Nairobi — An appreciation of history is necessary to understanding today's and future humanitarian crises.
One hundred and forty years ago, representatives from nearly all the countries of Europe as well as from the United States gathered in Berlin for 15 weeks to deliberate on the rules for what became known as the Scramble for Africa.
Held from November 1884 to February 1885, it was an event that no African representatives were permitted to attend, and where the rights and sovereignties of African peoples were subjugated to European greed for their land and resources.
The Berlin West Africa Conference, as it was formally known, clothed itself in the garb of humanitarianism even as it legitimised conquest and dispossession. It culminated in the adoption of a General Act, which, among other things, declared the "concern" of the assembly of thieves "as to the means of furthering the moral and material wellbeing of the native populations".
The anniversary will pass largely unnoticed, though it should be of import for journalists trying to help audiences understand the roots of today's interminable conflicts and humanitarian crises on the continent. There is a tendency to dehistoricise these and to essentialise them as peculiarities born of the inscrutable "African" condition.
Yet the remaking of the continent to fit the imagination of Europe had devastating and long-lasting effects, many of which are still being felt today. It eviscerated Indigenous political, economic, and social structures across the continent, destroyed and re-created and hardened identities through divide and rule, invented traditions for the natives even as it cut them off from - and robbed them of - their past.
It is no wonder that the shattered, manufactured countries that emerged from that traumatic experience umbilically tied to colonial masters have struggled to cope with the global political and environmental upheavals since, not to mention the congenital diseases such as corruption and tribalism that were the gift of their colonial heritage.
None of this is to undermine the agency of Africans, but rather it is to understand that agency is exercised and influenced by the context within which it is practised, and that agency does not always presuppose free choices.
In Kenya, for example, the British created 41 administrative districts, from which, out of a hodge-podge of hundreds of fluid ethnicities, emerged 42 "tribes", each with a colonially generated "ancient" history of non-stop feuding with its neighbours.
It is similarly difficult to understand the horrific trajectory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo without reference to its occupation by Belgium, including the unmitigated and genocidal horror that was the Congo Free State that emerged from the Berlin Conference.
And it is not just in Africa that an appreciation of history is necessary to understanding crises.
In the Caribbean, Haiti's chronic problems can be traced to its creation as a slave colony, the "debt" its people were forced to pay to France for winning their freedom, and the multiple invasions and robberies perpetrated by the United States.
Across the world, wherever one encounters a humanitarian crisis, it would be useful to remember that these are almost never discrete events that can be neatly divorced from historical circumstances. It is these circumstances that help explain what is a key criterion of humanitarian crises: vulnerability.
In a previous Decolonise How? column, I highlighted the need for journalists to be "careful, thoughtful, consistent, and open about how they employ humanitarian language and what they mean by it".
At The New Humanitarian, an internal working group has proposed defining a humanitarian crisis as occurring when "over time, a community's capacity to cope with human, physical, economic, or environmental challenges is progressively and severely undermined or overwhelmed by local and/or global policy factors". The idea is not just to focus on how events impact and immiserate large numbers of people, but to bring to mind why the vulnerability exists in the first place.
Historically, reporting on crises has tended to construct a bifurcated and ultimately false version of the world, characterised by Western competence and non-Western precarity. But there is rarely much journalistic headspace devoted to inquiring about the causes of such precarity - it is almost taken as the natural order of things that Africans will starve, West Asians will fight, and the banana republics of Latin America will oppress. The reasons why these situations arose and became prevalent in certain geographies and not others are too often dismissed as the realm of history.
Understanding that history not only allows journalists to begin to confront the racially and geographically deterministic mindsets they have imbibed - why did the deaths of over a million Americans from COVID, for example, not constitute a complex humanitarian emergency - hopefully leading not only to more consistent use of language, but also to an interrogation of what a valid humanitarian response is.
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Is it one that addresses the symptoms but allows the precarity to persist? If African hunger is not the natural order of things, in what sense would a response that provides food aid to Sudan but leaves the reason for that hunger intact and unaddressed be considered humanitarian? Or, to take a current example, would US provision of food aid to Palestinians in Gaza while continuing to provide Israel with the means to carry out a genocide against them meet a threshold of "humanitarian action"? Would demanding a ceasefire that pauses the horrific bombardment of Palestinians today but leaves intact the occupation and oppression that guarantees future resistance and massacres be a humanitarian undertaking?
William Faulkner once said: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Former University of Texas historian Joan Neuberger explained that "it reflects the belief that historical events continue to shape the present in myriad ways and [a commitment] to encouraging people to think about the past as alive in the present". This is advice that humanitarian journalists should take to heart.
Please send thoughts and critiques to [email protected].
