African blogger: "WE ARE NOT WHALES"

The following text is an excerpt from a July 4 posting on Solari Ekine's blog "Black Looks"

We are not whales!

The response from the liberal blogosphere to any criticism of the Live 8 concert and the ideology of paternalistic simplicity espoused by Geldof et al has been “at least they are doing something” or “its better than nothing” or a comment I read on African Bullets & Honey ”Pennies on the dollar are better than no pennies at all" or some other naïve variant. Statements such as these contain a loosely concealed self-congratulatory, paternalist and arrogant attitude towards Africa and Africans.

My argument is that No It is not better than nothing and that what they are doing is actually damaging to African countries. Furthermore the Live 8 concert reinforces racist stereotypes and like most liberal projects fails to challenge the status quo or address the real issues. It is as if people so much want to believe that Geldof's agenda for Africa has and will make a difference that they cannot see the wood for the trees. There is a desperateness about their rush to believe the superficial explanations offered to them. I can only conclude that the truth is just too much for people to bear. The bleeding hearts of liberalism cannot face the reality that their liberalism will solve nothing, that it colludes with the maintenance of the status quo and actually will cause more harm than good.

One of the pro-Geldof copouts is that Westerners are deprived of information about African countries and therefore something like Live 8 will give them the missing information. Rubbish. Westerners and other non-Africans do not need to live in Africa or live in any other part of the world to understand what is happening there. The information is available; Americans and Europeans have much more access to information than the rest of the world; if they choose not to read the available information that is because they have no desire or interest in doing so.

My prediction that the presentation of African countries during Saturday's concerts would be a negative pitiful one was correct. We were presented with Africa as the “scar of the world”, passive, starving, diseased, dying and helpless. This was a conscious decision by the organisers of the concert to make the crowd sympathetic to their cause and at the same time make them feel good, make them feel as if they had made a contribution to saving Africa. I am reminded of an American TV programme we watched as children in Nigeria: The Lone Ranger. At the end of each programme after the Lone Ranger had fought off the baddies and saved the poor defenseless people his horse would rear up and he would shout “hiooooooo Silver” and then ride into the wilderness till the following week. And so to we are all asked to give "thanks and praises" to the great white chief Geldof on his shining white horse.

Madeleine Bunting writing in today's Guardian quotes Cambridge historian, John Lonsdale description of Blair's Agenda for Africa as

"a construction that infantilises not only Africans, unable to fend for themselves, but us too, like babies demanding the instant gratification of self-importance."

Not only does it infantilise Africans and Europeans, it also facilitates the continued appropriation of all things African and all things in Africa including our problems and reduces the issues to cheap sound bites and meaningless nauseating rhetoric that go down well in the kindergarden playground of liberal politics.