CSotD: Africa Laughs
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Burkina Faso's Damien Glez salutes a satiric take on "poverty porn" that has gone viral among those who care about Africa or about assistance to the Third World in general.
Poverty Porn is the use of heart-tugging images to excite (and that's the right word) compassion in potential donors. The origin of the phrase itself is a little uncertain, but this writer traces the phenomenon back to the Biafran conflict of the late Sixties, and the "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and "We Are The World" campaigns of the mid-80s certainly established some mainstays, including the celebrity singalong.
It's problematic because, like traditional porn, it does have its gut-level appeal and, as this source notes, that's a short-range plus and a long-range minus:
Why is poverty porn (as I’ve defined it) so dangerous? As my passenger in my car argued: it serves a purpose. For UNICEF or Oxfam, the use of poverty porn is another tool to garner support for an unquestionably good cause: the reduction of suffering and poverty. We may be exploiting them to achieve this, but surely the end outweighs the means?
The reason I find this argument unpersuasive is due to the culture that poverty porn breeds. The statement that this sort of media makes is “We have a group of people who are utterly helpless, and only you can save them.” … I will not argue that places like Sub-Saharan Africa are without need, but the argument that the poor are completely incapable of rescuing themselves, either at the micro or at the country-level, removes all respect for their own agency and cultivates a culture of paternalism which is damaging to the development process.
This approach to assistance is also largely ineffective at solving problems rather than treating symptoms, and it isn't necessarily all that good at treating symptoms.
Gathering people at aid stations to recieve food is not only a stop-gap solution to their particular, individual hunger but takes them away from their homes so that their fields are not being attended to and their communities thereby become less sustainable.
What Glez salutes with his cartoon is this wonderful spoof video put together by a group of African and Europeans that reverses poverty porn:
My son brought this to my attention over Thanksgiving, during a conversation with his sister-in-law about her plans to document a series of self-sustainable programs in Uganda. It cracked me up, but I wasn't sure if it was being embraced by Africa until I saw Glez's understated homage and then did a little Googling and came up with pages like this one.
What has been emerging lately has been a movement away from poverty porn towards an approach based on helping to set up on-going programs within communities, like those my son's sister-in-law is off to investigate.
For instance, my friend Esther Garvi is part of an organization called "The Eden Foundation," founded by her family a quarter-century ago in Niger. The purpose of the group is not to distribute bags of grain but rather to reconnect local farmers to the traditional plants and trees that can flourish in the semi-desert.
This doesn't mean they can't also grow cash crops like millet, which are a good source of both food and income in the years when they grow well. But adding local, native plants means providing both a source of nutritional food that is not nearly as vulnerable to drought or soil depletion, as well as a second income for families.
There are all sorts of other face-to-face efforts that are yielding solid results by empowering communities, and they're not necessarily very large, or even based in Africa: A nurse in my area is originally from the Dominican Republic and came up with a saleable craft for her home village, making crocheted re-usable shopping bags from non-reusable ones. The bags are durable and attractive, and the income has created a source of micro-loans in the village for additional improvement projects.
She also gets donations from King Arthur Flour to help build ovens and teach bread-baking using the type of wheat that can be grown in the area, then gathers high-school students for annual spring break trips there to assist in setting things up.
Meanwhile, Uganda recently reported an increase in the population of mountain gorillas, which is based in part on ecotourism that directly benefits local villages, since income is plowed back into building schools and otherwise supporting the people, at which point their support for poachers and the market for bush meat decreases rapidly.
And both black subsistence herders and white ranchers in Namibia are signing on to a small program that protects cheetahs by providing Anatolian shepard dogs to negate the need for herders to kill predators.
Lecture over. Have another laugh, courtesy of MamaHope.org
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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