notes that the savior individual is often from the United States but focused on the world, particularly Africa. The savior sees dark skin and translates that to helplessness. And saviors see their own white skin as validation of the gifts they bring.
Author Binyavanga Wainaina, in a satirical essay titled “How to Write about Africa,” identified the patterns he has seen in non-Africans writing about Africa. His words are a stinging reminder of the ways in which colonial attitudes persist. Although his essay is directed at writers, it applies well to the many Westerners who have enriched their resumes and assuaged their consciences with charity work in communities that are not their own—from remote African villages to U.S. inner cities. Via social media these young white people spice up their vacations, posting photos of themselves with the darker-skinned children they have helped as evidence of their goodwill. “Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable,” writes Wainaina, “and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.”2
At elite schools, students are recruited for the Peace Corps, which sends them after graduation to countries they know little about, to do unpaid work that takes jobs away from locals or that helps maintain corrupt or authoritarian governments.3 Sometimes this work even entails feeding information back to U.S. intelligence services.4 Outside the elites, young people are recruited by the military, often with similar claims of helping others in faraway lands.
Many of the most offensive charitable campaigns involve white people “saving” Africa, but they never mention the history of colonial exploitation that led to poverty in Africa in the first place. The classic of the entertainment industry’s “savior pop” genre is the 1984 Bob Geldof song, sung by a forgettable assemblage of eighties pop stars, “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” which also includes the tellingly offensive line “Thank God it’s them instead of you.”
The song (and Live Aid, the subsequent project it birthed) raised over $100 million for famine relief. But when journalists dug deeper, they noted that the issues leading to the famine could not be solved through charity. Massive numbers of people in Ethiopia were dying. However, the primary cause was not a lack of food or bad weather leading to reduced crops. People were starving because of the political decisions of Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam.
As one reporter noted at the time, “Ethiopia, which has the largest standing army in Africa, is embroiled in four internal wars . . . government troops have systematically scorched the farmlands, destroying crops and killing oxen.” Ethiopia was yet another proxy war in the global Cold War, with Russian and U.S. interests both engaged. Any aid organization working within the country had to work within this dynamic, often actively supporting government resettlement programs. “People are dying in Ethiopia because of starvation. But throwing money and food at the problem without consideration of the politics that is keeping people and food apart is inexcusable,” concluded the report.5
The Save Darfur Coalition was founded in 2004 to raise awareness of human rights abuses in the Darfur region of western Sudan and recruited heavily on college campuses. The actions or crimes of the Sudanese government are almost beside the point. As Columbia University professor and author Mahmood Mamdani points out, the focus on Darfur was used to obscure crimes committed by the United States, Israel, and U.S.-supported dictators in the region, even though these were the crimes citizens were paying for from their tax dollars. Unlike Bush administration atrocities, liberals could condemn Sudan without endangering the overall project of empire. In a debate at Columbia University, Mamdani was harshly critical of this project. “The facts that this movement gives out are completely decontextualized,” he says. “Go to a Save Darfur website. What you will find on this website is a documentation of atrocities. No history, no politics, nothing [that] tells you why there is violence. All you see is evidence of killing, raping, ethnic cleansing. I call it a pornography of violence.”
“It is meant for the good of the one who views it, not for the good of the one who is being viewed,” said Mamdani. “The focus is on naming and shaming. On punishment, on criminal justice. The demand is not reform, the demand is punishment, as if they are lusting for blood. It is, I believe, seamlessly a part of the War on Terror.”6
These campaigns disseminate a simplistic worldview that disassociates the causes from realities on the ground. Save Darfur tells us to look at this video, sign this petition, and your duty to the world is done. To Mamdani it is the opposite of intellectual engagement. “The peace movement of the 60s turned the world into a classroom; its signature activity was the teach-in,” says Mamdani. “Save Darfur has turned the world into an advertising medium.”
It relates to its constituency not as an educator, but as an advertiser. It has not created or even tried to create an informed movement but a feel good constituency. Its focus, you can see, is increasingly shifting from college students to high school kids. These are Save Darfur’s version of child soldiers. Its leaders are less educators, they are more celebrities from high-profile activities: showbiz and sports. They openly disdain education and debate.7
Mamdani says that Save Darfur represents the difference between feel-good charity and true civic engagement. It is a way to “help” others, without addressing your own problems. “Why were my students and my son’s classmates . . . being mobilized around Darfur and not around Iraq?” asks Mamdani.
And I realized that Iraq calls on Americans to respond as citizens. A student who thinks of Iraq realizes either he feels or she feels guilty, or he or she feel impotent, that there are limits to American power. When it comes to Darfur, these same students . . . do not relate to Darfuris as citizens but as victims. . . . I realized that Darfur is a charity, Iraq is a tax. In Darfur these same students can feel what they know they are not in Iraq: powerful saviors. In Darfur, the assumption is as throughout the world . . . that if they don’t make it right we must go and make it right. The assumption is that the problem is internal, the solution is external. The U.S. has to learn to live in the world, not to occupy it.8
At the time, Darfur was often used as a rhetorical weapon against the growing pro-Palestine student movement. “Why are you focusing on Israel?” went the refrain. “Why not focus on the Muslims committing genocide against Africans?” And while real solutions to war and displacement are complicated and involve challenging systemic issues like the legacy of colonialism, Save Darfur offered a comforting, simplistic solution that did not involve challenging the privilege of U.S. citizens. Not coincidentally, the coalition was sponsored by pro-Israeli organizations (the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and American Jewish World Service) at a time of increasing criticism of the Bush administration’s role in the Middle East and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The campaign provided a Muslim villain for easy condemnation—perfect for an audience that might be uncomfortable with the style of the Bush administration’s demonization of Islam but still accepting a basic distrust of Muslims.
In 2009 the Christian Science Monitor reported that “activist campaigns mischaracterized and sensationalized” casualty rates in Darfur. “What they tended to leave out was that the majority of the casualties occurred as a result of disease and malnutrition” rather than more directly from war. As a result of activist efforts like Save Darfur, hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. funding shifted from humanitarian aid (which would have been more useful for combating disease and malnutrition) to military “peacekeeping.” The newspaper concluded, “Had the Darfur activists not advocated for a reallocation of funds, more lives would probably have been saved.”9
Many from inside humanitarian institutions argue that even in the best cases their intervention
