Cecelia Lynch
Kibera, the Nairobi neighborhood usually called a slum that is home to between 600,000 and one million people (depending on who is counting, how, and when), is the working site of over 500 local and transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), one aid worker told me in the summer of 2007. While northern Uganda and Sierra Leone crawl with humanitarian aid convoys, activists working in Rwanda complain that their conflict, along with the programs and funds attached to its resolution, is rapidly fading from donor memory. Malaria is arguably the new HIV/AIDS in Africa, in part because it appears more “solvable” (according to one transnational NGO representative), but another NGO representative from Kenya said, “It’s not as if we haven’t been dying of malaria forever.” The legal distinction between NGOs, IGOs (intergovernmental organizations), IFIs (international financial institutions) and governments is both exacerbated and eclipsed by practices of humanitarian assistance and the imperative to democratize, raising anew the question of state sovereignty vis-à-vis transnational forms of economic and military power in Africa. Paternalism, race, and religion remain issues for the complex of local and transnational NGOs (in Kenya, local NGOs have grown exponentially in number and influence, but in neighboring Somalia and across the continent in Sierra Leone, fledgling groups tend to be ignored by many Western-based transnational and donor organizations). Humanitarian aid groups and other NGOs provide an increasing number of jobs in both Africa and the West, and university programs created to train students to work in NGOs proliferate. While the complex interrelationship of donors, NGOs, UN agencies, corporations, foundations, and governments disciplines and channels Western aid, it also shapes local modes of production and local health, educational, and social services. Magazine covers and movies spark Western imaginations and highlight the necessity of assistance (e.g., the multiple July 2007 Vanity Fair covers featuring twenty different combinations of Western celebrities with prominent African religious and cultural figures; films on conflicts in Sierra Leone, Uganda, and other places have proven to be huge box-office draws).
The positive response from a wide range of scholars and practitioners to the idea of a conference and blog to think critically about the phenomenon indicates that an ongoing, multifaceted and interdisciplinary assessment of the way humanitarianism in Africa is imagined and practiced is much needed. “Africa” has become extremely trendy over the past decade, due to celebrity involvement, the explosion of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working in all areas of economic, political, and cultural life, and the immense amount of funding poured into those parts of the continent in the midst of conflict or severely affected by disease and famine. What are the broader processes and meanings at stake in this phenomenon? How are people – their lives, bodies, and souls — constructed and disciplined in the process? How do they (and others) respond?
The term “humanitarianism” has many meanings (one of which is outlined by Cilas Kemedjio in the next post), but it has become an object of humanistic analysis through debates about cosmopolitan moral obligation (Nussbaum 2007; Appiah 2007), critiques of attendant practices of economic, cultural, and military interventions into African states and societies (de Waal 2007; Ferguson 1994, Malkki 1995; Ferme 2001; Comaroff and Comaroff 2000; Wright and Comaroff 2001; Bornstein 2005), and explorations in literature and the arts (e.g. Farah 1999; Ngugi 2006).Humanitarianism, in other words, shapes and constructs cultural and economic practices in Africa, the power relations between African states and societies and others, and external knowledge and perceptions of Africa. Yet the duties and obligations of humanitarian cosmopolitanism, as articulated by scholars such as Nussbaum and Sen (1993/2007), among others, inadequately address many of the conceptual and historical, as well as pragmatic, problems raised by these and other trends. Instead, concepts such as governmentality, non-governed spaces, the construction of subjects, and others emanating from humanistic analysis are necessary for engaging humanitarianism critically and promoting reflection and reflexivity (e.g., Burchell, Gordon, and Miller; Foucault 2004). But academic critics, many of whom have themselves
been engaged with nongovernmental organizations, must extend critical reflection to our scholarly work as well as to the practices and practitioners of humanitarianism.
“Critical investigations into humanitarianism in Africa” aims to 1) draw attention to the phenomenon of humanitarianism in Africa, including the ways it produces knowledge and organizes and disciplines multiple areas of life as diverse as health, the economy, gender, politics, and religion; 2) highlight the critical interventions that humanistically-oriented research (e.g. ethnography, critical theory, literature and literary criticism, historical analysis, music and film studies) bring to the humanitarian phenomenon, as well as to the resistances and alternative discourses produced in response, and 3) create an ongoing dialogue between humanists, social scientists, medical experts, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) regarding these interventions.
Humanitarianism in Africa today saves lives (as Cilas Kemedjio points out in the following contribution), yet appears to buttress and reproduce political, economic, and ethical practices that are part and parcel of the problem. Investigating these and other aspects of the humanitarian phenomenon, along with exploring the sites of transformation and resistance to them by scholars, practitioners, and subjects of humanitarianism in Africa, is therefore crucial.
(I thank Peter Bloom, Cilas Kemedjio, David Theo Goldberg, Andrew Apter, and Mariane Ferme for their comments and input on this post and the conference proposal, from which it is adapted.)
Cecelia Lynch is Associate Professor of Political Science and director of the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Contact her at clynch@uci.edu.
References
— Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2007. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. W.W. Norton.
— Bornstein, Erica. 2005. The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe. Stanford.
— Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds. 1991. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago.
–Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff, eds. 2000. Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa: Critical Perspectives. University of Chicago Press.
— De Waal, Alex, ed. 2007. War in Darfur and the Search for Peace. Harvard UP.
— Farah, Nuruddin. 1999. Gifts. Penguin Books.
— Ferguson, James. 1994. The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. University of Minnesota Press.
— Ferme, Mariane. 2001. The Underneath of Things : Violence, History, and the Everyday in Sierra Leone. Chicago.
— Foucault, Michel. 2004. Sécurité, Territoire, Population, cours au Collège de France. 1977-1978. Seuil/Gallimard.
–Malkki, Liisa. 1995. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Wisconsin.
— Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. California.
— Nussbaum, Martha. 2007. Frontiers of Justice. Belknap Press.
— Amartya Sen. 1993/reprinted 20007. The Quality of Life. Oxford UP.
— Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. 2006. Wizard of the Crow. Pantheon Books.
— Wright, Melissa, and Jean Comaroff, eds. 2001. Millenial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism. Duke UP.
I enjoyed this posting and am sympathetic to the need for critical reflection – in this and all we do as academics and practitioners. I was taken at the end, though, by the claim that humanitarianism reproduces the political, economic and ethical practices that are part of “the problem”. Reflecting on what I know of Africa, I am not sure I could identify “the” problem – so partly this is a question about what you meant by that phase.
Beyond that, my comment is that we (academics) often write and speak as if there is an ideal solution to political issues (presumably solving “the” problem would lead us closer to that) ideal. In practice, however, there are few ideal solutions. Most require choosing among less than ideal options. Even if one of us could chose his or her ideal, many others would surely see it as less than ideal. The practice of politics reflects as much with the many unexpected consequences of well intended actions. As we engage in critical analysis, then, I would urge us to also be critical (and aware) of our (often implicit) assumption of this ideal and to force ourselves to realize that most actions can be criticized from one angle or another and thus the real challenge is to go beyond the critique alone to think about the available choices, consequences and trade offs.
Beyond that, it seems that humanitarians are part of African outcomes – but only part. To the extent that any particular political, economic or ethical situation is reproduced – the choices of those humanitarians interact with are also important and worthy of investigation.