Not having doesn’t equate to not being

‘Tiny, emaciated children with wrinkled skin hanging off their bones, rib cages jutting out, bulbous eyes gazing out forlornly, flies covering their faces – the-all-too-familiar face of African hunger’ – BBC News

At some point in my lifetime I sincerely hope that aid agencies will develop a system of asking for assistance that does not involve dehumanising African people, especially children. Newspapers across the UK are this week replete with images of hungry African children in various states of undress as part of a campaign to raise funds to assist those suffering from the drought in East Africa. Pictures of black babies struggling to hold on to life may shock Europeans and North Americans into opening their wallets, but I wonder if I am the only African for whom they represent an insidious and unintentional but no less distressing exploitation, not to mention a source of great shame over my government’s failures – but that’s another article.

For now, even conceding that it is necessary to show the extent of the catastrophe in order to push people to give, there has to be a way that dignity does not have to be compromised in the name of supposed generosity. For instance, there’s a law in the UK that explicitly prohibits television cameras from showing pictures of minors without the explicit permission of their parents or guardians. Whenever such images are required for a report, they are pixelated or blurred out, or the children and vulnerable people filmed out of shot. All of these measures are designed to avoid exposing vulnerable groups to undue harm by having their person permanently associated with negative phenomena in the public imagination.

Do such laws exist in African countries especially? Or rather, shouldn’t they be applied in European or North American countries to protect African minors from such exploitation as well? Do journalists offer the parents of these children the choice to either consent or decline the use of their images? What do the parents get from the journalists in exchange for the stories? If journalists are ethically bound not to offer goods or material assistance in exchange for the use of images or information in a story, then why can’t the same ethics prevent them from using these images in the first place? What is implied by this awful double standard about the way we think about or value African humanity?

What about the impact of branding places where people have to carve out an existence ‘hell’? If we associate places like Somalia, Ethiopia or Northern Kenya – places where people have to live, love, eat, sleep and drink just like the rest of us – with such heavy handed imagery are we not condemning them to the very fate that we are criticising or observing? Without diminishing the extent of the struggles endured by vulnerable communities in these regions, especially during droughts like the kinds we are experiencing now, doesn’t it debase the communities in question if we ‘otherise’ their environment, brand it unfit for human habitation and then spend 10 minutes wondering how ‘these people’ manage? Aren’t we implying that they are either endowed with a magical durability or that they lack that positive quality that makes it impossible for us to inhabit the same spaces?

I understand the need to emphasise the sense of urgency in times of crisis like the current drought in East Africa but it is already well documented that such images only serve to desensitise target audiences to the genuine plight of vulnerable communities. The CNN effect may have changed the way people react to crisis and conflict since Rwanda but it has also meant that images have to be more extreme and disturbing in order to prompt a reaction from the audience. Where’s the line? If a naked and suffering child, full face in view can be plastered across various media formats in the name of charity, where next?

Suffering doesn’t negate humanity. There is still dignity in poverty and in struggle, and not having does not equate to not being. Surely there is room in the humanitarian community or their sympathisers for humanity; to treat those who are most in need for protection with the same respect that we would expect to be treated with ourselves. Altruism is about charity in the manner in which we use in common parlance, but charity in the biblical sense, i.e. seeing value in other people and ‘doing unto others…’ and if our generosity can only be secured by such insidious dehumanisation then it says more about the state of our hearts than the lives of those we hope to help.

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