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Learning from the Past to Shape the Future Lessons from the History of Humanitarian Action in Africa

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HPG Working Paper Learning from the past to shape the future Lessons from the history of humanitarian action in Africa Edited by Christina Bennett, Matthew Foley and Hanna B. Krebs October 2016 HPG Humanitarian Policy Group Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank the following individuals for their expertise and advice during the development and shaping of this collection: David Anderson, University of Warwick; Luka Biong Deng, Kush, Inc.; Karl Blanchet, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; Laura Hammond, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; Simone Haysom, HPG Research Associate; Sara Pantuliano, HPG; Severine Rugumamu, University of Dar Es Salaam; Jeremy Swift, Sahara Conservation Fund; Joost Fontein, British Institute for East Africa; and Costantinos Costantinos at Africa Humanitarian Action. The editors would also like to thank Sharon Abramowitz for her contribution to the symposium on which this collection of papers is based. Humanitarian Policy Group Overseas Development Institute 203 Blackfriars Road London SE1 8NJ United Kingdom Tel. +44 (0) 20 7922 0300 Fax. +44 (0) 20 7922 0399 E-mail: [email protected] Website: http://www.odi.org/hpg © Overseas Development Institute, 2016 Readers are encouraged to quote or reproduce materials from this publication but, as copyright holders, ODI requests due acknowledgement and a copy of the publication. This and other HPG Reports are available from www. odi.org.uk/hpg. Contents 1 Introduction from the editors 1 2 Biafra’s legacy: NGO humanitarianism and the Nigerian civil war 5 Kevin O’Sullivan 3 Iconographies of humanitarian aid in Africa 15 Sonya de Laat and Valérie Gorin 4 Controlling sleeping sickness amidst conflict and calm: 31 remembering, forgetting and the politics of humanitarian knowledge in Southern Sudan, 1956–2005 Jennifer J. Palmer and Pete Kingsley 5 Humanitarian discourse and the politics of national liberation: 49 remember Cassinga? Christian A. Williams 6 Humanitarian involvement in wars of liberation in Africa in the 1980s: 61 an Oxfam perspective Tony Vaux 7 Humanitarian action in South Sudan: the case of Operation Lifeline 71 Sudan (OLS) Leben Nelson Moro 8 Church, humanitarianism and genocide in Rwanda: 77 beyond criticism and apology Richard M. Benda 9 The evolution of rights-based humanitarianism in Sierra Leone 89 Melissa Labonte and Ishmeal Alfred Charles i About the contributors Richard M. Benda is a Rwandan academic. He is a Research Fellow at Luther King House College/University of Manchester. His research interests include genocide studies, political theory, philosophy of religion and oral history. Ishmeal Alfred Charles is Program Manager of Caritas-Freetown, Sierra Leone, focusing on youth, ex-combatants, women and girls at risk and access to justice and peace. Valérie Gorin has a PhD in communication and media sciences from the University of Geneva. A historian and a media scholar, she has developed a strong focus on the visual culture of humanitarian action since the nineteenth century. She is currently carrying out research on the history of media practices, eyewitness iconography and the advocacy strategies of aid agencies in early humanitarian settings. She also teaches on humanitarian communication and the history of the aid system at the Center of Education and Research in Humanitarian Action (CERAH) at the University of Geneva. Sonya de Laat is a Media Studies PhD candidate from the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University in London, Canada. Her dissertation takes a cultural history and visual theory approach to exploring the role of photography in shaping humanitarian sentiment and practice, and relations with the subjects of aid. Sonya is also research coordinator for the Humanitarian Health Ethics Research Group at McMaster University, and a practicing visual artist. Melissa Labonte is Associate Professor of Political Science at Fordham University in New York, where her research focuses on humanitarian politics, human rights and West Africa. Leben Nelson Moro is Associate Professor, Director of International Cooperation and Alumni Affairs and Acting Director of the Center for Peace and Development Studies at the University of Juba. He primarily conducts research on development-induced displacement and resettlement, focusing on oil, conflict and displacement in South Sudan. Kevin O’Sullivan is a lecturer in history at National University of Ireland Galway, and also holds an honorary research fellowship at the University of Birmingham, where he was previously a postdoctoral fellow. His research interests are in international history, particularly globalisation, decolonisation, NGOs, aid and development. His current project, provisionally titled ‘The humanitarian international: Aid, NGOs and Western society, 1968–85’, examines the social and political phenomena that inspired the rapid expansion of the NGO sector in the UK, Canada and Ireland in that period. Jennifer J. Palmer and Pete Kingsley are social scientists working in the Centre of African Studies (CAS) at the University of Edinburgh on the European Research Council-funded project Investigating Networks of Zoonosis Innovation (INZI) (grant number 295845). Jennifer is also Deputy Director at the Health in Humanitarian Crises Centre, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Tony Vaux worked for Oxfam from 1972–2000, working in India, the UK, Africa –where he managed Oxfam’s work with the Liberation Fronts in Ethiopia and Sudan – and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In 2000 he published a memoir entitled The Selfish Altruist: Relief Work in Famine and War. Since 2001 he has worked as an independent consultant specialising in conflict analysis. Christian A. Williams is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of the Free State in South Africa. His most recent book, National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa: A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO’s Exile Camps, is published by Cambridge University Press. About the editors Christina Bennett is Head of the Humanitarian Policy Group. Matthew Foley is HPG’s Managing Editor and a Research Fellow. Hanna B. Krebs is a former Research Officer at HPG. ii Histories of humanitarian action in Sub-Saharan Africa 1 Introduction from the editors For better or worse, humanitarianism is more closely humanitarianism in this role was less easily shed. associated with Sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere Like colonialism before it, humanitarian action was else. In many ways, the continent has been the crucible something ‘done’ to Africa, an external intervention and proving ground for modern humanitarian action: into internal crises local governments or affected the site of hideous famines, diseases and conflicts, and people were deemed powerless to prevent or alleviate. the arena in which some of the formative moments As O’Sullivan argues, ‘the undercurrent of empire of contemporary humanitarian history have been … reflected a very Western imagining of how life in played out. Understanding the history and evolution independent Africa should operate’. of humanitarianism globally, as a concept and as a practical profession, is incomplete without an Building on this theme, Sonya de Laat and Valérie understanding of its place in, and relationship to, Gorin explore the influence of the colonial legacy conflicts and disasters in Africa. on modern humanitarianism in Africa through an examination of the historical relationship between This collection of papers, based on a joint symposium photography, suffering and humanitarian assistance. with Africa Humanitarian Action in Addis Ababa, From missionary photography in the mid-nineteenth Ethiopia, in March 2015, provides a survey of century to the more recent phenomenon of some of the key themes and events in the history of ‘development porn’, de Laat and Gorin trace the visual humanitarian action in Africa. Part of HPG’s study history of humanitarianism, and the crucial role of on the global history of humanitarian action, the photography in framing the discourse of humanitarian symposium is one of a series of regional conferences assistance. Drawing on extensive archival research, the in Singapore (on the history of humanitarian action authors demonstrate the persistence of a distinct set of in South-East Asia), Amman (on the Middle East) and tropes and stereotypes: the construction of otherness, Bogota (on Latin America). Like these other studies, difference and the exotic; the homogenisation and the papers presented here do not pretend to be a victimisation of suffering, particularly the suffering comprehensive account of the extensive and complex of children; and the mediatisation of crises as visual history of humanitarian thought and practice on the events, rather than social or political processes. Far African continent; rather, they highlight key themes from neutral documents of record, from their very or moments in order to shed light on humanitarian earliest roots in the hands of missionary humanitarians thought and action today. photographs reveal the ‘legacies of thought and subtle hegemonies’ that have shaped humanitarian action. Several papers explore the legacy of imperialism and its continued influence on modern humanitarian De Laat and Gorin also discuss the use of photography action. In his study on the Biafran war in the late in the self-projection of the humanitarian as hero, 1960s, Kevin O’Sullivan discusses the impact of the ‘in most cases either a technology or a person of conflict
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