In a Displaced Q post two weeks ago, I mentioned a 2002 report by the British VSO (Voluntary Services Overseas.) The report, The Live Aid Legacy, expressed concern at Britons’ false or exaggerated perceptions of the developing world — unwanted side effects of the 1985 Live Aid campaign.
Amongst the report’s key findings were:
Powerful giver and grateful receiver: The Live Aid Legacy defines the roles in our relationship with the developing world. We are powerful, benevolent givers; they are grateful receivers. There is no recognition that we in Britain may have something to gain from the relationship.
and
False sense of superiority and inferiority: The danger of stereotypes of this depth and magnitude is the psychological relationship they create between the developed and the developing world, which revolves around an implicit sense of superiority and inferiority.
Although the report referred specifically to the perceptions of Britons, it’s not unreasonable to assume that these unwelcome attitudes proliferate in other developed Western countries.
What is rather unreasonable, I feel, is to lay all the blame at Live Aid’s door.
Was Live Aid a perpetuator of developing-world stereotypes and the West’s superior attitudes? Very likely. But initiator of them? Doubtful. These attitudes and stereotypes were around long before 1985.
Unfortunately, they were not just the attitudes of an ignorant public, but also held by those in charge of governing industrialized nations.
The Poisonwood Bible — where West is not always Best
The Poisonwood Bible, the bestselling novel by Barbara Kingsolver, tells the story of a missionary family from Georgia. Nathan Price (a zealous Baptist preacher), his wife and four daughters, move in 1959 from Georgia to the Belgian Congo, determined to bring Jesus to unenlightened Africa.
Along with their strong religious beliefs, the Prices also bring the conviction that their American ways are far better than anything the Congo has to offer. Because the book is narrated by the five prejudiced female Prices, the reader at first tends to agree that this is the case.
Gradually, though, we come to see that West is not always Best.
The ”Demonstration Garden” episode illustrates this point. Nathan Price’s attempt to grow food for his family while at the same time showing the natives some basic agricultural techniques which would save them from starvation and malnutrition, ends in humiliating failure. Although the plants grow tall and lush, they will not bear fruit. The Prices’ North American plants have no suitable African pollinators.
An allegorical tale
Nathan Price is the only member of the family who does not narrate the story at any time. The reason? Barbara Kingsolver explains:
He represents an attitude. This book is an allegory, in which the small incidents of characters’ lives shed light on larger events in our world.
The Prices carry into Africa a set of beliefs about religion, technology, health, politics, and agriculture, just as industrialized nations have often carried these beliefs into the developing world in a high-minded way, very certain of being right (even to the point of destroying local ideas, religion and leadership.) But sometimes — as happens in this novel — those attitudes are offensive or inapplicable.
I created Nathan Price as a symbolic figure suggesting many things about how Western nations have approached Africa with a history of arrogance and misunderstanding.
Into Africa — and out of it
Barbara Kingsolver herself spent a year of her childhood in the Congo, where her parents worked in public health. The Poisonwood Bible, however, is not an autobiography, although the setting is similar to where she lived in the early 1960s.
Of her stay there, Kingsolver says:
For me it was just a fantastic adventure…I was ignorant of politics but initiated to cultural difference.
These jarring stints away [from home in Kentucky] were double-edged, giving me both a sense of the world beyond my small hometown and an uneasy status as an outsider in a peer-group that valued conformity.
In her adult life, her novels carry themes of social injustice, and in 2000, Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize — a literary prize of $25,000, funded by Kingsolver, for writers whose unpublished works support social change.
Perhaps her adult accomplishments and pursuit of social justice are due in no small part to those childhood experiences – even though at the time she saw them as just an adventure.
Shattering stereotypes
The Live Aid Legacy seems to agree. A key finding in the report, in the ”Solutions and Benefits” section, was:
Seeing it at first hand: People who have the opportunity to live and work in the developing world, and consequently move beyond the stereotypes, claim a huge positive impact on their lives…Most importantly, it appears to shatter feeling of false superiority or smugness.
Learning from other cultures encourages embracing new ways of living, different attitudes and priorities. It also creates personal potential to create change and make a difference.
In the last few days, we have been critical of people who jump on the “volun-tourism” bandwagon, questioning the usefulness of aid work done by someone whose main motive appears to be a look-good entry for a CV, or a subject for a college essay.
Perhaps their motives, though, are beside the point.
As a VSO returned volunteer said, quoted in The Live Aid Legacy:
My world view has totally changed. I’ve become more critical of Western policy and practice towards developing countries.
And perhaps if enough people jump on the volun-tourism bandwagon, whatever their motives, a shift in Western attitudes will occur.
Quotes by Barbara Kingsolver courtesy of www.kingsolver.com
STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s interview with Random Nomad, Adria Schmidt – Career Consultant at Violence Intervention Program & Former Peace Corps Volunteer.
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awindram
Kate Allison
ML Awanohara
tjslater
@Kate
I scanned this post originally as I thought it would be better to read it after I finished Barbara Kingsolver’s masterpiece of a book. I’m interested in your point about how Kingsolver intends for the book to be an allegory for what happens when you barge into someone else’s culture thinking you know everything and they know nothing. I was telling my husband about the book and I said that after the youngest girl dies, the characters lose some of their individuality and it becomes a little like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies or George Orwell’s Animal Farm — ie, more of an allegorical novel, with each of the girls (and their mother) standing for an attitude about Africa. I have to say, I liked it better in the earlier part, when the characters seemed more real and less certain of what they thought about their African experience.
I’ve been thinking since that although Africa is an extreme example, the characters might also be emblems for the kinds of expats one encounters wherever you go — one who goes a little crazy, one who goes native, one who thinks it’s all much ado about nothing, and one who studies the culture but from afar. What do you think?