From: Christopher Rhoades Dykema <crdbronx at erols.com> To: "LBO-TALK" <owner-lbo-talk-digest at lists.panix.com> Subject: FW: boycotts Of South Africans and, now, Israelis Date: Sun, 14 Jul 2002 21:59:21 -0400
I wrote to Chris Lowe, who is an Africanist, and very well informed on events there in the more and less recent past, to ask about the boycotts of South Africa in the eighties. This is what he wrote.
Christopher Rhoades Dykema
-----Original Message----- From: Chris Lowe [mailto:clowe at igc.org] Sent: Saturday, July 13, 2002 03:11 AM To: Christopher Rhoades Dykema Subject: Re: boycotts
The ANC called for a complete cultural boycott of South Africa, including an academic boycott, to variable effect. It was especially an American thing, I think, in certain parts of left academia. There were people who went to Botswana or Lesotho or various "frontline states" but wouldn't go to S.A. Occasionally there were efforts to exclude S.A. scholars from professional meetings in the U.S., not much traction on that as far as I know. When I was in grad school in the 1980s, there was a definite alienation among Southern Africanists, at least in the Northeast, between the network of boycott supporters, and those who ignored it. I was a student of one of the latter, although my politics were much further left than his.
A lot of British leftist academics (and S.A. expats) took a different tack. Some of them played a significant role in helping to launch the independent (and initially illegal) black trade union movement; more generally in helping to foster the growth of radical anti-apartheid thinking among white academics and students (often highly critical of South African "liberalism" such as it was). In the U.S. expat S.A. liberals who left S.A. when the government enforced total segregation on the historically white Anglophone universities that admitted a small number of blacks, or as the police state developed in the 1960s, along some of their American counterparts, ignored the boycott, in the interest of documenting apartheid and supporting S.A. liberals. Conservatives ignored it because they saw S.A. as a cold war ally.
In a sense there was a boycott among the boycott breakers, in terms of making distinctions among S.A. academics who supported the regime, and those who did not, and increasingly in the 1980s, those who might be persuaded.
After the "Soweto" (actually nationwide) rebellion of 1977-78, and even more after the rise of the independent unions and the formation of the pro-ANC internal United Democratic Front in the early 1980s, it is my belief that the academic boycott lost whatever intellectual coherence it might have had. It was fetishized to a degree in the U.S. because the main anti-apartheid organizations were so closely involved with the ANC U.N. delegation, I think. I believed and believe that the proper course was to find forms of solidarity and support for the growing internal opposition.
The sports boycott had a much bigger impact.
I do have to say as a white boycott buster that there definitely were ethically uncomfortable aspects of living as a white within the apartheid structures. On the other hand, it was pretty illuminating for comparisons to the U.S. at times, and I am not sure it would be that different to be a U.S. scholar living in a lot of countries, in ethical terms.
An academic boycott of Israel strikes me as likely to be ineffective and counter-productive. Far better to seek solidarity with anti-occupation academics and support them, and to create pressures for Israeli scholars to support the rights of Israeli Arab and Palestinian universities, scholars and students.
I feel nearly hopeless about the situation, but it seems to me that part of what is needed, terribly desperately, is new thinking. The proper role of intellectuals here is, insofar as possible, to seek to facilitate that thinking, among Jewish Israeli, Arab Israeli, Palestinian, and other Arab thinkers. We also need to concentrate on giving support to those on the Palestinian side who oppose the immoral, abhorrent, ineffective and counter-productive suicide bombing tactics, so as to re-open the space for critique of the occupation that does not imply support for attacking civilians. A boycott would only be partial, would isolate the anti-occupation forces in Israel still further. It would be entirely ignored by the Israel-is-always-right forces here, who would be supporting reactionary and regressive politics and policies there.
best, Chris