The CIHA blog is very pleased to post Megan Cole Paustian’s discussion of her new book Humanitarian Fictions: Africa, Altruism, and the Narrative Imagination. This book takes up themes that are central to the CIHA blog’s work and we look forward to your comments. We also acknowledge and thank Femi J Johnson for the beautiful and evocative painting on the cover.
(cover art by Femi J Johnson. instagram: @femijj)
Humanitarianism has a narrative problem. This is especially evident in relation to Africa as the CIHA blog has frequently pointed out. The tale of Western heroes saving African sufferers shapes the humanitarian imagination and impedes its outcomes by reinforcing inequity, overinflating altruistic confidence, and underestimating the complexity of care. Teju Cole brought this issue to global prominence when his response to the viral Kony 2012 campaign went viral itself, first through a series of tweets and then through his expanded meditation on the problem. In it, he highlighted the social and psychological dynamics at stake in Kony 2012, explaining that “Africa serves as a backdrop for white fantasies of conquest and heroism….A nobody from America or Europe can go to Africa and become a godlike savior or, at the very least, have his or her emotional needs met.” Critiquing the video’s sentimental story of Western heroes, African victims, and simple solutions, Cole gave us the term “White-Savior Industrial Complex.” As the term implies, the Kony campaign was an expression of a deeper phenomenon, recognizable to African viewers who had seen—and refuted—this story many times before.
The link between white saviorism and storytelling has also been familiar among scholars and critics of humanitarianism who have described its narrative as a “fairy tale” (Alex de Waal, 1997) and a “moral fable” (David Rieff, 2002). In Saviors and Survivors (2006), for example, Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdani attributed the American fervor over Darfur to narrative motivations, pointing to heroic protagonists, dramatic imagery, and “epic significance.” Humanitarian storytelling is clearly a problem. But what has often been missing from critiques of the white savior narrative is the actual study of narrative.
That is the starting place for my book Humanitarian Fictions: Africa, Altruism, and the Narrative Imagination (Fordham 2024). It strikes me as no coincidence that the most incisive and resonant critique of white saviorism came from Cole, a Nigerian-American novelist who is, by his own self-description, “sensitive to the power of narratives.” In the book, I argue for the vitality of literature in sorting out humanitarianism’s narrative problem. In addition to challenging the dominant humanitarian discourse, novelists—with their unique sensitivity to narrative—can play a valuable role in imagining and articulating alternatives.
To explore those alternative narrations, Humanitarian Fictions charts a literary terrain I call the humanitarian Atlantic.The humanitarian model of care transcends the boundaries of the state, and its networks touch much of the globe. To capture that network, I assemble a transnational set of novelists who address forms of global assistance that are nongovernmental and not-for-profit, led by missionaries in the colonial era and by aid workers after decolonization.Tracing the white savior narrative’s genealogy takes us not to the colonial administrator but to the Christian missionary, who operated in an external but uneasy relation to the state. While David Livingstone became the most iconic missionary-explorer and autobiographer, he was but one representative of a sweeping textual trend that produced titles like Pioneer Days in Darkest Africa and A Hero of the Dark Continent. Such tales of romantic adventure enshrined the missionary hero and his triumphant journey. Through this archive, nineteenth-century missions developed and popularized a discourse of African salvation through Western intervention that global literature continues to grapple with today.
Humanitarian Fictions begins from a study of missionary narratives and literary responses and moves toward secular forms of humanitarianism that maintain traces of the mission. This approach reveals the influence of religious thought on seemingly secular institutions and uncovers a spiritual, collectivist streak in the secular discourse of humanity. While African writers such as Chinua Achebe, Bessie Head, and Nuruddin Farah form the backbone of this study, their voices are supplemented by those of Western writers such as Joseph Conrad, Barbara Kingsolver, and Philip Caputo who fill out the northern and western sides of the humanitarian Atlantic and link missionary efforts to secular forms of nonstate aid. In some ways, this broad framework—with its limited attention to the particularities of any one national tradition—risks falling into the category Mũkoma Wa Ngũgĩ calls “Africa-is-a-country literary criticism.” I take that risk in order to think about a humanitarian discourse that is, indeed, about Africa in general and to uncover how writers from the continent and beyond contest it.
Part of what the novels show is how African people are aware of and engaged with the overgeneralized imagery of African suffering. We see this, for example, in NoViolet Bulawayo’s 2013 novel, We Need New Names. In one scene, a boy named Godknows rallies his friends in a game of pretend. He picks up a brick, holds it before his face, and calls the group to pose for this imaginary camera. He is playing “NGO man.” This imitation is suggestive of the presence of “NGO people” in the lives of the hungry children in Zimbabwe as picture takers more than aid givers. NGOs are constantly representing Africa to the world. What if their own image were reflected back to them from the perspective of humanitarianism’s “target” populations? The pretend brick camera, held by an irreverent recipient of aid, invites readers to view humanitarians through a new lens. Western NGOs may have a tight grip on African image-making, but the imaginative world of a novel can take hold of the camera in ways that defamiliarize those now ubiquitous images.
By reappropriating and freshly inventing narrative elements like character and setting, plot and point of view, novelists (particularly African novelists) can offer a fuller assessment of how narrative operates in the world and what effects it has on humanitarian ethics and action. As Kwame Anthony Appiah puts it, African literature “is grounded in an appeal to an ethical universal; indeed it is based…in an appeal to a certain simple respect for human suffering.” One might call this a humanitarian commitment. To go beyond the dominance of the white savior narrative, we can excavate the literature that shares humanitarianism’s commitment to care for those who suffer while also challenging its assumptions and oversights. In contrast to dominant narratives of African salvation by Western benevolence, fiction can cultivate an ethics of doubt, test out new frameworks of giving, and demonstrate the agency of African people in nonstate practices of care.
Author Bio: Megan Cole Paustian is the author of Humanitarian Fictions: Africa, Altruism, and the Narrative Imagination. She is an associate professor of English at North Central College.