Romanticizing Poverty The Representation of African Countries by Western Development Organizations
Michiel van Schagen Master thesis International Relations
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Romanticizing Poverty The Representation of African Countries by Western Development Organizations
Master thesis International Relations University of Amsterdam, 2015
Author: Michiel Van Schagen Student ID: 5871638
Course: Postcolonialism and Development Supervisor: Said Rezaeiejan Second reader: Nanke Verloo
Cover photo: Paul Bruins - Mnweni Rays; Drakensberg, South Africa
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“My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous.”
Michel Foucault
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Contents
Introduction ...... 7
Part I: Theory and Methods ...... 15
1. On Africa...... 16
1.1. Postcolonialism ...... 16
1.2. Orientalism ...... 19
1.3. Africanism ...... 20
2. On Development ...... 24
2.1. Underdevelopment ...... 24
2.2. Postdevelopment ...... 27
2.3. Reflexive development ...... 31
3. On Representation ...... 35
3.1. Re-presence...... 35
3.2. Framing...... 38
3.3. Identity ...... 40
4. Methodology ...... 44
4.1. Discourse analysis ...... 44
4.2. Dramaturgical analysis ...... 48
4.3. Data ...... 50
4.4. Limitations and considerations ...... 55
Part II: Analysis and Conclusions ...... 59
5. Historical Development Representations of Africa ...... 60
5.1. The Ethiopian famine ...... 60
5.2. Pornography of poverty ...... 63
5.3. Identities of Development ...... 68
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6. Contemporary Development Representations of Africa ...... 73
6.1. Setting ...... 74
6.2. Scripting ...... 80
6.3. Staging ...... 84
6.4. Context ...... 87
6.5. Performance ...... 91
Conclusion ...... 95
Bibliography ...... 96
List of Primary Literature ...... 108
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Introduction
The last decade race has resurfaced as an important theme in politics and the public debate in Europe and the United States. In Europe, several countries are reported to witness a ‘resurgence of racism’ in the wake of economic crisis, as right-wing political parties opposed to immigration gather increasing popular support with slogans as extreme as “So we can rid this land of filth” (Ames, 2013). In the United States, president Barack Obama has questioned the notion of the ‘post-racial society’, in a response to multiple instances of disproportional and even deadly police violence against black youths and the resulting outrage in the African American community (Obama, 2013).
Increasingly, these debates concerning race and racism focus on issues of representation and stereotypes. In the United States, mass media were criticized for stereotypically portraying the black victims of police violence as “thugs […] flashing gang signs” instead of using more neutral or even positive images such as graduation photos (Stampler, 2014). On universities across the world, as Harvard, Oxford and the University of Amsterdam, in an effort to break stereotypical imaging, students of color satirized the prejudices they encounter on campus, in campaigns as the I too am Harvard movement (Butler, 2014). In the Netherlands, the ‘Black Pete’ controversy stirs up every year, when critics protest the stereotypical blackface-like representation of a black servant with big lips and an afro-style wig accompanying a wealthy benevolent white man on a horse during the ‘Sinterklaas’ tradition (Pearson, 2014); a Dutch ‘colonial hangover’ as some put it (Bergman, 2014).
A recurring object of comparable critique and ridicule in the public debate is the dominant representation of African countries. A variety of actors has challenged the “one- dimensional view” (VSO, 2001: 15) of Africa that is perpetuated through stereotypical accounts of the continent in Western media. Recent examples include the campaign The Real Africa: Fight the Stereotype, which reminded audiences that ‘Africa is not a country’ by emphasizing the enormous differences between its 54 countries and billions of people speaking an estimated 2000 languages (Kermeliotis, 2014); and Nigerian novelist Chimamandie Adichie who warned the world of ‘the danger of a single story’ about Africa, a story of catastrophe, in a TED talk that has accumulated over 8.5 million views (Adichie, 2009). In very similar vein, a South African co-host of the popular US television program The Daily Show, mocked the common misconception that “Africa is just one giant village full of Aids, huts and starving
7 | Romanticizing Poverty children” (Comedy Central, 2014). In 2012, after a CNN report on a terrorist attack in Nairobi gave viewers the impression that violence was disrupting yet another conflict-ridden African country, Kenyans took to Twitter to explain the world that this stereotypical coverage was exaggerated and oversimplified, under the ‘hashtag’ #SomeonetellCNN (Nyabola, 2013). Drawing a comparison with the colonial 1906 addition of a Congolese man to the New York Bronx Zoo’s attractions, one journalist concludes that “today, the ‘savage nature’ of Africa is still on display, in American headlines” (Moore, 2012).
An important source of information on Africa for the European and American publics besides mainstream media accounts, are the fundraising campaigns of charities and other development organizations (Alam, 2007: 60). An increasing amount of criticism for propagating the stereotypical images of the African continent, is directed at these Western NGOs. Often, these critiques are a combination of humorous cynicism and genuine frustration. Recently, British philanthropist pop star Bob Geldof re-released his famous charity hit Do They Know Its Christmas? to raise awareness and money for NGOs in the fight against the Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. However, his well-intended endeavor was dismissed as “clumsy, patronizing and wrong in many ways” (Adewunmi, 2014) and found to be contributing to the well-established “pop culture of aid” that is orchestrating world-wide pity around negative stereotypes of developing countries (Moyo, 2009: 26)1. Another recent controversy arose when the American NGO Invisible Children launched their KONY2012 campaign with an emotional video appeal that was watched by more than 32 million people in four days, to stop the rebel warlord Joseph Kony from spreading terror in Uganda. In fact, at the time, Kony had already fled the country six years before, causing ‘growing outrage’ at yet another misrepresentation of a complex situation in an African country; many Ugandans found the appeal “highly irresponsible” and “totally misleading” (Pflanz, 2012). Stereotypical representations of Africa by development organizations have repeatedly been parodied the last years. The Norwegian Students’ and Academics’ International Assistance Fund started a mock-campaign called Radi-Aid, which urged “Africans [to] unite to save Norwegians from dying of frostbite” by sending old radiators to the cold suffering people in Scandinavia (SAIH, 2015). The abundance of such initiatives2 conveys a clear message: a growing amount of people in Europe, the United States, Africa and across the world is unsatisfied with the
1 In a response, Bob Geldof rejected the comments as ‘impenetrable bollox’ by an “ ill-informed, stupid, clichéd, metropolitan bunch of twats from ‘Cooltown’” (Band Aid, 2014). The Band Aid project raised US$ 2 million which was divided among several aid NGOs, such as Oxfam, World Vision, and Save the Children. 2 For an overview of recent aid parodies, see Purvis (2014).
8 | Romanticizing Poverty predominantly “cheap, predictable and stereotypical images” that aid NGOs use to represent African countries (Nederveen Pieterse, 1990: 235).
Invariably, criticized accounts in Western media and development organization’s communications depict Africa as homogeneous. They convey the image of a continent characterized by poverty, conflict, famine, disease, primitive cultures, a backwards economy and corrupt politics. Furthermore, Africa is represented as infantilized, through the repetitive portrayal of “emaciated children with distended bellies or flies in their eyes” (CCIC, 2008: 2), the so called “powerful image of the starving African child” (Cohen, 2001: 178). According to many scholars, this image of the lone black child, so frequently used in aid NGO’s campaigns, is in fact the dominant iconography of the whole continent (Manzo, 2006: 10). Ultimately, Africa is characterized by ‘otherness’ (Mazrui, 2005: 69) and ‘inferiority’ (Dodd, 2005: 26). As a result, a variety of social scientists - including anthropologists, development economists, political scientists, sociologists, and scholars of International Relations - have accused development assistance of racism (Crisp, 2011), and discarded it as a ‘White-Savior Industrial Complex’ (Cole, 2012) or a ‘White Man’s Burden’: a “self-pleasing fantasy […] that morally glorifies the West” (Easterly, 2006: 20). Additionally, development practices have become to be interpreted as instruments of control, as Foucauldian discourses of power and knowledge. They are argued to “constitute one of the most powerful mechanisms for ensuring domination over the Third World today” (Escobar, 1984: 384). In this light, some critical scholars view development as a continuity of colonialism; development as neo- colonialism, which “adapts to the new social and political circumstances in the postcolonial era” (Andreasson, 2005: 974).
Evidently, this is highly problematic. A well-intending international community of compassionate good doers, striving, as one development organization puts it, for a full solution to poverty and injustice out of “unconditional love for all people” (World Vision, 2015: 2), cannot ignore such criticisms. Development NGOs cannot be satisfied with the fact that their own communications are continuously being accused of reifying negative stereotypes of African countries; the very countries they aim to alleviate from destitution and marginalization. And they aren’t. Over the last decades, aid NGOs have conducted multiple researches and evaluations of their own communications to analyze the influence of development images on broader development objectives (i.a.: Van der Gaag & Nash, 1987; VSO, 2001; CCIC, 2008). The specific objectives of contemporary development are perhaps most explicitly defined in the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals. The
9 | Romanticizing Poverty individual goals include ending extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality, and combating diseases like HIV/aids and malaria. However, there is more to development than just a material side. In a recent resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly, the UN adamantly stresses its belief that the “eradication of poverty and hunger, as well as combating inequality at all levels, is essential” (UN, 2010: 2; italics mine). Following from its “fundamental values, including freedom, equality, solidarity, [and] tolerance,” the UN emphasizes that its countries “acknowledge the diversity of the world and recognize that all cultures and civilizations contribute to the enrichment of humankind” (ibid.: 3). When development is understood as such, and it should be, it entails not only the eradication of poverty and material inequalities but also of prejudice and racism. If development, as most large Western NGOs recognize, encompasses a commitment to a world where “all voices are heard and all human beings are treated equally” (Oxfam, 2014: 12) and “live in dignity” (Care, 2014: 2). Then, sensitive imaging and representation are crucial. Yet, as described above, it is precisely these notions of equality and dignity that the representations of African countries by development organizations allegedly undermine, as they are said to “strip Africans of their real dignity” (Coulter, 1989; CCIC, 2008: 2) and reinforce dichotomic thinking in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Mahadeo & McKinney, 2007: 15; Cooke, 2001: 14).
However, stereotypical images do also raise a lot of money. “They work” (Plewes & Stuart, 2007: 23). Fundraising has become big business (Smillie, 1995: 124), with campaigns and appeals costing millions (Lamers, 2005: 38) and raising even more (Campbell et al., 2005: 8). Bob Geldof’s original Band Aid song, despite widely criticized lyrics which informed the public that in Africa “nothing ever grows [and] no rain or rivers flow” (Bandaid, 2014), raised an astonishing US$ 24 million to combat the Ethiopian famine of 1984. In 2004 the five largest NGOs in Canada received about US$ 300 million in private donations (Plewes & Stuart, 2007: 23) and in 2010 World Vision Canada alone raised US$ 415 million (Nathanson, 2013: 104), even though at that time ‘concerns were raised’ and controversies remained surrounding the images that Canadian development organizations were employing in their campaigns (CCIC, 2008: 1,2). Amidst all these criticisms, beginning in the early 1980s when the term ‘pornography of poverty’ was coined to describe development imaging, a total amount of US$ 2.3 trillion in aid has been transferred to developing countries (Easterly, 2006: 4) and aid to Africa alone amounted to $1 trillion (Moyo, 2009: xviii). It is evident that NGO appeals, however stereotypical, have raised a lot of this money. When the world’s worst famine in
10 | Romanticizing Poverty history occurred in China around 1960 and an estimated 40 million people died, NGOs weren’t allowed in the country and no images were available to Western media; as a result not a single dollar in aid was provided (Campbell et al., 2005: 20). This is why one missionary in Sudan contemplated that “it may be a blessing to die or get killed in front of the camera because the world will know” (in: Clark, 2008: 37).
Thus, the stereotypical representations of African countries that development organizations use in their imaging, have contradicting effects. This phenomenon has been referred to as ‘the fundraising coin’ (Smillie, 1995: 137). NGOs are aware of this double effect and are consciously trying to find a balance between stereotypes and nuance, between oversimplification and providing context, and essentially between successful fundraising and informative education. In one report, an umbrella organization consisting of multiple large aid NGOs explains that “an appeal that tries to explain the complexity of the situation and show the broader development issues, and which does not show an urgent personal need, will not appeal to donors. The result will be a less effective fundraising campaign” and thus a less effective fight against Third World poverty (CCIC, 2008: 6). Furthermore, so does the report argue, the stereotypical representations of African countries are nothing more than truthful, “factual illustrations of the horrific situations in which people are living. People are starving, children are dying of preventable diseases, [and] people are clambering over trash piles looking for food” (ibid.: 3). Thirdly, images of extreme poverty build critical awareness and mobilize for action. Images of impoverished children evoke more compassion than complex stories of cause and effect substantiated with elaborate arguments and statistics (ibid.: 4). Also, complex stories give Western publics the feeling that their donations will not directly contribute to improving the situation (Lamers, 2005: 51). In the words of an Oxfam employee, the affluent fail to act “until television crews show children dying” (in: Meldrum, 2005: 14). Development NGOs often claim to need to shock the world into responding: “the only thing that does it is guilt: you have to shock people” explained one NGO executive (in: Coulter, 1989). Another clarified that “it is not an image we like [… but] I tell you, it opens the pockets” (in: Clark, 2008: 64).
Notwithstanding these benefits of shocking images, stereotypical representation of African countries also comes with a range of very tangible detrimental effects. Because, “no matter how effective the image, the message can be very destructive” (Coulter, 1989). First, Western public’s perception of developing countries is distorted (Rahnema, 2010: 187). Researchers found that school children in the United Kingdom “think 50-75% of the world’s children are
11 | Romanticizing Poverty visibly malnourished (the real figure is less than 2%), and that only 10-20% of the world’s six to twelve year olds attend school (the real figure is almost 90%)” (Alam, 2007: 60). Others point out that “in the public imagination, the home of the malnourished child is sub-Saharan Africa”, whereas in reality there a much more underweight children in South Asia (Ramalingaswami et al., 2007). In the 1980s, when development organizations were very actively covering the Ethiopian famine, children in the UK predominantly associated negative stereotypes with the word ‘Africa’, such as deserts, food sacks, sand, poverty, hungry, no houses, crying, fields, insects, vultures (Van der Gaag & Nash, 1987: 11). This is the reason why coverage on the developing world by Western media has been referred to as “the mass production of ignorance” (Philo, 2002). Apart from distorting the public’s view on Africa, dominant representations of the continent are said to have perverse economic effects as well. They allegedly “contribute to undermining investor confidence in Africa” (Diageo, 2004: 17) due to a “negative relationship between business investments and images of Africa as an object of charity” (Manzo, 2006: 11). Representations of Africa evoke an image of a continent that is not conducive to profit-making (Clark, 2008: 67). They also negatively impact tourism (Clark, 2008: 65). Another well documented perverse effect of decades of stereotypical representation of Africa as the inferior other, probably reinforced by the history of colonialism, is that black people’s sense of self is similarly distorted, resulting in serious dysfunction for African immigrants in the West (Plewes & Stuart, 2007: 24). It seems that “racism is internalized by those it negates” (Crisp, 2011: 31). Perhaps the most famous illustration of this effect comes from the ABC documentary Black in White America, where an African American child does not want to play with a black doll “because he's not the same color he's supposed to be” (Carter, 1989). Furthermore, it has been argued that images that portray poverty by focusing on individual victims and particular instances of hardship without providing the necessary context and bigger pictures, cause audiences to hold the poor themselves responsible for their own plight, undermining genuine compassion (Campbell et al., 2001: 425). This has been referred to as ‘a donor bias in attributing poverty’ (ibid.: 409). Another result of prevailing development representations is that “people do not see solutions to development challenges, but perpetual problems” (Nathanson, 2013: 103) and real progress and success is dismissed as un-African (Plewes & Stuart, 2007: 24). Thereby, the dominant development messages on Africa can undermine efforts to build an international constituency of informed people, in favor of ‘real’ and ‘sincere’ development based on social and economic justice (ibid.: 25). This is how stereotypical representations of African countries possibly “work against the aims of longer-term development work” (CCIC, 2008: 2).
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Thus, there seems to be a fundamental tension within the development practice. A tension between education as a longterm aim and fundraising as a short-term imperative (Campbell et al., 2005: 9), between “sensitising public opinion and simply raising money” (Lamers, 2005: 68). A tension between development as a goal, and stereotypical representations of African countries as a means to reach that goal and to communicate development to the Western publics. Until today, it remains an “unresolved issue is whether the ends necessarily justify the means” (Campbell et al., 2005: 9). Whereas ‘development’ requires emancipation, solidarity and equality, the practice of development imaging seems to promote a discourse of normalization (Escobar, 1984: 388), alienation (Nederveen Pieterse, 1990: 233), and patronizing attitudes (Power, 2003: 54). This apparent contradiction, which I refer to as the ‘paradox of development imaging’3, is central to this thesis. In order for development to have a chance of success, to meet the various objectives of development as explained above, this paradox needs to be overcome. A first step to resolving the paradox of development imaging, would be a critical reassessment of the images and narratives in aid NGO’s communications in the light of decades of criticisms for promoting racism and domination, which is precisely the aim of this thesis.
In this thesis I aim to analyze contemporary representations of African countries by development organizations and to compare these with the heavily criticized images that were ‘pornographying’ poverty in the past in order to determine if, how and why development imaging has changed over time. My aim is to provide an analysis of change and continuity in development imaging. Also, I aim to assess the effects of these representations of African countries by development NGOs on the broader goals of development in order to theoretically and empirically offer a small contribution to the ongoing development debate. In doing so, I approach ‘development’ from a postcolonial perspective4, conceptualizing development as a discourse. Postcolonial theory, as elaborated in the coming chapters, allows me to simultaneously dissect development imaging closely and to put it in a broader context. I aim
3 The paradox of development imaging is not the only paradox associated with development. A similar paradox is the ‘communications paradox’ (Greenfield 2010: 341,343) which describes that audiences are generally not interested in complex stories about development and do not want to know the details of NGO practices, but that NGOs must be able to provide them at all time. Other examples include the ‘sustainable development paradox’ (Krueger & Gibbs, 2007), which refers to the ecological problems of mass global development and the difficulties of sustainable development. 4 Interestingly, Postcolonial theory conceives colonialism as an ‘inner contradiction’ between the principles of liberty and democracy on the one hand and racism and authoritarianism on the other hand (Prakash, 1996: 191; Arendt, 1951: 138). This paradox of colonialism is explained by Fanon, who writes about “this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them” (Fanon, 2001: 251). This paradox resembles to some extent the paradox of development imaging that is central to this thesis.
13 | Romanticizing Poverty to analyze both the detailed specifics of the so called ‘development discourse’ and its general political implications, so as to provide an informed understanding of representations of African countries by development NGOs and recommendations to overcome the paradox of development imaging. Thus, this thesis should not be interpreted as a rejection of the notion of development altogether, but rather as a critical and constructive analysis of one specific aspect of the development discourse: its representation of Africa. The research question that articulates these intentions and guides the endeavor of this thesis is as follows:
How and to what extent do contemporary representations of African countries by Western development organizations undermine the goals of development?
Above, I have situated this research question within a broader public and scientific debate. However, several concepts that are central to this thesis require further elaboration. First, in chapter one, I will provide an overview of Postcolonial understandings of the representation of Africa by the West, through ‘Orientalism’ and ‘Africanism’. Second, in chapter two, I will explain the notion of ‘development’ through three of its paradigms: ‘Underdevelopment’, ‘Postdevelopment’ and ‘Reflexive development’. Third, in chapter three, I will conclude the theoretical framework of this thesis by elaborating the terms, ‘representation’ and ‘identity’ and by explaining how representations construct identities through ‘framing’. Fourth, In chapter four, the twofold methodological approach to the research question, consisting of a critical discourse analysis and a performance analysis, will be addressed, as well as some of its most important limitations and fundamental considerations that need to be discussed. Fifth, in chapter five, I will provide a historical overview of the development discourse on Africa, starting in the 1980s with the coverage on the Ethiopian famine; this chapter will serve as a historical point of reference throughout the thesis. Sixth, in chapter six, I will present the results of this study, in my assessment of contemporary representations of African countries by development NGOs, explaining their characteristics, change and continuity in development imaging, and their social, political and economic implications. Then, finally, in the conclusion to this thesis I will answer the research question and determine to what extent these development representations of Africa undermine the goals of development.
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Part I: Theory and Methods
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1. On Africa
In this chapter I will address the theorization of Western perceptions on the African continent. I will do so from a postcolonial perspective. First, in section 1.1., Postcolonialism itself and its understanding of knowledge, power and discourse is discussed. Second, in section 1.2., Edward Said’s (2003) account of Orientalism, arguably the most famous postcolonial assessment of Western representation of the ‘Other’, is elaborated. Finally, in section 1.3., I will turn to the extension of Orientalism to the African context: postcolonial theory on the Western perception of Africa which has been referred to as ‘Africanism’ or ‘Africanist discourse’. The premises, arguments and understandings of Africanism constitute the basis for the theoretical and methodological approach of this thesis.
1.1. Postcolonialism
The exact definition of ‘Postcolonialism’ is contested for a number of reasons. Its conceptualization is already difficult because, as some scholars have pointed out, “it is far from clear that colonialism has been relegated to the past” (Ashcroft et al., 1995: 2) and it is as such a “most optimistic move to characterize the present moment as postcolonial” (Robinson, 2003: 647). As a theory, its assumptions, concepts, systems, methods and theorems are also ambiguous. Therefore, it has been argued that “Postcolonialism [should] not be regarded as a uniform body of theory” (Abrahamsen, 2003: 189). Rather, according to some, the term refers to “a generation of intellectuals and to the coherence of an epoch” (Nederveen Pieterse, 2001: 92). Others have defined Postcolonialism similarly extensive as “the processes by which communities benefited from, formed through or subjected by colonialism come to terms with that fact and its aftermath” (Gooder & Jacobs, 2002: 210). Postcolonialism is always accompanied with a connotation of political activism and emancipation, giving voice to, or perhaps representing the voice of, the inferior and oppressed, and consequently criticizing superiority and domination. Postcolonialism stresses that, in order to come to terms with the pervasive results of colonialism, the previously colonized must rediscover and reformulate their own identity. The subaltern must speak (Spivak, 1988). As one of the leading philosophers of Postcolonial thought Jean-Paul Sartre
16 | Romanticizing Poverty explains: “The oppressed class must […] take conscience of itself” (Sartre, 1976: 7-8). However, Postcolonialism also implies that the oppressing class, the former imperial colonizer, takes conscience of itself and critically assesses its past and current social, economical and political practices. Thus, Postcolonialism can be meaningfully understood as a “broad and ambitious” (Radcliffe, 2005: 396) intellectual agenda, which prescribes critical analysis of “the material and discursive legacies of colonialism” (Radcliffe, 1999: 84).
At the core of Postcolonial theory is an understanding of the interrelatedness between power, knowledge, discourse and identity. Mostly, Postcolonial approaches are built on the insights of Michel Foucault and his theories on power, or subjects. In the work of Foucault, power is understood as ‘subjection’. He explains that power “categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him”, and that “it is a form of power which makes individuals subjects” (Foucault, 1982: 781). In other words, power is disciplinary and acts by normalization, by declaring what is normal and abnormal (Escobar, 1984: 388). Thus, according to Foucault, power should not be simply interpreted as a form of purely material or institutional repression, but instead as a phenomenon that is productive and creative of subjects (Ambrahamsen, 2003: 198). It creates its subjects, through modes of objectification and apparently scientific dividing practices, and it leads its subjects, it ‘conducts’, as it structures the possible field of action (Foucault, 1982: 778,790). Hence, the purpose of the ultimate exercise of power, government, is understood in Foucauldian terms as ‘the conduct of conduct’.
Furthermore, in Foucauldian Postcolonial thought, power “is also intimately linked to knowledge […] in terms of the production of truth and rationality” (Ambrahamsen, 2003: 198). Knowledge wields power by both categorizing and objectifying subjects. Said explains that “the object of knowledge is inherently vulnerable to scrutiny, [… thus] to have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. And authority here means for ‘us’ to deny autonomy to ‘it’ […], since we know it and it exists as we know it” (Said, 2003: 32). Knowledge also wields power by “directing people’s attention” (Sachs, 2010: xix) and thereby conducting interpretation and limiting possible actions. Building on these Foucauldian notions of knowledge and power, Western colonialism has been referred to by some Postcolonial scholars as a “hegemonic zone of the production of knowledge”, a so called ‘Knowledge-Production Industrial Complex’ (Robinson, 2003: 648), and as “an increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control” (Said, 2003: 36). In his book The
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Invention of Africa, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe also connects power, knowledge, and subjection, when he describes colonial rule in Africa as an ‘ideological model of conversion’ which sought to transform the indigenous African “from a naked child, through education, to a civilized adult”(Mudimbe, 1988: 63). Similarly, others have explained that as knowledge has become a “major mechanism for the legitimation of the hegemonic forms of power within a given system” (Escobar, 1984: 392), the “production of Western knowledge forms is inseparable from the exercise of Western power” (McEwan, 2001: 105). These Foucaldian understandings of Western colonialism are echoed in the etymology of the word ‘colonialism’ itself, which comes from the Latin colere, and literally translates as ‘to cultivate’ or ‘to design’ (Mudimbe, 1988: 1).
According to Postcolonial theory, power and knowledge can be studied through language, or more precisely through discourse. Discourse is the manifestation of power; through discourse, subjects are created. Foucault describes discourse as “systems of thoughts composed of ideas, attitudes, courses of actions, beliefs and practices that systematically construct the subjects and the worlds of which they speak” (summarized by: Lessa, 2006: 285). Ultimately, “it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together” (Escobar, 1984: 379). Thus, Postcolonialism interprets Western discourses on the Third world as mechanisms for “effecting domination over it” (ibid.: 377), and seeks to challenge the ways such dominant Western discourses come into being (McEwan, 2002: 127). Furthermore, these discourses are seen as instruments of differentiation and ‘otherness’, as they shape identities of the Self and the Other and their imaginative geographies. Western colonial discourses systematically and fundamentally objectify, essentialize, and basically indentify the European Self as well as the non-European Other (Deutsch, 2001: 199; Apter, 1999: 581), thereby perpetuating ‘Third World difference’ (Radcliffe, 2005: 292). These discourses of power and knowledge not only create subjects like the Oriental (Said, 2003) and the African (Mudimbe, 1988), they also invent and create their ‘imagined geographies’, the Orient and Africa. These are “representations that, although imaginative, function as the ‘real’ in the production of space” (Clark, 2008: 16), equal to Benedict Anderson’s idea of ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1991). Another aim of Postcolonialism is thus, to provide a critique of such Western spatial metaphors (McEwan, 2002: 127) and their claims to universalism (Robinson, 2003: 650). This is why influential Postcolonial scholars like Said and Mudimbe have both been praised as “whistle-blowers against ideologies of Otherness” (Mazrui, 2005: 69). Their theories on respectively Orientalism and Africanism, are the subjects of the next two sections.
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1.2. Orientalism
In his magnum opus Orientalism, Edward Said described the homonymous Western discourse on the Orient, the imaginative geography which is currently mostly referred to as the Middle East5. Through an analysis of predominantly 19th century European accounts of the Orient, in novels, paintings and other documents, he comes to an extremely insightful Postcolonial understanding of this powerful Western discourse. Said explains that Orientalism is essentially a distribution of geopolitical awareness into a variety of texts and symbols; an elaboration of a basic geographical distinction and a whole series of interests it maintains; a will or intention to understand, control and manipulate what is manifestly different; and a discourse which is shaped by political, intellectual, cultural, and moral power rather than a raw political power on its own (Said, 2003: 12). According to Said, Orientalism is a “cultural and political fact” (ibid. 13), a style of thought, a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference and distinction between the familiar, the Occident, and the strange, the Orient (ibid.: 43), and ultimately an instrument for “dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (ibid.: 3).
Exemplary for the Postcolonial, Foucauldian understanding of power, knowledge, discourse and identity, Said describes how Orientalism, as a discourse of power, conducts and imposes limitations on thought and action; and how “knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient” (ibid.: 40). Thus, the Orient is an idea (ibid.: 5), a constituted entity (ibid.: 322). The Orient is articulated by Europe, it is substituted and displaced: “in discussions of the Orient, the Orient is all absence” (ibid.: 208-209). The Orient is perceived as a geographical space to be cultivated and harvested (ibid.: 219). It is represented as inherently different, as “exotic, intellectually retarded, emotionally sensual, governmentally despotic, culturally passive, and politically penetrable” (Mazrui, 2005: 69). Stereotypical images that come to the European mind when the Orient is imagined, and which have as such been used endlessly in Orientalist depictions of the Other, are that of the snake charmer; the noble Arab warrior wielding his scimitar on the back of a camel; the prophet; the sensual woman in a harem; the religious fanatic; and the keffiyeh-wearing men smoking shisha while the muezzin calls the faithful to evening prayer as the red sun sets over dusty
5 This is not to suggest that Said has been the only or even the first scholar to write about a Western discourse on the Muslim world and Islamic faith. In his 1976 book The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual: Traditionalism or Historicism? Abdallah Laroui already criticized Western perceptions and representations of what Said would two years later refer to as the Orient.
19 | Romanticizing Poverty lands. Such images of Oriental otherness range from outright negative to denigrating and condescending. Orientalism distillates these essential ideas about the Orient into an unchallenged, static and externally fixed coherence, which resembles an ideal type (Said, 2003; 205). Thus, “the very possibility of development, of transformation, […] is denied the Orient and the Oriental” (ibid.: 208). According to Said, Orientalism is a representation, it delivers a re-presence, an imagination. This representation is internally consistent and its influence is long-lasting, “despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof with a ‘real’ Orient” (ibid.: 5). Orientalism is also a projection (ibid.: 95), wherein the Orient is a blank space onto which the West projects it own fears and fantasies. And so, Said explains, the Orient is a sort of ‘surrogate Self’ of the Occident (ibid.: 3), which “defines Europe as its contrasting image, idea, personality, and experience” (ibid.: 2). The colonial European sense of superiority stemming from Orientalism was ultimately comparative, or as Said formulates it: “the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures [was a form of] flexible positional superiority” (ibid.: 7). The result of this differentiation, an important aspect of Orientalism, is the polarization of distinction and the limitation of genuine human encounters between European and Middle Eastern cultures (ibid.: 46). However, colonial discourse of knowledge and power has not been limited to Orientalism. Western ‘subjection’ and its discourse that reifies or even essentializes the Self versus the Other, has not exclusively been exercised vis-à-vis the Orient. Another important subject of European superiority and domination has historically been the African continent. In the next section, I will turn to the theoretical extension of Orientalism to Africa, an approach which is usually referred to as ‘Africanism’ or ‘Africanist discourse’.
1.3. Africanism
As one scholar mentions, “the study of Africa is a poor relation, lexically and institutionally, to the long-prestigious and well-endowed study of the Orient” (Miller, 1985: 14). But when Edward Said’s work on Orientalism was originally published in 1978, immediately a wide range of Postcolonial scholars started to apply his ‘theory’ to other contexts, especially to Africa. It has been found that processes of oversimplifying and distorting through discourses of power, knowledge and otherness very similar to Orientalism, are discernible in the African context (Andreasson, 2005: 972). These are discourses on “the denotative and connotative
20 | Romanticizing Poverty blackness that the African people have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreading that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people” (Morrison, 1992: 7). Following Mudimbe and others, I will refer to such Western “discourses on African societies, cultures, and peoples as signs of something else” (Mudimbe, 1988: 9) as ‘Africanism’6.
Interestingly, scholars have related Africanism to Orientalism, a comparison which produced significant results. Long before Europeans ‘discovered’ Africa, which is a notion that is very relevant to Africanism, Arabs had already engaged with the African people for some time. The Arabs were the first to call the Africans ‘black’, without pejorative implications (Mazrui, 2005: 70). From the writings on Africa by Leo Africanus, a 16th century Arab diplomat working for Pope Leo X, Europeans learned that the Arabs considered Africa ‘the occident’. In the words of one academic: “Africa is the Orient’s Orient, the Other’s Other, which happens to be called Occident and which is nothing” (Miller, 1985: 16). In a ranking of Europe’s Others therefore, the African savage negro is subordinate to the Oriental civil mohametan (Mudimbe, 1988: 13). Africa is the third part of the world7 (Miller, 1985: 16).
The father of colonial racism, Joseph de Gobineau, who distinguished three races: white, yellow and black, puts this distinction into cruel wordings that are as sickening as revealing and therefore worthy to quote at length: “The African is the humblest and lives at the bottom of the scale. The animalistic character etched in his loins imposes his destiny from the minute of conception. His fate holds him within the most limited intellectual scope. However, he is not a pure and simple brute this negro with a narrow and sloped forehead, who bares in the middle section of his brain the signs of certain grossly powerful energies. If these thinking faculties are poor or even null, he is possessed by his desire, and also by his will of an often terrible intensity” (De Gobineau, 1967: 205-206). This concept of a nullity is crucial to a comprehension of Western perceptions of black Africa, as “in relationship between the Self [Europe] and the Other [the Orient], the third [Africa] is null” (Miller, 1985: 16). Ali Mazrui concludes that while “Arabs alerted the people of sub-Saharan Africa that they were black, Europe tried to convince Black people that they were inferior” (Mazrui, 2005: 70). This
6 There is however no scholarly consensus on what Africanism is and on what to call that what I refer to as Africanism. According to many scholars, Africanism is a discourse pronounced by Africans themselves (usually in the diaspora) which aims at reversing the moral hierarchy (Liu, 2013: 8). But such discourses have also been described as negritude and in the specific case of Afro-Americans as Afro-American Orientalism (Deutsch, 2001). To make matters more complex, that which I refer to as ‘Africanism’ has by others been labeled gnosis (Mudimbe, 1988) or specifically not Africanism but ‘Africanist discourse’ instead (Miller, 1985). 7 Not to be confused with the ‘Third World’, a term that originated in the Cold War rhetoric of bipolarity and spheres of influence, but is now coincidentally often used to designate Africa.
21 | Romanticizing Poverty inferiority of Africa and the superiority of the West, is at the heart of Africanism. Africa’s blackness remains an important negative aspect, which is “associated with dirt, degradation and impurity” (Miller, 1985: 29). The Greeks called the Africans Ethiopians, which means ‘burnt face’, the Arabs called their country Sudan, which means ‘the blacks’ (ibid.: 10), later Africa became the Dark Continent, or The Heart of Darkness. As such Africa is a metonymy. A multitude of other characteristics is ascribed by Africanism to its subject. Many of them reflect the racist remarks by De Gobineau. Africa is represented as “a primeval, bestial, reptilian, […] entity” (Jarosz, 1992: 108), it is inhabited by cannibalistic savages, it produces monsters (Miller, 1985: 4) and its rivers are snakes (Jarosz, 1992: 108,111). Also, somewhat similar to the Orient, Africa is imagined as oversexed (ibid.: 112) and as “an allegory of mystified eroticism” (Jeoung, 2003: 6).
African peoples have historically been identified and named by others in relation to themselves. They have been discovered, as if they did not exist before. In his account of Africanism, Christopher Miller stresses the idea of Africa as a nullity, “void and unformed prior to its investment with shape and being by the outside” (Miller, 1985: 13). Again, a quote from De Gobineau is insightful: “Barbarism vegetates unperceived, and its existence can be noticed only on a day when a force of opposite nature presents itself and barbarism is breached. This day was that of the appearance of the white race among the blacks” (De Gobineau, 1967: 217). Africa is a dark continent that needs to be enlightened to be noticed, and knowledge is that light being shed on the dark continent (Miller, 1985: 19). It is a projection onto the void, an imagination just like the Orient, a Western invention (Mudimbe, 1988; Morrison, 1992: 8). Africa is an imagined geography.
As is the case with Orientalism and any other ideology of otherness, Africanism in essentially an exploration of the European Self. In fact, Africa has been constructed by an analogy in which Europe was the vantage point (Mamdani, 1996: 12), a ‘negative comparison’ (Nederveen Pieterse, 1990: 35). Many scholars have stressed this point and have argued that “the image of Africa is accompanied by Europe's self-image” (ibid.: 23; Mbembe, 2001: 2). “The subject of the dream, is the dreamer” (Morrison, 1992: 17). Or, in the words of Miller, “the gesture of reaching out to the most unknown part of the world and bringing it back as language […] ultimately brings Europe face to face with nothing but itself” (Miller, 1985: 5). Even De Gobineau touched upon this phenomenon, when he wrote that Africa possesses civilization “only in an incomplete fashion, absolutely as the moon does with the light of the
22 | Romanticizing Poverty sun” (De Gobineau, 1967: 297). Thus in his imagination, like our moon Africa exists only by virtue of its reflection of something white (Miller, 1985: 18).
Africanism, as a discourse on inferiority and superiority, served as a legitimization of empire and colonial domination over Africa (Apter, 1999: 579). The metaphor of the Dark Continent essentializes Africa and its peoples and subjects them to unequal power relations and imaginative dualities like light/dark, civilized/savage, known/mysterious and tame/wild (Jarosz, 1992: 106). Thereby, the metaphor “identifies and incorporates an entire continent as Other in a way that reaffirms Western dominance” (ibid.: 105), clearing the way for the three major Western figures who discovered, colonized and transformed the African continent: the explorer, the soldier, and the missionary (Mudimbe, 1988: 59). However, as “formal colonialism’s demise has left a trail of inheritances” (Robinson, 2003: 647), and as Africanism and its all-pervasive influence, like Orientalism, lasts up to the present (Said, 2003: 44), perhaps its discourse of power and knowledge has also cleared the way for a fourth major Western figure: the aid worker who developed Africa. That will be the topic of the next chapter, in which I will elaborate on ‘development’ from the Postcolonial perspective that has been outlined so far.
This Postcolonial perspective constitutes the theoretical foundation of this thesis. In my approach to the research question as stated in the Introduction, Postcolonial notions of power, knowledge, discourse and identity that have been discussed in this chapter are pivotal. Furthermore, the practical implementations of Postcolonialism in Said’s work on Orientalism and more importantly in the analysis of Africanism as construed in the last section, provide both important parts of the historical and theoretical underpinning for the discussion of the representation of African countries by development NGOs in this thesis.
23 | Romanticizing Poverty
2. On Development
In this chapter I will elaborate on ‘development’. First, in section 2.1, a brief history of development and the notion of the ‘underdevelopment’ of ‘developing countries’ is provided. Second, in section 2.2, Postcolonial accounts of development are discussed in a section on the Postdevelopment school of thought, which combines Postcolonialism, Postmodernism and Poststructuralism to formulate a critique on what is referred to as the ‘development discourse’. Third, in section 2.3, I will turn to the criticisms of Postdevelopment and present the understanding of development that is adopted in this thesis, under the title ‘Reflexive Development’, borrowed from Jan Nederveen Pieterse (1998).
2.1. Underdevelopment
Although charity existed long before, contemporary policies on global development emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War, and were institutionalized at the Bretton Woods Conference (Moyo, 2009: 10). According to many, development commenced on 20 January 1949, when newly elected president of the US, Harry Truman, delivered his inauguration speech in which he declared large parts of the Southern hemisphere as ‘underdeveloped areas’ (Sachs, 2010: xvi). Truman stated that “for the first time in history humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these people” (Truman, 1964: 114). To accomplish that, he announced, “the old imperialism – exploitation for foreign profit – has no place in our plans. What we envisage is a program of development” (ibid.: 115). Since then, development assistance has taken on many forms, as six subsequent paradigmatic understandings of development have dominated international aid practices in ‘the age of development’ (Sachs, 2010: xv). Development began with the Marshall Plan in the 1950s and then progressed through phases in which the focus of aid changed every decade or so. The development focus was subsequently placed on investing in infrastructure and heavy industry in the 1960s; on providing solutions to rural poverty in the 1970s; on promoting neoliberal structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s; on emphasizing democracy and good
24 | Romanticizing Poverty governance in the 1990s8; and most recently on establishing a grand plan to end “Africa’s myriad of problems in the 2000s” (Moyo, 2009: 10). This last phase of development culminated in the UN Millennium Development Goals. Three types of development aid have been distinguished: disaster relief; NGO charity aid; and government-to-government systemic aid (Moyo, 2009: 7). The discussion in this thesis will concentrate on charity aid by Western development NGOs. Although the majority of development aid consists of systemic aid, NGOs have proliferated and grown into very powerful institutions in the increasingly multicentric politics of international development (Fisher, 1997: 457). The budgets of these organizations indicate their importance. In their latest financial reports World Vision, Oxfam and Care state their annual incomes of respectively more than US$ 2.67 billion (World Vision, 2014), US$ 1.1 billion (Oxfam, 2014: 68), and US$ 560 million (Care, 2014: 25). Development has grown into a trillion dollar aid industry.
In particular, the efforts of these development NGOs have been directed at reducing global poverty. They aim to help a wide variety of people in need and to address a multitude of interrelated problems. Western aid organizations aim to assist the 980 million extremely poor who live on less than US$ 1 a day (UN, 2007: 6), the ‘bottom billion’ (Collier, 2008). They provide their services to the 2 billion people who don’t have access to basic sanitation, and to the children in Southern Asia of whom 46 percent is underweight. They try to combat the easily preventable diseases that kill 10 million children every year, and infant mortality in sub-Saharan Africa, where 15 percent of children die before they reach the age of five (UN, 2007: 8,14; Easterly, 2006: 7). Despite their efforts, poverty persists9. Development scholars have put forward a range of explanations for and causes of the persistence of extreme global poverty. According to the influential development economist Jeffrey Sachs who theorized the possibilities of The End of Poverty, not to be confused with the staunch development critic and influential Postdevelopment thinker Wolfgang Sachs, “there is no single explanation for why certain parts of the world remain poor” (Sachs, 2005: 50). Most of the explanations for global poverty can be conceptualized as ‘traps’, a metaphor that has been used by several academics, like Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Collier, as well as Dambisa Moyo who wrote that the poor are “trapped in a quagmire of poverty” (Moyo, 2009: 47). Various development traps
8 The ‘good governance’ paradigm in development will be shortly discussed in the next section as it has inspired criticisms from Postdevelopment scholars. Its origins can be traced back to an influential article by two World Bank economists, Craig Burnside and David Dollar, who found that “aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal, monetary and trade policies, but has little effect in the presence of poor policies” (Burnside & Dollar, 2000: 847). 9 In fact, global poverty has increased for a long time. As Paul Collier writes: “by the turn of the millennium the bottom billion were poorer than they had been in 1970” (Collier, 2008: 9).
25 | Romanticizing Poverty have been discerned: the poverty trap, the natural resource trap, the conflict trap, the bad governance trap, the geography trap and the historical trap. First, the poverty trap as explained by Sachs, signifies the notion that poverty itself is a trap, since “the poor are too poor to save for the future and thereby accumulate the capital that could pull them out their current misery” (Sachs, 2005: 57). Second, the natural resource trap indicates the detrimental effects of an abundance of natural resources for a developing country. This trap is twofold, as it refers to both the political ‘resource curse’, causing corruption (Sala-i-Martin & Subramanian, 2003: 1), and the economical ‘Dutch disease’, causing exports to become uncompetitive (Collier, 2008: 39). Third, the conflict trap points to the devastating consequences of civil war and the vicious cycle of conflict and poverty. An average civil war has been calculated to cost US$ 50 billion and to leave a country 15 percent poorer than it otherwise would have been (Collier, 2008: 21). Fourth, the bad governance trap refers to the rampant corruption, which costs Africa alone an estimated US$ 148 billion every year (Goodspeed, 2005), and to the deleterious particulars of government in poor countries, exemplified by the fact that 75 percent of the extremely impoverished live in so called ‘failed states’ (Collier, 2008: 66). Fifth, the geography trap implies the many consequences geography and climate can have for the possibility of economic prosperity. Examples include being landlocked, recurring droughts, and environmental aspects that favor tropical diseases (see: Sachs, 2005: 104; Collier, 2008: 55; Diamond, 1997). Sixth, the notion of a historical trap emphasizes the catastrophic historical experiences of many developing countries, who were dominated, exploited and impaired through colonialism, only to subsequently become pawns in the Cold War (Sachs, 2005: 189), in which the American and Russian governments were eager to “support, bankroll and prop up a swathe of pathological and downright dangerous dictators” in the Third World (Moyo, 2009: 23).
The instruments of development vary and various interventions have been undertaken in its name, as remedies against poverty and underdevelopment,. Examples include providing the poor with funds, food, clean water, healthcare, infrastructure, science, technologies, education, technical assistance, and liberal values. Aid organizations “save lives and rebuild livelihoods” (Oxfam, 2014: 6), they strengthen capacities, provide opportunities, deliver relief, and influence policy decisions (Care, 2014: 2). Ultimately, these efforts aim to break the development traps that keep the poor trapped in destitution. The official goals of Western development NGOs range from “tackling the causes of poverty and injustice” (World Vision, 2015: 2) and finding “practical, innovative ways for people to lift themselves out of poverty
26 | Romanticizing Poverty and thrive” (Oxfam, 2014: 6), to working towards a “world of hope, tolerance and social justice” where poverty is overcome (Care, 2014: 2). These goals and instruments of development are thus similarly broad as the problems that are identified as ‘underdevelopment’.
Despite these objectives of development that seem unable to disagree with at first glance, criticisms have multiplied over the last decades. Indeed, denouncing development appears to have become the acceptable norm in scholarly behavior and an intellectual trend (Crush, 1995: 4) which has been described as a “fraternity of rhetorical consensus in criticizing mainstream development” (Nederveen Pieterse, 1998: 343) Development has been criticized by political scientists and development economists for its alleged high-modernistic belief in planning and a one-size-fits-all solution to global poverty (Easterly, 2006), and its allegedly perverse effects on the economy and government of developing countries (Moyo, 2009). Some scholars have even argued that aid has become a contribution to the problem it is supposed to solve (Escobar, 1984: 389), and claim that aid is another development trap (Hubbard & Duggan, 2009). However, these criticisms are mostly directed at systemic, government-to-government aid. Another aid critique, which concerns the work of development NGOs, applies Postcolonialism’s conception of power, knowledge, discourse and identity, as explained in the previous chapter, to the context of development. These critical theories of development, which are central to this thesis though they not necessarily reflect the author’s point of view, are generally referred to as ‘Postdevelopment’ and will be elaborated in the next section.
2.2. Postdevelopment
Postdevelopment thinking both originated in and was to some extent responsible for the so called ‘crisis of the modern and crisis of development’ (Watts, 2003: 7), or the ‘impasse in development studies’ (Schuurman, 2000: 7). This impasse emerged at the end of the 1980s, when the world became increasingly disillusioned with the modernist and hegemonic development practices of the neoconservative ‘structural adjustment era’. Characteristic for this era are the development policies of liberalization and privatization by the likes of Thatcher, Reagan, the World Bank and the IMF; policies which are nowadays dismissed as “a simplistic, even simpleminded, view of the challenge of poverty” (Sachs, 2005: 81). Amidst
27 | Romanticizing Poverty this crisis, scholars set out to refigure development and found a ‘fertile ground’ in the ideas of Postcolonialism (Watts, 2003: 10). And so, Postcolonialism became involved with development theory. Over time, “Postcolonial […] theories have had enormous consequences for how development is conceptualized” (McEwan, 2001: 93) as they “generated powerful critiques of [the] current political structures, institutions and practices of power […] of development” (Abrahamsen, 2003: 201) and a posed an “increasingly important challenge to dominant ways of apprehending North–South relations” (McEwan, 2001: 94). Until today, many questions raised by Postcolonialism remain relevant to the understanding of development (Power, 2003: 56).
The Postcolonial influences on Postdevelopment scholars like Majid Rahnema (1998), Arturo Escobar (2012) and Wolfgang Sachs (2010), are most evident in their Foucauldian conceptualization of development as a discourse (Storey, 2000: 40). A discourse of power and knowledge which creates norms, subjects and their identities. According to Postdevelopment theorists, development is disciplinary (Ambrahamsen, 2003: 202) and normalizing (Escobar, 1984: 387), it is a “perception which models reality, a myth which comforts societies, and a fantasy which unleashes passions” (Sachs, 2010: xvi). They argue that development created its subjects, the benevolent affluent and the victims of poverty, and that its discourse poses limits on their thought and action (Crush, 1995: 5). Arturo Escobar explains how knowledge and power are intertwined in the development discourse, which he argues is a Western ‘strategy of unprecedented scope’ to “penetrate, integrate, manage, and control” the countries and populations of the Third World (Escobar, 1984: 388). This strategy is threefold, according to Escobar: first, development is characterized by a progressive incorporation of problems, ‘abnormalities’ like the underdeveloped and the malnourished which need to be subjected to detailed observation, “a political anatomy of the Third World”, in order to be treated and reformed (ibid.: 387-388). Second, development is characterized by professionalization and technification, allowing experts to depoliticize development problems “and to recast them into the apparently more neutral realm of science”, where knowledge and classifications of the Third World are produced and a regime of truths and norms about development is established (ibid.). Third, development is characterized by institutionalization, forging the institutions that became the ‘agents of the deployment of development’ and of establishing the disciplinary apparatus of development (ibid.). Another characteristic of development according to Postdevelopment scholars, is that it is a teleological doctrine of Western supremacy (Power et al., 2006: 423), which essentializes the developing countries and its peoples as inferior
28 | Romanticizing Poverty homogeneous entities that need to be Westernized in order to progress (Schuurman, 2000: 7- 8). Development conceptualizes Third World ‘deficiencies’ as internal and even intrinsic and promotes externally originated solutions, Western solutions; “development as deus ex machina” as one scholar puts it (Andreasson, 2005: 972-973). Thus, Postdevelopment argues that the development discourse is an instrument of domination (Escobar, 1984: 378), that it is a Western doctrine through which “present international structures and relations of power are maintained and reproduced” (Abrahamsen, 2003: 203). Ultimately, development practices are constructed as Foucauldian modes of government; “development as the conduct of conduct” (Watts, 2003: 12,13).
Postdevelopment asserts that the development discourse as outlined above in section 2.1. on underdevelopment, legitimizes certain interventions (McEwan, 2001: 103; Lamers, 2005: 53) through its construction of the Third World as being in need of Western development (Storey, 2000: 40-41). So, the subjects of development discourse become the targets of power and the objects of development programmes (Escobar, 2010: 154). One article explains that “crucially, this desire to understand Africa as a lesser version of the West mirrors the desire to affect a form of social engineering across the continent” (Power et al., 2006: 424). This phenomenon has been referred to as ‘the double play of an aid/charity war/conquest programme’ (Hutnyk, 2004: 79). Precisely these kind of development interventions and the language that accompanies them, are the objects of Postdevelopment research and critique.
One such intervention was the 1980s World Bank development programme for Lesotho, analyzed and scolded by James Ferguson in an influential study of the practices of the development discourse. Ferguson describes how the World Bank characterized Lesotho as a “traditional subsistence peasant society virtually untouched by modern economic development”, when in reality the country has not been a ‘subsistence society’ since at least the mid-1800s as it has been selling surplus crops and livestock and providing a wide range of commodities (wheat, kaffir corn, wool, cattle) for the South African market for decades (Ferguson, 1994: 176). Also, Lesotho’s apparent ‘isolation’ was invented by the World Bank, as it was ‘rearranging reality’ (Ferguson, 1994: 177) in order to “legitimize, and facilitate the exercise of Western dominance over [the country]” (Storey, 2000: 41). Ferguson concludes, very much in line with Postdevelopment theory, that the development discourse’s false construction of Lesotho, which bore little relation to prevailing realities, “led to an inevitable
29 | Romanticizing Poverty failure of policies” (Ferguson, 1994: 176,179)10. Other examples of Postdevelopment critiques include the dismissal of commonly used development terms like ‘weak’ and ‘failed states’ as patronizing (Power, 2003: 54), and problematizing the notion of ‘trusteeship’ in contemporary development debates, which is regarded as a neo-colonial mission civilizatrice (Power et al., 2006: 423). Similarly, the development concept of ‘good governance’ is regularly condemned by Postdevelopment scholars. Good governance development policies evoke comparisons with colonialism, such as the remarks that “the good governance agenda rewrites and reinvents the right of Western countries to intervene in Africa” (Abrahamsen, 2003: 203) and is “partly a legacy of the late colonial period and of emergent discourses of developmentalism in the age of decolonization” (Power et al., 2006: 428).
Postdevelopment theory however, is not just a Postcolonial critique on development. Its scholars combine Postcolonial insights with elements of Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, and other ‘beyond’-branches of critical theory, to ‘write the obituary’ of development (Sachs, 2010: xv). Transcending modernism, Postdevelopment thinkers assume a ‘diversity of prosperity’ (Sachs, 2010: xii). They stress that simple hunter-gatherers in a tribal society with a autarkic economy might also enjoy a good life and even represent the ‘original affluent society’ (Sahlins, 1998: 3), and that Western society has much to learn from the traditional style of life of the people it considers ‘underdeveloped’ (Rahnema, 1998.: 22). Postdevelopment scholars contend that poverty is a Western invention, that very often the subjects of development had no notion of poverty until they were introduced to it through the West’s ‘development of underdevelopment’ (Prakash, 1996: 197-198). They question the sustainability of development, both in economic and ecologic terms, and claim that “the quest for fairness in a finite world means in the first place changing the rich, not the poor” (Sachs, 2010; xiv). They celebrate indigenous cultures and knowledges, local civil societies, so called ‘vernacular spaces’ that can solve their own problems (Rahnema, 1998: 113), and emphasize the need for “relinking [development] to community- and culture-based notions of well- being” (Sachs, 2010: xiv). In order to do that, development should be separated from economic growth, which has become a substitute for justice according to Postdevelopment academics (ibid.). They not just dismiss economic growth, also ‘the nation state’, ‘the market’ and ‘progress’ are regarded as outdated and irrelevant paradigms (Rahnema, 1998: 400). In
10 Interestingly, this conclusion Ferguson comes to is very similar to the findings of Séverine Autesserre in her study of the international peacebuilding discourse and the 2003 conflict in Congo. She concludes that Western peacebuilders failed to address the problems in Congo adequately, as they framed the conflict incorrectly; like the World Bank framed the situation in Lesotho incorrectly according to Ferguson.
30 | Romanticizing Poverty general, so concludes Postdevelopment theory, “development has grown obsolete” and is leading a race towards an abyss (Sachs, 2010: xv-xvi). Therefore, the development discourse should be abandoned altogether, and “breaking with ‘development’ as a habit of thought is part and parcel of an overdue decolonization of minds” (ibid.: xii). Postdevelopment thus “has taken the form of a position of total rejection of development” (Nederveen Pieterse, 1998: 361).
This Postdevelopment approach that has been outlined above has received multiple criticisms, and not just from the ‘mainstream’ development economists its theories are criticizing. Below, in the concluding section of this chapter on development, I will outline the most relevant critiques of Postdevelopment and present the understanding of development that is adopted in this thesis.
2.3. Reflexive development
Postdevelopment theory is problematic for a number of reasons. Although it poses some valid critiques on the discourse of Underdevelopment and offers relevant insights, it is generally an exaggeration which overstates its claims, both its comments and propositions (Nederveen Pieterse, 1998). In his analysis of Postdevelopment theory, Andy Storey distinguishes four specific analytical and political flaws (Storey, 2000: 42-44). First, Postdevelopment presents “an over-generalized and in some ways exaggerated conception of development that disregards achievement” (ibid.). While its theories criticize the development discourse for essentializing the Third World, Postdevelopment itself essentializes the development discourse as a static, homogeneous body of racist theory that only serves to legitimize domination. Second, Postdevelopment is criticized for nostalgia and romanticism (Radcliffe, 2005: 291; Nederveen Pieterse, 1998: 364), for romanticizing poverty (Power et al., 2006: 424), and for deploying ‘romanticized language’ when referring to non-Western grassroots movements and indigenous communities (Storey, 2000: 42). Storey asks the legitimate questions: “How many people and societies have achieved, or want to achieve, a condition of being beyond development? Where exactly do ‘people beyond modernity’ live?” (ibid.). He goes on to assert that “many popular struggles in the South are about access to development […] rather than rejection of it”, and that “to ignore that desire is to romanticize the aspirations of many ordinary people – precisely the type of cultural imperialism post-development
31 | Romanticizing Poverty theorists claim” (ibid.; see: Nederveen Pieterse, 1998: 363). Postdevelopment is patronizing, as it “rejects any movement for development in the name of respect for cultural difference” (Kiely, 1999: 47). This critique on Postdevelopment for romanticizing poverty will return later in this thesis. Third, the ‘agents of change’ that Postdevelopment commonly designates, local civil societies, are idealized (Storey, 2000: 43). It is a misapprehension that social movements in the developing countries are necessarily progressive, constructive, “anti- authoritarian and democratic in their structures and principles” (ibid.; Bob, 2013: 3). Postdevelopment’s grassroots, bottom-up, strategy for ‘development’, or rather diversity, is vulnerable to hijacking by violent, racist, extremist, exclusionary, conservative and oppressive movements11. Thus, Postdevelopment’s intention to leave effecting change to local social movements, might be a form of irresponsible ‘Pontius Pilate politics’ (Kiely, 1999: 45). Fourth, the solutions to Underdevelopment that Postdevelopment poses are criticized for being “astonishingly naïve in [their] simplicity” (Schuurman, 2000: 15). Storey stresses that it might be expected that the fragmented social movements of developing countries are no match for the power of nation states, international institutions and globalized capital (Storey, 2000: 44). In short, it is argued that Postdevelopment tends to be nihilistic, apocalyptic, populist, ahistorical and disabling (Radcliffe, 2005: 293). As it fails to translate its sensible criticisms into a constructive position and a realistic alternative, Postdevelopment is quasi- revolutionary or mainly ‘Anti-Development’, which is “much too simple and rhetorical” (Nederveen Pieterse, 1998: 363).
To overcome these limitations of Postdevelopment, many scholars argue that it needs to reappraise its roots: Postcolonialism (Radcliffe, 2005; Power et al., 2006; McEwan, 2001). They claim that the answer to the development impasse might be a theoretical engagement of Postcolonialism and Development, which is exactly what this thesis offers. According to these scholars, Postcolonialism, offers an interesting point of departure from which to overcome some of the limitations of Postdevelopment (Power et al., 2006: 424). In contrast to Postdevelopment’s exaggerations and romanticizations, its Postcolonial origins provide a number of relevant critiques and understandings of development, which have been described to some extent in the first two paragraphs of section 2.2 on Postdevelopment. I distinguish four central arguments of a Postcolonial approach to development, an approach that is also
11 Peter Uvin explains how this was the case in Rwanda, where social movements had racist goals and played a large part in instigating mass violence (Uvin, 1998: 178). Similarly, Michael Watts asks the question: “Is not Islamism a vivid exemplar of post development?” (Watts, 2003: 10), since it can be conceived as an indigenous response by a social movement to Western doctrines of development.
32 | Romanticizing Poverty adopted in this thesis. First, development is conceptualized as a discourse, a specific set of languages, ideas, assumptions and practices that represent and shape realities. Second, development is conceptualized as a consolidation of power and knowledge, it conducts, limits thought and action, and governs by normalization. Third, development is conceptualized as an instrument of identification, it creates subjects and their identities through differentiation, categorization and representation of the Self and the Other. Fourth, development is conceptualized as a legitimation of domination, it establishes supremacy and inferiority, and promotes interventions. As stressed in the Introduction, such a conceptualization of development should not be regarded as a rejection of the idea of ‘development’ itself. Thus, This Postcolonial approach to development is not Anti- or even ‘beyond’ Development. Rather, this Postcolonial approach, a stripped-down version of Postdevelopment, should be understood as a duality. On the one hand, it is a constructive critique aimed at promoting equality and justice by giving a voice to and incorporating the dominated and marginalized subjects of Development into development. On the other hand, it is a theorization of the development discourse, which provides us with indications on how to analyze development and make sense of its complexities.
Directions in which a Postcolonial approach to development can take us, have been elaborated by many and include challenges to the depiction of the “North as advanced and progressive and the South as backward, degenerate and primitive” (McEwan, 2001: 94). Through this approach, the ways in which ‘the West’ represents its nonwestern others can be reconsidered (Watts, 2003: 10). Furthermore, explicit critiques of the spatial metaphors employed by the development discourse are invoked (McEwan, 2001: 95), as a Postcolonial analysis deconstructs prevailing “languages of development, examining how specific ideological formations and persistent normative assumptions and expectations flowed from colonialism into development” (Radcliffe, 2005: 296). According to Storey, “its seemingly ‘negative’ predilection for deconstruction and critical discourse analysis” has much to offer (Storey, 2000: 45). Through an analysis of the development discourse, western centric assumptions and practices of development can be identified and disrupted (Power et al., 2006: 425), and particular development practices that may “ultimately serve to legitimize structures of power and domination” (Storey, 2000: 44) can be abandoned or transformed in favor of alternative forms of development. Thus, a Postcolonial approach to development attempts to recover the lost voices of the marginalized, the oppressed and the dominated (McEwan, 2001: 94-96). As a result of this “normative preoccupation with the poor, marginalized and exploited people in
33 | Romanticizing Poverty the South” (Schuurman, 2000: 14), rather than celebrating diversity or difference, Postcolonialism focuses on persisting inequalities and injustices that might be overcome through a refigured development. Furthermore, a Postcolonial analysis of the development discourse regards it not as static and homogeneous, but as stable and mostly coherent, allowing an assessment of change and continuity in development. Such a conceptualization of development partially mirrors Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s notion of ‘reflexive development’ (Nederveen Pieterse, 1998: 367)12. According to this theorem, the development discourse, both its thinking and its policies, reacts to the failures and crisis of development and adapts to emerging realities and to consequences of development itself. One aspects of the reflexivity of development, is that responsibilities for development are transferred from states to NGOs (ibid.: 369). Another aspect is that, crucially, development has over time incorporated alternatives and criticisms, like those of the Postdevelopment theories, in order to secure its continued existence (ibid.: 368). And so, the development discourse has become reflexive, simultaneously changing and adapting as well as remaining and stabilizing.
The interpretation of development as a reflexive discourse of power and knowledge which forms identities and legitimizes domination, is crucial to the argument of this thesis. It draws the attention to the practices of representation through which the subjects of development and their identities are constructed. This will be the topic of the next chapter.
12 The term ‘reflexive development’ is derived by Nederveen Pieterse from Ulrich Beck’s conceptualization of ‘reflexive modernity’.
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3. On Representation
In this chapter I will conclude the theoretical framework of this thesis by elaborating on representation and identity and their connection. In the previous chapters on Africanism and Development the issue of representation was already touched upon. First, I explained how Africanist discourse creates it subjects, the Westerners and the Africans, the Self and the Other, and their corresponding identities, such as white/black and civilized/primitive (see Said, 2003; Mudimbe, 1988). Then, I discussed how the development discourse very similarly constructs its subjects, the developed and the underdeveloped, again the Self and the Other, and their identities, like rich/poor and knowledgeable/uneducated (see Escobar, 2012). Both discourses define and produce their subjects, the objects of knowledge and power, through normalization and categorization. They shape their identities through representation (Hall, 1997: 44). Below, I will first discuss representation and more specifically ‘re-presence’ in section 3.1. Second, in section 3.2, I will address the function of ‘frames’ and framing as means of interpreting representations. Third, in section 3.3, I will expand on the notion of identity as created by representation.
3.1. Re-presence
A common perception of the concept of representation is that things exist in the material reality, that their ‘real’ material characteristics constitute them, and that their meaning is perfectly clear outside of how they are represented (Hall, 1997: 7). In his influential book on representation, Stuart Hall refers to this conventional view of representation as the ‘reflective or mimetic approach’, in which representation is regarded as a complete reflection of its object (ibid.: 24). Most contemporary theories on representation reject this view in favor of a ‘constructionist approach’ (ibid.: 25) which contends that representation refers to meaning production rather than reflection (Borgerson & Schroeder, 2002: 574; Bennett, 2005). As Hall explains: “now, meaning is thought to be produced, rather than simply found” (Hall, 1997: 7), since representation is thought to involve the very constitution of things, not just their display (Borgerson & Schroeder, 2002: 574). In such an approach to representation, the concept is defined as follows: “representation is the production of meaning of the concepts in our minds
35 | Romanticizing Poverty through language. It is the link between concepts and language, which enables us to refer to either the real world of objects, people and events or indeed to an imaginary world of fictional objects, people and events” (Hall, 1997: 17). Other scholars have added to that, that representations often function as replacements for experience as sources of information and knowledge, and that they as such serve as a foundation for the interpretation of future experiences and information (Borgerson & Schroeder, 2002: 571). Thus, representations produce and shape meaning, and not just of the objects that are represented. Furthermore, representations do not produce a fixed meaning, but are open to individual interpretations and therefore conducive of a wide range of possible understandings. Finally, although representations are still to some extent reflections of certain truths and realities, they should rather be understood as depictions or imaginations (Hall, 1998: 7-8). Representations ‘make’ places (Tuan, 1991: 693), places that aren’t real, but imaginary (Jeoung, 2003: 11). Or, as Mudimbe poetically elucidates, “once the painting is finished, it becomes both a given and a reflection of what made it possible” (Mudimbe, 1988: 6). Through the self-generating and self-confirming nature of the process of representation, re-presentations shape and become a new reality, a new presence. This is the ‘reality-effect’ of representation (Hall, 2005: 72). As such, representations are fundamental parts of discourse; according to Hall, a discourse is a ‘system of representation’ (Hall, 1997: 44).
An important concept for understanding representation, is ‘exteriority’ (Said, 2003: 20). Some academics argue that “representations have the power to make us believe that we know something of which we have no experience” (Borgerson & Schroeder, 2002 571). Discourses are constructed externally from their objects, they are characterized by exteriority to what they describe. The different discourses that have been addressed in this thesis, Orientalism, Africanism and Development, are all premised upon exteriority. Said explains that “the principal product of exteriority is representation” (Said, 2003: 21). These discourses deliver no presence, but a re-presence or representation (ibid.). This fact is widely recognized in studies of Orientalism and Africanism. As one scholar puts it: “perception is determined by Orientalism, rather than Orientalism’s being determined by perception”, and “the paper reality of Africanist objects must be sharply distinguished from the reality of Africa itself” (Miller, 1985: 15, 5-6). Another explains that “the West’s vision of Africa has been the product of its own imagination rather than […] what actually happens on the continent” (Chabal, 1996: 36). This is why Mudimbe refers to an ‘invention of Africa’ or an ‘African genesis’ (Mudimbe, 1988: 22). Exteriority and re-presence are also prominent features in assessments of the
36 | Romanticizing Poverty development discourse. Escobar calls this phenomenon ‘the making and unmaking of the Third World’ (Escobar, 2012). Rahnema, entirely in accordance with the rhetoric of Postdevelopment theory, refers to ‘preposterous misrepresentations’ (Rahnema, 2010: 187). In his previously mentioned article on Lesotho, Ferguson reveals that an important part of the development discourse is the definition of its objects. He claims that, as it “suits the [development] agencies to portray the developing countries in terms that make them suitable for [aid] packages” (Ferguson, 1994: 176), it is not surprising that the World Bank’s representation of Lesotho as a ‘less developed country’ was frequently not in conformance with the realities in the African country (ibid.). It has been argued that development is a ‘system of representation’ (Escobar, 2010: 153-154) which produces imagined worlds that generally bear little resemblance to the real world (McEwan, 2001: 96).
If representations are the result of exteriority, then the subjects of the discourse and objects of representation are absent in the process. This paradoxical aspect of representation can be described as ‘absence through re-presence’. In this regard, Foucault refers to the ‘essential void’ of representation: “the necessary disappearance of that which is its foundation, the person it resembles and the person in who’s eyes it is only a resemblance” (Foucault, 2002: 18). In his account of anti-Semitism, Sartre states that “the Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew” (in: Prager & Telushkin, 2003: 64), or similarly: “don’t ask what the Jew is, ask what we made of the Jew” (in: Nederveen Pieterse, 1990: 8). Regarding the representation of African countries, Nederveen Pieterse refers to “images of Africans about them, without them” (Nederveen Pieterse, 1990: 8).
Another aspect of representations, is that they often promote dichotomic meanings, giving rise to ‘well recognized, hierarchically ordered dualisms’ like Self/Other, white/black, civilized/primitive, rich/poor, et cetera (Borgerson & Schroeder, 2002: 576-577). Within such dichotomic imaginations, knowledge is derived from a Self-versus-Other comparison, an ‘epistemology of difference’ (ibid.). This reification of conceptualizations of Otherness through representation, reinforces hierarchical orderings between the Self and the Other and puts the privileged in a position where they can claim all knowledge of the subordinated, resulting in ‘epistemic closure’ (ibid.). Epistemic closure refers to the situation in which ‘we’ know everything about ‘them’. According to some, a discourse “informed by epistemic closure essentializes being and tends toward the creation of a recognizable ‘authentic’ identity, while knowing next to nothing about the other beyond his or her typicality” (ibid.: 577; Hall, 2005: 71). As we have seen in the previous chapters, Orientalism, Africanism and
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Development have all been criticized for epistemic closure, for essentializing their subjects. This is what Hall calls the ‘racialized regime of representation’, at the core of which are stereotypes that “reduce, essentialize, naturalize and fix difference” (Hall, 1997: 249). And so, stereotypical representations of a subordinate group contribute to facilitating the domination of that group (Borgerson & Schroeder, 2002: 584), explaining the statement that “the hierarchical dimension of representation determines the social effects of imaging” (Nederveen Pieterse, 1990: 224).
From this elaboration on representation as a central element of discourses like Development, it becomes clear that its objects, that what is re-presented, are not just reflected but rather reconstructed, and that in the process of representation its objects are absent. This absence explains the often dichotomic and hierarchical character of representations, which results in differentiations between the Self and the Other. It is evident that these constructions have very real political implications (Mahadeo & McKinney, 2007: 15). However, the constructions of representation are ambiguous and do not necessarily have the same clear meaning to all their audiences. In order to develop a better understanding of representations and the identities they shape, we need to address the more specific mechanisms of interpretation and meaning production. This will be the topic of the next section, where I will describe in more detail how representations evoke certain interpretations through frames and framing.
3.2. Framing
In his widely recognized work on frames and framing, Erving Goffman refers to them as “some of the basic frameworks of understanding” (Goffman, 1986: 10). More specifically, he defines a frame as a primary ‘schemata of interpretation’ that allows us “to locate, perceive, identify, and label a seemingly infinite number of concrete occurrences” (ibid.: 21). Framing entails applying frames and adopting frameworks, and thus selecting particular aspects of a perceived reality and making them more ‘salient’, more noticeable, meaningful or memorable to audiences in a communication. To illustrate, perhaps the most well-known and common example of framing, is the question whether a glass is half full or half empty. The answer to that question ‘frames’ the situation and interprets it in either a positive or negative way. Development issues can also be framed, starvation for example can be understood in terms of the number of people that die every year from hunger or in terms of the number of people that
38 | Romanticizing Poverty have received food aid. If frames are instruments for interpretation, then the consciously or unconsciously pursued goal of framing is to promote a certain interpretation, or in other words, to promote specific definitions of a problem, a causal interpretation, a normative evaluation and/or a recommendation for a solution (Entman, 1993: 52,53). We can distinguish between ‘diagnostic framing’, which defines problems and attributes causes, ‘prognostic framing’, which prescribes solutions, and ‘motivational framing’, which demands actions to be undertaken through “vocabularies of severity, urgency, efficacy, and propriety” (Benford & Snow, 2000: 615-617). In order to do this, frames highlight, but they also obscure (Entman, 1993: 54). Within framing, the exclusion of some interpretations is often as significant as the inclusion of others (ibid.). Thus, frames are manifested not only by the presence but also by the absence of “certain key words, stock phrases, stereotyped images, sources of information and sentences that provide thematically reinforcing clusters of facts or judgments” (ibid.: 52). However, this is not to say that frames are unequivocal or that a specific frame that is communicated always resonates with the receivers of that communication. Sometimes, the frames that determine the interpretation of a message are not the same frames the communicator intended to be important (ibid.). Intentionally or not, the way in which representations are framed evoke certain interpretations of reality and suppress others, shedding light on our kaleidoscopic social world of potential realities (Edelman, 1993: 232).
If there is no universal consensus on the definition and meaning of things, then the world has to be ‘made to mean’ (Hall, 2005: 63) and the practices of meaning production, or the ‘politics of signification’, are of great importance (ibid.: 64). Thus, framing plays a major role in the exertion of power (Entman, 1993: 55). Through strategic framing, discourses realize certain meanings and close off others (Hall, 2005: 72). The products of such strategic political framing are so called ‘collective action frames’ (Benford & Snow, 2000: 614). Collective action frames have been defined as “action-oriented sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate the activities and campaigns of a social movement organization” (ibid.), like a development NGO. They are “intended to mobilize potential adherents and constituents, [and] to garner bystander support” (ibid.). Such collective action frames are constructed as social movements develop an understanding of some problematic conditions or situations they define as in need of change, like poverty and underdevelopment; as they make attributions regarding who or what is to blame, like the climate and a lack of knowledge; as they articulate an alternative set of arrangements, like development aid and education; and as they urge others to act in concert to affect change, like the fundraising campaigns by development
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NGOs do (ibid.: 615). It is evident that development NGOs are very much embroiled in the politics of signification, they are commonly “viewed as signifying agents actively engaged in the production and maintenance of meaning” (Benford & Snow, 2000: 613).
Some interpretations, some frames, resonate more than others. These interpretations are parts of a dominant discourse and as such they are more powerful. As one scholar explains, “a frame can exert great social power when encoded in a widely accepted term” (Entman, 1993: 55). Development is such a term, and development is a dominant discourse. Social movements that operate within such dominant discourses are argued by Stuart Hall to freely articulate themselves systematically around interpretations of the situation which favor the ‘hegemony of the powerful’ (Hall, 2005: 82). Hall speaks of an ‘alignment between power and consent’ (ibid.). Even when we ignore the Marxist undertone in Hall’s remark, it seems a very real insight that some discourses and their framing exert dominance over others, and that their interpretations of reality can become hegemonic and accepted as common knowledge. This is what has been referred to as the ‘production of consent’ (ibid.: 81) or in the words of Noam Chomsky, as ‘manufacturing consent’ (Herman & Chomsky, 1994). The production of consent involves all the processes of representation that have been discussed above (Hall, 2005: 83). Discourse, as a system of representation, delivers a re-presence of the objects of its power and knowledge. Through framing, discourse promotes certain interpretations of its objects. As a discourse becomes dominant, so do its representations and interpretations, creating a consensual understanding of the objects of that discourse. And so, a discourse engages in imaging. Its representations and frames shape the dichotomic identities of the Self and the Other that the discourse promotes. In the next section, I will conclude the theoretical discussion of this thesis by elaborating on identity as a product of discourse, representation and framing.
3.3. Identity
In a theoretical response to the once dominant positivist paradigm in social sciences and its essentialist conceptualization of ‘identity’, the term has recently generally been understood as a fluid and unstable phenomenon. However, most conceptions of specific identities, such as the Westerner and the African, are not fluid at all but are rather relatively stable, as demonstrated by the historic overview of Africanism in the first chapter of this thesis. In fact,
40 | Romanticizing Poverty such identities can crystallize as powerful and compelling realities (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000: 5). They do change over time, but mostly very subtle. In Western Africanist discourse, the African has always been regarded as backwards, primitive and politically and economically inferior (Mudimbe, 1988), but the 20th century development discourse added the notion of underdevelopment (Sachs, 2010) and decolonization and postcolonial awareness largely removed the tropes of sloth and racial inferiority (Watts, 2003: 12). Thus, the contemporary understanding of identity as unstable can be regarded as an intellectual fad of ‘clichéd constructivism’ (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000: 11) and should be dismissed in favor of the acknowledgement that identities are stable but not fixed.
Charles Tilly distinguishes four components of identity, subsequently “a boundary separating me from you or us from them; a set of relations within the boundary; a set of relations across the boundary; [and] a set of stories about the boundary and the relations” (Tilly, 2003: 608). The idea that an us-them divide is a fundamental aspect of identity is widely recognized. Some scholars refer to ‘established-outsider figurations’ (Elias & Scotson, 1994: xix) or to an ‘ingroup and outgroup’ (Tajfel, 1982: 7). Thus, it is emphasized that identities distinguish the self from the other. (Nederveen Pieterse, 1990: 7). Central to this divide is a perceived inferiority of the outgroup, stemming from the dichotomic, stereotypical and essentializing character of representations (Hall, 1997: 249) that has been discussed previously in this thesis. Stereotypical representations create a symbolic frontier of identities, a frontier between the ‘normal’ and the ‘deviant’, the ‘acceptable’ and the unacceptable’ (ibid.). Such identities are often terribly singular (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000: 1), resulting from a so called ‘pars pro toto distortion in opposite directions’, in which the established attribute to the outsider group as a whole the ‘bad’ characteristics of its worst segments, whereas the self image of the established is modeled on the ‘good’ characteristics of its own most exemplary members (Elias & Scotson, 1994: xix). So, representation forges the imagined communities of the superior Us and inferior Them. This perceived inferiority legitimizes the stigmatization of the outsiders by the established (ibid.). It can also lead to the depersonalization and dehumanization of the outgroup (Tajfel. 1982: 21). Such understandings of representation and identity have regularly been adopted in criticisms of the development discourse. According to one scholar, development vocabularies like ‘the Third World’ homogenize peoples and countries and involve stigmatizing associations such as economic backwardness, the failure to develop economically and politically, and entail “connotations of a binary contest between ‘us’ and ‘them’”(Darby, 1997: 2-3; also: Cooke, 2001: 14). The mechanism of a ‘pars pro toto
41 | Romanticizing Poverty distortion’ is evident is these conceptions of the development discourse on Africa, through which the most deprived parts of the continent have come to resemble it as a whole. The place has come to represent the issue, Africa has come to represent poverty (Clark, 2008: 13).
As has been emphasized throughout this thesis, representations of the other necessarily involve a constitution of the self. Similarly, the identity of the other cannot be constructed without developing a sense of self-identity (Lamers, 2005: 66). Images of others reflect the dominant identity, and images of others are self-images as well (Nederveen Pieterse, 1990: 233). According to Said, “the construction of identity […] involves establishing opposites and ‘others’ whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and re- interpretation of their differences from ‘us’” (Said, 2003: 332). Thus, it is argued that representations of African identity should primarily be interpreted by their information on Western cultures (Nederveen Pieterse, 1990: 231-232). This is what is meant, when it is claimed that Joseph Conrad in his famous novel ultimately stared into Europe's heart of darkness, and not that of the Congo (Prakash, 1996: 193). Furthermore, outgroups often adopt their identities as formulated by the ingroup. The creation of identities through representation within dominant discourses affects not just “how ‘we’ see ‘them’, but also how ‘they’ see themselves” (Manzo, 2006: 11). With respect to the development discourse, it has been argued that underdevelopment has become an identity, “something that informs people’s sense of self” (Gupta, 1998: ix).
Henri Tajfel explains that the stereotypical representation of an outgroup and the essentialist conception of its identity has three social functions: as a justification of actions planned or committed against the other; as perceptions of social causality that serve to reduce the complexity of large-scale distressing events; and as positive differentiations of the self from the outgroup (Tajfel, 1982: 22). Nederveen Pieterse adds to that, that images of others serve as limits of normality, and that as such imaging of others is an exercise of the disciplinary power of a normalizing discourse (Nederveen Pieterse, 1990: 233). These four functions of identity creation and reification are discernible in the development discourse on Africa. Through the representation of Africa by Western development NGOs, an African identity of underdevelopment is created which legitimizes development interventions; reduces the complex reality of global poverty; differentiates the poor, primitive African outgroup from the rich, modern Western ingroup; and determines what is normal, i.e. being developed. Through such representation, identities are performed (Borgerson & Schroeder, 2002: 589). As Western development NGOs actively engage in representation and framing, they actively
42 | Romanticizing Poverty erect or activate the us-them boundaries that shape the identities of development. They produce and preserve the image of a destitute Third World and a benevolent First World (Nederveen Pieterse, 1990: 235). Thus, Western development NGOs can be regarded as ‘identity entrepreneurs’ (Tilly, 2003: 616). Such identity entrepreneurs utilize identities to “persuade people to understand themselves, their interests, and their predicaments in a certain way; to persuade certain people that they are identical with one another and at the same time different from others; and to organize and justify collective action along certain lines” (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000:4-5). Development programmes are an example of such collective action. Identity entrepreneurs adopt framing strategies to direct their representations, promote interpretations and shape identities. It is evident that the formation of identities by identity entrepreneurs like Western development NGOs, has important political implications.
In this chapter, I have discussed the issue of representation. It has become clear that representations deliver reconstructions and that these reconstructions can become relevant realities on their own. Representations are products of exteriority, the object is absent in the re-presence. This explains their dichotomic, hierarchical and often stereotypical character. Through framing, representations provide meaning and promote certain interpretations while rejecting others. Some interpretations become dominant, which is how representations produce consent. Ultimately, representation construct identities. Dominant representations shape us-them boundaries and the corresponding identities of the Self and the Other, a divide in which the Self is superior to the inferior Other. Representations and the identities they evoke, are manipulated by identity entrepreneurs through framing. As such, representations are a fundamental part of discourse, which has been referred to as a system of representation. Through representation, the Western discourses of Africanism and Development create their subjects, which is why a Postcolonial approach to discourse has been described as “a deep engagement with the role of power in the formation of identity” (Abrahamsen, 2003: 197).
This thesis addresses the representation of African countries by Western development NGOs. In the previous chapters the theoretical approach to that question has been outlined. The representation of African countries by Western development NGOs has been situated within two historical discourses of power and knowledge, Africanism and Development, that both provide representations and shape the identities of the Western Self and the African Other. To analyze these representations, a critical methodology will be adopted. Perhaps the only methodology that suits the theory. These methods will be the topic of the next chapter.
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4. Methodology
In this chapter, I will elaborate the methodology that is adopted in this thesis in order to analyze the representation of African countries by Western development NGOs. First, in section 4.1., I will explain the method of discourse analysis, which constitutes the first half of the twofold methodology. Second, in section 4.2., I will turn to the second half of the methodology, dramaturgical or performance analysis as proposed by Maarten Hajer (2005). Third, in section 4.3., I will explain the selection of data that is analyzed in this thesis. Fourth, in section 4.4., I will discuss the most relevant limitations of the adopted methodology and address considerations that it evokes.
4.1. Discourse analysis
In the preceding theoretical chapters, the three basic concepts that underlie the research question of this thesis, Africanism, Development and representation, have been discussed from a critical Postcolonial perspective. Africanism and Development have been postulated as discourses that shape identities through representation. From such a Postcolonial, Foucauldian perspective follows a clear methodological orientation: discourse analysis. This is why discourse analysis has been referred to as both a theory and a method (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999: 16). When one conceptualizes and problematizes Africanism and Development as discourses, it makes sense to analyze them as such. In doing so, this thesis fits in a broader research agenda. In fact, Postcolonial approaches to development studies “are most established when deconstructing the languages of development” (Radcliffe, 2005: 296). Language is crucial to discourse. Escobar designated the development discourse ‘a new realm of language’ (Escobar, 1984: 389) and Nederveen Pieterse explains that a main subject of discourse analysis is how imaging is implemented in everyday language (Nederveen Pieterse, 1990: 226). However, discourse is more than language. Also, discourse is not limited to text. In fact, as the saying goes ‘pictures speak louder than words’, it is argued that “communications depend largely on visual representations to produce meaning” (Borgerson & Schroeder, 2002: 570). Photography and film are not the representations of a geographical fact, they have an ambivalent but crucial role in influencing public imaginations of place
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(Clark, 2008: 51), like texts do. Very much in line with another proverb, ‘every picture tells a story’, Nederveen Pieterse explains that visual images are narratives as well (Nederveen Pieterse, 1990: 225). Thus, both textual and visual languages are part of discourse. But discourse involves abstract ideologies and entails material practices as well. Combining all this, Maarten Hajer, an expert on discourse analysis, arrives at a definition of discourse as “a specific ensemble of ideas, concepts, and categorizations that are produced, reproduced, and transformed in a particular set of practices and through which meaning is given to physical and social realities” (Hajer, 1995: 44). In her book on discourse, Sara Mills writes that “a discourse is not a disembodied collection of statements, but groupings of utterances or sentences, statements which are enacted within a social context, which are determined by that social context and which contribute to the way that social context continues its existence” (Mills, 1997: 11). Following both definitions, it is clear that Development and Africanism as described previously possess all the characteristics of a discourse. Thus, a complete analysis of discourse would look at a textual and a visual dimension, and combine an analysis of the more abstract ideological underpinnings with an assessment of the more material practices of that discourse.
In this thesis a critical approach to discourse is adopted, a ‘critical discourse analysis’. Such an analysis politicizes discourse. It is an “engaged form of social theory” (Carvalho, 2008: 162) which involves adopting a “spirit of skepticism” (Gill, 2000: 178). It combines all Postcolonial understandings of power, knowledge and identity. Its goal is to look beyond texts and to take into account their institutional and sociocultural contexts (ibid.: 161). Critical discourse analysis reveals the power relations that operate within discourse and that “seek to engage audiences into a particular response” (Clark, 2008: 12). Such a method is necessary, as the textual and visual languages of both Africanism and Development are ‘avowedly strategic and tactical’ (Crush, 1995: 5). Said argues that, “without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage and even produce the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily , ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively” (Said, 2003: 3). The same is true for Africanism. Escobar applies this argument to the context of development, and claims that “without examining development as discourse we cannot understand the systematic ways in which the Western developed countries have been able to manage and control and, in many ways, even create the Third World politically, economically, sociologically, and culturally, and that […] it has given rise to a series of practices (promoted by the discourses of the West)
45 | Romanticizing Poverty which constitute one of the most powerful mechanisms for ensuring domination over the Third World today” (Escobar, 1984: 384). It seems evident that critical discourse analysis is the appropriate methodological way to proceed this thesis.
The specific critical discourse analysis that is employed here, is coined by communication and media scholar Anabela Carvalho in her article Media(ted) Discourse and Society (Carvalho, 2008). It is selected as it translates the very broad and somewhat unspecified engagement of critical discourse analysis into a very detailed, practical framework for analysis of discourse. Although it is originally intended for the analysis of mass media news articles, the framework can be meaningfully applied to a study of Western development NGO’s communications. And although it is originally focused on textual language, with a few adaptations, it can be extended to include visual languages as well (ibid.: 167). Carvalho’s adapted model for critical discourse analysis consists of two levels: analysis of the content and the context of the specific representations that is the object of study. More specifically, textual/visual analysis and contextual analysis (ibid.).
The adapted model for textual/visual analysis of the content of a representation is divided in six categories, the six dimensions of the representation that matter the most in the construction of meaning (ibid.): layout and structural organization; objects; actors; language and rhetoric; discursive strategies; and ideological standpoints (ibid.). ‘Layout and structural organization’ refer to the so called ‘surface elements’ of a representation, such as size, colors, background music, headlines, the lead and subheadings (ibid.). ‘Objects’ refer to the topics, themes, and most importantly, the constructions of the representation, the objects that are constituted (ibid.). ‘Actors’ refer to the individuals, groups or institutions that are mentioned and represented in the representation, the identified subjects of the discourse (ibid.: 168). ‘Language and rhetoric’ refer to the concepts, vocabulary and the writing style used for representing a certain reality (ibid.). This part of the framework is closest to linguistic analysis, paying attention to grammar and “persuasive devices employed in the text” (ibid.: 169) like metaphors, “one of the central conditions of speech” (Cassirer, 1953: 95). However, metaphor and rhetoric are not limited to text, as images can be metaphors too and visual representations are as persuasive as texts, if not more. ‘Discursive strategies’ refer to “forms of discursive manipulation of reality by social actors […] in order to achieve a certain effect or goal” (Carvalho, 2008: 169); in other words, framing. Discursive strategies include selection and composition, as well as positioning, “constructing social actors into a certain relationship with others”; legitimation, “justifying and sanctioning a certain action or power”;
46 | Romanticizing Poverty and politicization, “the attribution of a political nature or status to a certain reality” (ibid.: 169-170). The latter two discursive strategies have reverse counterparts: de-legitimation and de-politicization (ibid.: 170). Evidently, this short enumeration of discursive strategies is not exhaustive, as one can think of many other relevant frames a text or image can adopt to construct meaning and conduct interpretation, like blaming, shocking and motivating a specific action. All these discursive strategies are important aspects of the collective action frames that social movements like Western development NGOs employ in their communications (Benford & Snow, 2000: 614). Such frames are embedded in both textual and visual language. Finally, ‘ideological standpoints’ refer to “social and political values associated with stances towards a certain reality” (Carvalho, 2008: 170). Ideology is an overarching aspect of text and image, and the ideology of a representation is embedded in its above-mentioned five other dimensions (ibid.). Carvalho contends that “it is important to make ideologies manifest because they involve fundamental motivations and justifications for keeping or changing a certain status quo” (ibid.: 171).
The second level of Carvalho’s framework for critical discourse analysis consists of a contextual analysis of the specific representation. The model for contextual analysis is divided in two categories, the “two time-related dimensions of analysis” (ibid.: 171): comparative- synchronic analysis, and historical-diachronic analysis (ibid.: 167). A comparative-synchronic analysis involves a comparison between the representation that is the unit of analysis and various other representations of the same topic from the same period (ibid.: 171). Such an analysis allows for a better assessment of the textual/visual languages, frames and ideologies that are embodied in a specific representation. In the words of Carvalho, it is a “confrontation of alternative depictions of reality that mainly aims to enhance the critical reading of […] discourse and help identify the specific discursive traits of a given [representation]” (ibid.: 172). Lastly, a historical-diachronic analysis puts the representation in a historical context. It involves two historical examinations. First, of the broader political, social and economical context of the representation. Second, of the temporal evolution of the discourse in which a certain representation is produced (ibid.).
Such a critical discourse analysis enables me to analyze the textual and visual dimensions of the content and context of representations of African countries by Western development NGOs. However, it is not very suitable for an analysis of the practices of development imaging and the results of the representations. The second part of the twofold methodology of
47 | Romanticizing Poverty this thesis consists of dramaturgical or performance analysis. This method allows me to study the practical dimension of representation, and will be discussed in the next section.
4.2. Dramaturgical analysis
As explained above, discourse is not merely abstract or conceptual. As Hajer puts it, language does not simply ‘float’ in society, it is related to particular ‘practices’ in which it is employed (Hajer, 2005: 447). The particular practices of the development discourse and the Africanist discourse that are central in this thesis, are the communications of Western development NGOs on African countries. These communications, like fundraising campaigns, websites, annual reports, and informational videos, ‘perform’ the discourses of Development and Africanism. In order to adequately understand these performances, the critical discourse analytical perspective should be enriched by combining it with an analysis of ‘the dramaturgical dimension of interaction’ (ibid.: 448). This is the performance or dramaturgical analysis that has been formulated by Maarten Hajer (ibid.) and it constitutes the second part of the twofold methodology that is adopted in this thesis to analyze the representation of African countries by Western development NGOs.
Performance or dramaturgical theory explores the theater on which language is presented and discourses are performed (ibid.: 449). It conveys the understanding that language does something and suggests that “certain meanings constantly have to be reproduced, that signification must be enacted” (ibid.: 448, italics original). Hajer’s model for dramaturgical analysis involves an exploration of four key aspects of the dramaturgically performed representations within a discourse: setting, scripting, staging, and performance (ibid.: 449). With ‘setting’, Hajer means “the physical situation in which the interaction takes place, including the artifacts that are brought to the situation” (ibid.). The setting of the representation involves its location or décor, its structure, and the objects and actors that are brought on the stage. With ‘scripting’, Hajer means “those efforts to create a setting by determining the characters in the play […] and to provide cues for appropriate behavior” (ibid.). The script of the representation involves its language, rhetoric and metaphors. With ‘staging’, he refers to the “deliberate organization of an interaction, […] as well as to the distinction between active players and (presumably passive) audiences” (ibid.). The mis en scene of the representation, to continue the analogy with theater, involves acting out a
48 | Romanticizing Poverty representation and its discursive strategies and ideologies. Finally, ‘performance’ refers to the way in which the representation “produces social realities like understandings of the problem at hand, knowledge, new power relations” (ibid.). The accomplishments of the representation.
The twofold methodology, consisting of a critical discourse analysis and a dramaturgical analysis, can be combined and then summarized as follows:
Analysis of the setting of a representation: - Location and structure - Objects - Actors
Analysis of the scripting of a representation: - Language and rhetoric - Metaphors
Analysis of the staging of a representation: - Discursive strategies - Ideological standpoints
Analysis of the context of a representation: - Comparative-synchronic context - Historical-diachronic context
Analysis of the performance of a representation: - Produced social realities
(From: Carvalho, 2008: 167; and: Hajer, 2005: 449)
This is the methodology that is adopted in this thesis. Combining Carvalho’s (2008) adapted framework for critical discourse analysis with Hajer’s (2005) method of dramaturgical analysis, allows me to fully apprehend the representation of African countries by Western development NGOs as parts of the discourses of Development and Africanism. It enables me to look at the textual and visual content of these representations, their context, and their performance. In the next section, I will elaborate on the specific data, the specific representations that have been analyzed to write this thesis, and motivate that selection.
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4.3. Data
For this thesis, I have analyzed communications of five of the largest Western development NGOs that work in African countries: World Vision, Save the Children, Oxfam, Care and Christian Aid. I have selected these NGOs on the basis of the facts that they are among the wealthiest and oldest development NGO charities that operate and engage in fundraising internationally and execute development projects in multiple African countries.
The development NGOs that I have selected for this research are diverse in their background, size and approach to poverty. World Vision was founded in the United States in 1950 as a Christian missionary aid organization for helping the world’s poorest children. Currently, World Vision is the wealthiest international development NGO, with revenues of more than US$ 2.67 billion and yearly expenses of US$ 2.21 billion. Of that budget, around US$ 308 million is annually spent on fundraising. World Vision has retained its Christian character but “serves all people, regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation” (World Vision, 2014: 3). World Vision focuses its aid efforts of ‘tackling poverty and injustice’ on children and families. In 2013, World Vision operated in nearly 100 countries, reaching 4.3 million children through child sponsorship programmes alone (ibid.: 6). Save the Children was established in 1919 in England, amidst the horrors of World War I and child starvation in Europe. Now, it is the development NGO with the second biggest budget in the world, at US$ 2.1 billion dollars (Save the Children, 2015). Its member organization in the United states alone has amassed an annual income of around US$ 690 million and has spent even more, including US$ 44 million on fundraising. Globally, Save the Children works in 120 countries, of which 35 are in Africa, helping 55 million children directly (ibid.). Like World Vision, the NGO focuses its work around children and mothers, providing disaster relief, healthcare, nutrition and education. Save the Children is also active in Western countries, through aid projects in the United States and European countries, together amounting to 8% of their expenses (ibid.). The third wealthiest NGO Oxfam, although currently headquartered in The Hague in the Netherlands, was founded in England as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief in 1942. Oxfam reported an income of US$ 1.1 billion in 2013, and an expenditure of US$ 1.038 billion, of which more than US$ 257 million was spent on development projects in
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African countries and around US$ 90 million on fundraising (Oxfam, 2014: 68-69)13. Oxfam provides development aid in more than 90 countries and works in almost all African countries. In 2013 their projects benefitted more than 20 million people (ibid.: 10). Oxfam focuses its endeavors on activating citizens in decision making processes regarding gender justice, climate change, sustainability, accessible healthcare, equal profit from natural resource wealth, and equality in general. They are determined to change the world by “mobilizing the power of people against poverty (ibid.: 6). The fourth largest development NGO is Care International, based in Geneva, Switzerland, and founded in 1945 as the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe. Today, Care’s total support and revenue amount to more than US$ 560 million. In 2013 Care spent around US$ 576 million, of which US$ 82 million on fundraising (Care, 2013). Care is active in 87 countries globally and in 32 African countries, conducting 927 development projects with which the NGO helps around 97 million people (ibid.). The organization’s development strategies are centered around gender equality, maternal and child health, climate change, agriculture and emergency responses (ibid.). Besides these four largest Western development NGOs, there are a number of smaller organizations with annual budgets around US$ 200 million dollars, that operate in African countries. Among these NGOs are Action Aid, Terre des Hommes, Cordaid and Christian Aid. I have selected Christian Aid to be the fifth and final Western development NGO who’s representations of African countries will be analyzed in this thesis. In the literature, Christian Aid is often mentioned as a relatively critical, or even socialist organization (Smillie, 1995: 226), that is conscious of the possible detrimental effects of development imaging and is trying to provide a nuanced image of the Third World (Crisp, 2011: 28). As such, Christian Aid is an interesting organization to complement the selection of NGOs. Christian Aid was established in 1945 in England in the aftermath of the Second World War by the British and Irish churches. Currently, its yearly income is reported to be around US$ 165 million, with expenses of US$ 160 million, of which US$ 21.5 million is spent on fundraising (Christian Aid, 2014)14. The organization works in 17 African countries, focusing on changing institutions, empowering the local people, climate change, equality, women’s rights, tax justice, and ending conflicts (ibid.).
13 Current exchange rate, €1 is worth US$ 1.135. The original numbers reported by Oxfam are an income of €970.100.000, expenses of €915.000.000, of which €227.100.000 on projects in African countries and €80.000.000 on fundraising. 14 Current exchange rate, £1 is worth US$ 1.588. The original numbers reported by Christian Aid are an income of £103.6000.000, expenses of £100.400.000, of which £13.600.000 on fundraising.
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This selection of Western development NGOs is as representative of the Western discourse on the development of Africa as possible. The largest aid NGOs with the biggest budgets, that conduct the most development projects in Africa, spent the most money on fundraising and thus reach the highest number of people in both Western as well as in African countries, are all included. Furthermore, as mentioned above, the five individual NGOs are diverse in their background and approach to poverty. The ‘ideological’ underpinnings of these organizations include Christian beliefs, socialist International Relations theory and Liberalism. Some NGOs specifically target certain parts of the populations of African countries, like children, women and people in rural areas; or they focus their attention on specific policy areas, like gender justice, climate change, education and healthcare. Except Save the Children, all these development NGOs were established in the 1940s, which as I have explained in section 2.1., was when the Western discourse of Underdevelopment commenced (Sachs, 2010: xvi). So, all five NGOs are well established within the development discourse.
For each NGO, I have analyzed nine sources: their main website as of may/june 2015, their latest respective annual reports, three recent television adverts/appeals, three informational videos, and one weblog/article on the projects that NGO conducted in Africa or in an African country. As images of Africa were present in all these sources, this means that in total 45 representations of African countries by Western development NGOs have been analyzed, varying in size, function, importance, scope, and range of audiences. I have not analyzed posters or newspaper adverts, as I was unable to obtain examples from all five NGOs that were useful for this study. Of the 45 representations included in this research, 44 are from the period 2010-2015, allowing me to assess the current state of affairs and to make statements about the contemporary development discourse on Africa. Only one source, a television appeal from World Vision, is from before 2010, as I could not find more than two more recent and suitable adverts from that NGO. Altogether, this varied selection of 45 units of analysis should provide a broad and comprehensive overview of the communications by Western development organizations and their current representation of African countries.
Below, I will very briefly explain all 45 individual sources and their selection. All these sources are listed chronologically per development NGO in the list of primary literature at the end of this thesis. First, the main websites of these development NGOs are of great importance, as they should provide the general public with all kinds of relevant information on these organizations, including information on their history, their specific projects, accountability and how to contribute. I have analyzed the respective international websites of
52 | Romanticizing Poverty all five NGOs (World Vision, 2015a; Save the Children, 2015a; Oxfam, 2015a; Care 2015a; Christian Aid 2015a). Second, the annual reports of the five development NGOs provide an overview of the work these organizations carry out, their vision, mission, the results of their efforts and their finances. As such, these reports give us an idea how the NGOs envisage themselves and their development work and are essential to this research. I have analyzed World Vision’s annual review of the year 2013 (World Vision, 2014a); Save the Children’s annual review of the year 2014 (Save the Children, 2015b)15; Oxfam’s annual report of 2013- 2014 (Oxfam, 2014a); Care’s annual report of the year 2013 (Care, 2014a); and Christian Aid’s annual report of 2013-2014 (Christian Aid, 2014a). Third, adverts are perhaps the most crucial to the development imaging of African countries, as they reach millions of people in Western countries when they are broadcasted on television. I have selected the most recent advertisements or appeals that were available on the Youtube channels of the developments NGOs. I have analyzed World Vision adverts on water pollution in Kenya (World Vision, 2015b), on child mortality (ibid., 2010) and on the different struggles children in poor countries face (ibid., 2007); Save the Children adverts on the lack of available healthcare for starving children (Save the Children, 2014a), on the dangers of drinking contaminated or dirty water (ibid., 2013), and on malnutrition of young children (Save the Children, 2012); Oxfam adverts on lifting a child out of poverty (Oxfam, 2013a), on drought and the ripple effect of aid (ibid., 2012) and on poverty in West Africa (ibid., 2010); Care adverts on the long distances impoverished people have to walk to get water (Care, 2015b), on children in refugee camps (ibid., 2015c) and on “the world’s most desperate children” (ibid., 2012); and Christian Aid adverts on the simple things that can change the lives of poor people (Christian Aid, 2015b), on child mortality as a result of malaria (ibid., 2015c) and on the possibilities of economic activity in developing countries (ibid., 2013a). In all these videos Africa or an African country is either explicitly mentioned or imaged, or people and/or locations are portrayed that can reasonably be assumed to be African or at least face similar problems as the African countries that are represented, i.e. extreme poverty, hunger or conflict. Fourth, all development NGOs create informational videos on specific projects or issues to educate their audiences on the work that they do and the problems that they address. These informational videos are longer than adverts and allow the NGOs to provide more detailed, nuanced and contextualized knowledge on the practices of development assistance. If aid NGOs are indeed trying to balance the goals of fundraising and educating the general public, as was argued
15 I have analyzed the annual review from Save the Children USA, since the annual review from their overarching parent organization provided a lot less information.
53 | Romanticizing Poverty previously in this thesis, then it is to be expected that their advertisements aim at fundraising while their informational videos focus on education. Therefore it is important to include them both in this analysis. I have analyzed World Vision videos on a water project in Kenya (World Vision, 2015c), on a water project in Zambia (ibid., 2014b) and on the experiences of a child in Malawi with sponsorship (ibid., 2013); Save the Children videos on universal health coverage in Rwanda (Save the Children, 2015c), on a newly built clinic in Liberia (ibid., 2014b) and on the trip English model Karen Elson made to Sierra Leone (ibid., 2014c); Oxfam videos on MTV presenter Alexa Chung’s visit to Malawi (Oxfam, 2015b), on Ebola prevention in Liberia (ibid., 2014b) and on a water project in Zimbabwe (ibid., 2013b); Care videos on dealing with storms and hunger in Madagascar (Care, 2014b), on early childhood development centers in Rwanda (ibid., 2014c) and on forced early marriage in Ethiopia (ibid., 2014d); and Christian Aid videos on the so called ‘life saving riders of Kenya’ (Christian Aid, 2015d), on providing free meals to schoolchildren in Ghana (ibid., 2014b) and on the potential of tax for ending hunger in Ghana (ibid., 2013b). As opposed to the sometimes ambiguous indications of locations in the advertisements, all analyzed informational videos specifically mention an African country. Fifth and finally, weblogs or online articles give development NGOs an opportunity to provide even more background information to their work or their organizational perspectives on the complex problems that they deal with. Thus, they complement the informational videos as means of educating Western publics about development in Africa and therefore they have been included in this study. I have analyzed a World Vision weblog on a report on the exploitation of teenagers in the Ebola-affected areas in Sierra Leone (World Vision, 2015d); a Save the Children weblog on forced early marriage in Ethiopia (Save the Children, 2015d); an Oxfam weblog on the rising African economy by its director Winnie Byanyima (Oxfam, 2015c); a Care weblog on its emergency response to South Sudan by its Secretary General and CEO Wolfgang Jamann (Care, 2015d); and a Christian Aid weblog on the problems of delivering aid to South Sudan (Christian Aid, 2015e).
While selecting all these 45 sources, I have picked the adverts, informational videos and blogs that were the most recent, involved African countries the most specifically, were the most suitable for applying the methodology as described in the first two sections of this chapters, and thus would provide me with the most information on the contemporary representation of African countries by Western development NGOs. However, the research as outlined above has some theoretical and methodological limitations of which I am well aware. In the next
54 | Romanticizing Poverty section, I will address the most relevant of these limitations and discuss some considerations that underlie this thesis.
4.4. Limitations and considerations
When studying the discourse of Orientalism, Edward Said’s two fears were “distortion and inaccuracy”, or more specifically making either sweeping dogmatic generalizations or remaining within the local analytical level of atomistic descriptions without regard for generalities (Said, 2003: 8). This thesis also risks becoming either too general or too specific. Related to this are three fundamental considerations regarding objectivity, abstractness and language, which I will address below.
First, I want to address considerations on objectivity that follow from the interpretative character of the discourse/performance analysis that is adopted in this thesis. Such an interpretative methodology is often criticized for being too subjective. Concerning this topic, Jan Nederveen Pieterse elucidates that “it is obvious that the analysis of imaging is itself historically and culturally determined. No objective position outside of history exists from which historical processes of imaging can be interpreted” (Nederveen Pieterse, 1990: 226). The Postcolonial approach to development taken in this thesis is in line with these comments and irreconcilable with positivistic epistemologies that presume the possibility of true objectivity in social sciences. I conceive objectivity as a hypothetical thought experiment impossible to attain as it involves transcending context and the Self, but extremely important to keep in mind as it provides direction; somewhat like John Rawls’ ‘original position’ (Rawls, 1999). As explained in the previous section, I have selected multiple development NGOs and many different sources to be analyzed through a very concrete, straightforward and well-structured methodological lens. This should obviate too much subjectivity in this research. Keeping objectivity in mind, I have been and will be very explicit and transparent about the methods that are adopted, the choices that are made and the limitations these entail for this study.
One such possible limitation is embedded in the recurring critique on Postcolonial approaches to Development for being too abstract. They are argued to be “too theoretical and not sufficiently rooted in material concerns” and their emphasis on discourse is found to detract
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“from an assessment of material ways in which colonial power relations persist” (McEwan, 2001: 102). Some have claimed that Postcolonialism “obscures the actual or material political economy and sociology of development, making it difficult to see where inequality fits into the equation” (Power et al., 2006: 427). Since, “poverty is real and not simply discursive” (McEwan, 2001: 103), “subjecting development to Postcolonial critique might be considered […] irrelevant and esoteric” (Crush, 1995: 4), or so the argument goes. However, discourse analysis is never dismissed. One scholar explains that “whilst one would agree with the importance of a discourse analysis […], this needs to be harnessed to relations between these and material outcomes” (Jackson, 1997: 148). Thus, somewhat abstract Postcolonial approaches to Development that focus on discourse and representation, like this thesis, should always make very clear how texts and images relate to social, political and economic practices. It is argued that only “if it can overcome a tendency to lock into intellectual rather than practical projects” (Sylvester, 1999: 703), Postcolonialism can be a “fruitful new avenue for those concerned with the study of development” (Power et al., 2003: 427).
It is evident that any study of a specific discourse needs to make clear how that discourse exercises power and translates into social, political and economic practices. However, I believe that these critiques overlook the fact that a discourse, even in the most textual interpretation of that concept which is not adopted in this thesis, is a very relevant practice on its own. This fact is emphasized by multiple scholars. Arturo Escobar writes that the development discourse “has validity of its own which goes beyond the materiality of ‘underdevelopment’ itself, and in fact profoundly affects it” (Escobar, 1985: 389). Therefore, according to him, “development as a discourse is a very real historical formation” (ibid.), mirroring Said’s previously quoted description of Orientalism as a “cultural and political fact” (Said, 2003: 13). I share the understanding of discourse as ‘intensely material’ (Blunt & McEwan, 2002: 5), something Stuart Hall refers to as the ‘reality of discourse’ (Hall, 2005: 70). If the development discourse on Africa wields knowledge and power over that continent, shapes the identities of the developed Western Self and the underdeveloped African Other, and ultimately serves to legitimize development interventions in African countries, than charity is indeed “bound together with geo-politics” (Hutnyk, 2004: 77), and development imaging is evidently directly related to social, political and economic practices. If besides that imaging itself is understood as an exercise of ‘the practice of signification’ (Hall, 2005: 75) rather than an abstract formulation of texts and images that is disconnected from a ‘real world’, then it becomes even more clear that an analysis of the Western development
56 | Romanticizing Poverty discourse on Africa is very politically relevant. In the words of one scholar: “development discourse promotes and justifies very real interventions with very real consequences. It is, therefore, imperative to explore the links between the words, practices and institutional expressions of Development, and between the relations of power that order the world and the words and images that represent the world” (McEwan, 2001: 103). Such an endeavor “does not entail a denial of the material condition of poverty, but rather a challenge to their conceptualization and the political practices they make possible” (Abrahamsen, 2003: 202).
Another limitation to this research is posed by language. One aspect of this thesis is an assessment of the language, images, rhetoric and metaphors deployed by the development discourse on Africa. However, within this assessment I am myself bound by the restrictions that the English language raises. One example of this difficulty is the word ‘development’. A critique of the ideas, languages and practices of the development discourse that criticizes them for being paternalistic or even neocolonial, must formulate an alternative conceptualization of the relations between Western and African countries. If the words that are available through language might not be appropriate, then such a reformulation becomes complicated. As a result, ‘development’ has been described and re-described as ‘aid’, ‘assistance’ and ‘cooperation’, while in fact the term ‘development’ itself is already problematic given its modernist connotation. However, the term has become entrenched in language and Western thinking about poor countries so much, that even the extremely critical Postdevelopment school of thought could not elude it when naming itself. Other problematic concepts that are inherent to the development debate include ‘First World’, ‘Third World’, ‘developed countries’, ‘developing countries’, and perhaps even ‘affluence’ and ‘poverty’ (Sahlins, 1998: 3). Also, the debate involves some clichéd, ambiguous terms, such as ‘the West’ and ‘Africa’. When writing this thesis, I have not been able to work around these concepts and avoid them. As is explained by others, “even progressive agendas focused on decolonizing development draw upon western discourses in order to articulate [their] vision” (Power et al., 2006: 426). Some scholars have opted to replace First World and Third World vocabularies with the terms ‘Minority World’ and ‘Majority World’, “in order to challenge the assumptions of superiority and inferiority associated with traditional representations” (Clark, 2008: 3). I have chosen not to do this, as such conceptualizations feel forced or artificial and distract from the realities they attempt to represent. I am aware of the power of the languages that I analyze and employ, but want to move beyond relativism instead of burying myself “in the trap of nonessentialism” (Schuurman, 2000: 14). Concerning objectivity, abstractness and language,
57 | Romanticizing Poverty in the words of Nederveen Pieterse: “generalizations are inevitable, but nuance is required” (Nederveen Pieterse, 1990: 228).
Finally, it is important to note that this thesis is not a complete dismissal of the efforts of aid NGOs or of the idea of development itself. Neither should it be interpreted as a relentless critique on individual representations, people or organizations. Rather, this thesis aims to deliver a critical analysis of contemporary representations of African countries by Western development NGOs and their implications. It is not my aim to make a statement about the correctness of the representations, in fact, that would be in contradiction with everything I have argued in the previous chapters. But, I do intend to provide a comprehensive theoretical and practical understanding of change and continuity within the development discourse as well as insights into the performative practices and political implications of development imaging, and suggestions for improvements. Below, in Part II, I will start this analysis by elaborating on the historical development representations of African countries in chapter 5, followed by the main evaluation of the contemporary development discourse on Africa in the final chapter of this thesis.
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Part II: Analysis and Conclusions
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5. Historical Development Representations of Africa
In this chapter I will provide a historical overview of the Western development discourse on Africa. In section 5.1., this overview will start with an outline of the representations of the Ethiopian famine by development NGOs in the 1980s. Second, in section 5.2., I will elaborate the features of the historical development representations of Africa, under the title ‘pornography of poverty’, a term that has been frequently used to describe these representations. Finally, in section 5.3., I will address the identities that these representations have constructed and explain recent assessments of change and continuity in the development representations of Africa, which is followed by my own analysis of contemporary representations of African countries by Western development NGOs in the next chapter.
The outline below will serve as a reference point for the analysis that is provided in this thesis. In this part, all elements of discourse as described in the first three chapters of this thesis come together. Within the Western development discourse on Africa, the discourses of Africanism and Development intersect and coincide. Its representations produce meaning, constitute an image, and shape realities through framing. Knowledge on the development of Africa is produced. As a result, the subjects of this Western development discourse on Africa and their corresponding dichotomic identities of the Self and the Other are constructed. These constructed identities combine elements of the Africanist and the Development discourse into one coherent imagination, the imagined geographies of an underdeveloped Africa in need of development aid. Such representations ultimately serve as a legitimation for the development interventions that the aid NGOs carry out.
5.1. The Ethiopian famine
From 1983 to 1985 the world was shocked by a disastrous famine in Ethiopia, in the course of which more than 400.000 people died. Until today, the images of emaciated women and children with bloated bellies, starving in the scorching heat on the parched earth, haunt the Western publics. These images that shocked the world, these “iconic representations of famine” (Manzo, 2006: 9), were provided by Western mainstream media, specifically the
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BBC, in concert with several Western development NGOs that had access to the region.16 The Ethiopian famine became the first mass media hype of development, a ‘media spectacular’ (Clark, 2008: 138) in which reports of starving Ethiopians stirred up ‘the perfect media storm’ (Sukop: 2010: 266). As such, the famine is often argued to be a “key event in the formation of geographic visualisations of the African continent” (Clark, 2008: 3), a ‘turning point’ (ibid.: 137), a ‘landmark’ (Franks: 2013: 2) or a ‘watershed’ (Manzo: 2006: 9) “for how aid agencies thought about images of disaster” (Campbell et al., 2005: 2). In her recent analysis of this ‘iconic news event’, Suzanne Franks claims that the Western representations of the Ethiopian famine have had “unprecedented impact, challenging perceptions of Africa and mobilizing public opinion and philantrophic action in a dramatic way” (Franks, 2013: ix). This is why the Ethiopian famine is the starting point for the historical overview of development representations of Africa in this thesis.
In 1984, the BBC sent their correspondent Michael Buerk from Johannesburg to the Horn of Africa to report on famine in the region. Buerk sent a message to the development NGO Oxfam that read: “Help, Have had a request from BBC in London relating to an appeal to be televised next Thursday entitled ‘Famine in Africa’…need urgent advice on where I can leap in and out quickly with pictures of harrowing drought victims etc” (Buerk, 2004: 270; sic.). He ended up in Ethiopia, covering the worsening famine in that country multiple times. On the 23rd of October, an otherwise ‘slow world news day’ (Clark, 2008: 144) 17, the BBC broadcasted the second report by Buerk and his camera man Mohamed Amin. These became the ‘images that moved the world’ (ibid.: 146). A slowly moving camera captured a horrific scene on a morning outside the small Ethiopian town of Korem, where thousands of starving people were flocking together. Against this background of shocking images of desperation, Buerk opened his ‘poetic report’ (ibid.) with the famous lines: “Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korem, it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the twentieth century. This place, say workers here, is the closest thing to hell on earth. Thousands of wasted people are coming here for help. Many find only death. They flood in everyday from villages hundreds of miles away. Delved by hunger, driven beyond the
16 Many studies have been conducted into the representations of the 1983-85 famine in Ethiopia. For a complete reconstruction of the media coverage of the Ethiopian famine, see Franks (2013) and Clark (2008: 137). The earliest complete analysis of the images of the famine and their result on Western public opinion has been conducted by Van der Gaag and Nash (1987). How much the coverage of the Ethiopian famine was a collaboration between NGOs and the media is illustrated by the statement of one journalist who explained that the media were 90% dependent on the development NGOs for their information (ibid.: 40). 17 In fact, the only other major news story that day was, ironically, coverage on the food mountains that were wasting away in warehouses of the EEC (Clark, 2008: 144).
61 | Romanticizing Poverty point of desperation. Fifteen thousand children here now. Suffering. Confused. Lost. Death is all around, a child or an adult die every twenty minutes. Korem, an insignificant town, has become a place of grief” (Buerk & Amin, 1984). An NGO aid worker from Medicins Sans Frontieres explained that “if nothing is done, there will be hundreds of thousands of people who will die” (ibid.). The report was aired by 425 of the world’s major broadcasting agencies, reaching a potential audience of 470 million people (Clark, 2008: 145). It was a touchstone (Van der Gaag & Nash, 1987: 32), it shocked the world into responding. In the words of a BBC news producer: “We had all seen pictures of famine, but these images were different, so haunting and powerful” (in: Clark, 2008: 144).
Development NGOs like Oxfam, Save the Children and World Vision also covered the famine extensively, through fundraising campaigns and informational messages. The NGO fundraising campaigns mirrored the media reports, showing shocking images of the victims of the famine. A study of 55 advertisements by several aid agencies found that “all the photographs showed Africans as passive if not starving” and “63% were of very pitiful or emaciated people” (Van der Gaag & Nash, 1987: 48). In one video, the evangelical World Vision president Stanley Mooneyham personally traveled to the famine-stricken Ethiopia to elucidate the NGO’s response to the humanitarian crisis. Mooneyham narrated in David Attenborough-fashion over images of starving tribes people very similar to the Buerk/Amin report: “After we landed and stepped out into the scorching heat, we made our way to some two thousand people waiting under a thorn tree. Waiting quietly, almost to quietly. Their bodies, their faces, even their measured steps told one story: prolonged hunger. Near starvation. And they kept coming. […] They were gathering for one reason: they were desperate for food” (World Vision, 2012). Upon seeing this tragedy, Mooneyham promised in the name of God to deliver food aid to the starving Ethiopians; which World Vision did, as the video emphasized (ibid.). Such development aid to Ethiopia became a ‘Crusade for humanity’ (Van der Gaag & Nash, 1987: 32). After the Buerk/Amin report and as a result of effective fundraising appeals, Oxfam’s switchboard was jammed for three days and Save the Children raised US$ 1.4 million in one month (Clark, 2008: 145). Newspapers framed aid to Ethiopia in terms of a ‘Mercy Mission’(Van der Gaag & Nash, 1987: 35).18 Celebrities joined the cause as well, as Michael Jackson’s USA for Africa sung We Are The World and Bob Geldof released the Band Aid charity song Do They Know Its Christmas and launched the 16-
18 The UK newspaper The Mirror undertook a so called ‘Massive Mirror Mercy Mission’ (Van der Gaag & Nash, 1987: 35). Following Postdevelopment theory, it is interesting to note that the term ‘Mercy Mission’ resembles the colonial notion of a mission civilizatrice.
62 | Romanticizing Poverty hour pop concert Live Aid, raising even more money. And so, the Western story of the Ethiopian famine “quickly became about the aid effort rather than the famine itself, contrasting passive Ethiopian victims with enthusiastic philanthropic deeds” of Westerners (Clark, 2008: 145).
This Western aid operation to Ethiopia, and its images of starving Africans became a “seminal moment in […] the global imaging of Africa” (Somerville, 2013). In fact, the representation of the Ethiopian famine produced a new paradigm in development imaging: the ‘pornography of poverty’. The ‘Live Aid Legacy’ (VSO, 2001). This specific ‘collective action framework’ (Benford & Snow, 2000: 614) of African development will be the topic of the next section.
5.2. Pornography of poverty
The analogy with pornography to describe the images of development originated in the 1980s, when one critic wrote that “the public display of an African child with a bloated kwashikorkor-ridden stomach in advertisements is pornographic, because it exposes something in human life that is as delicate and deeply personal as sexuality, that is, suffering” (Lissner, 1981). Since then, development representations of extreme poverty have frequently been described as poverty porn, ‘disaster pornography’ (Burman, 1994: 238) or the ‘pornography of poverty’ (Nathanson, 2013). According to Lissner, pornography entails “the exhibition of the human body and soul in all its nakedness, without any respect and piety for the person involved” (Lissner, 1981). Thus, poverty porn is argued to exhibit destitution and desperation and exploit naked poverty to shock audiences. Through the pornography of poverty, poverty becomes consumable. Since the Ethiopian famine, development representations of Africa have largely taken on the form of poverty porn. Below, I will elaborate its four most relevant features.
One striking characteristic of poverty porn, is that it invariably focuses on the suffering of women and children (Campbell et al., 2005: 13). In fact, images of starving black children have dominated fundraising campaigns for decennia (Crisp, 2011: 23). Development NGOs have been regularly criticized for a “wholesale reliance on images of decontextualised children to convey a variety of messages” (Manzo, 2006: 10) and for establishing “a vast representational compendium of children in need” (Hutnyk, 2004: 81). This strategy of using
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“starving babies and other emotive imagery to coax, cajole and bludgeon donations from a guilt-ridden Northern public” (Smillie, 1995: 136) has been referred to as the ‘Starving Baby Appeal’ (Fine, 1990: 154). This strategy has resulted in an abundance of “images of buzzing flies, begging eyes, and bloated bellies [that] flood television screens and print media in an attempt to pull at heartstrings and garner donations” (Nathanson, 2013: 103). Such appeals have made the child the ‘universal icon of suffering’ (Cohen 2001: 178). Often, children in development representations have been accompanied by their mothers, resulting in images that can be interpreted as references to the Christian icon of Madonna and Child (Clark, 2008: 89; Van der Gaag & Nash, 1987: 32).19 These pictures of children and women in distress have been omnipresent in the development imaging of African countries.
As early as 1969, the effectiveness of the use of children in charity appeals was emphasized, when a fundraising consultant explained his maxim: “all the time show more and more babies” (in: Lamers, 2005: 47). It is argued that, “everybody understands that you need to protect a child and take care of a child because of its vulnerability and innocence” (ibid.). We can see “a nation’s hunger in a child’s face” (Campbell et al., 2005: 20). Women and children are seen as victims. Pictures of women and children also possess strong emotional power. A Reuters employee explains that the directive for photographers is “trying to convey an emotion and basically that’s it. It sounds easy but it is the hardest part of the job and how do you do that? You focus on children, you focus on women and that is it” (in: Lamers, 2005: 47.). This is why Western development NGOs often have resorted to images of women and children in their representations of African countries. A study of the images that were used in the coverage of the Ethiopian famine concluded that “mother and child photos made up a quarter of the total number of images that were used”, that in the UK newspaper The Mirror “80% of the pictures were of mothers and children or children alone”, and that in NGO advertisements “more than half of the images used were of women, or women and children, [and] only 1 photograph was of a man” (Van der Gaag & Nash, 1987: 32,48). More recently, a study of all the fundraising posters that were produced between 1966 and 2001 by a Belgian NGO named the National Centre for Development Cooperation (NCOS), found that “the image of a child is the most frequently appearing image in the posters” (Lamers, 2005: 47). Thus, images of women and children have historically dominated poverty porn and, more general, the representations of African countries by Western media and development NGOs.
19 Such a Madonna and child reference is not only present in development images of African countries. It is also used in one of the most famous photographs of poverty, the Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange, which has been labeled as “one of the most expressive pictures in the history of photography” (Clark, 2008: 89).
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Fig. 5.1. Congo, 1961. A picture of emaciated, naked children used by Oxfam in one of its campaigns. The children were probably instructed to cover their genitalia, and the bare breasted woman on the right was eventually cropped out by Oxfam (Campbell et al., 2005: 8).
However, the pornography of poverty encompasses more than just pictures of starving mothers and children with bloated bellies. Although “famine images became the currency of the media and NGOs” after the Ethiopian crisis (Van der Gaag & Nash, 1987: 1), and although famine, malnutrition, or the problem of not having sufficient food, remain a recurring theme in NGO representations of Africa (Lamers, 2005: 50), other specific features of these representations can be distinguished. Generally, development images of Africa have been characterized by “the preponderance of negativity” (Mahadeo & McKinney, 2007: 15). They have depicted Africa as a failure and as a continent eluded by progress (Andreasson, 2005: 971). Development representations of Africa predominantly have reduced the continent to “a series of stereotypes of chaos and disaster” (Power et al., 2006: 422). Famine and starving children are a part of these stereotypes, often displayed in dark black-and-white photographs like Figure 5.1. above. Others stereotypes of development imaging have included primitivism, violence, corruption (Van der Gaag & Nash, 1987: 12, 29-30), war, coups, riots (Nederveen Pieterse, 1990: 235), aids, disease, little education and an unsophisticated economy (Mahadeo & McKinney, 2007: 18). Thus, historically development representations have conveyed a dominant image of Africa as “a place of misery, chaos, and brutality”
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(Beattie et al., 1999: 233). As a ‘country’ of disaster, poverty and war “where everyone is permanently malnourished” (Campbell et al., 2005: 15). The consistency and recurrence of that image has been ‘almost predictably systematic’ (Beattie et al. 199: 233).
Within this image of an underdeveloped Africa, the Africans themselves have been ‘bystanders in their own affairs’, depending on the generosity of Western donors (Mahadeo & McKinney, 2007: 18). They have been portrayed as helpless, ignorant and passive, which has been amplified by the fact that Westerners have been represented in a more active way (Lamers, 2005: 53), as we see in Figure 5.2. below. In the case of the Ethiopian famine, the difference was evident between black Africans, who were framed as suffering and starving, and the white Westerners, who’s actions were referred to as ‘generous’ and ‘miracles’ (Van der Gaag & Nash, 1987: 29-30). But also in general, it is argued that “most white faces represented in development are either professionals […] or celebrities” (Crisp, 2011: 29), whereas the victims of underdevelopment are all black (ibid.: 21). In this respect, one scholar refers to a “startling contrast […] between the empowered white expert and the disempowered people of color” (Rutherford, 2000: 135). Thereby, the poverty porn that has come to be the dominant development image of the African continent, has emphasized the destitution of black Africans and the benevolence of white Westerners.
Fig. 5.2. Bob Geldof in a refugee camp in Ethiopia (picture by: Brian Aris, 1987).
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A final characteristic of the pornography of poverty that is relevant to this thesis, is its apolitical nature. Historically, development representations of African countries have shocked the world with extremely pressing global problems, like extreme poverty, famine, and conflict. Yet, these representations have generally managed to remain politically neutral and decontextualized (Nathanson, 2013: 114). Causes of the hardships that face the African continent have often been framed in terms of climate, bad luck, or a lack of resources. In the Ethiopian case, “famine was simply a lack of food” (Clark, 2008: 144). Despite the Cold War context, and despite the fact that catastrophic policies of the Marxist Ethiopian regime contributed to the famine to a large extent, political explanations for the humanitarian crisis were largely avoided by development NGOs in favor of a safely neutral cause: drought (ibid.; Van der Gaag & Nash, 1987: 33). This is why development NGOs have been referred to as an ‘anti-politics machine’ (Fisher, 1997) that remains uninterested in explicit examinations of economic and political contexts of global poverty (Hutnyk, 2004: 80). One scholar explains that “in order to keep everybody happy”, it is necessary for NGOs to communicate politically neutral messages in their fundraising campaigns (Lamers, 2005: 38) and avoid controversy (Nathanson, 2013: 114). And thus, development representations of African countries have historically refrained from addressing the complex, sensitive, political facets of poverty and have retained their apolitical character.
In short, representations of African countries by development NGOs have regularly taken the form of poverty porn, conveying shocking, exploitative images of extreme poverty that share four broad characteristics. First, a focus on women and children. Second a propensity for negativity and a disproportional attention the most cruel aspects of African life. Third, a contrast between passive African victims and active Western lifesavers. Fourth, a lack of attention for political context. This is a very specific way in which the development discourse has framed the work of Western aid NGOs. It can be understood as a ‘collective action framework’ that produces meaning, motivates action, and inspires and legitimates the activities and campaigns of these development organizations (Benford & Snow, 2000: 614). In fact, the pornography of poverty is the collective action frame that has dominated the Western development discourse on Africa ever since it originated during the Ethiopian famine in the 1980s (Franks, 2013).
A primary function of this framing strategy is to reduce the complexity of poverty in Africa and the Western efforts to address that poverty. This is why poverty porn has been described as ‘inaccurate and misleading’ stories (ibid.: ix) or ‘blatant manipulations’ (Hutnyk, 2004:
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80). Poverty porn delivers a ‘re-presence’ (Said, 2003: 21) and ‘produces meaning’ (Hall, 1997: 7) of Africa and the West. Through framing, it selects certain aspects of African reality and ignores others, simplifying the reality it represents. Historically, the development representations of African countries have reduced “a continent of 57 countries, nearly 900 million people and numerous disparate cultures to a single, impoverished place” (Campbell et al., 2005: 2). As a result a highly differentiated continent is understood in terms of a series of general stereotypes (Beattie et al., 1999: 266) which trivialize complex issues (Crisp, 2011: 6). Some argue that “no other region in the world is described with such sweeping generalizations” (Diageo, 2004: 4). At the same time, the poverty porn framework has morally glorified the Western aid efforts (Easterly, 2006: 20) and systematically portrayed white people as saviors, ignoring the role that external Western political forces might have played in the problems on the African continent, for example through Cold War politics of spheres of influence or trade barriers. Through this practice of ‘reductive repetition’ (Andreasson, 2005: 971) a ‘single story’ about African development is constructed (Adichie, 2009), a story “which, through repeating the same representation of a concept, becomes the definitive story about that concept” (Crisp, 2011: 5). This is the ‘reality-effect’ (Hall, 2005: 72) of development representations of Africa, and this is how the stereotypical images of African development have contributed to the ‘production of consent’ (ibid: 81). And so, poverty porn, a powerful, simplified single story of the development discourse on Africa, has produced knowledge on Africa, has shaped the identities of the Western Self and the African Other and has legitimized the interventions of development NGOs. In the next section, I will further explain the identities that have been constructed through the pornography of poverty framework.
5.3. Identities of Development
The pornography of poverty framework has produced very specific knowledges on Africa, the West and the relation between those two. It has made the Western public understand Africans, themselves, and the development of African countries in a very specific way. It has combined elements of the Africanist and the Development discourse into the identities of the Western Self and the African Other who have met each other amidst the horrors of extreme poverty in the imagined geography of an underdeveloped Africa. These identities have been created
68 | Romanticizing Poverty through and have corresponded with the shocking images of poverty porn that have focused on African women and children, selected the most destitute parts of the African continent, portrayed Africans as passive victims and Westerners as active saviors, and retained an apolitical, decontextualized character. All four characteristics of this framing strategy that has prevailed in Western development representations of Africa, have worked to erect Us-Them boundaries and relations of superiority and inferiority between Western and African countries.
First, the focus on women and children in representations of African countries by Western development NGOs has infantilized and feminized the African Other. According to one scholar, “the focus on kids is a distortion” that “implies and exposes an adult–infant relation of inequality” between the West and Africa (Hutnyk, 2004: 84,83). Others assert more elaborately, that “using children in fundraising campaigns symbolizes the weak, vulnerable and dependent position that developing countries have in relation to the stronger, richer and more dominant developed countries” (Lamers, 2005: 49). These unequal, paternalistic power relations have reproduced ‘boundaries of adult and child’ in such a manner that “the infantilization of the South exemplified in imagery of children works to secure the competence and maturity of the Northern donor” (Burman, 1994; 238). Second, the strategic selection of the most impoverished places and people on the African continent to feature in the development representations of that continent, is also a distortion. It has contrasted African starvation, primitivism, violence, conflict and disease with Western abundance, modernity, civilization, peace and health. These contradictions have emphasized Otherness, further carving out the identities of the Western Self and African Other and, again, suggesting a power relation of superiority and inferiority between the West and Africa. Third, portraying black Africans as passive victims and white Westerners as lifesavers, has deepened the cleavage between a developed Us and an underdeveloped Them. Africans have been “presented as incapable of doing anything intelligent by themselves” (Rahnema, 2010: 187). They have been “reduced to hollow shells, bloated stomachs, or empty gazes” (Rutherford: 2000: 125) and “never the agents of their own salvation” (ibid. 78). These allusions to “the natural weakness and incapacity of Africans” (Andreasson, 2005: 971) have been made in stark contrast to the way Western efforts of development have been portrayed. These latter representations have produced a sense of a heroic, merciful, benevolent and potent Self (Van der Gaag & Nash, 1987), thus the power relation of superiority and inferiority is emphasized more. Fourth, the apolitical and decontextualized character that representations of African countries within the framework of poverty porn have generally had, has also influenced the
69 | Romanticizing Poverty construction of the development identities of the Self and the Other. They imply that the West is not to blame for the hardships on the African continent, and have prevented the Western self identity from becoming stained by guilt and responsibility. Instead they have evoked pity, and either bad luck, nature, or the African Others themselves have implicitly been blamed for their poverty. These development images of Africa have historically “bestowed a kind of grace on the giver and absolution from further responsibility” (Sukop, 2010: 267). And thus, they have promoted emotion without understanding, charity without the need for structural change (Manzo, 2006: 11).
It is clear that these development representations of African countries have been the product of ‘exteriority’ (Said, 2003: 21). From the West, they describe something external, something foreign, that remains or even becomes more external and foreign through representation. The absence of Africans through their re-presence in the development images of poverty porn is striking, demonstrating the ‘dichotomic’ character of these representations and the ‘epistemology of difference’ between black and white that underlies development imaging (Borgerson & Schroeder, 2002: 576-577). Through the ‘production of otherness’ or ‘othering’ (Clark, 2008: 3, 49), the differences between Africa and the West have been reified and essentialized to the point that they appear to be intrinsic. This is Hall’s ‘racialized regime of representation’ in full effect (Hall, 1997: 249) and also the reason why NGO communications have been accused of racism (Crisp, 2011). Thus, historical development representations of Africa have reified Otherness, while simultaneously constituting a sense of self identity; they have established an ‘ingroup and outgroup’ (Tajfel, 1982: 7). Furthermore, the mechanism of a ‘pars pro toto in opposite directions’ (Elias & Scotson, 1994: xix) is clearly discernible, as development images select the most primitive, violent and impoverished parts of African life to become representative for the whole continent, while ignoring successes in Africa; and select the richest, altruistic parts of the Western world to become representative for Europe and the United States, while ignoring poverty and corruption in the West. Through erecting these Us-Them boundaries, Western development NGOs have acted as ‘identity entrepreneurs’ (Tilly, 2003: 616), constructing and utilizing identity to promote their agendas. And so, the discourses of Africanism and Development have coincided to shape the identities of the Western developed Self and the African underdeveloped Other through the collective action framework of poverty porn that has dominated the representation of African countries by the identity entrepreneurs of the Western development discourse on Africa: the aid NGOs.
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As mentioned previously in chapter three, scholars have distinguished four functions of identity creation. One is reducing the complexity of distressing events (Tajfel, 1982: 22), which as I have shown has clearly been an aspect of the historical development representations of Africa, that have reduced the complexity of extreme poverty in African countries. Two other functions of identity creation are to provide a positive distinction of the Self from the outgroup and a boundary of normality (ibid.; Nederveen Pieterse, 1990: 233), who’s presence also has become clear in the sections above. A final function of identity creation, that can only be performed when the previous three have been completed, is the justification of actions (Tajfel, 1982: 22) or the legitimation of interventions and dominance. Development interventions have been legitimized through the pornography of poverty framework. The power and knowledge relations of Western superiority and African inferiority that this framework has consolidated, degrade, infantilize and perhaps even dehumanize African people and their cultures, “rendering them passive objects of a Western gaze which seeks to confirm its own agency and omnipotence to ward off its own insecurities” (Burman, 1994: 238). The essential message of these development representations of Africa, has been that solutions to African problems, its set of core deficiencies, are not readily found in African realities themselves but must be externally generated and devised (Andreasson, 2005: 971- 973). According to Nederveen Pieterse, these images of the “Third world as the object of development assistance produces an image of Africa in need of relief” (Nederveen Pieterse, 1990: 235), in need of Western intervention and perhaps even domination. Which brings us to the start of this thesis, as this is where criticisms directed at the Western development discourse for neocolonialism originated. Exactly these images, images of helplessness and dependency, have been “denounced as an allegory of colonialism” (Manzo, 2006: 9). They have evoked the statements that “the abject and passive victims […] represent an extension of 19th-century colonialism - Africa as inferior, feminised, infantilised, the object of our charity” (Dodd, 2005: 26) and that the representations of African countries by Western development NGOs ultimately amount to “a continuation of colonial ideologies of the African Other” (Mahadeo & McKinney, 2007: 18). These critiques crystallized into Postdevelopment theory.
If development strives for equality, justice and dignity for all human beings, and even if it is understood in strictly economical terms as growth, then this development imaging that has promoted power relations of superiority and inferiority, is detrimental and undermining its own goals. It is evident that the framework of poverty porn has had negative consequences that have impaired the broader objectives of development (CCIC, 2008: 2). As a result of
71 | Romanticizing Poverty these Postdevelopment critiques, the pornography of poverty is now normally conceived as a harmful, self-defeating strategy of development imaging (Nathanson, 2013), also by NGOs (VSO, 2001; CCIC, 2008). By the 1990s, most aid NGOs had developed internal guidelines on their use of images, and international codes of conduct had been formulated regarding their representation of the people of developing countries, propagating terms like “dignity and empowerment” (Manzo, 2006: 9). In 1989 one NGO employee claimed that the effort to stop the use of demeaning images in fundraising campaigns was “an old battle which has very largely been won” (in: Coulter, 1989). However, the development discourse of Western aid NGOs is often argued to be still ‘directly affected and distorted’ by the pornography of poverty and the veneration of aid efforts that consolidated as development images in the wake of the Ethiopian famine (Franks, 2013: ix). Many scholars assert that poverty porn remains an important aspect of representations of developing countries by aid NGOs and that images of starving children are “rarely absent for long” (Coulter, 1989) or that it is “debatable whether such images ever fully went away” (Manzo, 2006: 9). Recent studies found that NGO communications have changed very little over the past ten years (Clark, 2008: 167), that “nothing has really changed in 15 years” (Lamers, 2005: 47-48) and that racism in fundraising images is still endemic (Crisp, 2011: 8).
Although I have found that latter statement to be more or less correct, the results of this study disagree with the idea that nothing, or even very little has changed in the development images of Africa. In fact, a lot has changed. I will contend that the pornography of poverty, although it has not disappeared, is no longer the paradigmatic framework that development NGOs generally adopt to represent the Western Self and the African other. Below, in the final chapter of this thesis, the analysis of contemporary development representations of Africa, I will assess to what extent the Western development discourse on Africa has indeed retained the character of poverty porn and to what extent it has changed and even become ‘reflexive’ (Nederveen Pieterse, 1998: 367) and adopted criticisms.
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6. Contemporary Development Representations of Africa
In this final chapter of this thesis, I will explain the contemporary development discourse on Africa. I will discuss the findings of the combined critical discourse analysis (Carvalho, 2008) and performance analysis (Hajer, 2005) that I have used to analyze 45 recent representations of African countries by Western development NGOs, and provide explanations for change, continuity and the current state of affairs, as well as the social, political and economic implications of these representations. This chapter has been organized in correspondence with the methodology that has been adopted. This means that first in section 6.1., I will address the setting of the representations: the location, objects and actors that are involved. Second, in section 6.2., I will explain the scripting of the representation: their languages, images, rhetoric and metaphors. Third, in section 6.3., I will elaborate the staging of the representations: the acting and deliberate organization, the discursive strategies that are performed and the ideologies that underlie them. Fourth, in section 6.4., I will turn to the context of the representations: similarities and differences between them as well as change and continuity over time. Finally, in section 6.5., I will explain the performance of the representations: the social realities that they have produced and the political impact they have had.
Out of the analysis below, a very distinct picture emerges of the contemporary development discourse on Africa. As will become clear in the following paragraphs, this discourse is characterized by a remarkable coherence and consistency, which makes me confident that the findings in this thesis are not accidental. Besides interesting but expectable and explainable differences between the five NGOs and between types of sources, for example between Saving the Children and Oxfam and between advertisements and annual reports, a general trend in development imaging is very well discernible. In this trend, the influence of the Postdevelopment critiques on the development discourse is evident and it confirms the idea that Development has become ‘reflexive’. As a result, with the important exception of advertisements, development images of African countries seem to be changing drastically in character from the pornography of poverty to the romanticization of poverty. Shocking, exploitative images of extreme deprivation have been replaced by an emphasis on positivity and diversity. The crying child suffering from hunger has been replaced by the smiling child dreaming of becoming a doctor. However, much more nuance is required to adequately describe the current representation of African countries by Western development NGOs.
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6.1. Setting
The ‘setting’ of a representation has been defined by Hajer as “the physical situation in which the interaction takes place” (Hajer, 2005: 449). This notion of a setting also encompasses certain elements of Carvalho’s (2008: 167) critical discourse analysis: the objects and actors that are involved in a representation. Thus, the setting of a representation includes the location, the objects or topics and the actors that are represented. The setting of development representations of Africa is not randomly selected. On the contrary, their location, objects and actors are some of the most consistent aspects of the contemporary development discourse. A setting demarcates the possible representations of a certain reality. Thus, the setting of these representation contributes to the coherence of the development discourse on Africa to a great extent.
The location of the representations of African countries by Western development NGOs is the African continent. However, Africa is not a country, as some critics have reminded these organizations (Kermeliotis, 2014). Thus, most representations specify the location they portray by emphasizing the country, region or even city or village in which the representation is set. However, 14 of the of the total 45 sources that have been analyzed, do not offer any specific indication of place, which means that their images are more easily attributed to Africa as a whole as opposed to a certain African country. Contemporary development images of Africa are almost invariably situated in rural Africa. In fact, 28 sources explicitly mention or are obviously located in remote rural villages in African countries, whereas only 4 show urban areas within larger cities. In the five annual reports alone, the word ‘rural’ is mentioned 23 times and the words ‘farm’, ‘farmer’ or ‘farming’ are mentioned 107 times. The NGOs explain that a majority of the African population lives in rural areas, and that “small-scale farming offers exciting potential to […] reduce poverty” (Oxfam, 2014a: 47). We read about their efforts “to address drought in rural areas and protect the livelihoods of poor farmers” (Christian Aid, 2014a: 13); about Emily, who “at only 17 years of age, is transforming the way farmers in her rural village in Malawi grow food” (Care, 2014a: 17); and about a ‘market-led agricultural programme in Tanzania’ which is “helping farmers grow their crops in a sustainable manner” and “rural communities to […] improve efficiency” (World Vision, 2014a: 7). Rural Africa as represented by Western development NGOs, consists of farmers’ fields, dirt roads, remote little villages, small-scale farms, and inconveniently far away situated elementary schools, clinics and dirty water wells. Sometimes, we see dry, parched earth, ramshackle huts and
74 | Romanticizing Poverty polluted water. However, more often, rural Africa is portrayed in its full beauty: with vast green landscapes, bright colors, a blue sky or a rising sun that paints it red and yellow. These are all recurring themes in the representation of location in development images of Africa. In one informational video, of which a still is shown in Figure 6.1., Christian Aid explains the difficulties of limited healthcare accessibility in rural Kenya (Christian Aid, 2015d). Against the background of panorama’s of farmlands; of images of a clay hut in the middle of green bushes with a small child in front of it and colorful clothes hanging out to dry; of women cultivating the land; and of a young boy walking on a red dirt road; the narrator informs that “in rural Kenya, a quarter of the population live on a dollar a day, with poor access to basic services like water, sanitation, schools or healthcare. In remote villages, the nearest healthcare facility may be a weeks walk away, making it impossible for many to receive basic medical care” (ibid.). Such images are exemplary for the representation of location in NGO communications on Africa.
Fig. 6.1. “In remote villages, the nearest healthcare facility may be a weeks walk away” (Christian Aid, 2015d)
The actors that dominate the contemporary representations of African countries by Western development NGOs are women, women’s groups, children, schoolchildren, farmers, NGO workers, Western celebrities and ‘you’, the Western donor and audience of these representations. In the five annual reports, 74 images of children are included, 45 images of women and only 15 images of men. The World Vision report shows 24 images of children, displaying around 80 individual children in total, 8 images of women and 5 of men (World
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Vision, 2014a). The Oxfam report shows 12 images of children, 12 of women and 5 of men (Oxfam, 2014a). In Care’s report the word ‘women’ is used 68 times, and 15 images of women, 8 images of children, and no images of men except for white NGO employees are shown (Care, 2014a). In the Christian Aid annual report only 1 picture is used, on the cover. It is a picture of a women’s group in South Asia (Christian Aid, 2014a). Within the report, the word ‘women’ is mentioned 26 times, the words ‘child’ or ‘children’ 13 times and the word ‘men’ only 1 time, ironically in the following sentence: “the success of our gender model family approach in Sierra Leone, showed we need to involve men to achieve sustainable change in women’s lives and a structural shift in male-female power relations” (ibid.: 14). Oxfam explains that “the reinforcement of people’s rights, and especially women’s rights, [is] at the heart of all [they] do” (Oxfam, 2014a: 21). Consequently, 52% of the 20 million people that benefitted from the projects of the NGO are women (ibid.: 10), such as the ‘women farmers’ who asserted their right in South Africa with the help of Oxfam (ibid.: 27). Care’s slogan on the front of their annual report states: “Fighting poverty and empowering women and girls in the poorest communities in the world” (Care, 2014a: 1). They go on to explain that their development work “empowers people, especially women, to become grassroots activists and drivers of change in their communities” (2014a: 10). With regard to the inconveniently located water wells that are omnipresent in development representations of African countries, Care claims in one advertisement that “around the world, millions of women and girls spend their days walking for water” (Care, 2015b). Often, these women are farmers, dressed in colorful traditional clothing and wielding primitive farming tools. Unsurprisingly given the rural setting, famers make up a significant part of the African people that are represented by development NGOs.
World Vision and Save the Children have adopted an approach to development that centers around children. World Vision explains that it is “dedicated to working with children, families and communities to overcome poverty and injustice” (World Vision, 2014a: 3) and that its efforts aid an estimated 400 million children (ibid.: 6). Through their representation, Western audiences ‘meet’ a lot of individual children, such as the seven year old Amos from Malawi, who tells us that his family are farmers, that his mother sells vegetables, and that the mothers in his village save more money because they share it (World Vision, 2013). Save the Children, who refer to themselves as “the leading expert on children” (Save the Children, 2015b: 1), bring another recurring actor of development representations of Africa onto the stage, ‘you’ the Western donor. In their annual report they write that “thanks to your
76 | Romanticizing Poverty tremendous support, we helped more than 166 million children last year” (Save the Children 2015b: 2). In their report, the words ‘you’ and ‘your’ are mentioned more than 20 times, for instance when it is emphasized how important the donations are for babies in Kenya: “your support gives tiny Bianca, just 6 hours old, the chance to grow up healthy” (ibid.: 9). Another actor that makes an appearance in many representations of Africa, is the NGO worker. Interestingly, more often than not, these NGO workers are local people from African countries, something some NGOs emphasize. In their annual report, Care state that “97 percent of Care staff come from the country in which they work” (Care, 2014a: 6). A final actor that is depicted by aid NGOs in their images of African countries and that needs some explanation, is the celebrity. In 7 out of the total 45 sources that have been analyzed, Western celebrities were featured. American actress and philanthropist Angelina Jolie is pictured in Care’s annual report (Care, 2015a), one Save the Children informational video shows British model Karen Elson’s trip to Sierra Leone (Save the Children, 2014c), and Oxfam’s website includes a webpage with global ambassadors such as Coldplay and Colin Firth as well as African celebrities like Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee and ‘Africa’s premier diva’, music star Angelique Kidjo (Oxfam, 2015a).
Contemporary development representations of Africa broach a variety of related topics. The primary, fundamental topic of all 45 representations is poverty, or a lack of resources. Poverty is understood in different terms: a lack of food and malnutrition, a lack of education, a lack of clean water and sanitation, diseases and a lack of healthcare. Topics that are recurrently related to these problems, are gender equality, nature or climate change, injustice, primitivism, and to a lesser extent governance and conflict. Two final themes of the development images of African countries are the proposed solutions to poverty, the efforts of the Western development NGOs, emphasized in all 45 representations, and local African civil societies, or ‘partners’. One specific representation that combines many of the elements of the setting of development images of Africa as described above, is the Oxfam advertisement It All Starts With You (Oxfam, 2012). The advert centers around Adjitie, a female farmer from a rural area in an unspecified African country, and tells us how she has been enabled to cultivate the dry, parched land, as seen in Figure 6.2., as the result of a water well that Oxfam provided. The advert is narrated by British television host, comedian, actor and writer Stephen Fry, who highlights the ‘ripple effect’ that Oxfam’s well has had in Adjitie’s community: “these are the kids that go to the school that the whole village helps with the cash they made from the crops they grew with the water they drew from the well that Oxfam built thanks to
77 | Romanticizing Poverty two pounds a month from someone just like you” (ibid.). The advertisement is emblematic for the representation of African countries by Western development NGOs. It involves multiple aspects of the rural setting: the dry earth, the green crops and fields, the village, the water well, the woman, the farmer, the colorful clothes, the children, the school, poverty, hunger, the climate, water, education, the aid effort, the celebrity and ‘your help’. Below, Figures 6.3. to 6.10., images taken from the different development representations of African countries, further illustrate the setting of these representations and the contemporary development discourse on Africa. In Figure 6.4. we see a Ghanaian farmer, introduced by Christian Aid in their informational video with the words: “this is Samson Napatia, and this is his crop of maize” (Christian Aid, 2013b). In Figure 6.7. a mother and child in Ethiopia are pictured. The original caption reads: “Care empowers women and girls in Ethiopia to protect their families through safe water and hygiene practices, drought readiness and new forms of livelihood” (Care, 2014a: 11). In Figure 6.10. a participant in a Care project in Mozambique is depicted, where “communities are learning to increase their yields and farm more nutritious crops” (ibid.: 12). Figure 6.12. is taken from Save the Children’s informational video on Karen Elson’s trip to Sierra Leone, where a woman from a local village explains how she had to give birth in the jungle because the clinic was too far away (Save the Children, 2014c).
Fig. 6.2. Parched earth (Oxfam, 2012). Fig. 6.3. Poverty in rural Madagascar (Care, 2014b).
Fig. 6.4. Samson Napatia (Christian Aid, 2013b). Fig. 6.5. A Rwandan clinic (Save the Children, 2015d).
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Fig. 6.6. A water well (World Vision, 2015a). Fig. 6.7. A mother in Ethiopia (Care, 2014a)
Fig. 6.8. Women in Mali (Care 2014a) Fig. 6.9. Rwandan Schoolchildren (Care 2014c)
Fig. 6.10. A farmer (Care, 2014a). Fig. 6.11. Alexa Chung in Malawi with a women’s group (Oxfam, 2015b).
Fig. 6.12. Karel Elson in Sierra Leone (Save the Children, 2014c). Fig. 6.13. Egypt (Oxfam, 2014a).
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6.2. Scripting
The ‘scripting’ of a representation has been defined by Hajer as “determining the characters in the play and [… providing] cues for appropriate behaviour” (Hajer, 2005: 449). This notion of a script also encompasses certain elements of Carvalho’s (2008: 167) critical discourse analysis: the language, images, rhetoric and metaphors. If the setting of a representation provides information on the location, the actors and the topics, then the scripting informs us what kind of place that is, what kind of people are involved and what the appropriate language is to describe them. If the setting tells us ‘where’, ‘who’ and ‘what’, the script elucidates ‘how’. The language and images of the development discourse on Africa are almost as coherent and consistent as its setting, constructing a very distinct vocabulary of contemporary Development.
The word that is used most by Western development NGOs to describe the people from African countries is ‘poor’. In the five annual reports alone, the words ‘poor’ and ‘poverty’ are used 237 timed. Another word that recurs throughout the development representations of Africa is ‘vulnerable’, which is mentioned 87 times in the reports. The word ‘marginalized’, which has a more political connotation, is used 31 times. Thus, Africans are portrayed as poor, vulnerable and in some instances marginalized. However, the term that seems to be most ‘fashionable’ in the contemporary development discourse, and which is used most in the representations, is ‘community’. The word ‘community’ is used 339 times in the annual reports of Save the Children, World Vision, Oxfam, Care and Christian Aid. In Oxfam’s report alone, the word is mentioned 138 times (Oxfam, 2014a). Apparently, the natural, regular mode of social organization on the African continent, from Morocco to South Africa and from Ethiopia to Nigeria, is the community. And not just in rural areas, in the few representations of urban areas or even large cities, groups of African people are referred to as ‘communities’ as well. In one Save the Children informational video, we see that the NGO has constructed a Community Health Center in the slums of Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone (Save the Children, 2014c). In an informational video from Oxfam, an NGO employee follows so called ‘community health volunteers’ in New Kru Town on the outskirts of Monrovia, Liberia, “a very poor area” (Oxfam, 2014b) when a local volunteer explains the things he has been doing “in the community today” (ibid.). The term is also regularly used in general statements by the development NGOs. World Vision describes its ‘core characteristics’ as “Christian, child-focused and community-based” (World Vision, 2014a: 5),
80 | Romanticizing Poverty while Christian Aid explains that they are “responding when vulnerable individuals and communities have needed immediate help” and claim that their “ability to help communities become stronger is widely respected” (Christian Aid, 2014a: 4, 5). The word ‘community’ accentuates both a local and a social character, very similar to other frequently recurring terms like ‘grassroots’, ‘indigenous’, ‘civil society’ and the previously mentioned ‘partners’. The word ‘partner’, that the NGOs use to denote local civil society organizations with whom they cooperate in their development work, is used around 250 times in the five annual reports that have been analyzed. In Oxfam’s report alone, the word is mentioned 93 times (Oxfam, 2014a). Another ‘buzzword’ in the development discourse on Africa is ‘empowerment’.20 Empowerment in this context, entails the process in which impoverished or otherwise marginalized people in developing countries are instructed how to be or become self- sustaining and able to improve their own social, political and economic position in society. Western development NGOs also refer to this concept as ‘enabling’, ‘strengthening capacity’, ‘self-help’, and helping people ‘lift themselves out of poverty’. The words ‘empowerment’ and ‘enabling’ are used 91 times in the five annual reports. A final term that is pervasive in the development discourse is ‘lasting change’, or ‘solutions’ or ‘transformation’. NGOs use them to represent the results of their own efforts.
Often combining multiple aspects of the script of contemporary development representations of Africa as described above, we read or hear that Oxfam works “alongside communities and local partners to help people in poverty to thrive” and that they “empower people in poverty to shape their own future” (Oxfam, 2014a: 3); that they “strengthen the capacity of civil society organizations to address the priorities of poor, marginalized and indigenous groups” (Oxfam, 2014a: 12); that Care works to “promote lasting change by strengthening capacity for self-help” (Care, 2014a); that Save the Children inspires and achieves “lasting impact for millions of the world’s most vulnerable girls and boys” (Save the Children, 2015a: 1); that as a result of a well that Oxfam built, “parched earth is transformed to food for the whole community” (Oxfam, 2010); and finally, that Christian Aid gives “communities the tools they need to change” and that they “help communities around the world to help themselves” (Christian Aid, 2013a). This is the very specific, coherent and consistent vocabulary of the development discourse.
20 Development aid has often been criticized for patronizing attitudes that are argued to foster aid-dependency. The notion of ‘empowerment’ in the development discourse has emerged as a response to those critiques, as ‘homegrown development’ is thought to be more effective (Easterly, 2006: 23).
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Representations of African countries by Western development NGOs often involve metaphors, figures of speech and imagery that imply an analogy or comparison. Two recurring metaphors are the smile and the sad face. The smile is a metaphor for happiness, satisfaction and solutions, whereas the sad face is a metaphor for despair, discontent and problems. In contemporary development images of Africa the smile is omnipresent. While still 13 out of the total 45 analyzed sources show images of crying people or people in distress, 40 representations portray smiling African people. Other metaphors that are frequently used to represent happiness, are playing children and dancing women, such as in Figure 6.11. above. Other metaphors involve two important topics of the representations of Africa: poverty and primitivism, or backwardness. Often, these topics are explicitly and directly broached, through the use of the word ‘poverty’ and images of ramshackle clay huts. However, these themes are also regularly addressed more implicitly, through metaphors. One important metaphor of poverty and primitivism has already been discussed: an almost complete focus on rural Africa. Other persisting metaphors of poverty and primitivism are the lack of cars and the emphasis on the distances that people have to walk. Cars are a rare occurrence in development representations of African countries. Only 10 out of the 45 sources portray cars, however, five of them do not show local cars, but the recognizable white SUVs that the development NGOs use, see Figure 6.14. below.
Fig. 6.14. A World Vision SUV bringing change in Kenya (World Vision, 2015c)
Besides from the lack of cars in the development images of Africa, an emphasis on the long distances people have to walk is another recurring metaphor for poverty and primitivism. Generally, the representations show Africans walking to fetch water, walking to a clinic and walking to school. In a World Vision informational, of which a still is seen below in Figure
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6.15., a Zambian girl tells us that “three times a day I walk two miles to fetch water. While I walk I dream of going to school. I dream of becoming a doctor” (World Vision, 2014b). Care even devised a fundraising campaign around the phenomenon, called Walk In Her Shoes 2015 (Care, 2015b). In the advertisement we see a girl in colorful, traditional clothing walking on the dry earth somewhere in rural Ethiopia, while the narrator explains: “This is Ambie, she is 10 and she lives in Ethiopia where water is scarce. Instead of going to school every day she walks for hours to collect water for her family. […] Ambie dreams of becoming a nurse. But until she has time to go to school, this will remain a dream. This is where you come in. Sign up to walk in her shoes and walk in solidarity with girls like Ambie” (ibid.). Both videos are also examples of a final metaphor that I want to elaborate: the unfulfilled dreams of African children. Every child has dreams; children realizing their dreams are a metaphor for success. The impoverished African children in rural areas that dream of becoming a doctor, a teacher or a lawyer, represent the failures on the continent but can also be interpreted as signs of hope and a better future. In one representation, a South Sudanese mother says: “I have big dreams for my baby. I dream he will grow up, go to school and become a doctor or lawyer” (Save the Children, 2015a: 10).
Fig. 6.15. A child child fetches water (World Vision, 2014b) Fig. 6.16 Amos’ dream (World Vision, 2013)
And so, the representations of African countries by Western development NGOs are set in the green fields and small villages of rural Africa, where women and children live who are scripted as ‘poor’ and ‘vulnerable’ ‘communities’. With the help of ‘local partners’ these communities need to be ‘empowered’: ‘enabled’ to ‘lift themselves out of poverty’ in order to achieve ‘lasting impact’ and ‘change’. This will bring a ‘smile’ on the face of the African people, as their ‘dreams’ will be within reach. Or so the development discourse wants to make its audiences believe through its very specific representation of Africa.
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6.3. Staging
The ‘staging’ of a representation has been defined by Hajer as “the deliberate organization of an interaction” (Hajer, 2005: 449). This notion of staging also encompasses certain elements of Carvalho’s (2008: 167) critical discourse analysis: discursive strategies and ideological standpoints. Whereas the setting and scripting of a representation tell us ‘where’, ‘who’, ‘what’, and ‘how’, the staging involves the ‘why’. Discursive strategies refer to strategic discursive manipulations that are intended to achieve a specific goal or motivate an action (Carvalho, 2008: 169), they are framing strategies. Obviously, both the setting and scripting of development representations of Africa involve such manipulations of reality, however, discursive strategies are more encompassing and deliberate than for example metaphors, which is why they can be understood as aspects of staging. Apart from discursive or framing strategies, ideological standpoint are also aspects of staging. The ideologies that underlie a representation are fundamental, and influence its setting and scripting as well as its framing strategies. Although the ideologies of the development discourse differ per NGO, the discursive strategies that are adopted are remarkably similar.
The discursive strategies of aid NGO communications generally share one specific goal: to raise funds or at least commit audiences to the cause of development. Contemporary representations of African countries by Western development NGOs regularly adopt one discursive strategy. They are often very deliberately organized into a very specific structure, which I will refer to as the problem-aid-happiness structure of development representations. These representations first introduce a problem, like malnourished children in a village in Rwanda. Then, they show the efforts of an aid NGO to address that problem, such as food aid and agricultural training for the village farmers. Finally, happy African people are represented, usually smiling women and children. The different parts of the representation, problem, aid and happiness, are distinct and often somewhat disconnected, which means that the representation really tells three separate stories that have been arranged in a particular order to convey a certain meaning and frame the situation to emphasize the lasting results that the development NGO has achieved. Of the 30 advertisements and informational videos that have been analyzed, 12 adopted the problem-aid-happiness structure. A second recurring discursive strategy is to focus on personal experiences of poverty from individual citizens of African countries. In the total 45 sources that have been analyzed, more than 60 individual Africans are introduced, such as Lukman and Sulemana, who “are both 13 year old boys.
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Lukman gets to go to school while Sulemana works in the field” (Christian Aid, 2014b), or Kula, “who’s story typifies the kinds of challenges mothers face in remote rural areas” (Save the Children, 2014c). By focusing on individual stories, the development NGOs try to evoke compassion and emphasize similarity, the African people who are the victims of poverty deserve our attention and are ‘just like us’, in the words of one World Vision advert (World Vision, 2007). A third discursive strategy that is commonly used by development NGOs, is to address the audience directly by thanking or asking for ‘your support’. In 11 of the 15 advertisements, the ‘you’-actor is emphasized. One appeals claims that “your support can bring food to a child like Fedosi” (Save the Children, 2012), another points out “the amazing difference you make” (Oxfam, 2010). And so, the development NGOs want to convince their Western audiences that “your support […] enables [them] to continue to fight poverty and injustice in the poorest communities in the world” (Care, 2014a: 3) and that “with your help [they] can create real change” (Care, 2012). This framing strategy is clearly intended to motivate Western publics to donate and commit to the cause of the development of African countries, by convincing them that they can make a difference. The fourth discursive strategy that recurs throughout development representations of Africa is politicizing. Often, the representations emphasize the role of local governments, of African states, of Western countries, of international organizations or of multinational corporations, and explain how the development NGOs try to influence decision making within those organizations. Oxfam argues that “too many African governments are reneging on their promises to improve the rights and living conditions of their people” (Oxfam, 2014a: 13), and criticized food companies like Pepsico and Nestlé as well as the World Bank for harmful practices in developing countries (ibid.: 53). World Vision explain how they “contributed to policy changes” and that “local advocacy work is becoming an increasing focus” of the organization (World Vision, 2014a: 9). Care inform that they “demanded bold action at the UN Climate talks in Doha” (Care, 2014a: 4). Save the Children stress that their lobbying “contributed to making maternal, newborn and child survival a priority at the U.S.-Africa Leaders’ Summit” (Save the Children, 20115a), and finally Christian Aid explain that they are “currently pressing governments” and have made clear “to G8 leaders that aid, which plays a crucial role in development, is not enough” (Christian Aid, 2014a: 5). Thus, the development NGOs emphasize that they fight poverty at all levels and that they put pressure on politicians all over the world to improve the lives of poor Africans, largely but not completely without making too political claims that many would disagree with. The fifth and final discursive strategy that I will elaborate, is to shock audiences with horrific, confronting images of starvation, sickness
85 | Romanticizing Poverty and despair. These can be images of crying children talking about the loss of their parents: “my mother died and my father lived, I miss my mom” (World Vision, 2007); of women who don’t have enough food to feed their babies: “could you stand by while Anta’s baby cries out with hunger?” (Oxfam, 2010); or of a sick starving child: “all Umad has to drink is filthy water. Or none at all. The water could kill him. He’s too exhausted to cry” (Save the Children, 2013). These images evoke guilt and pity and are meant to shock their audiences into responding. Like the ones seen below in Figures 6.17. and 6.18., they often portray emaciated, sick children. Such pictures are only used in advertisements by the NGOs, they are employed in 9 out of the 15 adverts, but in no other sources.
Fig. 6.17. A starving child (Save the Children, 2012) . Fig. 6.18. Who cares? advertisement (Care, 2012).
Three different ideological standpoints can be distinguished between the five Western development NGOs that have been analyzed: Christianity, Marxist International Relations theory, and Liberalism. World Vision and Christian Aid share a Christian religious background, the policies of Oxfam and Christian Aid have a socialist character, and all NGOs, specifically Care, can be argued to adhere to general principles of Liberalism, such as an emphasis on democracy and good governance, civil society, freedom and gender equality. World Vision and Christian Aid propagate their Christian beliefs in different ways, but both organizations work with African people of other religions and do not proselytize. World Vision strives to “help fulfill Jesus’ statement in John 10:10: ‘I came to give life, life in all its fullness’” (World Vision, 2014a: 7) and offers its donors a prayer app for mobile phones, which has been used “more than 7,000 times as people pray for the needs of children and communities” (ibid.). Christian Aid explains that they use their faith as a ‘force of change’ (Christian Aid, 2014a: 22) and that “rooted in our belief in a creative and loving God, we’re clear that poverty can be eradicated by empowering individuals and communities” (ibid.: 7). Christian Aid also has a socialist character, as does Oxfam; in the past they have even been referred to as ‘radical socialist and Marxist’ (in: Smillie, 1995: 226). As a result, these NGOs
86 | Romanticizing Poverty focus on unequal power relations between Western developed countries and the developing countries in the Third World. Christian Aid writes that “the root cause of poverty is lack of power” (Christian Aid, 2014a: 6) and that addressing this imbalance in power is at the heart of their strategy. In their annual report, the word ‘power’ is mentioned 29 times. Oxfam shares this emphasis on unequal power relations, and state that their development work “could be summed up as our outrage at the inequality in the world” (Oxfam, 2014a: 4), and that they are “determined to change that world by mobilizing the power of people against poverty” (ibid.: 6). It becomes clear that despite the coherency and consistency of the development in Africa, in terms of setting, scripting and staging, the underlying ideologies of the five NGOs that have been analyzed differ to some extent.
6.4. Context
The contextual analysis of the representations of African countries by Western development NGOs consists is twofold. As Carvalho’s (2008) model for critical discourse analysis prescribes, it entails a comparative-synchronic analysis of similar representations from the same period as well as a historical-diachronic analysis of the historical evolution of the discourse in which they are situated (ibid: 167). Thus, the contextual analysis of development representations of Africa look at both similarity and difference, and change and continuity, to put these representations in a wider context.
Multiple interesting similarities and differences within the contemporary development discourse on Africa can be distinguished. As mentioned earlier, the coherence and consistency of this discourse and the similarities between representations are striking. Representations of African countries by Western development NGOs are invariable characterized by a focus on personal accounts of women and children in poor rural communities, that need to be empowered with the help of local partners to change their lives with your support. They emphasize positivity, by portraying smiling, hardworking people and playful children in colorful clothes and green landscapes in bright colored pictures. In many ways, the television appeals are an exception within the development discourse on Africa, and even the consistency of those exceptions are remarkable. The advertisements are different from other representations of Africa in multiple ways: they focus less on positivity, they are the only representations that make use of shocking images of sick, starving children, they provide no
87 | Romanticizing Poverty contextual knowledge, they do not specify the location, and the emphasize the ‘you’-actor more. First, the adverts do not emphasize positivity, rather than showing active, smiling, and hardworking Africans in colorful clothes and surroundings, they portray passive, sad, and sick people in hospital beds or bare environments. Second, as mentioned in the previous section, adverts are the only sources that show the largely abandoned imagery of the starving child, which is not used in any other source that has been analyzed. Third, as opposed to websites, and especially reports, informational videos and weblogs that provide more of information on the context of a representation, adverts generally do not inform their audiences on the problem that is addressed. Related to this, most advertisements do not specify the location that they represent: 13 of the 15 appeals do not mention the country that is portrayed whereas of the 30 other representations that have been analyzed, 29 specifically state the names of the countries they show. Finally, adverts emphasize the ‘you’-actor more through statements like “to survive, these children need you” (Save the Children, 2014a), whereas other representations focus more on the efforts of the aid NGO, the local civil society and individual Africans. Thus, the advertisements seem to be completely inconsistent with the general communication strategies that development NGOs have adopted. Other noteworthy differences within the development discourse on Africa exist between NGOs. Although not completely similar, the representations by Oxfam, Care and Christian Aid share a lot of characteristics, such as a focus on poverty, farmers, women, and equality, while the representations from World Vision and Save the Children center around children and emphasize hope. In World Vision’s annual report, the word ‘poverty’ is only mentioned two times, whereas the word ‘hope’ is used 11 times (World Vision, 2014a). Save the Children mentions the word ‘poor’ only three times in their report, while the words ‘hope’ and ‘future’ are used respectively six and 30 times (Save the Children, 2015a). However, the most remarkable difference between the five development NGOs, is between Christian Aid and the four other organizations. Whereas World Vision, Save the Children, Oxfam and Care all employ shocking imagery of starving children, and other discursive strategies that resemble the pornography of poverty porn, in their advertisements, Christian Aid is the only NGOs that has refrained from doing so. This can be an accidental finding, given the fact that only three advertisements have been analyzed per NGO. However, given the internal consistency of Christian Aid’s communications, I expect that the organization has deliberately chosen not to resort to poverty porn.
When comparing the contemporary development representations of African countries as outlined above with their historical counterparts that have been described in the previous
88 | Romanticizing Poverty chapter, an assessment of change and continuity in the development discourse on Africa can be made. Below I will first explain five continuing traits of this discourse, before I turn to the changes that have occurred over time.
One remarkable similarity between the pornography of poverty that has historically been the paradigmatic framework for representations of African countries by Western development NGOs and the contemporary images of the continent, is the focus on children, or women and children. This continuing focus is among other things a result of the fact that two of the biggest global aid NGOs, World Vision and Save the Children, aim their development efforts at children, and of the recent shift in the approach to development to prioritize gender equality and female empowerment, included in the UN Millennium Development Goals, which embody and are directives for contemporary development thinking. A second continuation, is the use and production of stereotypes on Africa through one-sided, essentialized representations that focus on very specific aspects of African reality. The similarity of all the 45 development representations of African countries, their focus on women and children, but also on smiling, working rural people in villages who have to walk a long distance to fetch water, consolidates existing stereotypes and creates new ones. These poorest parts of the African life are then made to represent the continent as a whole, the pars pro toto mechanism that was also an important aspect of poverty porn and other historical development representations of Africa. And thus, a third similarity between these historical representation and the contemporary development discourse, is the continuing differentiation between Us and Them, which shapes the identities of the Western Self and the African Other. Some parts of these mechanisms of identity creation have remained the same, such as the representation of white people only as active aid workers or celebrities. Even organizations like World Vision and Save the Children, who also operate and provide aid in Western countries, show predominantly images of Western people as helpers of lifesavers. However, the role of black, African people has changed dramatically in the NGO communications, as a lot more agency is attributed to them and not all black people that are portrayed are victims anymore. In fact, as can be seen below in Figures 6.19. and 6.20., contemporary representations of African countries even show some local ‘heroes’, like the black NGO worker in Liberia who volunteered as a community health worker “in order to save my community and save my country” (Oxfam, 2014b). A ‘life saving rider’ in Kenya explains that “it really feels like a blessing when I give my time. Even if I give a little from my own pocket, I feel it’s a blessing and a good thing” (Christian Aid, 2015d), emphasizing agency and kindness in local Africans.
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Fig. 6.19. A life saving rider (Christian Aid, 2015d). Fig. 6.20. A local volunteer (Oxfam, 2014b).
Much more has changed in the Western development discourse on African countries. When compared with the pornography of poverty from the 1980s, contemporary development representations of Africa are very different. The results of these drastic changes, are a focus on positivity, smiles and happiness, on local communities, and on the activities of African people such as working, playing and going to a school or a clinic. Furthermore, the a-political character of development images has to some extent been shed and replaced by an emphasis on the political activities of development NGOs. Also, unspecific representations of Africa as a ‘country’ have largely disappeared as now, the names of villages, cities, regions or countries are regularly mentioned. In general, the framework of poverty porn has been discarded by the NGOs. However, all these changes do not apply to the advertisements and the appeals that the aid organizations broadcast on television. With the exception of Christian Aid’s appeals, these adverts have predominantly retained the character of the pornography of poverty and have changed very little from the pornography of poverty of historical development representations of Africa. Overall, contemporary representations of African countries by Western development NGOs are much more nuanced, although still stereotypical, and differences between Us and Them are somewhat smaller as more agency is attributed to the represented African people, although emphasis on rural poverty and primitivism is still degrading. Except in advertisements, the contemporary development discourse is moving away from the pornography of poverty, towards a focus on positivity, smiles and happiness. This is an important aspect of the romanticization of poverty, that will be explained in the next and final section of this chapter on the performance of development representations of Africa.
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6.5. Performance
The ‘performance’ of a representation has been defined by Hajer as “the way in which the contextualized interaction itself produces social realities like understandings of the problem at hand, knowledge, new power relations” (Hajer, 2005: 449). Thus, performance refers to the social and political results or implications of a discourse. The contemporary representations of African countries by Western development NGOs have had multiple relevant consequences, a significant performance. They have been the product of certain social realities, and have given rise to new ones.
First, the analysis above indicates that the development discourse has indeed become reflexive, as Jan Nederveen Pieterse suggested (Nederveen Pieterse, 1998: 367). It has become reflexive as it has incorporated alternatives and criticisms to reformulate itself and secure its continued prevalence (ibid.: 368). As a result, mainstream Development has integrated important aspects of Postdevelopment. In fact, it has done that to such an extent, that the term ‘Postdevelopment’ is becoming obsolete, as some of its fundamental elements do not apply anymore in the context of Reflexive Development. When Postdevelopment originated out of the ‘impasse in development studies’ in the 1980s (Schuurman, 2000: 7), its scholars emphasized the so called ‘vernacular spaces’(Rahnema, 1998: 113), the local, grassroots community organizations and civil society movements that were their designated agents of change (Storey, 2000: 43). Also, Postdevelopment emphasized diversity of prosperity, with its notion of an ‘original affluent society’ (Sahlins, 1998: 3): the indigenous ‘primitive’ communities of developing countries that were rich in their own traditional way. Notable Postdevelopment scholars like Wolfgang Sachs stressed that concepts of development, like growth and progress, needed to be relinked to “community- and culture- based notions of well-being” (Sachs, 2010: xiv). This focus on community and diversity, on civil society and local traditions that deserve to be viewed in a positive way, is exactly what we recognize in the contemporary development representation of African countries. According to Nederveen Pieterse, Postdevelopment’s “key elements have been adopted in mainstream development: participation, co-operation, transcending the state, civil society, [and] goals redefined away from GDP growth to human development” (Nederveen Pieterse, 1998: 344). And so, just like Postdevelopment theory has been criticized for nostalgia, romanticism, and ‘romanticized language’ (Radcliffe, 2005: 291; Nederveen Pieterse, 1998:
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364; Storey, 2000: 42; Power et al., 2006: 424); the contemporary development discourse is romanticizing poverty.
This is a crucial performance of the representations that have been analyzed, they are replacing the pornography of poverty with the romanticization of poverty. The crying child is no longer the iconic representation of Africa, the smiling child has taken its place. Inherently, the response of Western audiences to development imaging will be different. Whereas the pornography of poverty evoked feelings of shock, guilt and pity, romanticizing poverty induces connection to some extent, but also nostalgia and the contemplation ‘how can they be so happy when they are so poor?’ As a result, the idea that African people are poor but happy has become common in Western societies (Bundervoet, 2013). In one informational video by Save the Children, an English model and musician who is nearing the end of her visit to Sierra Leone explains that “it’s really been a profoundly life changing trip. Today it sort of clarified, being in the slums, just why we’re here. While the people here are so incredible and spirited and welcomed us, you just see the other side of life” (Save the Children, 2014c). In other words, while they were so happy, they were also very poor. And so, “even the positive imagery preferred by some NGOs […], risks merely telling a different version of the same ‘single story’” (Crisp, 2011: 28-29). This new stereotype of Africa is reinventing the continent and its people. Although it might be a step forward from poverty porn, the romanticization of poverty is similarly degrading. It demotes and reduces an entire continent to people that are primitive, poor and happy, and happy with their own poverty. Their traditions and cultures are romanticized, perhaps because Western publics see in the African people something they have lost in the process of ‘modernization’, tradition and a sense of community. Although African people are deemed eligible for development aid that sustains their livelihoods, real economic growth, industrialization and ‘modernization’ with all the benefits they bring, are regarded as neocolonial, Western inventions that would destroy the indigenous Africa. This makes Them inherently different from Us. Surely, this is an improvement from the pornography of poverty that historically dominated the Western development discourse on Africa and which exploited African poverty for shock-value, but romanticizing poverty is nothing more than yet another framing strategy to stereotype the African continent.
As these representations of Africa begin to take root in Western societies, the development discourse contributes to a completely new understanding of the continent: poor and happy. Thus, an emphasis on positivity entails a belief in the diversity of prosperity, very much like Postdevelopment theory advocates. However Postdevelopment scholars, as a result of this
92 | Romanticizing Poverty appreciation of diversity, as well as their general aversion against development practices, dismissed the idea of development altogether. This why the incorporation of ‘diversity’ into the reflexive development discourse on Africa is problematic, a consequent application of a genuine belief in diversity, renders development NGOs redundant. Similarly, the portrayal of African people as ‘poor but happy’ might cause Western audiences to stop donating money to development organizations, as happy people do not need aid. This logic might explain why four of the five NGOs that have been analyzed in this thesis, do not apply the framework of romanticizing poverty to their television appeals, and that 9 out of the 15 advertisements show shocking poverty porn. These NGOs are afraid to consistently apply their communication strategy of positivity and diversity to all their representations. Their identity is split. Christian Aid is the only aid NGO that refrained from employing poverty porn in the adverts that were analyzed. However, there is a reason that Christian Aid’s budget is a lot smaller than the other NGOs, the budgets of World Vision and Save the Children are around twenty times larger. Besides its name being Christian Aid in a society where less people are practicing their religion or even ‘militant secularization’ is taking place (Wintour, 2012), the power of their advertisement to motivate people to give money might also be explanatory. This exemplifies the concerns development NGOs have about the effectiveness of fundraising campaigns that are too nuanced or positive (CCIC, 2008: 6), a concern that has been established and voiced for a long time, but is apparently still not resolved. It also exemplifies the difficulties they have with combining their imperatives of fundraising and education (Campbell et al., 2005: 9) and more fundamentally, between development as a goal and accumulating donations as a means to reach it. Because, if ‘development’ is defined in terms of both social, economic and political empowerment as well as in terms of promoting equality and dignity, a definition of development that all five aid NGOs involved endorse, than a continuation of detrimental development imaging undermines the goals of development. This is the fundamental tension that underlies the representation of African countries by Western development NGOs, the paradox of development imaging in full effect.
So then, if both the negativity of poverty porn and the positivity of romanticizing poverty should be dismissed as destructive, prejudicial and stereotypical frameworks for development imaging, what can Western development NGOs do to represent African countries? It has become clear that, to quote Michel Foucault: “not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous” (in Rahnema: 1998: 377). Western representations of Africa are inherently dangerous. But the problems of the development discourse that have been identified in this
93 | Romanticizing Poverty thesis, are more fundamental then imaging. I believe that possible answers to these problems are not found in Postdevelopment theory, but rather in Postcolonialism. A Postcolonial approach to development would attempt to recover the lost voices of the marginalized, the oppressed and the dominated (McEwan, 2001: 94-96), it would let the subaltern speak (Spivak, 1988). The only way to transcend the paradox of development imaging, is to stop imaging development. Since that is not a feasible or even desirable option, this means that the paradox of development imaging will remain. We cannot represent Them. However, they can represent themselves. A Postcolonial conceptualization of the development of Africa, would be in the first place about poor people in African countries that need ‘development’, and not about the Western NGOs who deliver it. As a result of this “normative preoccupation with the poor, marginalized and exploited people in the South” (Schuurman, 2000: 14), inequality rather than diversity or difference would be the main focus of a Postcolonial approach to development, “inequality of access to power, to resources, to a human existence, in short, inequality of emancipation” (ibid.). This would make Development more political and more relevant, and it would make the representation of African countries by Western development NGOs something more close to the presentation of development in Africa by African people.
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Conclusion
The information in the previous chapters allows me to answer the main research question that has been posed in this thesis, which has been:
How and to what extent do contemporary representations of African countries by Western development organizations undermine the goals of development?
It has become clear that these representations do indeed undermined the broader goals of development, even though they have responded to many of the criticisms that they have face. Now, development imaging is suffering from a split personality: on the one hand its advertisements retain the character of negative, shocking poverty porn, on the other hand the discourse has largely adopted the framework of romanticizing poverty. Both communication strategies however, are detrimental to the development of African countries. To overcome this situation, Development should embrace Postcolonialism. Together, Postcolonialism and Development might provide insights that enable NGOs to overcome the paradox of development imaging. This is what remains to be done. The development discourse and the practices of development imaging need to be further explored from a Postcolonial perspective, to find concrete ways to construct development images of Africa that do not undermine the goals of development. Also, the insights of a Postcolonial approach to Development that builds on the results of this thesis, need to be connected to the work and projects of aid NGOs to see how they relate to the practices of the development discourse in Africa. Imaging is only one part of the discourse and it remains to be seen to what extent the findings of this study and the notion of Reflexive Development apply to the practical reality of African development.
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List of Primary Literature 22
Care (2015a) Website Care International, accessed at: http://www.care-international.org/
Care (2015b) Advert Walk in her Shoes, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d5QajcEYM0
Care (2015c) Advert Refugee, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwUaRJiMxLk
Care (2015d) Weblog Hope for South Sudan, accessed at: http://www.care- international.org/news/stories-and-blogs/emergency-response/south-sudan-a-future-for-south- sudan.aspx
Care (2014a) Care International Annual Report 2013, Geneva: Care, accessed at: http://www.care-international.org/about-us/annual-report.aspx
Care (2014b) Informational video Care in Madagascar, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG7hHP8ZojM
Care (2014c) Informational video Early Childhood in Rwanda, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI3GqbgOEoc
Care (2014d) Informational video Melka: Early Marriage Ethiopia, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13USVGxx2QE
Care (2012) Advert Who Cares?, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFHORe4sChI
Christian Aid (2015a) Website Christian Aid, accessed at: http://www.christianaid.org.uk/
Christian Aid (2015b) Advert Simple Things Change Lives, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqoP2NyvDsI
Christian Aid (2015c) Advert Malaria, Children Deserve Future, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bOGVHsnguo
22 All website URLs were accessed on June 21, 2015.
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Christian Aid (2015d) Informational video Life Saving Riders of Kenya, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_eySq3H0cM
Christian Aid (2015e) Weblog Fighting in South-Sudan Suspends Aid Delivery, accessed at: http://www.christianaid.org.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/june_2015/fighting-in-south-sudans- unity-state-suspends-aid-delivery.aspx
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Christian Aid (2013a) Advert Bite Back at Hunger, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8KxVVODqlw
Christian Aid (2013b) Informational video Tax and Ending Hunger, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_3rXsPg1eM
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Oxfam (2015c) Weblog Africa Rising for the Few, accessed at: https://blogs.oxfam.org/en/blogs/15-06-02-africa-rising-few
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Oxfam (2013a) Advert Lift Dilip’s Life, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWf_0G1kVBQ
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Oxfam (2013b) Informational video Water Project Zimbabwe, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9891jPDzTQ
Oxfam (2012) Advert It All Starts With You, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyyNCKsMSc4
Oxfam (2010) Advert If You Were There, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBWDelvQ6TY
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Save the Children (2015c) Informational video Healthcare in Rwanda, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyJMYqMRYy4
Save the Children (2015d) Weblog A Girl’s Dream, Rescued, accessed at: http://savethechildren.typepad.com/blog/2015/06/girls-dreams-rescued-.html
Save the Children (2014a) Advert Waiting, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVCNjesR8Ok
Save the Children (2014b) Informational video First Baby in Clinic Liberia, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HcWkGiPG5M
Save the Children (2014c) Informational video Karen Elson in Sierra Leone, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AePVK6naokA
Save the Children (2013) Advert Wash, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRmXGSj9duA
Save the Children (2012) Advert One Child, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99pQ0KJfdoE
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World Vision (2015b) Advert Dear Water, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_FTqaOTj74
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World Vision (2015c) Informational video Clean Water Kenya, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hZluhyA2wo
World Vision (2015d) Weblog Sierra Leone Teen Exploitation, accessed at: http://www.wvi.org/ebola-crisis/pressrelease/children-report-increased-exploitation-teenage- pregnancies-ebola-affected
World Vision (2014a) World Vision 2013 Annual Review, Uxbridge: World Vision, accessed at: http://www.wvi.org/international/publication/world-vision-international-annual-review- 2013
World Vision (2014b) Informational video Zambia Water Project, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg1iLMnKD-4
World Vision (2013) Informational video Amos in Malawi, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6QV1KFjJNs
World Vision (2010) Advert Vision 10.000, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89GnQ5-_Bwg
World Vision (2007) Advert Just Like Us, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2ne3QvLtrk
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