring empire an act of philanthropy.

[Enough! Will youth protests drive social change in Africa?]

Shared struggles

For far too long, marginalised communities have been subject to visions of development that grind up their local interests as fuel for notions of national prosperity. If they dare to dream differently about the future, they are brutalised.

But those gathered at Standing Rock beckon us beyond this false opposition. For instance, last week, Kandi Mossett/Eagle Woman (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara) described the water protectors’ plans to survive the winter as an opportunity to “take back the narrative” by modeling a progress that sacrifices neither the earth nor future generations.

“We’re not just stopping a pipeline here, but showing what we can be, what we can build, by bringing in solar, by bringing in wind, and it’s our own Native people,” she said. “We’re going to stop a pipeline, we’re going to celebrate our future, and we’re going to create that platform, and that community, that eco-village for them, for generations to come.”

In these words, there are whispers of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s prediction that victory is inevitable for those who work for a cause from which they cannot be blackmailed or intimidated. The images of elders holding drums, praying and singing while police blast them with freezing water call to mind Steve Biko’s insistence that self-knowledge and culture are the paths to liberation. For all of us, Standing Rock is a site of both devastating privation and dazzling prophetic leadership; it invokes Thomas Sankara’s invocation of a country “brimming with all the misfortunes of the people of the world… but also – and above all – the promise of our struggles.”

This struggle against the Dakota pipeline extends far beyond US national borders. Using ceremony and prayer as weapons of choice, the water protectors stand against a generations-old doctrine of exploitation and its reconfiguration as national progress. They expose how the language of “caretaking” and “human rights” is still being deployed as accompaniment and ornament to brutality. And their victory, however temporary or partial, reminds us that development does not need to happen over the bruised and broken bodies of the land’s people. If it does, it should at least be called something else. “Colonialism” comes to mind.

Abena Ampofoa Asare is Assistant Professor of Modern African Affairs at SUNY- Stony Brook University. She writes and teaches about how African political and social movements are transforming international human rights. 

Previous Article

Museveni says he’s “not excited” about Uganda’s ...

Next Article

Hungry for change: the economics underlying DR ...

Abena Ampofoa Asare

0 comments

  1. Seth Asare 9 December, 2016 at 16:10

    Thanks Abena for putting together important human rights concerns from different regions.

Leave a reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  • Politics

    Kenya: Obama has a word with Raila and Uhuru, but US position on ICC is ambiguous – By Njambi Ngunjiri

  • The Gambia's former president Yahya Jammeh. Credit: UN Photo/Erin Siegal.
    PoliticsThe Gambia

    Seeking justice in The Gambia: Why Jammeh’s days are numbered

  • KenyaPolitics

    Wangari Maathai was not a good woman. Kenya needs more of them.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Click here to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter and never miss a thing!

  • 81.7K+
    Followers

Find us on Facebook

Interactive Elections Map

Keep up to date with all the African elections.

Recent Posts

  • Freddy: Madagascar’s 8th cyclone in 13 months compounds climate crises
  • The invisible labour of Africa in the Digital Revolution
  • Peering into Africa’s AI future: A roadmap for digitisation
  • “Enemies of the state”: Uganda targets climate activists in quiet crackdown
  • Well-funded Riddles: Notes from Uganda’s sexual culture war

Editor’s Picks

ClimateEditor's Picks

Fortress conservation is heading for a crisis that can’t come soon enough

Governments “protect” wildlife from the very people who have conserved it for centuries, while allocating mining concessions in the same areas. Outside Africa, many people’s first encounter with the continent ...
  • President Emmanuel Macron of France during his three-country tour in Africa. Credit: Présidence de la République du Bénin.

    Liberté, Egalité, Impunité

    By Billy Burton
    August 16, 2022
  • Girls in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, which has been at war since November 2020. Credit: Rod Waddington.

    Tigray: Our suffering may not be convenient, but it is real

    By Temesgen Kahsay
    August 3, 2021
  • In 2011, mass protests led to the downfall of President Mubarak. In 2013, the military retook power in a coup. Credit: Gigi Ibrahim.

    This is how our revolution in Egypt failed. Sudan, please be warned.

    By Osama Gaweesh
    June 5, 2019
  • A man in Benghazi holds a picture of King Idris in the midst of the Libyan Uprising in 2011. Credit: Maher27777

    Libya: A country in need of a king?

    By Ashraf Boudouara
    July 12, 2022

Brought to you by


Creative Commons

Creative Commons Licence
Articles on African Arguments are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
  • Cookies
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
© Copyright African Arguments 2020
By continuing to browse this site, you agree to our use of cookies.