IMRAAN BUCCUS: Africans can think for themselves, thank you

There has been a kerfuffle in academic circles about an article by Stellenbosch professor Herman Wasserman and two co-authors that was published in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research and summarised by The Conversation. Academic WhatsApp networks have been buzzing.

The article is on Russian and Chinese disinformation in Africa. There is no doubt that the Russian and Chinese states, like the remaining European powers and the US, try to shape narratives in Africa and around the world. Israel does the same. Critical studies on this are important.

We need to know how powerful states try to influence public discourse and understanding, to be able to engage critically with all attempts by these states to shape public opinion. This work must be even-handed and guided by empirical evidence. 

When the Russian state makes statements or tries to build arguments that are not credible they must be carefully interrogated. We should look carefully at the claims in these statements and arguments, as well as how they are dispersed. The same standard must be applied to the US, and to all of the states competing for global influence.

It is a problem, though, when concern about “fake news”, “disinformation” or “propaganda” is applied only to one side in the new Cold War. To claim or to imply that it is only Russia or China that engage in what are sometimes called the “dark art” of spinning global narratives is to forsake a rational, critical, evidence-based position for a partisan position. A partisan position is, by definition, not a credible position.

One cannot credibly claim or suggest that it is only Russia and China that are trying to win influence in Africa. This is precisely what Wasserman implied in a controversial opinion piece in the Daily Maverick last year. That piece made no mention of the ways in which countries such as France, the US and Israel have also tried to influence opinion in Africa and elsewhere. It was not the work of an independent critical intellectual.

The bias of that piece was largely expressed in the form of omission, simply leaving out the attempts of the West and Israel to shape opinion, thereby creating the impression that it is only Russia and China that engage in the dark arts.

The new piece is even more alarming. Wasserman and his co-authors explain that their methodology was to ask African respondents if statements identified as Russian disinformation were true, and where respondents agreed with the statements to conclude that this was evidence of the respondents having been duped by Russian disinformation.

They grudgingly mention that France has tried to shape narratives, perhaps in response to the criticism of Wasserman’s Daily Maverick piece, but do not explore this any further.

The first statement presented to African respondents as a test of their susceptibility to Russian propaganda was as follows: “The war in Ukraine is a consequence of Nato’s expansion in Eastern Europe.”

The problem here is obvious. Numerous people and organisations that are critical of Putin take the position, informed by evidence, that the war was provoked, in full or in part, by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (Nato’s) expansion.

Holding this view in no way means one endorses the invasion by Putin’s regime. Explanation, as first-year students of politics are told, is not the same thing as justification.

Ultimately, none of us has access to Putin’s mind and none of us will ever have certain knowledge about his motivation for invading Ukraine, something every decent person opposes. All we can do is base our conclusions on the available evidence.

Before the war there was a wide range of people who, after having examined the evidence, concluded that expanding Nato to the point at which Putin felt encircled would risk war. Among them were prominent US academics and people with powerful positions in the US state.

In 1995 Anthony Lake, then US president Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, warned the president that expanding Nato eastward would not be accepted by Russia and would pose grave risks. 

In 1997 Dennis Ross, then a senior state department official, issued a similar warning to then deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott. In 2022 The Conversation headlined an article “Ukraine war follows decades of warnings that Nato expansion into Eastern Europe could provoke Russia”. 

A few months ago George Beebe of the US foreign policy think-tank The Quincy Institute said that “US officials clearly have long understood the depth of Moscow’s objections to Nato’s eastward expansion, going back to the Gorbachev era. Today Russia... is resolved to block Nato’s incorporation of Ukraine and Georgia by whatever means necessary”.

Many of the best academics in the US, such as the celebrated political scientist John Mearsheimer, took the same view. In the same year a headline in The Guardian declared that “Many predicted Nato expansion would lead to war. Those warnings were ignored”.

How can it be that a view held by many leading academics and journalists in the West, and powerful people in the US state, suddenly becomes a matter of being duped by Russian propaganda when Africans hold the same view?

Wasserman and his co-authors are treating Africans like children. They are also using a conspiracy theory to explain why many African people hold a perfectly ordinary view, one widely held by serious people in the West. 

Wasserman and his co-authors have not tried to turn a thought, a rational, evidence-based and quite possibly factually accurate thought, into a thought crime. But they have misrepresented the many decent and well-informed people who hold that thought as dupes of the propaganda of a foreign state.

If this clearly bogus claim were to be accepted we would be in a situation where anyone who differed with the official views of the Western powers would have their integrity, intelligence and credibility called into account. This is a direct attack on rational conversation, an attack aligned with the Western practice of the dark arts.

Academic journal articles are supposed to be based on a carefully peer reviewed rigorous engagement with evidence, to avoid obvious flaws in their logic and factual claims. The article by Wasserman and his co-authors fails that test in a shockingly crude way. Serious questions need to be asked of the editorial processes at the International Journal of Public Opinion Research.

We as Africans need to defend our right to think for ourselves and to think independently of all the major powers competing for global influence. For our thought to be credible it must be based on logic and evidence. To demand that we abandon our autonomy and take an uncritical position in support of any player in the current version of the great power game is a dereliction of academic duty.

Putin and his regime are odious. The invasion of Ukraine is an ongoing criminal act. But the same was true of George Bush’s invasion of Iraq and the war crimes committed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s forces in Gaza. Africans have every right to be critical of all of these states, and should not be misrepresented as dupes of propaganda when we hold views that contradict those of Western states.

• Buccus is a political analyst.