Archaeology of Differences

A ‘DIFFERENTIATING’ film by a Fellow of the ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON:

‘AFRICA SPEAKS’  [1930]   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nF0Z9JjJbP8

When I grow up I want to write a serious book. Perhaps not too serious though because it will have to be an easy manual for bigoted people who would like to feel bigger, better and normal. I will seek to emphasize that human beings are very different and that the Victorian racist myths were right. The purported ‘darkness’ which was in fact the result of the epistemic challenge of (mis)understanding the diversity of the world created a fundamental basis for constructing Africa as different, just because people did not share the same cultural and social practices. But I will not write about the ignorance or arrogance of the uninvited visitors who were hunting for fame and fortune or  were simply unhappy and un-titled back home in Great Britain where royal/noble branding mattered. H M Stanley the miserable sod who didn’t know his father became famous didn’t he? I might focus on how gun power allowed them to capture a few ‘savages’ to bring back to the empire for freak shows. Millions at home could witness how ‘dark’ and ‘barbaric’ other people were! Charles Dickens then wrote ‘The Noble Savage’ proposing that Africans should be ‘civilised off the surface of the earth’. We still are actually. Surely Dickens could not have gotten it wrong. His visits to the London human zoos made him an expert on the inherent savagery of the black people just like ‘donor gaze’ convinces donors that ‘underdevelopment’ is a big issue. Dickens did not know that the captured humans exhibited behind the cages thought that perhaps the zoo visitors epitomized evil in capital letters; precisely, like former ‘social actors’ in charity films lament on being ‘used’. One such documentary humiliation is ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ where children were exposed to drugs and scenes of sexual nature. In Tanzania.  Luckily, I will have a balanced story about past episodes of human degradation. Some people actually felt pity for the exhibited humans and demanded the ending of these inhumane exhibitions. However, in our charity culture, no one is saying we should stop  dehumanizing portrayals in media or adhere to simple ethics like ‘DO NOT RECONSTRUCT MISERY WHERE IT DOES NOT EXIST’. In the human zoos, individuality was irrelevant, just like in charity appeal. one-size-fits-all. A tearful face of a starving kid is sought after. One black African ‘poor’ can represents any…He/she doesn’t have to have a name. Templates for helplessness, misery etc, do not warrant name and addresses or countries. An African disaster is and African disaster. In short these reductive motifs are purse openers for donating public who believe that their input is life-changing for the ‘wretched’ of Africa.

It is a common sense view that, pity towards others can make one feel better. You objectify. Empathy is another thing. It means you judge the feeling of the other from a subject position because you have the ability to understand and share his or her feelings. Perhaps your human-ness allows you to view the other person as an equal you can identify with depending on your own experiences and social learning. Empathy is different  from pity in this regard and it is seldom the narrative of the ‘donor gaze’, which instructs the Western audience to feel privileged enough to open their purses and donate. In a back-handed way, the donor gaze also entertains by showing the triumph of the benevolent. It peddles pity as commodity , which is what most  poverty-tainments do. These pity narratives also evolve with time. The gucci/burberry clad celebrities drying real tears in African slums have now been joined by another extreme form of differentiating genre, courtesy of BBC. I saw one episode where an English normal farmer with ipad and all other modern gadgets visits a draught-prone farming community in Northern Kenya to live with a farmer who did not even have enough water for his family, let alone his skeletal cattle! He then walks with equally thin women to fetch water and explicitly expresses pity time and time again. ‘I can’t do this’ he cries. He actually cried at some point. Just as little Bieber? wept in an iconic  comic relief gig recently. It gets more creative everyday. If poverty was to end I am somehow convinced that the aid industry would still find something original to gaze at. Hopefully, poverty is here to stay and it has a permanent address in picturesque Africa. And as charity lives on, so will the need to differentiate between the ‘helper’ and the ‘helped’.

Charity goes hand –in-hand with the media. I call the documentation hype ‘helper-as-documentarist’ tradition. Documenting ‘dark Africa’ was an important process of dominating it. Belittling the ‘natives’ to believe that their simple harmonious life was not good enough! The narrative in the ‘global village’ makes us believe that there is an ideal destination that we need to be. Materially and culturally. The Western nations are supposed to have ‘arrived’. Explorers-as-documentarist, missionaries-as-documentarists and anyone who could line up a bunch of ‘savages’ for a photo session did so in juxtaposition to the empires. Even ‘saint’ Dr. David Livingstone sat on a ‘racial high horse’ asking his brother Charles  to be careful not to photograph the ugly ones; [savages]. He died believing that, ‘only Christianity and commerce can make the black race equal to the white’. If ‘children of God’ were fundamentally unequal in Livingstone’s eyes then I clearly have a good story for my intended manual book for bigoted people.

‘In The beginning There Was Darkness’

Yesterday I went to Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire where the history of cotton mills is permanently on display. It is a fantastic site that I am particularly pleased to support through my National Trust membership. Obviously, I know a thing or two about the processes that made industrialization possible and the poverty that existed in pre-industrial Europe. Not everyone cares to know though. Especially the face book generation whose ‘visualised enlightenment’ convinces them that the Western ‘superior’ culture is ideal and should therefore be copied by the rest of the world. This IT generation is informed by an extremely arrogant media attitude which is bent on showing poverty in Africa as proper entertainment, just like our ancestors were exhibited for amusement in imperial exhibitions in the late nineteenth century to amuse Europeans. TV has replaced those exhibitions now. After one of such an exhibition in Hyde Park corner London,  Charles Dickens eyes couldn’t stand the ‘ugly screeching savages’. It prompted him to write in  ‘Noble Savages’ (1853) that, ‘the savages should be civilised off the face of the earth’!  As if Europe was always ‘civilised!’ And by the way, academics are still struggling to define for sure what exactly civilisation is. My Masai grandfather whose society kept order without police or prisons was convinced that they were civilised just fine. He actually sent the missionaries packing when they attempted to ‘sell’ a white God to him. In his views, one prayed and showed respect to ones ancestors and he wasn’t excited in buying into ‘white ghosts.’ He was baptised ‘over his dead body’ in his coffin by the kindly white priest who couldn’t pronounce his name Lemn’ge and insisted on calling him Gabriel. My grandfather also refused to send his ‘useful’ strong boys to school and picked his lazy last born (my father) to ‘wear those ridiculous missionary shorts and write nonsense.’ Anyway, that is another funny story!

The Quarry Bank Mill was an eye opener for my face book age companions. It displayed and explained the hard work that pre industrial Britons had to put into creating just a little piece of cloth for covering oneself in the harsh cold climate that forced you to ‘dress up’. You’d freeze to death otherwise. It wasn’t a case of sexual modesty but a necessity.During those days, little  children as young as eight worked hard too and it wasn’t called abuse! Hard labour followed with inadequate nourishment and biting cold was a norm for many. These was no central heating, no electricity, water situation curiously unsorted, and I daren’t think what one did when one had to go to toilet in the night. The thinking process that went into inventing better machines to help make life a bit tolerable must have been a necessity ‘survival mechanism’ not just for the sake of a Nobel prize. There was none at the time. Just hard life! Europeans didn’t have ‘inventing genes’ as my IT friend had fantasized. They had to think forward. Sheep that produced the much needed wool for the clothing had to be fed and kept warm and alive during frost winter etc etc. Stronger, more permanent structures had to be put up. Now, compare this with my grandfather whose environment didn’t demand architectural planners from Oxford university. A nice cool mud hut did just fine!

I can’t begin to visualise how miserable the existence must have been for pre industrial Europeans. Stories like Les miserable, Oliver Twist etc shed a little light  on some of the misery that majority of people experienced.  Professor Ali Mazrui explores this in detail in BBC series about Africa’s triple heritage where he claims that European’s rapid ‘development’ was an instinct for to survival, whereas the warm African climate gave us a ‘lazy gene’. I believe him. The Quarry displayed enough information to support this hypothesis.  It also exposed the process of exploitation as the industrialization created unprecedented demand for raw material. Cotton, sugar, coffee, tea tobacco etc etc were in demand here but didn’t grow here. I won’t go into details on how slavery came to feature in the cotton and sugar plantations. It’s unnecessarily painful. One other thing, all the talk of ‘development’ and no donor money has gone into constructing factories to process these raw materials and package them for export. Instead, even the most un-European product like mosquito net is still manufactured in the West and sent back to Africa. Someone must make the profit I understand.

The Quarry had documentary proof that, precisely like in Africa, poor families lost half their brood of children in ‘preventable’ diseases. Even the rich man that owned the quarry lost six of his thirteen children in diseases that would have been treated at the GP’s today. Surprisingly, at that time, according to Dr. Livingstone, Africans were ‘of better health than the British’. Food was plenty, water unspoiled and people went about their business. They even challenged Dr. Livingstone in a walking duel as he didn’t seem that fit in their eyes. LOL . Perhaps manual labour made us fit. I do not remember worrying about calories in my village! Water was and is still carried from the streams on the head by women and children. I see nothing wrong with that. I grew up fetching water from the stream two to three times a day and delighted greatly in walking and playing with my mates on the way there.  How much water does one need anyway? Who needed to soak in a bath full of bubbles? A bucket of water per wash was all we needed. The latrines did not require water either. Besides, squatting was OK.  No big problem with that either. Squatting is good for you according to some ‘pooh researchers’ who claim that the Western ‘throne’ isn’t ideal for constipated folks, and recommend the Indian style toilets. I can’t argue there!

So then, what has happened since?

Africa’s reality isn’t seen through African eyes. Even the good doctor Livingston considered us savages, just like that brute Henry Morton Stanley whose cruelty I don’t wish to describe. Like many other ‘losers’ they embarked on so called exploration missions in order to discover themselves above all. For once they could feel superior.  Unfortunately, they took the liberty in seeing everything in Africa as dark and in need of  ‘enlightenment’ from the West. In the genesis terms, Africa was all dark in the beginning! It needed light to descend upon it for redemption. Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ epitomizes this Victorian myth.  The real truth is that before the European gaze Africans didn’t even know they were black’ said Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere. Actually they were not even Africans. The putting together of the continent and carving it up had nothing to do with the people who lived there. The bottom line is, it is only in the European’s gaze that we became blacks and identified ourselves as blacks! You become black  only when pitted against a white. OR?  The trouble begins when the default humanity that defines everything and everyone is the white one. The African way of life  then becomes ‘strange’ and ‘backward’ because it is different from the European. We don’t have toilets inside our living space therefore we are backward? My grandpa would have thrown his 6 foot spear in someone’s flesh if he was forced to pooh inside his house. LOL. For some reasons, Africa’s way of life was stigmatized from first encounter with the European Others and Africans were made to feel inadequate and on the lower ladder of civilization.

We still are.

According to the helping narratives, the ‘darkness’ hasn’t gone away. However, it is not politically correct to call us savages or backward anymore. We are called ‘underdeveloped.’ The last person who openly called us backward was Queen Elizabeth II in her 1953 Christmas speech where she urged Great Britons ‘to continue leading other backward nations.’ This was at a time when many African countries had had enough of being colonized. They just wanted out! I am sure the Queen meant well in wanting to ‘help.’ President Truman had already shown support for ‘helping’ the developing of the ‘underdeveloped’ parts of the world. After the WW II, two billion people were defined as under developed by the ‘Marshall Plan’ discourse.

Unfortunately, arrogant commentaries from world leaders reinforce the ‘media attitude’ that allows misrepresentation of a whole continent. Tony Blair insists that ‘Africa is a scar on the world conscious.’ My friends Hegel and Kant already set the tone by calling us stupid and ugly. These two gentlemen never even bothered to leave Germany in order to make such demeaning deduction. Missionaries stories were sufficient, said Immanuel Kant the representationalist phenomenologist who said you cannot represent another thinking being and that truth is only when the knowledge agrees with the object. How could he then define us based on apriori assumptions and hearsay? Obviously, he was convinced blacks couldn’t think?

Black Africans were ‘created’ by Eurocentric frameworks underpinned by comparison of un comparable existence. How do you compare countries with such different history and  environment? How do you compare societies that mass produced advanced weapons and descended upon un assuming people who were busy chewing their raw sugar cane and demanded they grew more of it and send away? When somebody complained back in Europe that the savages were not greedy and didn’t know money he was urged to ‘introduce it to them by imposing tax. ‘Tax for what sir’? asked the gentleman. ‘For anything, something, the mud hut, or poll tax…yes for having a head’ I still laugh when I read such stories. New world order! Powerful versus powerless.

These comparisons continue today in aid narratives.

The darkness that was seen in the beginning has a new permanent name: POVERTY.

Rural African women are compared to the likes of the ‘Sex and the City’ to tell stories of gender oppression.

The rich and glamourous of the rich countries travel with heavy camera crew to ‘poverty gaze’…..or help a little. Not to make what made Britain great, but to alleviate poverty. Which wasn’t always there.

Wolfgang Sachs a post developmentalist like myself says ‘Poverty is in the eyes of the beholder.’

WELCOME TO POVERTY VOYEURISM. I HAD MY DOSE YESTERDAY.

Is ‘Truth’ More Beautiful Than ‘Reality’?

My first 2013 meeting with my PhD supervisor, Bruce Hanlin left me with a challenging question of philosophical nature.

After he read a draft of my mumble jumbo theoretical chapter about documentary’s power to reinforce or challenge a ‘way of seeing’, Bruce ‘jokingly’ asked me to clarify one thing: ‘Is truth the same as reality?‘. Luckily, he usually knows when I am cornered, so he left it at that, and I escaped from his office.

My delayed response after leaving the campus was to browse my challenged African memory for ‘acceptable’ definitions of ‘truth’, ‘reality’ and ‘knowledge’. How do we know what we know is true? Is my experience of ‘reality’ the same as everyone else’s? What would the fat man sat opposite me on the train do if he found out that I thought he should try to lose weight? Anyway, I smiled politely at him as he finished gulping his coca-cola, which I thought he definitely didn’t need. Luckily, the reality is: ABSOLUTE TRUTH IS UNKNOWABLE otherwise there would be chaos on this planet as punches were exchanged for EACH negative thought we labored. Who isn’t thankful that we are not transparent? Phew!

Anyway, back to my truth versus reality dilemma.

First I need to make an important confession. Athough there are many published African philosophers like Mudimbe, Chukwudi Eze etc, I am burdened with Western philosophy because that is what ‘philosophy proper’ is ……….right?  Their ramblings about truth, beauty, knowledge and reality is the real stuff because we are all judged by it. The oral system of knowing that informed my ancestors for centuries is not a valid episteme as I found out the minute I stepped into a classroom.  So my interest being representation of reality, Immanuel Kant’s take on truth is forced upon me. He defined truth as ‘the agreement of knowledge with its object’. To totally know the object you must be it . (Literally!)   In order to represent another thinking human you must lose your subjectivity according to Kant.  HOW DO YOU DO THAT?  Mhhhh…Let’s put that in a perspective of a documentary filmmaker with a camera in his/her hands. (a) You have your own biases about the piece of ‘reality’ you want to represent (b) the funders likewise have their own biases….According to the polarised world, you belong in the ‘developed’ half and you are about to represent the ‘underdeveloped’ other.  So what do you come up with? Reality? Truth?  Whose? I think the ‘filmic’ truth is definitely different from reality.  It will be just truth according to the filmmaker’s limitation, ethics and purse. ….Documenting ‘reality’ indeed!

The popular documentary definition so far is Grierson’s ‘creative treatment of actuality’ …fair enough…If the same pair of eyes treating the reality belonged to the same person experiencing that reality. [Kantian?] So,by pointing our film cameras at ‘objects’, we are making a fundamental epistemological statement; see-it-this-way. We are creating a specific ‘way of seeing’ that reality: -a ‘gaze’ in my theory-on-the-way.

My own experiment with a documentary called ‘LIFE GOES ON: Voices from Cape Town’(2008), demonstrates that ‘reality’ is definitely contaminated by our perception, which in turn is tainted by our preconceptions and dispositions, because ideally, making a documentary is supposed to present-things-as-they-are. So called a window on the world. However, in actual fact, documentary filmmaking is an interpretation of a particular (chosen) reality, in a particular way. Perhaps premeditated, perhaps not. If intercultural documentary ethics ruled perhaps the world would see less negative stereotypes of the ‘Other’. When I arrived in Cape Town South Africa, I was totally prepared to embrace whatever reality was out there. Any. No synopsis or idea. How could I? What authority of ‘knowing’ South Africa did I have? Did we have  a shared memory? Have I grown up in a country where I was told where I couldn’t go, sit or stand? I humbled myself by accepting my limitations. So a good place to start was to actually listen to people who belonged in that place. For two months I stayed in Cape and tried to figure out just what I could ‘know’….. It was difficult. The iconic townships which are routinely splashed on global media to depict misery can either be ‘known’ from the ‘safety’ of the  air conditioned township tour buses or through the eyes and hearts of the residents who have called those shacks home since birth. Their ‘reality’ is limited to circumstances. It was a hate child of  apartheid.  It’s an evil ‘reality’ that is still at  the dry cleaners with stains hard to clean.

One other thing; -what I saw and heard from the multitude of people we met, was totally different from what my Swedish film partner Anna Larson saw and heard. On some bad days  she would burst into tears, interrupting filming process, whereas I could find in my frame of  reference a better way to deal with such purported unfairness.  Any Tanzanian can still sing the songs that spoke of the unfairness that apartheid made a ‘reality’ for way too long. In the end Anna and I, decided on not making any statement with the film, because reality kept running away!….Besides, there were also Oh! so many ‘truths’!.  Our ‘truth’ was irrelevant………..I therefore think that,  truth is perhaps someone’s ‘reality’ dressed up in comforting rags. Isn’t creation and evolution truths too?  Perhaps what Herr Kant called ‘things-in-themselves’ is the naked reality; the absolute truth, that we can never capture and dress up.

Maybe then, Just maybe…Truth is more beautiful than reality. 

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7HSbTz8WII)

                                                                    ‘This is my neighbourhood,

                                                                     This is where I grew up,

                                                                     I feel more comfortable here.’                 

 

 

21/12/12….END OF THE WORLD THAT NEVER CAME?

It was priceless to hear a BBC presenter poking fun at the Mayan prophecy about the end of the world.  George Alagiah said on the 20^th December: ‘LETS HEAR THE WEATHER REPORT FOR TOMORROW….IF WE ARE STILL HERE’  then burst into laughter….Ok, so we did not explode into nothingness…but whoever said the Mayan were wrong? End of the ‘world’ perhaps means different things to different people! I know people who live on parallel planes. The physical and the divine. To them human beings are not only physical beings.

It’s actually funny how humans are so desperate to attach a meaning to every sign even when they did not create it in the first place!  The exact meaning the Mayan had in mind is not up to ‘Others’ to decode and understand (our) way.  There are many ways of understanding the world and we should embrace that.  Essence of ‘being’ is also very different. Even the way of counting differs. I once interviewed an African wise woman (a Witch) who told me that the more I think I know the less I did. She never went to school yet her understanding of the abstract was phenomenal. She questioned my so called ‘universal episteme’ and laughed at the way I spoke of my age.

‘Why do you say this is year 1999?’ WHY!!! She wanted to know.

Anyway, the Mayan thing didn’t bother me because my tribe has other ways of telling time.

My grumpiness today isn’t about calendars because I think synchronizing how we count or tell time is not a bad thing.  Imagine the chaos at passport controls at airports if  people popped up with passports valid until 1390 or arriving for flights based on the sunrise or sunset. OH DEAR!  I genuinely think the ‘universal’ Gregorian calendar is one of the best thing in the global memory. It was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII sometimes in the 16^th century and popularized by the Catholic church. Nothing at all wrong with that I guess. It’s the privilege of the powerful to impose meaning to stuff. I have no problem with that.

My worry  just now is that, here we are, few days  remaining to 2013 and the hypocrisy surrounding AID to Africa is still not challenged!

Why is Fair Trade not FAIR?

Why is development AID not sustainable?

Why is power in AID sector still …Oh so White???

Why is a continent of hard working people still regarded as incarnation of helplessness?

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2013…….My wish? ……….MAY EMPOWERMENT DREAMS COME TRUE !!!

‘KONY 2012′ and the Symphony of sympathy for Africa.

Talk about digital technology shaping human history! The World Wide Web has surely facilitated the making, sharing and shaping of history. Genuine documentaries and other wannabe ‘documentaries’ which essentially are narcissistic narratives littered with real images of real people supposedly in need of help, have found faithful audience on the internet. Once again, those hands that can reach and grab better technology (not guns or canons this time around) are pointing it at Africans in the pretence of a benevolent  ‘saving mission’.  The films produced find appreciative online audience who know ‘everything’ there’s to know about ‘poor’ Africans through media. It’s pretty sad!

The list of the skewed films is too long for a proper moan so I will only bitch about the latest ‘saving Africa saga’, by an American campaigner Jason Russell. Russell’s NGO ‘The Invisible Children’, made a ‘documentary’ about misery of African children soldiers, -abducted and recruited to kill. Russell’s approach of choosing out one child’s particularly devastating story and making it a shorthand for the whole tragedy is a well-known phenomenon for appealing to the viewer’s empathy. The film went viral the first week, having been watched by more than a hundred million. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc.

              (Clever juxtaposition: Rusell’s son is strategically edited in to offer a point of contrast. WELL DONE!)

I will not say that the film has no merits or that the issue addressed is not an important one. Taking away people’s childhood is wrong. The warlord Joseph Kony and others like him do not deserve to even be called humans. The issue however is, how visual media is used to simplify complicated realities and produce euphoric stories that continue to feed the discourse of ‘White man’s burden. Why Africa? Why tragedy? Why film?. Are the stories trying to tell us that nothing important happens in Africa unless initiated by outsiders? Actually I would go to great length and argue that the whole notion of ‘giving voice’ here, ‘empowering’ there is just as patronizing as claiming to make something visible! On whose authority? Does the First World privileges anyone with a camera and air ticket  or electric guitar to assume a power of position to unilaterally ‘speak for’ Africans?  It is not right. What patronising narratives such as KONY 2012 do is feed the negative stereotyping where Africans are seen as helpless and hopeless. There are many subtle ways of dealing with serious human issues without sensationalising them. A good researched film would have taught us how-things-really-are but instead the audience is served a melodramatic concoction of how-things-should be and then joins in an exciting ‘mission-almost-impossible’ journey that climaxes in one hell of a feel-good-job-well-done trivia!

I am not surprised to read somewhere that Nicholas D. Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, thanked Invisible Children for making the film and stating that rather than being “white man’s burden”, when “a warlord continues to kill and torture across a swath of Congo and Central African Republic … it’s a human burden.”

I can’t agree more. The nagging question however is, WHO THEN ARE HUMANS? How exactly does one read such a comment? Are Americans THE humans then???? How was the research for pre production carried out? How did the power inequality play out? Because again…dangling a carrot at the right time will solicit the ‘correct’ answers for the symphony of sympathy to play on……..

I AM A CELEBRITY-SAMARITAN, TAKE ME TO AN AFRICAN SLUM

There is something special with (Celebrity-Samaritans) and African slums. These celebritans are out ‘doing good’ on the ground where they are needed in order to entertain audience. Why else would a good samaritan document every little hug and tear they shed for the ‘wretched’ of Africa? Africa is the ultimate destination for voyeuristic shows. To emphasize the difference between the ‘rich’ and the ‘poor’, slums in Africa feature in telethons and other charity appeals.Slums are icons symbolising Africa. A landmark if you will.

After the success that Sir Geldof had with Live Aid back in 1985, fundraising has never been the same. The images of the hungry, fly filled faces of the Ethiopian famine victims have come to stand for Africa in general. And ‘begging’ on behalf of Africans is now done using famous faces. It’s as easy and pleasing as rock and roll. Many are doing it. Some nobody’s became somebodies because of ‘helping Africa’! If  you are white and feel a bit bored, just grab a video camera and jump on a plane; you will find yourself though helping ‘those’ humans. After all in donor countries eyes, Africa is seen as ‘the white man’s burden’

Here is UK’s Tony Blair’s wearing the most patronising donor cloak: [Excerpt from his 2001 speech]

‘The state of Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world. But if the world as a community focused on it, we could heal it. And if we don’t, it will become deeper and angrier’. (et tu, Tony???)

Well done! Considering that he stood by his word even after his time in office when the ‘feel good effect’ of playing god lingered. On his website, Mr. Blair says,  posted a three minuted money begging clip that is quite amusing. Like most interventionists he claims that; ‘a lot have been achieved but much more has to be done. ‘ And he shows many wounds. Who is this kid? does he have a name? Is is ethical to just film children without consent.? 

.

Why are slums so important to these charities ‘FAT CATS’ anyway? Shouldn’t that be the African government’s problem to demolish them? Tanzania has demolished the infamous ‘Hyena Square’ a few times but people go back and erect shacks and invite foreign NGO to come and ‘gaze’! There are more than six hundred NGOs in Kibera slum downtown Nairobi, Kenya. My point is; since the celebritans enjoy pilgrimaging to these miserable places, why can’t Blair et al call for UNESCO to protect them as World Heritage sites? SLUMS are what Big Ben is for London. Surely, protecting such landmarks will be good for fundraising and the general entertainment that is involved? It is very good for propaganda to prove that Africa is on the bottom ladder of development. Most people do not travel to Africa yet they think they know Africa. Believing that documentary films show truth and nothing but the truth is naive, but it produces a certain feeling in the brain.  It is called ‘epistephilia’ (Nichols 1991) –A pleasure of knowing

Propaganda and the pleasure of knowing might have made Germans accept and fear Herr A. Hitler. The triumph of the will is a film I admire a lot because of the size of lies it told. Hitler smiling, kissing babies and taking flowers from a cheering audience? Editing is priceless to produce the pleasure of knowing.

Most Westerners thrive on seeing these disaster porns and believing that is what Africa is all about! They enjoy seeing celebrities who look like them ‘saving’ Africans from starvation. I read somewhere that a stampede of papparazzo’s almost flattened African children in a hospital corridor whilst trying to get a close up of a Sophia Loren spoon feeding a starving child in Somalia. I won’t begrudge her because she is a ‘proper celebrity’. They do whatever they want to.

The little disturbing thought is that, there is so much money raised through mega-telethons, yet the African slums get no face lift! What about a proper EXTREME MAKEOVER? Not a good idea. Celebritans need the hell-holes for the helping Africa narrative to climax.The difference in life standards have to be visually emphasized in order to shock.

Lucky for us, Blair, Geldof, Bono and other Celebrity-Samaritans have pledged to take us out of the misery. The UN too. Milenium Development goal. Surely the milenium bureaucratic ” FAT CATs’  in Armani suits aren’t going to lose their salaries if ‘corrupt’ Africa doesn’t show development?

Now for the season I hate most. I find Christmas a complete nuisance. A complete disruption of everything rational in favour of vulgur shopping and glutonous eating!

As if overeating around a Jewish guy’s birthday isn’t bad enough, the christmas fundraising spree bombards eaters with miserable images of Africa.

For now, Africa continues to depicted through the donor’s Eurocentric eyes which are extremely powerful and patronising. It is ‘their’ version of Africa. ‘The White man’s Burden’.

 

 

“DO THEY KNOW IS CHRISTMAS IS ALSO ANOTHER PROPAGANDA OF THIS  MILLENIUM”!

                                                                                                         But say a prayer,

Pray for the other ones.

At Christmas time it’s hard

But when you’re having fun…

There’s a world outside your window

and it’s a world of dread and fear

Where the only water flowing is

the bitter sting of tears

Where the Christmas bells that are ringing

are the clanging chimes of Doom

Well, tonight thank God it’s them instead of you.

Donor gaze plays on the misery of the continent! It problematises our existence. Because we are not like ‘them’  Even the lack of snow is a problem???

Hopefully, UNESCO, will soon declare the slums in Africa ‘a world heritage’ so that celebritans can permanently secure their pilgrimage site for comparing their lives and those of ‘wretched mortals!

 

 

Coronation Street in Kenya? WHO’S NEXT?

I will get straight to the point. The pornography of poverty is getting into me. Yesterday, I watched an ITV programme called ‘CORRIE GOES TO KENYA’ . They didn’t. They went to a slum dwelling in Mombasa with a population of around 20,000 Kenyans. Why? Because they think that, to entertain a Western audience used to demeaning images of Africans, Coronation Street had to choose an appropriate ‘poor’ setting not to upset the begging trend set by Geldof and Co.

Am I Grumpy? Shouldn’t everyone be? Any intelligent human being will find it abusive to witness the continuation of skewed representations of other human beings in the name of ‘helping’. The series are supposed to help spread awareness on HIV/AIDS issues, so to fault them is to condemn those ‘poor Kenyans’ to their early death! So let the carrying of ‘the White Man’s Burden’ continue. I was hoping to be spared the ‘donor gaze’ before Christmas time begging spree, but Coronation street decided to start early. This is to me the third coming of the white gods. First the Missionaries, then the Development experts, and now we have Celebrities…WHO’s NEXT?

Big issue sellers? Actually a great idea.

Just bring any ‘aimless’ Briton into ‘Africa’ and they will do splendidly.

A 50 year old country against an Empire?

I call it a ‘freaky comparison’ of realities.

 

“White Man’s Burden” versus True Empowerment.

When the British Imperial Poet Rudyard Kipling wrote his poem “The White Man’s Burden” back in 1899, little did he foresee the relevance his words will hold in the 21^st century’s glamour aid culture. The patronizing attitude of the aid sector implies that “ending poverty” is in the hands of the “rich” who have the power to “help”. After the mega success of the live band-aid in 1985, begging has never been the same. It is an act of the benevolent. Everyone and everything goes. Even goats! I am particularly keen on the give-a-goat to African peasants scheme that Oxfam and WaterAid are rolling out. Sure they carried out impressive research, evaluations and came up with targets & monitoring strategies. In appreciation for the empowering goats, I am happy to do a pro-bono monitoring gig for them. Already I know that some ungrateful people in Ghana think a goat is too little a gift. They are forgetting that a beggar must not choose. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poPwm9Oosq8

Africa is gazed upon as a space that needs “sorting out”. A “White Man’s burden” attitude is the gaze that asks “how can I help” instead of the entrepreneur oriented attitude of “what can we do together?” It’s funny how even school kids in the West are entrenched in the belief that they can help Africans. They learn quite early. Christmas time, I usually observe how shoppers give their unwanted coins to small children to drop in the rattling tins of charity muggers with posters of the iconic skeletal nameless African children. It is touching but at the same time I hate the fact that some of these children actually grow up feeling it is their responsibility to help. How did they figure out that? Western children are growing up with images of dying Africa. They have no clue how Africans live. It’s a scandal if the begging industry’s agendas continue to dominate what can be known about Africa. Africa is seen through narrow filters that overemphasize the problems. The so called “donor gaze” justifies emphasizing helplessness to unzip giver’s purses. It also rewards with melodramatic good feelings, as the “white saviour’s” good-deeds in Africa are shown for TV audience at home. It’s amazing how some of these stories are orchestrated. Very few philanthropists travel without a film crew these days!

Donor gaze started aggressively with President Truman’s “Marshall Plan” back in post-war days when America “sorted out” European ruined economies. The world became polarized into developed and developing and Mr. Truman proclaimed that Imperialism had no place anymore. He proposed a program of development based on the concept of democratic fair dealing. Some post-colonial scholars call this the beginning of ‘foreign aid imperialism’. Obviously, the imperialistic robe didn’t look good so the West put on the  development robe to give respectability and purpose to an aggressive world order concerned with acquisition of raw materials and conversion of citizens into consumers. The colonial officers were replaced by development experts and so started the crusade for carrying the “White Man’s burden”.

Aid is now a culture we have to live with. It polarizes us into “helpers” and the “helped”. Some hate it and some love it. By the same token, it does provide jobs for film photographers. The audiences need their dose of helping stories to boost their morale. These helping marathons stigmatise the world beyond belief. We see how the rich kind people visit hell-holes to experience misery first hand. Was it Lazarus in the bible who gave drops of water to someone in hell? I don’t remember. I do God very bad.

Donor gaze is epitomized not by rock stars like Bono, Geldof et al, but by people who should know better.  I do not find Tony Blair amusing when he goes around calling Africa a “scar”. It is not right! He said that, “Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world”. Mr. Blair is a man of many words but for some reasons he failed to elaborate more on how he worked out the “scar” thing. His film on his website is one of the most “donor gazed” production I have seen so far. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDb5a1JFqnE .

Hopefully begging money for charities will reach its use-by date soon as more Chinese continue to look at Africa not with patronizing sympathy but just as partners in business. I believe donor gaze can only stop when true empowerment starts. www.tanz-uk.com

Interpreting Others: I’m OK You’re OK.

Drinking a satisfying pint of banana and strawberry milkshake in a pub near the university while my research mates drank various other non-toxic concoctions, I realized how simple and enjoyable life actually is. If we allow it! Discussing the most explosive topics imaginable, I came to a conclusion that if people talked freely and constructively about important issues like racial and religious differences, they would find out that it is perfectly OK to look different. Diversity is the beauty of life and everyone should be happy in his or her own skin. Just because MJ bleached his skin, it does not mean that all black skinned people wish to be white. Or because some white people imagine that it must difficult and sad to be black then one has to be self-conscious of their blackness. Analysing a recent TV disaster “Make Bradford British” I could tell that in our digital global village, there is a lack of authentic information about the essence of humanity. What it is to just be human before being “gazed” at.  In interaction with each other we are assigned meanings according to what is programmed in the mental “hard disks” of the “gazers”. To my fellow villagers on the slopes of Kilimanjaro I am just “that girl who went abroad” but depending on whom I am juxtaposed against, I can become anything from “that tall woman” to “that black woman”. To me that is necessary in the process of categorizing and I do not expect strangers in a shopping mall in the United Kingdom to think differently. That would be hypocritical. It is pushing political correctness down people’s throats.

I remember back in the 80s in USSR, overhearing a little Russian boy on a park bench asking his mother “why does she look like that?”… I then looked at the mother hoping she would explain to him that I was from another continent and people do look different elsewhere. Instead the poor woman told him to be quiet and looked apologetically at me. That was quite not right in my view! There was nothing to apologise for. Racial differences are visual and people need to make sense of that from early childhood.  Naturally, being the Dirty Harry I am, I asked the woman to allow me to talk to the boy, which I did. It was my first year in Moscow and I was still negotiating the language but I managed to tell the curious little boy about my country where everyone looked like me. I told him of my village and the food we ate, the milk we drank and the games children played. I cannot say for sure if my bench education in skin colour influenced the boy’s future encounters with black people but as an adult I was happy that I contributed with knowledge. I think there is a lack of balanced information about “others” in this part of the world.

My question that day and perhaps in this PhD is; what is the best way to conceptualise and accept differences? My interaction with others is guided by the basic principle of: I am OK You are OK. It is underpinned by the breakthrough Transactional Analysis; (TA), an everyday psychology advocated by Eric Berne who dared branch off from Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalysis. TA offers a healthy mindset for healthy humans to interact as equals. Because We are equals.

Miss HIV: A Documentary That Shocked Me.

Honestly, I find most human competitions plainly untoward and I would be disturbed if I were to be crowned Miss something. Everyone is beautiful to someone and beauty is felt not just seen. My belief and I stick with it! How can we measure beauty? Universalising beauty is problematic. I call it global barbielisation. I blame visual representation of beauty and of course consumer products like the famous barbie dolls that promote ideals to mold on. I read somewhere that Oprah Winfrey was asked to “lose a few pounds” in order to grace the front cover of vogue? What is wrong with O’s curves? I think African mature women like myself are not happy with the appropriation of beauty ideals that are sneaking on our younger generation. Before you know it, beauty clinics will mushroom in Africa to combat our curves and halt the natural aging. (Aging is synonymous with decaying for some people here in the West!) Anyway, my ranting today isn’t about the Miss HIV pageant per ser. Africa is a big continent that can accommodate all sorts of pageants. Miss Poverty, Miss Hunger, Miss Thirst, Mr Corruption, ..the list is long indeed.

I am shocked into writing about a feature length documentary covering Miss HIV pageant in Africa. http://misshiv.com/   I first saw the trailer online. When I bought my DVD copy of Miss HIV documentary, I was half expecting the standard out of Africa “disaster pornography”. Instead, I watched a beautiful, most daring and comprehensive AIDS-related documentary film ever made in recent times. This is utterly shocking for me. For a long time, Africa has been a space for demeaning depictions and HIV/AIDS pandemic brought in a generation of quasi-documentary productions that are insult to many of us and reinforce stigmatisation of the disease. For once it was nice to watch this serious documentary film exploring the pandemic. The film is well balanced beyond belief! No patronizing “voice of god” narration or other annoying interpretive devices. Images communicate, and the editing places you in AIDS conferences where you can judge things for yourself. It is a credit to Sergei Eisenstein who saw editing as the essence of the film. One more thing: everyone in the film is allowed the microphone. Rich and poor. When Bill Gates is booed in the AIDS conference, the scene is included…contextually.

The two Miss HIV contestants tell their own story of living positively with the virus. The credibility lies in the fact that they talk freely without scripting or cues as to what to say next. No embarrassing monologues like in some other “begging” stories we are all familiar with. Their story is definitely worth telling and we follow them all the way to the stage. We are happy that they are taking part and when they apply their final make up we understand why it is important for them. Miss HIV is a film that achieved what it set out to do. The director promises on his website http://www.jimhanon.com, that his films seek to show how it is to be human. I believe him. Miss HIV manages to portray the “little” people at the same time it maintained human dignity consistently. Juxtaposing hundreds of funerals and thousands of weddings, the film offers you permanent food for thought about Uganda’s AIDS response and the pro-condom advocacy of sex as human right. Above all, this film illuminates the power inside the AIDS industry.  If you didn’t know that AIDS is a massive ideological and economical industry, this film signposts the whats’ whys’ and hows. It is a well-researched, intelligently balanced portrayal of a historical actuality. The socio-cultural dynamics influencing the spread of the HIV virus are explored and blames are rightly laid where they belong. I think Miss HIV is a quintessence of documenting reality. This is what John Grierson meant when he defined documentary as “creative treatment of actuality”. Miss HIV situates the pandemic in the bigger global picture because it is impossible to discuss HIV/AIDS without mentioning the Western nations that are in charge of the programming, medicating and researching.

I still think representing a “cultural other” is an extremely complex exercise but Miss HIV is a rendition of what can be achieved if human respect guides the filming process. The motto should be: YOU MUST NOT POINT YOUR CAMERA AT PEOPLE YOU DESPISE. It is wrong! Luckily in Tanzania we have film permit system to filter away junk filmmakers. Availability of digital equipments is now allowing untrained filmmakers without credentials to continue the colonial gaze on African realities. The grand narrative of the donor gaze that allows visual definition of “others” as poor and backward because they sleep in mud huts and never been to a “proper” school underpins pretty much the HIV-era filmmaking that trivialises the pandemic. The internet is full to capacity of such imaginations of Africa. Iconic films like Miss HIV should actually be posted on the internet as a mandatory educational tool for teaching basic training to the generation of “I can help you” digital filmmakers who have no clue what it is to be human! They think that it is highly desirable to help Africans become ‘humans’ like them. Their films glamourise aid and celebrate the alms culture. By forceful juxtaposing “developed” versus “developing” they make people in the ‘rich West’ feel a moral duty to help ‘poor Africa’. They glorify consumerism, not human essence.  Luckily most films are so transparent you know immediately that they are guided by the “god complex” of “sorting out Africa”.  In transactional psychology it translates as “I, (First World) AM OK;  YOU,(Third World) ARE NOT OK“. Miss HIV assumed the dignified stance of  ” I AM OK ,YOU ARE OK” film. It is the ideal position for equal human interactions!