Debating Ideas reflects the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books. It is edited and managed by the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, the owners of the book series of the same name.
A civilisation that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilisation
So begins Aimé Césaire’s incomparable Discourse on Colonialism, a short but fiery text that brings the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised in sharp relief. In 2024, the text remains relevant as the global majority roils with the consequences of the political choices undertaken by the global minority. Nowhere is this more evident than in Gaza where a genocide enters its sixth month even as its chilling details are broadcast on our phones, our computers and our televisions.
What does Césaire’s text add to our understanding of the global context in which colonial violence is made possible? Can our notions of “international order” withstand his critiques of power and structural violence? Read alongside Edward Said, Ghassan Knafani and Kwame Nkrumah, what does Discourse on Colonialism add to our collective understanding of its contemporary forms? This panel brought together researchers and practitioners from across affected regions to analyse the impact of colonial history on current discourses around the universality of rights, who has them and who has an obligation to enforce them and how. We centred the voices of de-colonial thinkers drawn from wide ranging disciplines and regions to further Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, particularly in the digital age, and examined the utility of this seminal text to our collective understanding of some of the largest challenges facing the world today.
You can watch the event by clicking on the below video. Information on panelists follow below.
This panel took place on 15 March 2024 with the following cohort:
Chair: Nanjala Nyabola is an independent writer and researcher based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her work focuses on the intersection between technology, media, and society
Speaker: Henning Melber is a Political Scientist and Sociologist, whose focus is on African and Development Studies. As a son of German emigrants to Namibia, he joined the anti-colonial movement SWAPO in 1974. Associated with the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, he is Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria and the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein and Senior Research Fellow with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London. His next book is The Long Shadow of German Colonialism (Hurst, 2024).
Speaker: Yotam Gidron is a postdoctoral fellow at the department of social and cultural anthropology at KU Leuven whose work lies at the intersection of African history, the anthropology of religion, economic anthropology, and migration studies. His research in recent years focused on Christian Zionism, as well as on the economic lives of refugees, primarily in East Africa. He has also written about Israel’s engagements with African countries in the past and present, particularly as they relate to migration, religion, and the question of Palestine. His book Israel in Africa was published as part of the African Arguments series in 2020.
Speaker: Toufic Haddad is the author of Palestine Ltd: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory (I.B. Tauris, 2016). He currently directs the Council for British Research in the Levant’s Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem.
Speaker: Mohammed Elnaiem is a PhD Candidate in Sociology who is training to become a historical sociologist with a focus on the history of capitalism and the global reparations movement. He is the director of the Decolonial Centre, a project of the Pluto Educational Trust. His former column, “Black Radicals”, ran for two years on JSTOR Daily.
