Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 22:38:51 +0200
30 years on: Ethiopia and the business of hunger
<https://www.opendemocracy.net/author/nick-dearden> Nick Dearden
24 October 2014
30 years after images of Ethiopian famine haunted British TV screens, they
still shape how we see Africa - and ensure we fail to understand.
It’s 30 years since Michael Buerke’s harrowing report of a ‘biblical famine’
reached BBC TV screens. Following a year of cynical government inaction and
silence, Bob Geldof launched a frenzied celebrity campaign to get aid to the
famine-hit regions.
Money from the public, if not the government, poured into the country. But
in the process, the politics of what was happening in Ethiopia was
completely erased, and our ideas of ‘charity’, ‘hunger’ and indeed ‘Africa’,
were changed in fundamental ways which to this day are difficult to
challenge.
The <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-29727220> BBC remains proud of
its reporting of Ethiopia’s famine, and certainly it directed public
attention to a horrific situation. But it did this at the price of
understanding what was really happening in Ethiopia, a problem compounded by
Bob Geldof who insisted on seeing the famine as a terrible ‘natural
disaster’.
In fact Ethiopia’s authoritarian government under Mengistu Haile Mariam,
heavily armed by the Soviet Union as a key proxy player in the Cold War, was
waging a war against Eritrean and Tigrayan freedom fighters. Drought was
being used by Mengistu as one tool to starve and defeat the rebel areas.
Yet when aid started flowing in, it largely went to the Ethiopian government
itself, which further used that aid to forcibly displace thousands of
opponents. In an excellent article for the Guardian yesterday, former
<http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2014/oct/22/e
thiopian-famine-report-influence-modern-coverage> BBC journalist Suzanne
Franks makes clear just how problematic the aid effort was:
“Victims of famine were lured into feeding camps only to be forced on to
planes and transported far away from their homes. Some estimate the number
of deaths from this policy to be higher than those from famine.”
As Franks says, Médecins sans Frontières refused to play along – a
principled position they have maintained in humanitarian emergencies ever
since. War on Want sent aid directly to rebel areas, where it was
administered by the rebel infrastructures and senior Labour Party figures
like Glenys Kinnock continued to support the Eritrean People’s Liberation
Front and expose the horrific circumstances they were facing.
But by and large, aid agencies played along with the politics as the best
chance they had of getting aid in. Indeed, the Ethiopian famine played a
huge role in the enormous growth of the aid industry over the next few
years.
Unfortunately, I’m not convinced that such a situation would be tackled more
honestly today. Partly that’s because the way Ethiopia was treated
fundamentally shaped the way we view Africa. Our idea of starving Ethiopians
– helpless, passive and in desperate need of Western salvation – became our
image of Africa as a whole. Media and governments played a role, but the
biggest culprit was the aid organisations themselves, who understood it was
untruthful, but found it an incredibly successful way of raising money.
In a report commissioned several years ago called
<http://www.findingframes.org/Finding%20Frames%20New%20ways%20to%20engage%20
the%20UK%20public%20in%20global%20poverty%20Bond%202011.pdf> ‘Finding
Frames’, researchers found that this framing of Africa – what they describe
as the ‘Live Aid’ legacy – remains incredibly strong today. Swept away is
the political context of Africa – the decades of Empire and slavery through
to structural adjustment and debt crisis. Also ignored are the many examples
of African resistance and success – from the national liberation governments
of the 1950 through to Thomas Sankara’s transformation of Burkina Faso up to
1987. Africa’s agency is marginalised.
The idea that we are a ‘Powerful Giver’ to ‘Grateful Receiver’ continues to
dominate the aid discourse today,
<https://progressivedevelopmentforum.wordpress.com/category/imagery/>
constantly reinforced by some aid agencies who still insist of perpetuating
offensive imagery in order to raise funds.
It’s important we use the anniversary of the Ethiopian famine not simply to
show ‘how far Ethiopia has come’, after all Ethiopian civilisation long
precedes our own. Rather we should use it to review our image of, and
relationship towards Africa, and refuse to support those organisations which
still grow rich on the ‘Live Aid’ legacy.
<http://opendemocracy.net/files/imagecache/wysiwyg_imageupload_lightbox_pres
et/wysiwyg_imageupload/553846/220px-ThomasSankara.jpg>
http://opendemocracy.net/files/imagecache/article_xlarge/wysiwyg_imageupload
/553846/220px-ThomasSankara.jpgThomas Sankara/Wikimedia
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