Today’s post addresses a composite of issues connected to racism and paternalism in representations of Africans in the West and its impact on humanitarianism in Africa. The post represents revised sections of US students’ research projects for the CIHA online class last Spring.
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Irene Akram, University of California, Riverside, Christina Tajerian, University of California, Irvine, Genevieve Weinstein, University of California, Davis
“In my view, Africa is always giving, literally [slaves, gold, copper, etc.] … if you think about who is the donor and who is the recipient, it seems like Africa is the donor and the West is the recipient.” – Ngūgī wa Thiong’o, 2009[1]
Given Professor Ngūgī’s critically important insight, how has it come to be that Africa is usually seen as being dependent on the West? Numerous Westerners, including celebrities, humanitarians, missionaries, scholars, policymakers, and some scholars, perpetuate the idea that Africa needs and depends on Western aid. But they fail to acknowledge that dependency is a vestige of colonialism, and the representation of Africa has much to do with the mythological narrative of Africa needing western/ “white” help. However, several African countries are among the fastest growing economies globally (Mitchell 2019). While Africa is depicted as “needing” help from the Western world, Africa is self-sufficient and capable of sustaining its people and upholding its multiple cultures. We look at this through examples of films depicting the need for “white saviors” and adoptions of African children by white celebrities (Cole 2012; See also CIHA’s previous posts: In the News: Not Again! Another White Savior in Africa and In the News: “In a Guardian Story About an Environmental Conflict in Kenya, the White Saviour Rides Again”).
But first, we examine critically the concept of dependency. The degree of dependency of African countries and/or societies on donors and organizations originating from the global North continues to be a controversial topic. “Aid colonialism,” a term coined by Professor Tim Murithi, head of the Peacebuilding Interventions Program at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in Cape Town and Professor of African Studies at the Centre for African and Gender Studies at the University of the Free State, South Africa, provides an important perspective on the concept of dependency. “Aid colonialism” attempts to show the political manipulation, control, and coercion of the system of aid to Africa.[2] It is a continued form of colonialism done by “developed” countries that give financial or humanitarian aid to countries in Africa.
Nkwazi M. Mhango, the author of Africa’s Dependency Syndrome: Can Africa Still Turn Things around for the Better? defines dependency as “… any chronic behavior affecting a person or society so as to force it perpetually to succumb to depending on someone or society to address his, her or its needs and sometimes problems in order to develop.”[3] Dependency would not be possible without colonialism. The end of colonialism also came with colonizers pulling out resources from the continent, including human capital and economic support. As Mhango states, “… soon after gaining independence some African countries experienced balance of payments problems which forced them to borrow from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to cover shortfalls in foreign exchange … due to gaping holes their colonial master caused and left behind.”[4] Given the rise of anti-Black racism in the United States and globally, organizations such as the World Bank (WB) and IMF have been called out for their racist policies that adversely impact African populations in particular. The call for increased recognition of Black folks was brought up by Africans Rising, a Pan-African movement of people who seek to foster African-wide solidarity for a more unified Africa. They came together with more than 50 civil society organizations, including CIHA, to call for the inclusion of anti-Blackness and systemic racism within the WB and IMF in their upcoming Annual Meetings Agenda occurring from October 16 to 18, 2020. (For more information, see this CIHA blog post with an update on the WB and IMF anti-Black letters sent by Africans Rising.)
Colonialism involves physical subjugation and control. In the past, that subjugation may have been more easily recognized but aid colonialism is often done behind closed doors and is harder to see publicly because it is not done in the eyes of the public. Aid colonialism can come from major dominating industries such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank which disguise their aid money as “helpful.” In reality, these predatory practices continue to take power from African countries. This, in turn, creates a dynamic in which countries and institutions of the “Global North”[5] are able, once again, to exert control and domination. The dynamics of shifting power from Africa to the “Global North” forces many African countries to rely on these foreign powers for support and assistance: they are literally forced to depend on foreign powers for many necessities. The “Global North” creates dependency by appearing to be altruistic when in reality, it is perpetuating, solidifying, and extending its control.
Such control takes many forms: control over land, resources, and exports and as we shall see below, children and families. But to understand how this happens, we also need to look at issues of race and representation in the relations between “white westerners” and “Black Africans.” We first look at the pervasiveness of the image of the white savior in the visual representation of Black suffering in film, focusing on the movie, District 9, and relating it to other visual representations. Though District 9 is more than a decade old, the relevant themes presented in the film still mirror the realities of African society and lack of representation in African spheres. The misrepresentation of Africans is depicted in the film, as Kimberly Brown assesses it as a visible form in which “white directors still” serve “as translators of black [African] experiences for audiences in the United States.”[6]
Wikus van der Merwe, just like other white leads and voices, represents the archetypal white savior figure whose purpose is fulfilled at the very end when he assumes the “white man’s burden” of helping another race. Van der Merwe is a white man with an elite position because of his nepotistic ties. He has never faced suffering or struggles because his privileged background prevented him from considering the feelings of aliens, who are refugees. The aliens are called “prawns” as a metaphor for the treatment of the “other.” “Prawns” essentially represent the disenfranchised black people who are disregarded and are still disenfranchised in post-apartheid South Africa. The aliens are victims of hate crimes and are isolated from the rest of society by being displaced in a remote piece of land resembling slums. Furthermore, the government also expresses the lack of empathy towards these fictional refugees through the means of experimenting and exploiting “prawns” for their weaponry for their own advantages. This parallel can be viewed in the way Africa and Africans are exploited and continue to suffer from the effects of colonialism.
These works suggest that the vestiges of colonialism still remain in a postcolonial era. The suffering of black Africans in the “Global South” and black people in the “Global North” are interlinked in different ways, as they both share the same inherent struggle. The white western gaze allows the fixed narrative of saving and suffering to continue in Black spaces even when they no longer want to uphold neo-colonial, racist tendencies. It is less complicated to express racial tensions if the “other” is an alien — and “prawns” are not real. Brown also introduces the concept of meta-racism, where hostile forms of racism are adopted in an elusive manner, to describe this kind of move.
District 9 alludes to real racial tensions in South Africa by showing how Black South Africans are easily characterized as the “other.” But by maintaining a white gaze, confronting pressing racial issues and the legacies of evolved forms of colonialism are avoided in reality. We can draw parallels with media campaigns such as Kony 2012, and charitable performances such as “Live-Aid” (See CIHA posts on the Kony 2012 Campaign and Band-Aid 2014), which romanticize black suffering without offering any solutions to the complexity of multifaceted problems. As Teju Cole (2012) argues, the white savior narrative in Africa has stretched “from the colonial project to Out of Africa to The Constant Gardener and Kony 2012” and has essentially “provided space onto which white egos can conveniently be projected.” The creators of Kony 2012 argue that they gave “American youth a sense of purpose” that made the youth feel as if they could make a difference in their own mundane lives. Like District 9, they try to engage social commentary without making it too real, and without reflecting on their own positionality in perpetuating fictionalized stereotypes.
Another pernicious form of control that stems from problems of racism in representation concerns how the drive to “save” Africans has resulted in harm to African families and communities. This section of our post focuses on the role of celebrity adoptions, especially the case of Malawi (For celebrity activism more broadly, see previous CIHA blog posts: On Angelina Jolie Pitt and William Hague Appointments at LSE’s Women Peace and Security Programme and Thoughts on Angelina Jolie and WPS).
A deeper look at the orphanage system, taking Malawi as an example, shows a convergence among orphanages, local actors, external actors and celebrities in exploiting children. With celebrities like Madonna engaging in highly-publicized adoptions, the demand for orphanages has increased for monetary gain. It has also shifted some African children’s impression toward thinking that they will have a better life in an orphanage. In addition, there is an underlying tone of white saviorism in these adoptions, that ignore Africa’s exploitation and neo-colonialism by other countries. Unfortunately, institutions such as orphanages are also not free from corruption by local governments. Dr. Biziwick Mwale, the executive director of Malawi’s National AIDS Commission, states “Because there’s money in orphanages, people are creating them and getting children in them.” Children have been placed into orphanages to attract foreign funding and promote tourism or “voluntourism”. When celebrities blindly support these institutions, it becomes a catalyst to build more orphanages rather than other facilities, such as schools, that can provide support to extended families and focus on keeping families together rather than separating them. It is reported that “four out of five of the estimated 8 million children currently living in care institutions, have one or both parents alive.” So instead of spending so much money on orphanages, organizations should provide families with money and support to assist them to take care of their children without orphanages. This is, however, not to deny the utility of orphanages for children who do not have families to take care of them or the fact that some of the local and national institutions have been playing a positive role in the lives of these children. The purpose is rather to highlight the different channels through which exploitative practices of “white savorism” can work.
Actresses and singers such as Angelina Jolie and Madonna, have undoubtedly contributed to the orphanage problem by adopting children from African orphanages and donating money to the facilities. While Angelina Jolie was not caught in an adoption scandal, “the attention that’s paid to celebrities who adopt transracially diverts attention from the real story facing African-American children and adoption.” In Madonna’s case, such involvement resulted in scandal. The most notable scandal was Madonna’s attempt at adopting an orphan from Malawi. She attempted to build a Kabballah center for orphans, using her image and fame to try and cut corners when adopting her children, which put her on trial in Malawi. She also held a fundraiser with UNICEF for the orphans and the Kabballah Center, while also inaugurating a new Gucci store.
Research has also shown that orphanages can cause more harm to children rather than benefiting their growth and development. Orphanages have been used as channels for child-adoption which later become transformed into child trafficking. A number of African countries have been putting strict measures on international adoption of African children. Instead of building orphanages, a better solution that some people in Malawi requested to have a lasting impact, would be to fund schools to provide children with meals and education, and provide aid to extended families. Not only will the children receive an education and support, but they can also remain with their extended family members.
Each of these cases demonstrates important aspects of the intertwined problems of aid and representation. In this post, we seek to reiterate that it is critical to do away with neo-colonial dependency and white saviorism once and for all and for that, it is imperative that we move away from racist and paternalistic depictions of Africans as lacking agency and being inferior that are dominant in Western discussions of Africa.
[1] Ngūgi wa Thiong’o, CIHA conference, UC Irvine, 2009.
[2] Murithi, Tim et. al, Aid to Africa Redeemer or Coloniser? (Capetown, Dakar, Nairobi and Oxford, Harare: Pambazuka and African Forum of Debt and Development (AFRODAD), 2009), viii.
[3] Nkwazi Nkuzi Mhango, Africa’s Dependency Syndrome: Can Africa Still Turn Things around for the Better?, (Baltimore, Maryland: Project Muse, Mankon, Cameroon : Langaa Research & Publishing CIG, [Oxford, England], 2017), 1.
[4] Nkwazi Nkuzi Mhango, Africa’s Dependency Syndrome: Can Africa Still Turn Things around for the Better?, (Baltimore, Maryland: Project Muse, Mankon, Cameroon : Langaa Research & Publishing CIG, [Oxford, England], 2017), 3.
[5] I recognize that the Global North represents Europe, North America, and parts of Asia, however, for this post, I will be using it exclusively to mean North America.
[6] Kimberly N Brown, “Every Brother Ain’t A Brother.” Hollywood’s Africa After 1994, Ohio University Press, 2012, pp. 193–206.