Reassesing darfur: mamdani’s flawed thesis

In the ever-changing world we live in, it is perhaps not surprising that one of the most disturbing events of the 21st century has virtually disappeared from the media spotlight. Darfur- once the most high-profile justice movement in the world- has become something of a footnote now that bigger stories are dominating the agenda. Despite this turn of events, there is still some discourse going on about the topic. Unfortunately at least one aspect of this debate is going down some very unfortunate paths. I’m referring here to Mahmood Mamdani, the Ugandan-born professor of Government at Columbia University. Mamdani is something of an academic superstar inasmuch as University professors with a special interest in African affairs can be called superstars. Mamdani has written extensively about African affairs and his contribution to Rwanda’s story was his 2001 book When victims become killers. I take no pleasure in passing this judgment, but its one of the most tedious books I’ve ever read. The prose was so turgid and impenetrable that it disappeared into some kind of academic black hole. The only good thing about his book was that it served as a surprisingly good cure for sleeplessness- I know because it worked for me. Merely finishing the book required me to draw on reserves of courage and patience I didn’t know I had in me. The poor prose was matched by insights of such dense academic contortions that it was virtually impossible to make head or tail of what he was trying to say. In light of that, I don’t have high hopes for Mamdani’s next venture. This time, he is tackling the Darfur crisis with the release of his new book Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror. I haven’t read the book and I’m unlikely to do so in the near future, but I did stumble on an interview Mamdani had with Guernica magazine in which he elucidated the arguments he set forth in the book. Having read that interview, I find myself quite disturbed by many of Mamdani’s views on the conflict. For starters Mamdani’s assertion that the Darfur conflict as an historical narrative seems wrong. I’ve seen and read plenty of media reports about Darfur that place the atrocities in that context. He repeatedly returns to the way the conflict is presented as a ‘narrative’ and he discusses its’ narrative structure but this says nothing about the truth of those events. Mamdani is implying that the media narrative is hiding some bigger truth but this is misguided. Ultimately, serious atrocities have been committed and dwelling on media narratives doesn’t change that fact at all. Indeed it does the opposite- it ends up minimizing the shocking events that have occurred. Another of Mamdani’s central contentions is that Darfur was not genocide because it was a conflict over land which became a conflict over power. Yet this ignores the fact that the conflict has indeed been driven by racial hatred by those carrying out the killings. Unless Mamdani is accusing the victims and the media of lying, it is evident that such hatred has been a driving component in the killings. Even if we accept his argument that the conflict is driven by power and land, that doesn’t negate the possibility of the killings being a genocide. It is entirely possible for those factors to go hand-in-hand. The desire for power or land can be the drive behind an attempt to eliminate an entire people. Mamdani also challenges the general consensus on the number of people killed in the conflict insisting that the numbers have been greatly exaggerated. He notes that the killings slowed in late 2004 and grudgingly gives the ‘Save Darfur’ coalition some credit for the publicity which may have led to the decline. Somewhat bizarrely, he then attacks them for not acknowledging the decline. He stresses that they should have used the decline as an opportunity for political settlement. In this vein, he is scornful of any ideas of external involvement insisting that the decline in killings was an opportunity for an internal solution. It is almost touchingly naïve to imagine how an ‘internal solution’ could be achieved with the same people who have engineered the mass slaughter. What this does of course is once again bury the key issues-the death of hundreds of thousands of people- with statistical haggling and impractical solutions. It also blocks any debate on justice. Once this ‘internal’ solution has been achieved, what role is justice supposed to play? Mamdani also sees the ‘Save Darfur’ movement as being a manifestation of the energy that went into the ‘stop the Iraq war’ coalition. He argues that the coalition was more of a celebrity-driven vehicle than a genuine mass movement and didn’t attempt to reach out to scholars. Mamdani’s view of the coalition as a bunch of misguided do-gooders is a laughable caricature. In suggesting that they were responding to a flashy advertising campaign rather than the actual horror of mass killings, he also makes an attack on the genuine moral outrage that so many people had and the expertise that was within that movement. Mamdani attempts to strengthen his argument by asking why the International Court of Justice doesn’t indict American officials for the excesses. That is an interesting discussion, but one that shouldn’t be inextricably tied to discussions on Darfur. It doesn’t change anything about the mass slaughter that has occurred and it doesn’t say anything constructive in the debate about the quest to bring Darfur’s killers to justice. Ultimately Mamdani’s views reveal some of the deficiencies with academia. Occasionally, it completely departs from real-life and exists on a completely different level- one of abstraction and rhetoric. In claiming to be bringing sophistication and clarity to the Darfur discourse, Mamdani does the very opposite. minega_isibo@yahoo.co.uk