by Cilas Kemedjio
Kwame Anthony Appiah, in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, suggests that the implementation of human solidarity requires us to go beyond particular and localized loyalties en route to a truly cosmopolitan ethics: “Each person you know and can affect is someone to whom you have responsibilities: to say this is just to affirm the very idea of morality. The challenge, then, is to take minds and hearts formed over the long millennia of living in local troops and equip them with ideas of institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become” (xiii). The role of a platform such as the Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa blog is precisely to take up Appiah’s challenge and see whether or not agents of the global humanitarian galaxy have met it. Humanitarian operations, under pressure from donors, have become large bureaucracies saddled with huge accountability departments. The CIHA Blog intends to add a critical dimension to this audit culture. We may ask if the alleged move from mostly religious to mostly secular is in fact the case and whether the real or perceived nature of this move has fundamentally altered the business of humanitarianism. These questions are rather uneasy because humanitarianism is allergic to critical analysis, as David Kennedy notes in his book, The Dark Side of Humanitarianism. Any attempt to even consider asking such questions may unleash what Barnett and Weiss call an “ontological insecurity” in the humanitarian galaxy. The task is made even harder when humanitarian interventions are framed as a moral duty originating in religious obligations.
Some scholars have argued that the movement to abolish the slave trade could be seen as the prefiguration of modern humanitarianism. The movement marks the passage from charity to a more cosmopolitan form of action. Yet abolitionists do not necessarily challenge the hierarchical dimensions of philanthropy. We all remember of the image of a black man kneeling and asking “Am I not a brother?” This image is the most powerful inscription of the unequal distribution of power that is reproduced in the workings of non-governmental organizations intervening in less fortunate parts of the world, especially in Africa. French historian Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, in a controversial book on the slave trade, suggests that abolitionism foreshadows the current humanitarian ideology. He moves to suggest that as a principle of universal human rights, abolitionism was conceptualized and implemented in Western Europe before being exported to Africa and other parts of the world under Western domination. Abolitionism, despite its grounding in an ethics of universal solidarity, does appear to function as one of the markings of Western superiority. The redeemed slaves, having received the gift of freedom, owe a spiritual or moral debt to their redeemers.
The debate over charity within humanitarianism is also and foremost a debate over the term of the very act of redeeming. Redemption, which is also at the center of the Christian faith, cannot be separated from debt, as Atwood teaches us in her book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth: “Christ is called a Redeemer, a term drawn directly from the language of debt and pawning or pledging, and thus also from that of substitute sacrifice” (67). We are reminded that colonial missionaries were bent on converting colonized lands on the basis of Christian superiority. Éric Deroo, discussing the survival of imperial and colonial myths, evokes the case of missionaries of non-governmental organizations who are convinced that their mission is to teach African mothers how to breastfeed. For Deroo, in order to fully comprehend the good faith and the civilizing spirit that undergirded colonizers in 1930, it is imperative to look at humanitarian agents of our times who are inhabited with the same “innocent arrogance,” believing that they have something to offer to others (20). Redeemed Africans ought to be grateful to their Redeemers, from abolitionists to agents of the humanitarian global order. If we are to believe Deroo, the secularization of humanitarian interventions has done very little to “equip them with ideas of institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become.”
Dr. Kemedjio is Director of the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies at the University of Rochester and co-editor of The CIHA Blog.
I think this is extremely true within certain Christian missionary circles. Christian mission trips often become mission pornography and highlighting relationships that are based on unequal partnership. I think this sort of conversation needs to happen within all mission organizations within Christian denominations engaged in relationships beyond the United States of America.
When the acts of charity just feel good. It is rare to hear debates on the benefits of charity to the philanthropist. What deafens the public ear is the recurring voice articulating the insantiable benefits accrued by the recipient. As Dr Kemedjio intelligently recaptulates the unequal power dyamics separating the giver and the receiver are hugely the problem. Conceptually power politics usurp the intent of goodwill turning it into a blasphemous act. One theological adage attests that ‘No one is too poor not to give and no one is too rich not to receive’. In this theological framework everybody is by nature both a giver and receiver. The danger comes with the intention undergirding the cause to give or even to receive. Is it bad to give – ofcourse not – I think it is a humane act of responsible living. However, what we should note is that acts of charity commonly carry a selfish clause – ‘what do I gain from all of this?’. Giving without strings attached is only circumspect to material gains but less to spiritual and psychological ones. In my argument this still surmounts to surprisingly enormous gain – for some to the tune of eternal life.