Lwazi Lushaba and his Hitler analogy: The cul-de-sacs and conundrums of ‘competitive memory’

It was recently reported in the Sunday Times that Dr Lwazi Lushaba told first-year University of Cape Town political science students in an online lecture that Hitler “committed no crime” because “all Hitler did was to do to the white people what white people had normally reserved for black people”. 

This article, which came out the day before Holocaust Memorial Day or Yom HaShoah, created consternation on social media and was seen by some to be yet another antisemitic expression of Holocaust denial.

After reading this account, I listened to the online lecture, which has been posted on Facebook, and it became very clear that the broader context of Dr Lushaba’s lecture had been ignored in the Sunday Times article. In fact, apart from a systematic contextualisation of the lecture by journalist Chris Roper, most media reporting on the statement did not in any way clarify the broader context of the lecture. As Roper notes, the reporting and social media reactions were based on 12 seconds of a 55-minute video lecture.

In an SAfm radio interview on 12 April, Dr Lushaba claimed that the Sunday Times journalist did not understand the academic context within which these statements were made. As Roper indicates, the wider context of the lecture, and the logic of Dr Lushaba’s overall argument, do not in any way support Holocaust denial, and he certainly does not seek to argue that Hitler and the Nazis committed no crime in their acts of genocidal violence.

Instead, the lecture is a critical reflection of the racial blind spots of his discipline of political science, and why it was only after the Holocaust that genocide came to be recognised by scholars and human rights lawyers as a crime against humanity. 

In my response below, I focus on another aspect of the broader academic context of the argument developed in Dr Lushaba’s lecture. I do this in the spirit of public dialogue and mutual respect for each other’s pain in the wake of histories of violence and trauma.

In the lecture, Dr Lushaba makes an argument about colonialism and the Holocaust that resonates with the ideas of Aimé Césaire, the anti-Fascist Francophone and Martinican poet, Afro-Caribbean author, politician and co-founder of the négritude movement in Francophone literature [Aimé Césaire, Discourse of Colonialism (Discours sur le colonialisme), Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955].

Dr Lushaba’s seeming extrapolation from Césaire’s 1955 essay, Discourse on Colonialism, suggests that the international human rights community only really took notice when white people (Germans) went about killing other white people (Jews). 

As he notes in the lecture, events such as the 1921 Bulhoek Massacre in the Eastern Cape, in which 163 members of Enoch Mgijima’s Israelites breakaway church were killed by South African police during a protest, and the Herero and Nama genocide (1904-1907), were not regarded as crimes against humanity. 

He asserted that these massacres did not draw the same kind of international condemnation because in these cases “black people were being killed by white people”. As he concludes in the lecture, “we should not privilege one massacre over the other”.

A number of Facebook responses were outraged by Dr Lushaba’s apparent trivialisation of the Holocaust by describing it to first-year students as merely an example of “white people killing other white people”. 

As the son of a German Jewish refugee whose parents and siblings were murdered in Auschwitz and Riga, I too was deeply hurt and angry when I initially read about the Holocaust being referred to as just an example of “white people killing other white people”. This was especially problematic to me as there is so much literature on the extreme racialisation and dehumanisation of European Jews during the Nazi era. 

Yet, upon listening to the lecture in its entirety, it is clear that Dr Lushaba’s argument is certainly not about Holocaust denial. In fact, the lecture raises substantive issues about the relationship between the Holocaust and black histories of colonial violence that are certainly worthy of academic and public debate.

Césaire was one of the key black intellectuals of the 20th century who sought to address the relationship between Nazism and colonialism. Césaire, who was anti-Fascist to the core, argued that Nazism was made possible by the normalisation of colonial violence and what he referred to as the “barbarism of colonialism”. (University of the Western Cape anthropologist Heike Becker initiated an interesting Facebook discussion on the problems with Dr Lushaba’s loose borrowing from the ideas of Césaire.)

For Césaire, Hitler’s rise to power was itself a product of the Western, Christian bourgeois culture of the 20th century. He adds that Nazism was not an exception in European history, but instead the result of a civilisation that justified colonisation without acknowledging the threat this posed towards creating the very conditions for Nazi savagery.

Dr Lushaba correctly calls attention to the erasure of black histories of colonial violence and contrasts this with the centrality in the public sphere of the history of the Holocaust. He is of course not the first to be caught up in controversy concerning comments on the relationship of the Holocaust to black historical experience of slavery, colonialism and apartheid. 

It is worthwhile considering another relatively recent example of this involving Black First Land First (BLF) activist, Andile Mngxitama. Although the content and circumstances of Mngxitima’s intervention differ quite significantly from the current debate surrounding Dr Lushaba, it provides a window on to how public debates and reactions on the relationship between the Holocaust and black historical experiences of colonial violence have unfolded in recent years in South Africa.

In August 2017, Mngxitama tweeted that the Holocaust was experienced by “white people” (ie, European Jews) for a mere moment, while black people had experienced five centuries of suffering. Mngxitama articulates a position that pits Jewish and black histories of collective suffering in direct competition with each other and insists that the centuries of suffering of the “black holocaust” have been ignored. He also positions Jews as simply “white people” who were, and are, complicit in colonialism, apartheid and the repression of Palestinians.

What this position implies is that Jews were/are not the “real victims”, and only black people can occupy that position by virtue of centuries of suffering. He also seems to imply that a massive international Holocaust memorial culture is responsible for erasing histories of black suffering. From this perspective, the status of Jews as white, middle class and connected to a powerful Israeli state that represses Palestinians negates their capacity to claim any relationship to a history of victimhood compared with the ongoing legacies of centuries of black suffering.

Some may argue that these kinds of perceptions are reinforced by an influential and well-resourced US and European-centred Holocaust memorial culture — of museums, memorials, films, theatre and books — that insists upon the historically unique character of the Holocaust, thereby rendering it incomparable with any other histories of genocide and violence.

Surely it is possible to acknowledge the traumatic histories of the Holocaust while simultaneously calling for more recognition of histories of systemic racism in South Africa and elsewhere? 

Given recent South African debates on the relationship between the Holocaust and black historical experiences of colonial and racial violence, it seems to me that a zero-sum competition is both an intellectual and political cul-de-sac.