“What’s in a name?” William Shakespeare once asked in Romeo and Juliet before concluding: “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.” The point is the name doesn’t matter more than the quality of something.
But what if the name is Ukraine? Or, say, Vladimir Putin? Then the name is everything. War might even be necessary, if you disagree. Some will call it war, but Putin might decide it’s a “special military operation”.
The idea of Russia being in a war with Ukraine is, well, revolting, if you’re Putin. So it’s a special operation around which “a hostile anti-Russia is being created on our historical lands” bordering Russia.
But, again, what’s with borders? Borders have, historically, spawned wars without end. Forget Russia and Ukraine, for a second, and look at the ruins that are the Middle East and how Palestinians and Israelis have used the same language of historical lands — or ancestral home — to justify killing each other. How long have they been at it?
Today, children grow up filled with hatred for one or the other because they don’t have to read about histories of violent conflict — they have either witnessed it or they are without parents, siblings or family because they have been bombed out of existence. As they say, violence then begets even more violence. And, for hundreds of years, there has not been peace between Palestine and Israel, all because they’re, in essence, fighting over a piece of land. A small piece, at that.
The borders between SA and Botswana or Zimbabwe or Mozambique are laden with examples of how some families are made to belong to different countries when they are, in fact, one.
Meanwhile, in Africa, some borders are nothing more than picket fences, an idea of separation between people who are anything but apart. The borders between SA and Botswana or Zimbabwe or Mozambique are laden with examples of how some families are made to belong to different countries when they are, in fact, one. The historical explanation is to be found in the Berlin conference of 1885, attended by war mongers of Europe who were splicing Africa and deciding which colonial powerhouse would control which part, leading to the so-called Francophones, Anglophones and Portuguese-inspired colonialism. This, in part, is why African borders are straight and weird because the drawers did not take into consideration occupiers of the land. This is why some Tswana speakers are in North West in SA while others are in Botswana, to state one example. In the end, we are of the same lineage.
This is why it makes a mockery of some so-called Africanists who, armed with microphones, shout that undocumented Africans must go back to their homes, homes that were decided in Berlin. And they, because of some accident of history, belong in the south of some borders drawn up for them, and that guarantees them the privilege of being South Africans. But the point is that borders have and continue to be a source of much pain and have just, sadly, gifted us Europe’s latest war.
And Europe doesn’t take kindly to its wars. It’s easy to fight wars and drop bombs in Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa and elsewhere. “The first bomb ever dropped from an aeroplane was Italian, and it exploded on November 1 1911 in an oasis outside Tripoli in North Africa,” writes Mahmood Mamdani in the book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.
But when the guns and bombs are unleashed on Europeans by Europeans, it’s unforgivable. Mamdani, in his assessment of the post-9/11 response to terror in the US, traces “modernity and violence” to Aime Cesaire’s observation that “European bourgeois cannot forgive Hitler for the fact that he applied to Europe the colonial practices that had previously been applied only to the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the Negroes of Africa”.
He says, however, “a Hitler slumbers within the very distinguished, very humanistic and very Christian bourgeois of the 20th century”. As Putin turns guns on people who look like him, he does so knowing that a war-weary America has just suffered an undignified withdrawal from Afghanistan. But he is not confused on whether he will be fought with everything available.
In response to the Russia-Ukraine war, Kenyan UN ambassador Martin Kimani told the UN Security Council on Monday: “This situation echoes our history. Our borders were not our own drawing. At independence, had we chosen to pursue states on the basis of ethnic, racial or religious homogeneity, we would still be waging bloody wars ... decades later. Instead, we agreed that we would settle for these borders that we inherited, but we would still pursue continental political, economic and legal integration. Rather than form nations that looked ever backward into history with dangerous nostalgia, we chose to look forward to a greatness none of our many nations and people had ever known.”
In his own way, Kimani was saying that the fact that some racists sitting in Berlin decided that Libya must have straight lines for borders or that those of us north or south of the Limpopo river belong to different countries, we, as Africans, know who we are. That Shakespearean logic is timeless: “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.” Africans, north or south of Limpopo, are still Africans.
Borders are, after all, primary identifiers. Those who drew Africa’s borders and those who took the decision to accept colonial borders for purposes of peaceful existence have now, through action or omission, declared some Africans targets of xenophobic actions like Operation Dudula. As Russian forces invaded Ukraine on Thursday, displacing thousands, in SA borders have redefined people’s identities and rendered them less than. They may use Kimani’s logic and say they’re Africans being chased by other Africans in Joburg, and that doesn’t make them any less African because some are xenophobic.
For Putin though, this won’t cut it. He might, perhaps correctly, argue that Africa’s so-called peaceful existence is a mirage, given the internecine wars over resources that have been raging for decades. The proxy wars in Burkina Faso, Mali and elsewhere in the form of sponsored military takeovers prove a lie to Kimani’s political and economic integration and his expressed aversion to history and “dangerous nostalgia”.
What, in the end, is in a name? Would you rather be peaceful and poor, even though your idea of peaceful is contested? Or be a rich warmonger with nuclear power in Moscow, dragging the entire world into a needless war right in the belly of Europe? A Hitler slumbers not in Putin. A modern Hitler is manifesting.
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