Reductionist Media and Africa
The continent of Africa is a biological refuge, a geographical wonder, and a sociological intrigue. She is wildly modern and vastly rugged. Animals roam free and communities celebrate with ease.
Her resources and her intrigue attract everyone.
Foreign nations, international businesses, church missions…everyone wants what Africa has to offer either their investment accounts or their charitable egos.
In 2017, an estimated $203 Billion was leaving the continent of Africa through tax loopholes, repatriated wealth from businesses run in Africa but used outside of the continent, and other funds being stolen from Africa through illegal logging, fishing, and trade in wildlife.
According to the Changing Markets Foundation, as much as one third of clothing sent from the wealthy west to developing countries every year may be ending up in a landfill. Kenya alone receives 900 million pieces of used clothing each year, many of which are unusable (like skiing outfits) and end up being burned, exposing local residents to toxic fumes.
I was preparing a lecture on ethical storytelling when I first came across this proverb. It has become quite the North Star for me and my thinking over the years.
The Western Church’s approach to Africa is where I want to focus today, because the continent’s complexities are often deduced to a narrow characterization. I came across this post as I was scrolling my feed last week, and it is a perfect example of this issue:
If there’s one thing that has established a lifelong residence my brain, it is the idea of social inequity.
I was first brought to tears over human suffering during the 1992 drought in Southern Africa. In the aftermath of the We Are the World (U.S.A. for Africa) supergroup single, the portrayal of the continent’s poverty perpetuated media artifacts and deeply impacted the way Americans characterized a diverse continent.
It was a photo very much like this one that caught my breath and held my prayers hostage for a good long while. Those closest to me still talk about me talking to God about “the kids who don’t have a mother or a father and have to drink muddy water.”
I looked around me and couldn’t understand why I was growing up in a large house with two healthy parents with a dinner table full of food, and other kids were drawing water out of dried up mud holes.
No one was blaming me for starving children, but I felt it.
I was five years old.
My mind was mostly preocuppied for the next decade with placing my feet on the same red dirt as the children I’d only seen in National Geographic periodicals.
I imagined them destitute.
Fatherless.
Waiting for a rescuer.
Just like the pictures told me.
What I didn’t realize was that I had allowed my mind to form around a single narrative of African poverty and destitution. The way I conceptualized almost 20% of the world’s population would be the equivalent of Africans imagining that all Americans look like this:
In 2012, I finally landed in the middle of Massai Mara, Kenya, on an 8-person plane that barely missed a giraffe’s head as the wheels touched the dirt strip.
My brain didn’t know how to assimilate the bombardment to my senses.
The camp manager welomed me with Hakuna Matata, and I could only connect the traditional Swahili greeting to Disney’s The Lion King.
My eyes were so huge. She wasn’t joking.
I volunteered in an elementary school there for 6 weeks, giving teachers a break from their regular classroom duties.
I failed miserably. Perhaps the teachers just enjoyed the entertainment.
A village chief asked me to visit the women in a local beading circle, thinking I may be able to give some design advice.
He asked for a ride on the motorcycle I’d just learned to drive. I accidentally dumped him in a mud puddle.
As I spent more and more time in East Africa, Southeast Asia,
and other parts of the Global South, I internalized a consistent sense that my presence in other people’s cultures was as harmful as it could be helpful.
I set out to build enough trust with the people in these places to be able to ask them how foreigners [specifically Americans] could change that.
Unlearning with Courage
When we encounter our whiteness, we must decide how we will process the big feelings associated with our racial heritage. As this article says, the big feelings typically play out in one of two ways:
White guilt can lead people to unlearn racist attitudes and fight against White supremacy.
White guilt can cause a person to disengage from the feelings of guilt and shame and become defensive.
It takes courage to receive hard truths about your ancestors causing significant harm to others. It takes courage to search for the blind spots in your own privilege and connect that privilege to generations of racist social norms.
It takes courage to love yourself—existing in a body with skin you neither created nor chose—for the purpose of better loving your neighbor.
I am still fumbling my way through this, be sure.
I still use words that have been a part of my lifelong lexicon, completely ignorant of their racialized origins [see this resource for ideas].
I am currently behind on so many messages sent to my phone from Uganda, Kenya, and Thailand.
The layers of my privilege are so thick, I have to peel back my worldview through people, literature, media, and events that still give my brain a bit of a disorienting buzz.
Even after 20 years of traveling the world, I encounter that buzz regularly. Humanity is brilliantly complex, and while I am a tiny part of it, my role in understanding it weighs heavily.
I was recently challenged by a prompt to name ONE critical leader
in African history (and it couldn’t be Nelson Mandela).
Do you feel the buzz? The uncomfortable recognition that there’s no other name there as your brain tries to find a justification to this prompt?
I’m currently working through a podcast season on Reforming Orphan Care. In a recent interview, David Sanon knocked me over with a message he said he heard often growing up in Haiti: God is life. Blancs [white people] are life.
The presence of White folks has a significant influence in a global economy and a global church, and until we are dogmatic about culling out its negative impact, we will continue to perpetuate harm.
As you may have learned in this podcast season, around 80% of the world’s *orphans* have at least one living parent. They are growing up in orphanages, though, because well-intentioned churches are committed to funding them.
A recent Barna study titled Residential Care: U.S. Giving and Missions found that 19% of U.S. Christians donate to orphanages, totaling $3.3 billion annually across various programs.
(There is SO much more to dive into here, so make sure to listen to this season’s conversations on my podcast. I’d start here with my interview with Kimberly Quinley in Thailand.)
Resistance from Within the System
My curiosity of White Flight, White Supremacy, White Church, and White Fragility has been [not surprisingly] most appalling to my fellow White community, overwhelmingly from evangelical roots.
Just as Dr. John Perkins experienced resistence from fellow Blacks as he urged them to register to vote in the 1950s, mankind is terrified to disrupt the status quo. In people’s minds, social orders exist for a reason, even if they don’t understand that reason.
What would happen if we stopped submitting to classism and disentangled the inequity around us?
How would we know where we belonged if we couldn’t place ourselves within a social heirarchy?
If we advocated for others to have more, wouldn’t that mean we’d have less?
There is enough of this struggle within the stratification of American systems. No doubt, there is significant work to be done in healing broken divides among us on domestic soil.
BUT KNOW THIS:
Any Civil Rights success we have witnessed in the U.S. has not translated
to the evangelical expatriate presence in the Global South.
I’ve sat in many a room with all of these cross-cultural conversations taking place, especially in the decade following When Helping Hurts. The cross-cultural conversation has been almost exclusively one-sided, though.
How do we handle money?
What do we do with the power differential?
What is our role in maintaining the status quo?
The pressure from my fellow Westerners who have long held economic power in developing contexts sends a strong message: Don’t mess with the system.
If you pay your house helper more, I’ll have to pay mine more.
If we pay our missional business employees more, they will start to expect too much.
If I pay my night guard’s hospital bill, he’ll become dependent.
I’ve been processing a whole lot and examining my own shortcomings as I neighbor across cultures. I’m so tired of accepting malaria for my friends’ kids. I’m so tired of being called ‘madame’ and sugarcoating allyship as I wait for the sands of time to somehow shift inequity towards the favor of Ugandan nationals.
Or Nepali nationals.
Or Lao nationals.
Or Palestinian nationals.
Or Haitian nationals.
I’m here to say…the status quo is failing us all. And I don’t know a whole lot of folks living at the mercy of foreign dollars [read: Christian charity] who are begging to keep their incomes, their living situations, or their healthcare the same.
Sure, my family is carrying its own kinds of burdens. My excess is not sin and I am not required to completely devoid myself of all comforts.
I am simply entertaining the guest of contemplation,
opening any windows I have covered
with curtains of timidity or arrogance.
There is a boisterous, colorful, global party to be had,
and I have postponed it long enough by sharing my resources
like cold leftovers rather than genuine invitations.
Bring in the pots steaming with hot rice and homemade noodles. Pile up all the smoked spices and throw them into boiling lentils. Surround my table with saris and sihns, lace and silk, incense and oil.
Henna and music and tea and ginger.
Language that dances. Laughter that carries.
Wealth that is collective. Resources that are protected.
It is more than enough, what I have. It is so very abundantly more than enough.
My skin, my education, and my network may communicate one message of where my status places me in the world.
But my desire is for the position of my knees and the openness of my hands to communicate where I wish to plant myself in the world.
Shared tears. Shared celebration. The same cries of despair and of hallelujahs.
I refuse to perpetuate the robbery of the Global South anymore.
My sisters of Swahili and my brothers in Bangkok will have my solidarity.
What is mine, I give. And what is yours, I receive.
Kindred Exchanges…a mutual submission.
On Earth as it is in Heaven.
-lp
i am always in awe of your thoughtful writing, especially as i am the child of burundian immigrants. thank you for all you do 🤍