Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire
  • omnibus

The Silencing of Fred Dube
Abena Ampofoa Asare
24 Jan 2024
Fred Dube at a 1981 UN meeting, “South African Women and Labour under Apartheid.”
Fred Dube at a 1981 UN meeting, “South African Women and Labour under Apartheid.” Image: UN Photo

Forty years ago, the exiled South African activist dared to teach Zionism critically and he was subjected to a ferocious attack. The treatment he was subjected to is being repeated today.

Originally published in Boston Review.

At the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the syllabus for an Africana Studies summer course entitled The Politics of Race includes prompts for students in need of term paper guidance. The twelve optional topics are deliberately provocative: “Can a Christian or a democrat be a racist?” “I.Q. tests are a means for blaming the victim.” “Zionism is as much racism as Nazism was racism.” A historian visiting from Israel’s Ben-Gurion University complains that the latter topic, thus the course, thus the professor are examples of anti-Semitism. An uproar ensues.

This year is 1983. The professor under scrutiny is Ernest Frederick Dube, the South African anti-apartheid activist, Robben Island survivor, Cornell-trained psychologist, husband, and father. Branded as an anti-Semite, he will be gone from the Stony Brook campus by 1987.

When I began teaching at Stony Brook, my colleagues in Africana Studies told me Dube’s story in different ways. Each time, I understood the lesson: the politics of Israel-Palestine are cordoned-off; they are an arena where you dare not tread. Even when, like Dube, your faculty peers support you, students lead protests against your dismissal, and you are a hero of the South African anti-apartheid movement, you may still end up losing your home and position.

Read the entire essay here.

 

Abena Asare is Associate Professor of Modern African Affairs at Stony Brook University. She is author of Truth Without Reconciliation: A Human Rights History of Ghana and When Will the Joy Come: Black Women in the Ivory Tower.

South Africa
Israel
Zionism
Academia

Do you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles. Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can.


Related Stories

Jon Jeter
Fleeing Imaginary Persecution at Home, South African ‘Refugees’ May Find the Grass is Not Greener in America
14 May 2025
The Trump administration’s decision to fast-track asylum for white South Africans—claiming "persecution"—is a political stunt, ignoring that th
Editors, The Black Agenda Review
ESSAY: White Racism and Black Consciousness, Stephen Bantu Biko, 1971
12 February 2025
Steve Biko long ago diagnosed the pathological cruelty and rot of whi
Jon Jeter
Landless and Poor, Black South Africans Say they will Defy Trump and Move Ahead, Finally, with Land Reform
12 February 2025
A torrent of false and racist claims culminated in a presidential executive order suspending any aid to South Africa.
Abayomi Azikiwe, Black Agenda Report Contributor
Namibia Blocks Vessel Carrying Explosives to Israel
04 September 2024
The ruling SWAPO party says it is upholding international law.
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
The Victims’ Pact: Rwanda and Israel
31 July 2024
Rwanda weaponizes the Rwandan Genocide to justify its vio
Irvin Jim, NUMSA General Secretary
NUMSA Statement on the National Elections Results and Coalitions
19 June 2024
With its recent historic loss of the Parliament majority, the African National Congress has formed a coalition with the Democratic Alliance, he
Qaanitah Hunter
Will South Africa’s new Coalition Government Change Tack on Israel-Palestine?
19 June 2024
While the new government includes parties neutral about Israel’s war on Gaza, ANC insists it will still support Palestine.
OAU flag
Editors, The Black Agenda Review
RESOLUTION: The Question of Palestine, Organization of African Unity, 1975
08 May 2024
Looking back at a time when African states acknowledged their shared anti-colonial struggle with Palestine and rebuked zionism for the white su
President Hage G. Geingob of the Republic of Namibia addresses the seventy-third session of the United Nations General Assembly.
Presidency of the Republic of Namibia
Namibia Rejects Germany’s Support of the Genocidal Intent of the Racist Israeli State Against Innocent Civilians in Gaza
17 January 2024
Namibia issues a statement in response to Germany's declaration of support of Israel during the hearing at the International Court of Justice a
 Biden is welcomed by Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu, as he visits Israel amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Tel Aviv, Israel, October 18, 2023. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Bryan K. Bullock
Zionist Joe
20 December 2023
Joe Biden's several decades in political office have proved him consistent in his depraved indifference toward the suffering of oppressed peopl

More Stories


  • Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    Biden's Fate and Israel's Sadistic Revenge
    21 May 2025
    Israel is starving Gazans to death and continuing its bombing attacks on civilians. Israel also specializes in personal revenge, targeting men, women, and children who might be the subject of…
  • Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    ESSAY: Towards Lasting Peace, Shirley Graham DuBois, 1970
    21 May 2025
    Shirley Graham Du Bois on the liberation of Palestine.
  • Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    Propaganda Watch: Kagame Is Not Traoré
    21 May 2025
    A recurring social media trope casts Rwandan President Paul Kagame as a defiant African hero, like Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traoré, resisting the West’s dictates, but nothing could be further from the…
  • Jon Jeter
    In DC, A New ‘Mayor 1 Percent” This Time in Blackface
    21 May 2025
    Muriel Bowser is proving that Black faces in high places don’t break systems, they grease them. While slashing wages for tipped workers and handing billionaires stadium deals, D.C.’s mayor is the…
  • Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright
    Temerity, Tartuffery, and Toxic Identity Reductionism…the Latest Democrat Party Hoggwash
    21 May 2025
    The Democratic Party would rather silence critics like Hogg than fix its own rot. Their reliance on Black Misleaders to do the dirty work exposes once again that the Democrats care more about power…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us