Ukraine: What should Africa do?

If the world had not grown into one big ball that is electrically charged with powerful economic, military, and political forces the war in Ukraine would be none of Africa’s business. That there is a world system of which Africa is part, and this world system is a volatile geopolitical sphere that Africa cannot escape from, necessitates that Africans ponder what to do when a war breaks out and appears to be escalating in one part of the world.

With what influence or power Africa can intervene, what the political weight of Africa’s intervention would be, that is another question. The present issue is that Africa is involved already because the continent is a significant part of world history, world geography, and the world economy and polity. For that reason, I think they are a joke, the many political analysts who made jokes out of the delegation of African heads of state that went to Russia and Ukraine to conduct a situation analysis and to add the voice of Africa to the pleas for peace in Ukraine and Russia where many innocent lives are being lost, infrastructure decimated and the environment polluted at an alarming scale. Before we delve into the political actions and interventions that Africa can make it might be important to think about how Africa should see, think about, and experience the war in Ukraine. Standing on African soil with the whole history of Africa behind us, dressed in our experience of the world and world politics what should we see in what is happening in Ukraine? Pleading innocence and pledging neutrality might not only be cowardly but also irresponsible as I think that Africa has a lot to teach the world, especially about war and victimhood. We must bid farewell to political innocence and get involved in helping humanity survive.

This war has been long in coming but clear to all who cared to look. Russian fears of being surrounded and engulfed by NATO are many decades old, they are fears inherited from the Soviet Union. NATO ambitions of spreading to the East, introducing the Western version of democracy that side and expanding economic, political, and military influence are also old desires that have not been hidden to anyone one who cared to look. What has happened is that old politics have degenerated into a new war. A war that the belligerents seem unable to pull out from. What we daily observe is an escalation in this war of fears and desires. This stalemate is different in detail and location but in all ways, it is the same with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

How to think about Ukraine
I believe that Africa should not buy into dogmas of acceptability, respectability, and sensibleness in looking at the escalating war in Ukraine. Being African in Africa should at least permit us some independence of sight and thought to reject imposed views and senses of what is right and wrong. Not for Africa, even, should be the cowardice of non-alignment and neutrality. Africa should have the moral and political stamina to see and name this war for what it looks like from Africa and not as presented by either side of the warring parties.

The Americans, especially, should be the first ones to admit that Russia was provoked into this war. Observing the truth of Russian provocation is not a justification of the war but another description of it based on the signs and symbols that the war carries. American political analysts: most of them, frequently remind us of how an American and Americanist of note, George Kennan predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. What they are not in a hurry to remind us of is that Kennan emphatically pronounced, as early as 1948, that NATO should not attempt expansion into the former Soviet Republics, especially Ukraine. Kennan put it to America that such expansionism, such enlargement in that direction, will ignite another world war.

Recently, Pope Francis noted that NATO’s “barking at Russia’s door” is the cause of this war. This war was seen, known, and understood before it broke out in earnest in February 2022. The regime change in Ukraine in 2014, where a pro-Russian leader was toppled with the assistance of the USA was, perhaps, the first battle of this war.

It is politically profitless for Africa, or any African, to join the chorus on either side of this war that has been framed in terms of ultimate good versus ultimate evil, and vice-versa. An African eyes and mindset should allow us to see the failure in big powers to play the political game and to degenerate into the military game. It is poor political thought that has led to poor political action that has led to war. Poverty of politics leads to war; experience has taught the world. No need to cite the otherwise generic aphorism of Carl Von Clausewitz that “War is simply the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means.” The very political suggestion that one day, Ukraine could join NATO, was a declaration of war on Russia.

Western political analysts and some of their African followers, and echo chambers, are busy on that Russia started what it believed was going to be a war of few hours which has dragged on to near two years now. First Russia never said or showed any signs that it planned a blitzkrieg in Ukraine. The observers and the analysts are not keen to help us see how the vaunted counter-offensives have dismally neither been successfully counter- or effectively offensive. The NATO trained, paid, and equipped Ukrainian side has failed to defeat Russia in Ukraine, which is an unpopular but true observation in our Americanised world where to see and think is only done the American way. We have watched too many Rambo movies to understand that the USA has been a military flop, many times, in the real world.

Equally, it has been made common sense that this war is existential for Russia, losing it means the end of Russia and Vladimir Putin’s leadership as they are known. What we are prevented from seeing and understanding is that this war has become existential for the USA, more. The alleged amounts of money spent, quantities of big weapons extended, and political energy invested by the USA on this war means that the superpower can no longer be a peacemaker or accept Russian victory, without bringing the USA as we know it to an end. So, being Africans can allow us the stamina of view and perception to see that both warring parties in Ukraine are not winning even if they are not losing. Ukrainian battlefields have visibly become cemeteries of men, and some very modern and powerful weapons, vaunted tanks. If things worked mathematically and sensibly, in the present world, Africa should be telling both the warring parties to drop the weapons and return to politics, talk things out. The failure of political thinking and action by superpowers led to war, and now the failure of war should lead back to wise political thought and action, or an unfortunate escalation into a nuclear world war.
Africa: Against war

African philosophers, with no history of African military conquests and dominations of other continents, have understandably found shelter in preaching peace whenever the opportunity arises. The whole canon and archive of Ubuntu are about Africa teaching the world peace and generosity because, in world history, Africa has nothing to show concerning military might, conquest, colonialism and imperialism. We can only boast about long struggles of liberation from colonialism that were wars of resistance not aggression. It is for that reason that Africa can look at Ukraine and lose respect for superpowers, make unkind judgements, and recommend urgent political solutions to the war.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Sunnyside, Pretoria, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected].