Once upon a time, the Holocaust mattered to Africans. While Germans rampaged through North Africa, African newspaper editors saw Nazi atrocities as yet another argument against the so-called civilizing benefits of Western colonialism. African nations tried to prevent their Jewish residents from being hauled off to camps, some of which became synonymous in the native language with the word for hell. Then came the struggles of African independence and the 1967 Six-Day War, after which many African nations broke off relations with Israel, and interest in the Holocaust all but disappeared. But last week, a new generation of African scholars did something extraordinary: They held a conference to talk about the Holocaust again.