adminIN late 2014, Band Aid, a fund-raising effort in which dozens of Western musicians come together to sing the charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was relaunched. When the concept was first envisioned in 1984, its goal was to raise money for the Ethiopian famine in “Africa”. The goal of Band Aid 30 was to fund-raise for efforts against Ebola in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
Those involved in the song may well have had good intentions, but the whole initiative presented an offensive image of Africa and Africans. It denied African agency by suggesting all the continent needed was for the West to save it.
And it crowded out better homegrown actions such as the work of Tiken Jah Fakoly and Salif Keita’s own song, “Africa Stop Ebola”. Band Aid 30 was questionable in many ways, which ought to be examined, highlighted and criticised.
However, for all its sins, the song and the narratives which it peddled were really just symptoms of a much bigger problem: the White Saviour Industrial Complex.
In March 2012, Nigerian-American author Teju Cole coined the term to describe the power relations that privileged outsiders and their African agents try to enforce on the continent. The phrase, invented in response to Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign, points to the nexus of power lurking behind supposed Western do-gooding.
Have you ever felt a campaign “to help Africa” was stupid, offensive and more about the well-being of non-Africans than Africans? Are you bored of the notion that Africa is a charity case, when it feels like the continent is making so many wealthy?
Are you tired of seeing authentic attempts at emancipation torn down and replaced with a politics of gratitude? Has the foreign-funded NGO workshop you are attending ever appeared to have another agenda that you can’t quite put your finger on? Have you ever thought that it is easier to look outside, rather than inside the African continent, for best practices, technology, and innovation?
If so, you’ve seen the White Saviour Industrial Complex at work.
In this article, New African will take on Band Aid 30 and move well beyond it by analysing and critiquing this broader complex: its politics, economics, development agendas, ideology, psychology and stereotypes.
The purpose of this story is by no means to attack those who are not of the continent. Many non-Africans do excellent work on the continent, as do many Africans outside the continent. Moreover, the “white” in White Saviour Industrial Complex is not about pigmentation. It is certainly not “reverse racism”.
Rather, we want to point out the privilege and power dynamics that underlie the complex in order that we can emancipate ourselves from it and forge a new relationship. So much good can come from co-operation across borders and the coming together of struggles, but we believe that those on the outside should be amplifying and supporting, not overpowering, patronising and warping.
Africa is now, and has been for at least 250 years, struggling against different forms of white saviourism. And one reason the complex has proved so powerful, is that these struggles, these alternative narratives, are never told.
In subsequent instalments, therefore, we will tell some of these stories and optimistically point to current dynamics, which look much more positive than they have for many years.
Everywhere in the world, people must increase their efforts to dismantle the White Saviour Industrial Complex, and build a new politics based on justice, solidarity and equality in its place.
Africa and the politics of pity
Band Aid’s song relies upon a politics of pity, it is clear that the words are only the surface manifestation of a deeper worldview, and that they could only have been tweaked up to a point.
Because whether through sensationalist lyrics about “a world of dread and fear”, or whether through more subtle alternatives, Band Aid 30’s underlying politics of pity required the song to create a distinction between “us and them” and depict “the other ones” as being as helpless, hopeless and pitiable as possible.
The song’s offensive lyrics could maybe have been softened but they were not a regrettable misstep; they were central to justifying the whole rationale of the endeavour.
Another apparent oddity was the conspicuous exclusion of African artistes, something Band Aid has been criticised for in each one of its incarnations since 1984. Bob Geldof typically defends himself by saying he simply gets the biggest artistes he can in order that the appeal reaches the largest possible audience.
But to some it might still seem curious that Band Aid doesn’t even try to include more African musicians when it would help the project avoid criticism and give it the kind of legitimacy it most lacks.
This seems confusing, but once we appreciate the project’s politics, the decision to marginalise African artistes starts to add up. To begin with, there is a risk that including too many musicians from the continent might disrupt the stereotypes on which Band Aid’s eliciting of pity relies, but, secondly, and more importantly, African musicians are excluded because they just aren’t that necessary.
After all, in order to elicit pity, Band Aid needs to depict Africans as helpless victims, but this is only half the mission. The other half ? and arguably the far harder task ? is to overcome the cynicism and apathy of Western viewers in order to get them to play the counter-role of the non-suffering valiant hero.
Band Aid doesn’t just need to create passive objects in need of rescuing, but also empowered and well-meaning Westerners ready to do the rescuing. This latter challenge is the real mission at the heart of Band Aid. It is where the majority of its efforts and messaging is directed. And it is a sphere in which African artistes are at best irrelevant and at worst a hindrance.
Once we recognise the underlying politics of pity that informs, and is perpetuated by, the likes of Band Aid, we can better understand how the phenomenon operates and we realise that rather than making a few errors of judgment regarding the lyrics and chosen musicians, the team behind the song did exactly what they needed to do.
Where does that leave us? Well, on the one hand, this understanding arguably provides an even more worrying analysis of Band Aid than most, because it suggests that the song was not an anomaly when it comes to Western views of Africa, but symptomatic of them.
Band Aid no doubt propagates a certain way of seeing the world, but, more importantly, it relies on these cultural and political attitudes already existing.
A five-minute song cannot argue for a certain worldview or create widely-accepted stereotypes; it can only tap into and enhance those that already dominate the cultural and political environment. Another way of saying this is that Band Aid’s politics of pity is not really Band Aid’s ? it is, more broadly, the West’s.
This is a worrying proposition, but at the same time, the first step to changing narratives is to understand them. And once we recognise that for all its sins, Band Aid was just a symptom of a problematic and much more widespread politics of pity, we can turn our attention to examining the structures upon which this worldview is built and begin to dismantle them.
As seen from the backlash to Band Aid 30, much of it from Africans, it seems that the distinction between “us and them” is already getting harder to maintain in today’s hyper-connected world.
This is a hugely positive trend, but alongside this, our understanding of a politics of pity also suggests that we will need to defeat the notion that luck is the main driving force behind issues of inequality, hunger and disease.
Combating an entrenched and wilfully simplistic view of the world made up of “us and them” will no doubt be a difficult and long-term challenge, but repurposing the words of Geldof himself: “We can stop it, and we will stop it.” – New African.
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