Why White Saviors Aren't Saving Anything
Back in January, I received a frantic series of WhatsApp messages from a woman who had hosted my homestays in rural Kenya. She sent pictures of her daughter in a hospital bed, surrounded by medical equipment; she explained that she had already maxed out her credit cards and desperately needed help to keep her daughter alive. I was fairly drunk when I received the texts, so I took one look and said "I don't want to deal with this right now."
The next day, waking up bleary-eyed in uncomfortably bright Ugandan sunlight, I checked the messages again - they were still there. I didn't quite know what the appropriate response would be; I almost never give money to people on the street and am acutely aware of the many scams and cons people try on me. This was different. The woman was a trusted friend and coworker; she was in legitimate need and her daughter could actually die without my help. That night, I finally took some action and sent her a few hundred dollars as a one-time gift (I really didn't feel like chasing her down for loan repayment). Her daughter recovered, is out of the hospital and last I heard is doing fine.
I never really felt comfortable with this anecdote and it's taken me a while to articulate exactly why. Many Christian groups like this sort of story; it fits cleanly into the narrative that White People are helping to fix their ancestor's mistakes. However, the more I thought about it the more absurd the situation becomes. This woman is middle-aged and well-educated; her two sons are in college and she has enough extra income that she takes care of the neighborhood children (letting them use her extra solar lights to do homework at night). She's well-respected and one of the more affluent members of her community. So why is she depending on a random 26-year-old American who spent less than a week at her house as her best source of credit? Why did her credit cards max out at $1000, and why was the hospital willing to let her daughter die if she couldn't pay?
In one sense, the narrative of the story is "I saved a woman's life". Seen in a harsher light, the true narrative becomes "society doesn't give a fuck about this woman". I happened to know this particular family; there was probably a family in the same hospital that same night where no one helped and the patient died.
White Saviors won't fix the fundamental issues in Africa because it is not in our fundamental interest to do so. My impression is that many mission trips are just unpleasant enough that people can feel like they've contributed, but not unpleasant enough to drive real change. Real change would be very inconvenient; not "I should probably do something about these starving orphans on TV" inconvenient but "all the coffee growers are on strike and now a kilo of coffee costs $200" inconvenient. Real, permanent societal changes aren't going to come from a visiting group of teenagers; they can only come from local people realizing the power they wield, holding their politicians accountable and (nonviolently) fighting for their rights. Personally I would like to see Africa unionize; the rest of the world is benefiting immensely from African products without paying a fair price for them.
For guilty white people there are some actions preferable to others (building a playground may be existentially pointless but it seems to make some local Ugandan children happy). In my view, the best model of what white people should be doing in Africa shows up in the movie Black Panther. We can be helpful (a la Agent Ross), but we're not at the center of the narrative because the problems here are often indecipherable from an outside perspective.
The next day, waking up bleary-eyed in uncomfortably bright Ugandan sunlight, I checked the messages again - they were still there. I didn't quite know what the appropriate response would be; I almost never give money to people on the street and am acutely aware of the many scams and cons people try on me. This was different. The woman was a trusted friend and coworker; she was in legitimate need and her daughter could actually die without my help. That night, I finally took some action and sent her a few hundred dollars as a one-time gift (I really didn't feel like chasing her down for loan repayment). Her daughter recovered, is out of the hospital and last I heard is doing fine.
I never really felt comfortable with this anecdote and it's taken me a while to articulate exactly why. Many Christian groups like this sort of story; it fits cleanly into the narrative that White People are helping to fix their ancestor's mistakes. However, the more I thought about it the more absurd the situation becomes. This woman is middle-aged and well-educated; her two sons are in college and she has enough extra income that she takes care of the neighborhood children (letting them use her extra solar lights to do homework at night). She's well-respected and one of the more affluent members of her community. So why is she depending on a random 26-year-old American who spent less than a week at her house as her best source of credit? Why did her credit cards max out at $1000, and why was the hospital willing to let her daughter die if she couldn't pay?
In one sense, the narrative of the story is "I saved a woman's life". Seen in a harsher light, the true narrative becomes "society doesn't give a fuck about this woman". I happened to know this particular family; there was probably a family in the same hospital that same night where no one helped and the patient died.
White Saviors won't fix the fundamental issues in Africa because it is not in our fundamental interest to do so. My impression is that many mission trips are just unpleasant enough that people can feel like they've contributed, but not unpleasant enough to drive real change. Real change would be very inconvenient; not "I should probably do something about these starving orphans on TV" inconvenient but "all the coffee growers are on strike and now a kilo of coffee costs $200" inconvenient. Real, permanent societal changes aren't going to come from a visiting group of teenagers; they can only come from local people realizing the power they wield, holding their politicians accountable and (nonviolently) fighting for their rights. Personally I would like to see Africa unionize; the rest of the world is benefiting immensely from African products without paying a fair price for them.
For guilty white people there are some actions preferable to others (building a playground may be existentially pointless but it seems to make some local Ugandan children happy). In my view, the best model of what white people should be doing in Africa shows up in the movie Black Panther. We can be helpful (a la Agent Ross), but we're not at the center of the narrative because the problems here are often indecipherable from an outside perspective.
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