The world isn’t watching: conclusion

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Apart from her willingness to ask urgent, probing questions, what I especially value about Sholgami’s work is her interest in the work of public intellectuals who write about the structure of thought and the way this helps manage or mismanage societal development.

(This topic is crucial, too, to Dipo Faloyin’s Africa is Not a Country, reviewed by me in these pages some weeks ago, except that Faloyin doesn’t explicitly make use of the scholarship).

I made mention last week of Sholgami’s reference to the work of Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe. She draws, too, upon the work of American feminist Judith Butler, author of Gender Trouble. Especially relevant to Sholgami is Butler’s work on “grievability.”

Sholgami shows how Butler “argues that some lives are more grievable and hold more value than others. Ungrievable lives, in her definition, are lives that can’t be lost or destroyed because they already inhabit a lost or destroyed zone” (for which, read Sudan).

Also from the USA is W E B du Bois, author of The Souls of Black Folks and the intellectual who developed the concept of “double consciousness”, the lethal state-of-mind that occurs when an oppressed population, such as black Americans coming through and out of enslavement, looks upon themselves through the eyes of the oppressor (for example, “I’ll survive if I become like Whitey”).

And there is French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, whose Archaeology of Knowledge is one of the works that has most influenced my own thinking, formidably difficult though it is to read—a book that explores the idea that all knowledge comes from a specific time and a specific place and should be assessed accordingly (in other words, like much of Karl Marx’s writing, it is a work on the relationship between knowledge and power).

Sholgami observes: “Foucault explains that the body is a ‘political field’—in the context, the reaction to the body’s struggle is destined by the current systemic notions of power. Due to imperial influences, the subconscious mind is programmed to associate violence, poverty, and instability with black and Muslim bodies, reducing the power [to shock] of this violence.”

It is partly through her insights into the work of public intellectuals such as Mbembe, Butler, du Bois, and Foucault—but chiefly through her own not inconsiderable intellect—that Sholgami marshals her power to shock and to generate empathy. Her power is to get the world to wake up to the suffering taking place in Sudan and to look at this through eyes that are not tainted by false consciousness.

Chris Dunton is a former Professor of English and Dean of Humanities at the National University of Lesotho.