Imani Tafari-Ama | Why do the devious repeat blunders of history?

When I was little, my mom often urged us as children, not to dawdle at the dinner table. We were told, in no uncertain terms, to finish our food and not waste it. Other children in my generation are also familiar with the reference for this discipline. The geopolitics of the day bore witness to Britain’s brutality as a settler colonial power. When my mom would say, “it would be a shame to waste your food, because the children in Biafra are starving,” she was divulging her acute awareness of Britain’s use of starvation as a weapon of war.

This thread is something that has returned to my memory many times over the years. The British, as a settler colonial power, supported the Nigerian government in the ruthless mechanisms it applied for three years, to break the back of Biafran resistance and desire to secede. The images that we saw from Biafra tell us that current images of starvation in Gaza have a dangerous precedent. In Biafra, aid workers had to make the harsh decision how to divide up resources among the dire categories’ of victims of man-made hunger. Only those who exhibited the ability to survive were given scarce food while three million people were left to die.

Images of emaciated children dying from intentional lack of food in Biafra were also similar to the pictures we had seen from the South West African (today’s Namibia’s) experience of genocide at the hands of Germany. The Germans’ use of starvation as a weapon against the Herero and Nama peoples resulted in a still-to-be-reckoned-with genocide. This atrocity was the precursor to the Holocaust committed against the Jewish people in Germany.

FRAMEWORK OF RESISTANCE

We must put these catastrophes into the framework of resistance, which does not happen in a vacuum. Can you imagine if historians only considered Sam Sharpe’s Christmas Rebellion as an aberration, without looking at the brutality of a system to which it was responding? One might even pause to wonder if the colonial response that Sharpe was a terrorist might have been the dominant discourse. The point is that resistance of the Biafran people did not happen in a vacuum. Between 1967-70 was a time of turmoil. The complicity of the Nigerian government with the excruciating experience of settler colonialism, was the major contention. Britain, the United States and France, the familiar musketeers, conspired to deny the Biafrans (Igbo people), the food without which they were forced to surrender.

This tells you clearly that European colonialism has had dire consequences for anyone who was unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of such disasters. What people experienced in South Africa under the apartheid regime, was a kind of medieval savagery, which knew no moral boundaries. It is in this context that it is impossible to witness the social media streamed genocide taking place in Gaza without making the connections.

What happened over the past century in the Gaza Strip is reminiscent of the horrors of settler colonialism that the Caribbean knows only too well. If our ancestors were not planting food on their own provision grounds, it would have been possible for them to go the same starvation route. Saltfish and pork could not adequately nourish men, women and children doing back-breaking work, which separated muscle from bone, on plantations producing capitalism’s raw materials.

Incidentally, when Paul Bogle led the revolutionaries on the march from Stony Gut to Spanish Town to seek justice from Governor Eyre, the response of an empty dismissal just added insult to already injurious conditions. Frustrated, this spirited company returned empty handed to St. Thomas and set the Morant Bay Rebellion in motion. The disproportionate destruction, which was enacted by the British against oppressed people who were simply standing up for their rights, is legendary. Over a thousand houses were burned to the ground, hundreds of people were murdered and the ultimate response was the installation of the police force, an institution which still haunts us to this day.

GENOCIDE

So, when we reference the genocide in Gaza as another in the series of atrocities against humanity, we know what we are talking about. It is a familiar strategy, only that nowadays, it is being enacted in front of our eyes, on our phones, and computer screens. We know the disturbing melody of “Strange Fruit,” which causes us to remember the lynchings that were treated by the settler colonials as entertainment. Come on! Where are the body parts? Sliced with precision, as keepsakes, to bewitch the ghoulish crowd. The social media postings of Israeli soldiers masquerading in women’s underwear, which they stole from their victims, revealed the bizarre desires lurking under the cover of devastation.

Nowadays, by teasing the public with promises of military pauses and ceasefires that do not materialise, the US government and the Israelis are deploying psychological warfare tactics, which compound the combined collateral damage of death, by bombings, displacement, hunger and ultimately, starvation. Warnings of a full-blown famine were announced over a year and a half ago and yet countries like France and Britain, which are now mouthing platitudes about two-state-solutions, have steadily armed Israel to enact the Genocide in Gaza.

The US, as political enabler of this atrocity, has made no pretence about its protagonist position. First step, under Joe Biden’s presidency, Israel and the US were joined at the hip in prosecuting the war. And despite election campaign promises to the contrary, Donald Trump will go down in history as the president that told Prime Minister Netanyahu to “finish the job.” This is the code that presidential aspirant Nikki Haley had written on a bomb when she visited Israel. It had an ominous ring, coming from the wannabe Nobel peace prize winner. If the US and Israel have their way, the Gaza strip will be renamed Middle East Riviera. Will we even remember that this is the place where Palestinians were starved and faced myriad other forms of death?

What is tragic nowadays, is that the discussion or action in response to the Gaza situation is shrouded in political demonizing. To even mention it on school campuses is to run the risk of defunding, deportation or, at the very least, academic discipline. As one student is currently learning, despite earning it in record time, your degree may be withheld as punishment for pro-Palestine protest. Although some 200 members of this student’s family were murdered in the war, she was denied her “piece of paper.”

The outlawing of critical thinking is an added factor that prevents free speech or even awareness of the crisis that is currently unfolding. Israel’s establishment of a concentration camp for the people who have been herded like cattle from the North to the South of the Gaza strip, is one of the most unfortunate repetitions of history. Why is the torture that Nazis visited on Jewish people now being applied to Palestinians? Reproducing these heinous horrors of history must be the most devious blunder of all time.

Imani Tafari-Ama, PhD, is a Pan-African advocate and gender and development specialist. Send feedback to i.tafariama@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com.