In our post today, Tristan Corcoran a former CIHA course student, delves into the current famine conditions in Somalia. As Tristan points out, CIHA has previously covered famine in the Horn of Africa. His analysis brings into stark relief the intersection between ongoing problems of representation of African aid recipients with a lack of attention to economic and political external interventions. As always, we look forward to your comments.
By Tristan Corcoran, former CIHA course student and current graduate student at San Diego State University
Earlier this year, the United Nations reported that insecurity has increased across twenty countries and regions. One of the most severely impacted regions is the Horn of Africa, where up to twenty million are projected to go hungry. The war in Ukraine has been blamed for disrupting grain exports to much of the world, including Somalia. Focusing on the war in Ukraine is short-sighted as it dismisses other factors such as environmental degradation. Moreover, focusing on Ukraine turns attention away from assessing the mixed impact of past aid campaigns to overcome famine in the region.
To that end, I critically review the campaign to address famine in Somalia in 2011, which the CIHA blog covered at the time. Returning to this period is necessary to address food insecurity meaningfully, which requires an understanding of why it occurs, as well as how humanitarianism risks contributing to the problem. I argue that, once again, the 2011 campaign made use of imagery that robbed Somalis of their agency and dignity. I also challenge the narrative that the famine was a natural occurrence, instead showing how colonialism and neo-colonial intervention served to facilitate the crisis.
One of the aid organizations that played a significant role in the 2011 famine response was United Kingdom Charity Save the Children, which launched a fundraising effort titled “I’m Gonna be Your Friend” (IGBYF). The Horn of Africa has been the site of celebrity driven humanitarian campaigns since the early 1980s; an understanding of what occurred in Somalia serves to both illuminate the political background to the famine and the unintended consequences of the involvement of cosmopolitan elites in the face of the ongoing threat of famine today.
1. IGBYF and the Humanitarian International
IGBYF was a fundraising campaign initiated by Save the Children. The campaign centered the deceased Bob Marley and featured heavy involvement from his wife. The campaign showed Marley’s “High Tide or Low Tide” along with footage of children suffering from the famine, and then imploring viewers to “be a friend” by downloading the song for $1.29 or donating and sharing the video through social media. The proceeds would then be used by Save the Children to purchase food, water, and medicine. The campaign partnered with companies such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Universal Music Group to spread the video, and 150 celebrities took part in using their social media accounts to bolster this message. The official website also connected the campaign to the late Marley, stating in response to the famine that “Bob’s music has always conveyed a message of hope, unity and love. And this is a message needed now more than ever.”
In many ways, this campaign echoed the problems of the 1984 Band-Aid campaign. The CIHA blog in 2014 described how the original music videos for that campaign had clips of starving people, thus connecting Africa with a sense of hopelessness in their portrayal of the continent. The IGBYF video similarly showed “an almost biblical landscape, windswept and dusty, animals lie dead, people are being buried, children are close to starvation, mothers queue at feeding centres—a quasi-prototypical representation of famine in Africa.” As Band-Aid did with Ethiopia, IGBYF opted to invoke a stereotypical portrayal of Somalia as a dying wasteland where everyone is starving and in a perpetual state of despair. The purpose of this video was to provoke an emotional response that would encourage viewers to donate, but this strategy was unintentionally very harmful. As CIHA explained in 2014, this sort of imagery is typical for celebrity-oriented aid campaigns on the continent, and are immoral in the manner in which they display the suffering of people within Africa without their consent. IGBYF was disrespectful and exploitative with how it showed Somalis starving and burying their loved ones to try and appeal to a Western audience. It appears as though humanitarian actors had not learned from the disrespectful portrayal of famine in Ethiopia during Bandaid, and instead chose to double down. As IGBYF relied heavily on this video being shared through social media, regular people played a role in disseminating these harmful images, and the suffering of those in Somalia was simply reduced to content to be viewed and forwarded again and again. While it may have been an effective way for obtaining donations (it was estimated that over a billion people saw the video), it showed the continued lack of concern on the part of campaign organizers for how they actually engage with the people they wish.
This concern can be explored further through Teju Cole’s description of the White-Saviour Industrial Complex. Cole (2012) famously argued that within the context of humanitarianism, Africa is seen as the “backdrop for white fantasies of conquest and heroism.” Africa is thus portrayed as a location in which people are perpetually in need of being “saved” by affluent westerners. While characteristic of other forms of humanitarianism, this dynamic can be strongly fueled by the involvement of celebrities (generally led by white folks although they also include BIPOC people), as was the case with Band-Aid and IGBYF. The Band-Aid campaign not only featured celebrity performances to raise donations, it was originally organized by singer Bob Geldof. The impact that celebrity humanitarians such as Geldof have had is creating a dynamic in which the global population is divided into the ‘humanity that suffers’ and the ‘humanity that saves.’
IGBYF repeated these same mistakes. The film was produced by filmmaker Kevin MacDonald. MacDonald stated that when he heard about the famine, he “couldn’t help but wonder what Bob [Marley] would have felt about it” and how he believed Marley would have used his money to encourage people to do something (Weakley 2011). MacDonald took it upon himself to mobilize an effort to rescue Somalia under the belief that Marley would have felt an obligation to do so himself.
The problem is not that MacDonald was moved by the crisis in Somalia, but that he believed that he could take a leading role in “saving” the country. By showcasing Somalia as a desolate and hopeless place, MacDonald played into the idea that westerners (organized around the legacy of a celebrity) could “save” the country with their donations. By stripping Somalis of their agency, the campaign also ignores the efforts they have made to improve their own lives. IGBYF focused on Somali children to enforce “this interpretation of innocent infliction that calls for empathy.” However, this approach erases the suffering and sacrifice of Somali parents in favor of letting donors believe they are going to be the ones to save these children with their generosity. Somalis were not simply passive actors waiting for aid to arrive, they were struggling with their daily reality. Somalis responded to the 2011 famine primarily by making use of their social connectedness; they had established and made use of networks of reciprocity, obligation, and mutual support through clan and non-clan communities. Somalis coped amidst this horrific crisis by providing assistance to one another. This was commonly accomplished through the payment of remittances, which was hindered by counter-terrorism efforts which isolated Somali money transfer companies from international financial systems. On top of being insensitive and perpetuating a unequal and harmful dynamic between Somalia and international humanitarian actors, the narrative which portrays Somalis as merely passive actors waiting to be saved can contribute to geo-political engagements with the country that are detrimental to such coping strategies and further endanger the lives of those in Somalia.
The United Nations declared that the famine was over in 2012. This was due to both a high yield harvest as well as donations from abroad. In that regard, the humanitarian effort did produce some positive effects. Unfortunately, it was not to last; Somalia was stricken with a new food crisis in 2014, and continues to struggle with starvation to this day. The celebrity-led humanitarian effort only provided very brief temporary relief.
2. The Causes of Famine in Somalia
IGBYF was insufficient because it did not properly address the underlying causes of the famine. Economic and political instability produced by international intervention and exploitation within an unequal global political landscape played a large part. When discussing the cause of the famine, the campaign only made reference to “the worst drought in decades.” Such an explanation is a recurring component of humanitarian narratives. Food insecurity in the Horn of Africa today continues to be attributed to drought conditions. While the environmental conditions undoubtedly do play a factor, natural causes alone do not fully explain the crisis. California went through similar drought conditions as Somalia in 2016 with a much higher population density, but the state and federal government intervened to alleviate the impact. Somalia on the other hand has not had a stable government since 1991. As a state with the proper capacity would be capable of mitigating such natural crises, the famine of 2011 can be understood as a human-made crisis.
To fully understand why Somalia lacked the state capacity to prevent famine, it is necessary to “reverse the lens” and explore the manner in which the west was also complicit in this crisis. The portrayal of famine in Somalia pushes a narrative where the country is a perpetual recipient of western funds. However, Ngūgī wa Thiong’o challenged this perception by arguing that the opposite is true; throughout history, Africa has always “given” to the West as its resources, wealth and even its people were extracted during colonial occupation as well as postcolonial economic and political interventions. Any aid received by countries such as Somalia pales in comparison to what has been taken from them through colonial domination and its aftermath. This erasure of colonial dynamics is particularly troubling given that it is essential to understanding why famine occurs.
Colonialism continues to have significant social consequences in Somalia today. Peacebuilding in Somalia has been significantly hindered by ethnic divisions that were institutionalized under colonial rule. Moreover, the country continues to suffer under neo-colonial dynamics. These divisions and the violent conflict they have produced have since been exacerbated by the United States in its attempts to gain greater influence in the Horn of Africa, first by supporting dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and then through military interventions following his removal from power. Military intervention can be directly connected to the 2011 famine. While food shortages were most severe in areas controlled by the Islamic militant group Al-Shabaab, this group has achieved power in part due to a US-backed attack on the Union of Islamic Courts in 2006. The 2011 famine which IGBYF sought to respond to can certainly not be seen as a natural occurrence when its effects are most prominent in areas controlled by the militant group. Furthermore, Peter Maundu has emphasized that a stable government would have minimized the activities of Al-Shabaab. However, the portrayal of Somalia as a land of starvation is a simplistic narrative that does not account for these factors.
Even the drought conditions themselves cannot be divorced from the inequality present in international politics. Research has shown that the lack of rain in Somalia in 2011 was a result of human-induced climate change. Far from a problem that all states contribute to equally, it is the twenty-three wealthiest countries which have produced half of all planet warming greenhouse gasses over the past 170 years, while the least developed countries suffer the most severe consequences. The countries that left Somalia unable to mitigate the effects of the drought were also largely responsible for creating those dry conditions in the first place. IGBYF painted an oversimplified picture where Somalia was stricken by drought and could simply be rescued through donations. It was ineffective because it ignored the political context the famine occurred within, and thus the role of external actors in producing the environmental and political conditions that led to famine.
3. Conclusion
Overall, a critical assessment of humanitarianism displays how the IGBYF campaign (and by extension, many additional famine relief efforts) was insufficient in meaningfully addressing the recurring issue of famine in Somalia. The images used in “I’m Gonna be Your Friend” to promote the campaign were offensive. They also painted a misleading picture attributing the famine solely to natural causes and framing Somalia as simply a passive actor receiving western support to overcome those natural characteristics. By changing the lens, it is possible to trace the political and economic causes of the famine. The drought conditions are primarily a product of global warming caused by the excessive release of greenhouse gasses by the most developed economies. Countries such as Somalia which have been destabilized by the colonial and neo-colonial interventions by a number of those same countries are left unable to sufficiently respond to the effects of these climate change induced disasters.
It is essential to learn from this investigation into the causes of the 2011 famine and the failures of the humanitarian response in order to better address the present crisis. Focusing on the impacts of the conflict in Ukraine and a lack of humanitarian aid does not address factors that continue to enable famines in the region. If the international community wants to help those in Somalia, then the focus needs to instead be placed on putting an end to harmful interventions and meaningfully addressing climate change. To that end, it is also important to continue to challenge humanitarian responses that rob the Somali people of their agency.