Mahmood Mamdani’s new book, Saviors and Survivors, suggests that the Save Darfur campaign borrows its playbook and players from America’s War on Terror, not to mention colonial projects of olde.
Anna Mundow interviews Mamdani in the Boston Globe:
A. I’m struck by the contrast between the mobilization around Darfur and the lack of mobilization around Iraq. The explanation, I believe, lies in the fact that Save Darfur presented the conflict as a tragedy, stripped of politics and context. There were simply “African” victims and “Arab” perpetrators motivated by race-intoxicated hatred. Unlike Iraq, about which Americans felt guilty or impotent, Darfur presented an opportunity to feel good. It appealed to the philanthropic side of the American character. During the presidential election, Save Darfur’s constituency became integrated into the Obama campaign, and I welcomed that opportunity to organize around real concerns. The downside now is the attempt by Save Darfur to pressure the Obama administration to intervene militarily in Darfur.Q. Are you saying that humanitarianism is a form of colonialism?
A. I’m saying that historically it has been. The movement after which Save Darfur patterned itself is the antislavery movement of the 19th century. Remember that the elimination of slavery was the ostensible reason given by British officials for colonization of the African continent. The cataloging of brutalities – real ones, not exaggerated – was essential preparation for seizing chunks of real estate, again ostensibly to protect victims. Today, the humanitarian claim uses ethics to displace politics. Conflicts are typically presented as tribal or race wars between perpetrators and victims whose roles are unchanging.
Q. Does the problem lie in who uses the humanitarian label?
A. The language of human rights was once used primarily by the victims of repression. Now it has become the language of power and of interventionists who turn victims not into agents but into proxies. It has been subverted from a language that empowers victims to a language that serves the designs of an interventionist power on an international scale.
Read the full interview here. Hat tip to Africa is a Country.
I agree with the idea that Darfur partly is attractive to activists because it is presented in a less politicized way than other conflicts. I think a main reason that the documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell has been so popular is because it de-politicized the Liberian war. The film had almost no mention of the role other countries, including the US, played in fueling the fighting. It made viewers deeply sympathetic to the protagonists–the women peace activists–while completely villifying the fighters as crazy men who just wanted to kill each other for no apparent reason.
For Mamdani to armchair psychoanalyze thousands of people, and make claims about their motivations is presumptuous, at best. People likely joined the Save Darfur Campaign for various reasons, and, without some magnificently accurate lie detector test, Mamdani has no way of knowing how many people did so out of pure or impure motivations.
The allegation that Jewish groups have been active on Darfur because they want to “reinforce the racialization of the conflict and the demonization of the Arabs” gave me pause.
i think our governments should do some more proactive task in Darfur. the UN is not doing a very good job in resolving the crisis in Darfur.