The Humanitarian Misunderstanding: Fragmented States and the Privatization of Imperialism

Cilas Kemedjio

In the wake of massive starvations in Ethiopia two decades ago, singers from around the world came together to protest the tragedy. The popular song “We are the world” came out of this effort. We recall the Wembley megashow, organized by Bob Gedolf and broadcast around the world. French Singers, calling themselves Chanteurs sans frontières, [Singers Without Borders] alerted the French people to the plight of Ethiopian Children suffering from starvation. In another song entitled “Tam-tam pour l’Éthiopie,” [Drumming for Ethiopia] performed in French, English and many African languages by a group of African musicians assisted by Radio-France International, the starvation was deplored and aid was solicited, but the social and political conditions that brought about starvation were left unchallenged.

The New Humanitarianism assumes identification with defenseless victims, such as the starving children of Ethiopia. These defenseless victims constitute by themselves the visible presence of the “non-governed,” a living proof of the postcolonial state’s inability to carry out its basic responsibilities towards its citizens. The New Humanitarianism presents starvation as a fatality, a result of implacable droughts in a dry continent, a malediction of this accursed continent, rather than as a phenomenon attributable at least in part to human causes.  Looking at the human responsibility for starvation would have called for an ethical reading, which would require a challenging of our own position (political, social, etc.) with regard to the starvation, and challenge us to question choices that were made (good and bad) and that may have directly or indirectly contributed to the crisis. The critical investigation of both the starvation and the attendant responses (including the humanitarian one) becomes almost impossible when it is constructed as a curse that is outside of the realm of rationality. The Western humanitarian intervention then becomes either a blessing or a curse, a performance of compassionate international solidarity or a disguised performance of a “dying colonialism,” or rather, of a colonialism that refuses to die. The duty to examine critically humanitarian practice, rhetoric, and subsequent responses is justified only if it can help to bridge the misunderstandings that it generates.  For example, while Western activists tend to see NGOs intervention as a demonstration of generosity, postcolonial thinkers tend to suspect humanitarianism of being nothing more than “calculated philanthropy.” (Glissant 35).

But, the critical investigation of Western nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Africa has to acknowledge and cope with the awareness that these interventions do save lives, at least in the short term.  Along with Appiah, I wonder how much good it does to critically examine NGOs interventions in Africa when I am aware that “the real battle is not being fought within the academy” (Appiah 179). The analytical objections we raise about the New Humanitarianism should therefore “pale in the light” of the practical gains that may come out of its missions. However, maintaining silence “about its lies and myths” may not always be the best approach for, “we cannot change the world simply by evidence and reasoning, but we surely cannot change it without them either” (Appiah 179).

Elias Mandala notes that “the food crisis in Africa made it virtually impossible to think about Africa historically” (Mandala 9). We may follow on Mandala’s footsteps and suggest that repeating crises that trigger Western NGOS’ emergency interventions in Africa made it virtually impossible to think about NGOS critically. The failure of the postcolonial state (the failed state that creates the very concept of the non-governed) made it virtually impossible to think about the very concept of the African State critically in the rush to intervene and save lives. Both critics and proponents agree on the fact that NGOs stand in as representatives of the West. The stance taken by The Economist (“If a country’s government is too venal or incompetent to spend the money as specified, it must be told to allow non-governmental organizations to step in or to do without aid altogether.” (The Economist 14) can be read as a confirmation of Mandala’s view according to which NGOS are “the West’s consulates in this era of informal empire” (Mandala 231). These “consulates” are located in refugee camps, in war zones, in these spaces that are non-governed, ravaged with starvation, unending wars, massive exoduses, epidemics such as AIDS. As Rufin (a former director of Médecins sans frontières and current French ambassador in Dakar) writes, the terrain of intervention of humanitarian aid “is that multitude of conflicts of the jungle, of civil wars, of ethnic rebellions; it is those revolutions without victors and those invasions without victory. Humanitarian aid, in the entire third world, is the slow slithering of power.” (Rufin 72).

Médecins sans frontières started in 1971 during the Biafran war. France was trying to encourage Biafra’s independence, so that France could get more of a political foothold in the region. When Bernard Kouchner (the current French foreign minister and founder of Médecins sans frontières) came back from a trip to Biafra warning “There can be other Biafras,” the politics of international watchdog operations solidified and the New Humanitarianism was launched. Singers Without Borders—like its institutional radical, Doctors Without Borders, or its philosophical coefficient, Humanism Without Borders—may be interpreted as part of this newly minted mission humanitaire, mobilizing French intellectuals in search of a form of humanism that would cure the afflictions of Western capital.

By the mid-80s, the idealism born in the Third World fervor came under attack in France by critics like Bernard-Henri Levy, Alain Finkielkraut and the so-called Nouveaux philosophes who associated Marxist-inspired revolutions with the excesses of Stalinism, Castroism, and Maoism. The mission humanitaire, representing a new humanism dedicated to the protection of freedom and human rights and to the world wide fight against racism, arose from the ashes of revolutionary ideals forged in the Marxist-Leninist tradition. In its rediscovery of questions pertaining to ethics, minority franchise, legal proscriptions against atrocities and indiscriminate killings, and democracy politics, the New Humanitarianism implied a new way of thinking, a new modality of action that, at least in part, was designed to redeem French intellectuals and French institutions that had tarried with the Communist Party or become implicated in the politics of neocolonialism. Coming in the wake of Third World fervor (for which decolonization was a defining moment), the mission humanitaire was both an attempt to preserve the colonial order of things and a move to alleviate the harsh consequences of this same colonialism. It disguised the historical vacuum left by the demise of neocolonial states; that is, states weakened by privatization, decentralization, the dispersion of human resources, the dearth of expertise, and the democratization of dependency. In the wake of this demise, postmodern pedagogies and postimperial policies emerged (French youth collecting rice for the starving children of Somalia, learning imperialism at a young age). Local elites were converted into agents of postimperial policies (born-again believers in the redeeming power of western charity), and the politics of partnership was replaced by a politics of aid that bypassed the state its delivery of charity. In a sense, I am “for the state” only because it remains the only viable bargaining tool for postcolonial African peoples, the only unit with sufficient economic density in world politics to have political clout. Médecins sans frontières, Chanteurs sans frontières, “We are the world,” Oxfam, Save the Children,—these are the slogans of born-again Enlightenment, shattering the borders with charity, remaking old borders with old tactics and old amassed money through centuries-old injustice. Any attempt to study the concept of human rights will have to challenge the amnesia and arrogance displayed by a mission humanitaire that dissembles its resemblance to the mission civilisatrice.

Médecins sans frontières has managed to inscribe humanitarianism at the heart of diplomatic intervention. Former Médecins sans frontières cadres, such as Bernard Kouchner (one of the founding members), and Rufin (a former director), are now respectively French Foreign minister and French Ambassador in Dakar. A Junior Minister (Secrétaire d’état) in charge of human rights has also been appointed within the Foreign Affairs ministry. Could it be said that the New Humanitarianism is now driving French diplomacy, and is it possible to claim that it has taken over the French and the Post-Colonial State, therefore further blurring the lines of demarcation between the non-governmental and the governmental? Assessing humanitarianism in the Postcolonial State, the theater where the non-governed is located, offers a unique perspective in exploring these questions.

Cilas Kemedjio is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Rochester.  Contact him at ciko@mail.rochester.edu  

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Kwame Anthony Appiah. In My Father’s House. Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

The Economist. “Emerging Africa,” The Economist (June 14^th-20^th 1997), 13-14.

Cilas Kemedjio. “The Politics of Humanitarianism: From Forced Labor to Doctors Without Borders”, Social Insecurity (Alphabet City, vol. 7), 2000, 58-59

Elias C. Mandala. The End of Chidyerana. A History of Food and Everyday Life in Malawi, 1860-2004. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2005.

Bernard-Henri Lévy (written and narrated by). French intellectuals in the 20th century [videorecording]; directed by Alain Ferrari ; produced by Simone Halberstadt Harari. Released by Films for Humanities, 1992.

Christophe Rufin. Quand l’aide humanitaire remplace la guerre. Paris: JC Lattès, 1986.