By Cecelia Lynch
I sent the following email to the Directors of the UN Foundation (Timothy Wirth and Elizabeth Gore) after viewing a screening of the film, “When the Night Comes.” We at the blog are very appreciative of Elizabeth Gore’s subsequent phone call to me, her openness to our concerns, and her willingness to continue the discussion by phone (she preferred not to write for the blog). Ms. Gore and the Nothing But Nets campaign raise good questions about how to generate support for campaigns to benefit others; we are concerned with the imagery sustained and promoted by this campaign in particular (as well as many others) and the connotations of this imagery for humanitarian assistance in general. We invite readers to comment on any component of the issues raised.
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Date: March 8, 2010
Dear Mr. Wirth and Ms. Gore,
I am writing to alert you to problems with a film you have financed, “When the Night Comes,” that I believe constitutes what has become known as “aid/development pornography” and violates the spirit if not the letter of the Code of Conduct of Humanitarian Organizations and best practices guidelines for humanitarian assistance.
I am a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine, specializing in international relations and currently working on humanitarianism, and I have been interviewing in-depth aid workers in several countries in Africa (and the Middle East) for the past several years.
I viewed the film as part of a screening at the Art Theater in Long Beach, California on February 25, 2010. I attended the showing with a friend from a very multicultural background who is not an academic, and who had a very similar reaction from the point of view of “the public,” if you will. Following are some extremely disturbing specifics from my recollection of the film:
— Misinformation about malaria and about the history of its eradication in the US. For example, no information is given that indicates that malaria primarily kills children (under the age of 5) — although it can be deadly for those who are older, people tend to develop an immunity over time. Many adults I interviewed had had malaria (two were just recovering at the time of my interviews) and while it is a serious disease and something that definitely needs to be addressed in aid to Africa (and elsewhere), misinformation serves no one well.
— The intimation that Westerners’ better diet and health gives them immunity from malaria. This is wrong, and precisely the opposite is why Westerners travelling to Africa must follow strict malaria protocols, use very strong sprays or lotions against mosquitoes, etc. It also feeds into the “Westerners should be emulated” fiction promoted throughout the film.
— The intimation that the US government’s campaign to eradicate malaria in the US in the 1940s and 1950s was wildly successful, largely because of the government’s can-do attitude. In fact, many would argue that malaria, never as serious in the US as in parts of Africa, was very much on the wane and had been for some time. The USG’s campaign also involved spraying with DDT, which is controversial because of its own deleterious health effects. (I do not remember DDT being mentioned in the film.) Again, the idea that the US knows how to do everything well is not only simplistic, but gives a sense of US superiority that is undeserved as well as patronizing to others.
— The theme that “we are going to do all we can to save ‘these’ people” is rampant throughout the film. It sets up a Western versus black African dichotomy that is inaccurate as well as patronizing.
— The worst part of the movie, however, is the extended sequence in which the death of a baby in a clinic (from malaria) is filmed, including the reaction of the distraught mother, who flees the cameras, and the repeated tears of the film’s three ingenue producers. It is completely unclear what purpose this very long sequence is intended to accomplish, other than exposing a dying child’s and mother’s vulnerability, and looks as though we are supposed to feel sorry mainly for the three Westerners who witnessed this death. (At this point in the film, my friend said, “It’s all about them” — referring to the three filmmakers.)
— The idea that children are afraid to go to sleep because the mosquitoes might bite them during the night may be true of some children, but it is completely different from any of my own experiences in Cameroon, Kenya, or Ghana, and the experiences of many others I have talked to. Again, this is a patronizing, one-sided view of Africans that assumes that they are inherently vulnerable and have no agency in the face of this disease. Many in fact know exactly what to do when they contract malaria, and so do many local clinics.
— Also patronizing are virtually all of the actions of Bobby Bailey, who holds up African babies and walks through villages and refugee camps in apparent attempts to show he is not only friends with locals but will save them all from this scourge that he has somehow discovered.
— The idea that all we have to do to “save Africa” (already a problematic stance) is to buy mosquito nets — and that that should be done FIRST before any other efforts to support health, education, and other initiatives — is contradicted or at least complicated by much research, including my own. Nets are good, but as always, aid groups cannot just send huge numbers of them and expect the problem to be solved. The reasons why many people do not use nets are varied, including cultural as well as economic rationales. And nets will not resolve problems of poverty and inequality.
One might argue that this movie is pitched at the level of high schoolers and must be simplistic to appeal to them. I saw the first Invisible Children movie, and my daughter was involved in their efforts on her high school campus. While problematic in many respects, it had a certain charm, particularly because the filmmakers were honest about their cluelessness. This film, in contrast, replaces cluelessness with certainty about misinformation, patronizing attitudes, and a serious Bono or even Jesus-complex on the part of Bailey. This is never ok for any age audience. I cringe to think that our youth will see this. I think many of them would be uncomfortable but might not be sure how to articulate their questions, given the film’s insistence on joining the campaign to “save Africa” — because “those” people can’t do it themselves. This is not support or aid that works.
I urge you to pull this film and refuse to support its being shown in the future. I would also be happy to discuss this issue with you, (here contact information is provided).
Sincerely,
Cecelia Lynch
We received an initial email response from the UN Foundation, which described their campaign to raise awareness on the issue of malaria. We then reiterated our concerns in another email, stating the following:
“We are also very much in favor of reducing deaths due to malaria (as well as other causes). We understand the rationale of the Nothing But Nets campaign and the United Against Malaria partnership to use the film as a tool to reach out to college students. We believe there are better ways to reach out” (here we summarized briefly the points we made previously).
Soon thereafter, Elizabeth Gore of the UN Foundation called Cecelia Lynch and they discussed the goals of the Nothing But Nets Campaign and the concerns we raised. Ms. Gore approved this summary of our phone call and her willingness to continue the exchange with us, although she did not wish to write her views on the blog. We appreciate her willingness to discuss these important issues with us.
Summary of phone call between Cecelia Lynch and Elizabeth Gore:
On Monday, May 3, Elizabeth Gore of the UN Foundation called Cecelia Lynch to discuss the concerns outlined in our emails. We very much appreciated her willingness to continue the dialogue on these issues, which we believe to be extremely important. Ms. Gore said she did hear our concerns, and that the UN Foundation and Nothing But Nets’s work on malaria is very comprehensive, encompassing a number of initiatives. She said the Foundation had chosen to support the film, “When the Night Comes,” because they saw a big gap in participation in the 15-22 age range, and thought that The Brave and Bobby Bailey had personalized a real story. Nothing But Nets wants to send a message of hope and focus on this issue as being solvable. They want to do everything possible to eliminate malaria deaths by 2015, and in particular they want people to talk to Congress and make $10 contributions to send nets. Their efforts are geared towards making people feel that they can make an impact.
Cecelia Lynch reiterated her serious concerns about the film and asserted that in her experience, young people can become informed and handle complexity and nuance, as shown by many of the students at UC Irvine and elsewhere. We should not promote either misinformation about malaria or paternalistic models for eliminating it. Lynch and Gore also discussed the long sequence in which a small child dies of malaria; Gore acknowledged that that scene was a tough call for her.
The call concluded with a willingness to continue the dialogue. We ask our readers to respond with their views.
We invite you to read a previous post on the blog, in which Uli Beisel puts contemporary attempts to eradicate malaria into historical context and advocates for a comprehensive approach to expanding public health in Africa, including the control and treatment of malaria.
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Cecelia Lynch can be reached at clynch@uci.edu.
I share Cecelia’s comments about the pornography of aid and I would like to call our attention to two recent African novels that also raise ethical issues about the representation of humanitarian aid. Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s Wizard of Crow (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006) addresses this issue with a lot of irony. The novelist, in what appears to be a critique of the unsustainable exploitation of the forests, remarks that “pictures of beggars or wild animals were what many tourists sent back home as proof of having been in Africa.†With wild animals becoming rare thanks to dwindling forests and poaching, “tourist pictures of beggars and children with kwashiorkor and flies massing around their runny noses and sore eyes were prized for their authenticity.†(35) Ngugi also show how this demand made by Western tourists for a pathological production of Africa has come to impact the packaging of Africa by Africans for the West. Africans, in this case the “holly beggars†act out their suffering in dramatic fashion to impress upon the Western donor: “There were always beggars loitering around those kinds of hotels at all hours of day and night. But that night they were there in unusually large numbers, looking for all the world to see like wretchedness itself. The blind seemed blinder than usual, the hunchback hunched lower, and those missing legs or hands acted as if deprived of other limbs. †(72/73). Cecelia also raised another The pathological representation that is dramatized in the by the filming of the dying baby: does this mother know that she is being filmed?
Congolese writer Emmanuel Dongala, in Johnny Mad Dog (New York: Picador, 2002), a novel about the civil war that ravaged the central African country of Congo-Brazaville, voiced his concern about the representation of humanitarian disasters. Responding to Katelijne, a Belgian journalist who recites the usual mantra (“When it bleeds, it leads.’ In other words, the bloodier the image, the more visually compelling it is and the better it worksâ€), Lakoale, a young woman trapped by the war, refuses to have her crippled mother body being filmed: “At that, I lost my temper. Mama’s stumps were our suffering, our pain. Katelijne saw them only as something that would attract the attention of an audience. Was she completely heartless? No, I don’t think so—she simply lived in another universe. She didn’t understand that poor people like us didn’t make a display of our misery. We had the right to keep it private.†We should all take some time to think about these relevant, dramatic and ethical questions that Cecelia, Ngugi, and Dongala are asking about the ethics of humanitarian intervention in Africa.