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Oxfam’s Book of Lamentations

January 13, 2024
5 mins read

By Tolu Ogunlesi

Thursday, January 3,
2013.

Oxfam, the UK charity,
recently released an updated version of the Book of Lamentations.
Something about how “the relentless focus on ongoing problems at the expense of
a more nuanced portrait of [Africa], is obscuring the progress that is being
made towards a more secure and prosperous future.”

That’s Chief
Executive Barbara Stocking, as quoted by the BBC. Apparently the charity’s
been doing some polling recently (in the UK), and coming up with interesting
results. In one poll half of the respondents confessed that Africa conjured for
them images of hunger, famine and poverty. In another poll, almost half of the
2,000 respondents thought Africa’s biggest challenge was hunger. Three out of
four were suffering from ‘Africa-fatigue’ – that debilitating condition that
afflicts well-meaning foreign philanthropists exposed to an endless stream of
images of suffering and torment originating from the dark continent.

A distressed Oxfam
has since gone ahead to launch its latest Africa campaign, in a desperate bid to
shift the world’s attention from African Hunger, to
African-Hunger-Backdropped-By-Stunning-African-Landscapes.

That’s, in a
nutshell, the story.

It left me a tad
puzzled. A w-t-f puzzlement. As in: is Oxfam for real?

Let’s even forget,
for a moment, the unforgettable fact that Oxfam has probably done far more than
any other organisation in propagating these images.

Let’s focus on
something else that struck me about the story: the way blame is being placed
squarely on the shoulders of The Images.

Oxfam appears to be
saying: Put All The Blame On The Images. Not the people hanging on stubbornly
to those images in the face of alternative evidence.

Am I alone in
thinking Oxfam’s lamentations suggest a British public that is at the mercy of
what they are fed.

Helpless Brits who
somehow cannot — despite all their efforts — rise beyond the bombardment of
pity-evoking images of Africa,

One might as well
rephrase Dame Stocking as follows:

Oh poor helpless
people of Britain, all they’re being fed is harrowing, unhelpful images of
Africa. We need to stop that. We need to feed them something different. We need
to change their diet.

That’s the summary
of the Oxfam Lamentation. It’s

In whose
interest?

The whole set-up
suggests that Britain is now guilty of the sort of intellectual laziness once
associated (almost solely) with America (er, sorry). Clearly the surveys say
far more about the British mind than they do about the African condition. Now
we know, courtesy of Oxfam, that all along we’ve been depending on a bunch of
wallet-opening puppets to deliver us from ourselves.

Now the puppets are
growing weary, the strings fraying, the wallet-opening mechanisms aging. Now we
have to refurbish the puppets, oil the creaking joints with a new, more
positive type of ‘communication’. Landscapes, not Hunger!

A mindset that
elevates what the British public thinks of Africa, over and above contemporary
reality, and that suggests that it is in Africa’s interest for that thinking to
change, is not only faulty but dangerous as well.

To put it less
mildly, who — apart from Oxfam, obviously — really cares, in 2012, what the
British public thinks about a continent from which they fled in varying stages
of undress a half-century ago? What’s that proverb about crying more than the
bereaved?

In the 21st century
are people still allowed to be zombies gobbling up everything they’re
fed by a collaboration of powerful media and NGOs?

I seriously doubt
that it is in Africa’s interest for Brits to change their perception of Africa.
Instead I think it is totally in Britain’s interests to change its perceptions
of Africa. That problem, is Britain’s, and no one else’s. If the Brits insists
on seeing Africa primarily through the lens of philanthropic intervention, in
2012, good for them.

Let them stay
thinking that way; let Oxfam, with its its Africa-emblazoned super-hero
capes, stay convincing itself that it has a duty to alter global
perceptions of Africa, while the Russians and Chinese
— and diaspora Africans, who must have once assumed they’d
left the continent for good — boldly head out to the continent to
engage in potentially more useful ways.

Alternative
images

Granted that those
starving-children-and-dying-mothers images form a sizable part of African
exports to the West. There may be little we can do about that, as long as we
have a West obsessed with delivering Africa from itself. But what about the the
tens of thousands of kwashiorkor-free, English-speaking, pocket-money-receiving
African students who flock to the UK annually, to study (with a good number
actually returning, to continue with the lives they left behind in Lagos and
Nairobi and Accra and Freetown and Johannesburg etc).

How the British
public fails to permit these alternative images to displace some of the “old
stereotypes” (quoting Dame Stocking) should alarm many right-thinking people,
and perhaps inspire an industry of academic theses on national delusions and
epidemics of ostrich-in-sand-syndromes.

If those
flesh-and-blood representations of contemporary Africa somehow don’t succeed in
serving as a useful counterbalance to the stereotypes, then nothing will.

“We want to make
sure people have a really better balanced picture of what’s happening in
Africa. Of course we have to show what the reality is in the situations in
those countries. But we also need to show the other places where things are
actually changing, where things are different,” Dame Stocking says.

I wish her and Oxfam
the very best. Must be awful to have to take on that job of saving people from
self-inflicted ignorance. In an age in which Google, Twitter and the news media
lie at most fingertips, delivering, alongside stories of African suffering,
narratives of determined recovery from tragedy and technology-driven
change and emboldened youth and rising political awareness and growing
intolerance for tyranny – is there still room for getting
way with blaming with fixating on photos of begging bowls and the oxfamished
children attached to them?

Kudos where due.
But still…

I might also add
that this is not to disparage the useful work that Oxfam has done and is still doing across the continent.
The effects of aid, like AIDS, are real, no doubt. George W. Bush’s PEPFAR saved, and continues to save,
millions of Africans lives.

But stories also
abound of the startling stupidities and failures of aid projects whose origins
lie in a mentality belonging to a world that appears to have vanished. Misguided Messiahs and
their T-shirt donation and Shoe donation schemes, money-grabbing consultants, corrupt practices, high-profile-nil-value baby
adoptions, etc etc.

It’s important that
the Oxfams of this world do not allow themselves to get overly caught up in the
myth of their impact. In the larger scheme of things, perhaps they’ve been
overestimating their messianic abilities. Consider this: In his posthumously published collection of essays
pan-Africanist Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem says, of Nigeria’s 2006 debt relief deal:
“What kind of success is debt relief that sees Nigeria paying back over three
billion dollars to Britain alone, a figure more than the total aid budget of Britain
in the same year?”

You could of course
argue that that is oil-rich Nigeria, and choose instead to focus on the Rwandas
and Malawis where close to half the national budgets are donor-funded. And I
could remind you of what the late Malawian President did with chunks of his
country’s money. Or the mystery of the vanishing dollars in the Ugandan
Prime Minister’s office.

I’m also somewhat
surprised we’re still having this ‘African aid’ argument at the end of 2012,
after the eloquent arguments of books like Dead Aid and The Fastest
Billion. And after the Economist already publicly
regretted its silliness.

Shame.

Is Oxfam stuck on a
planet that no longer exists?

Oxfam Capital,
anyone?

*

Watch out for
Part 2 of this piece, focusing on how Oxfam can shift its focus from cajoling
donation-weary Westerners and tap into African wealth to fund its
Africa-transformation drive (not kidding).

Tolu Ogunlesi is a writer and award-winning
journalist based in Lagos, Nigeria. He blogs at http://toluogunlesi.wordpress.com

 

 

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