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IN one of the short aid-appeal videos produced by the Norwegian Students and Academics International Assistance Fund, the tables are turned. Instead of featuring wealthy Norwegians giving aid to starving Africans, smiling and singing Africans are collecting heaters and radiators for freezing Norwegians.
The result is an active challenging of the stereotypes usually employed by aid organisations to raise money. Instead of depending on empathy and pity, the usual vehicles on which charity for the poverty and disaster-stricken is collected, the focus is on stereotypes on which the ‘haves’ of the world rely, and which they give to the ‘have-nots’.
The video is not the only one released by the group, whose objective is to collect aid. In another, entitled How to Save Africa Gone Wrong, the part of the ‘starving African boy’ is played by a child actor. In off-takes are quips that play on what people believe about Africa. A white woman tries to give him a pastry (because such things don’t exist in Africa). The subtext is clear: aid is an industry and its audience is the ‘white saviour’ on whose sympathy the gaping coffers of the developing world rely.
As Sindre Edland, who works at the organisation that produced the videos, points out in an article published in Al Jazeera America, the genre of ‘aid satire’, where the West’s presumptions of superiority are called into question, is an inherently tricky one. Some aid workers worry that jokes such as these will discourage people from giving money. After all, those who give want to feel good about what they do, and making fun of them may drive them away.
Edland disagrees. In his opinion, humour and levity are good ways to call attention to assumptions and stereotypes that are ultimately misleading. The images of suffering children in Africa are embedded in the minds of most Westerners and they need to be dislodged.
Africa is not simply the touchstone against which Western superiority can consistently measure its own goodness. The precept of ‘we’ (the West) being lucky against disease-stricken children and devastated communities of the developing world must be tempered with reality.
As Edland says, “Dumping unwanted Western goods such as used designer suits, old political campaign or sports team T-shirts and broken computers on African countries does little more than create garbage piles and environmental problems and tamper with the local market. In addition, it makes the self-congratulatory act of giving more important than the need of those on the receiving end.”
The debate is an interesting one, and until its divisions are marked by the ‘West’ on one side and the ‘rest’ on the other, most Pakistanis likely will have a good time chuckling at Africans striking back against the stereotypes. After all, Pakistan has been subjected to similar typecasting.
Images of abused women, flood-stricken villages and displaced hordes have all been used in appeals to raise money. As in the African case, they do represent truths; all of those groups exist and do need help in Pakistan, and the mechanisms of global giving are all poised on presenting their haplessness to the wealthy Western giver. But Pakistanis do not like this. The stereotype bears within it a store of reality, but we can all get behind the proposition that the two should be disaggregated.
The conclusions, however, would perhaps be different if the lens were moved from global disparities centring on the West and the rest, to focus simply on Pakistan. In the past several weeks, television cameras and news reports have all been focused on a very local cataclysm: the famine-struck families of Thar. If stereotypes about Africa and Asia are troubling when they are fed to the Western world, they should be similarly problematic when fed to local publics.
Are the most intrusive images of infants wasting away and wailing women necessary for us to understand the urgency of the situation and to inspire the better-off in Karachi and Lahore and Islamabad to give?
The conclusions, then, are about the nature of caring and the superficialities that lie beneath. If those in the global south, in Africa and India and Pakistan and Bangladesh, take issue with the Western practice of utilising stereotypes — presenting the most miserable and disturbing pictures of want in order to invoke giving — then local practices within these contexts also deserve some attention.
At the centre of this consideration lies the question of the ethics that are due to the real people that make up these images of desperation. In the case of the famine-afflicted of Thar, it may be useful to question whether they have the power to agree to such portrayals of themselves, and to pause and wonder whether we would want our own family members pictured in such desperate states of physical and environmental degradation.
The issue rests on the connections between dignity and empathy. Whether it is rich Western-givers or the relatively rich of Pakistan looking at the starving suffering in their own country’s recesses, they must consider whether they can give freely and still preserve the dignity of those whom they wish to help. A preservation of dignity requires a different lens: a refusal to objectify pain, to dramatise suffering, and to reduce those afflicted to just images and pictures; it requires giving not to feel superior but to fulfil a primary condition of humanity.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
