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The Obscured Continent

It’s hard to find Africa in Vanity Fair’s new “Africa Issue”

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In recent years, two main schools of thought have emerged about how to lift Africa out of its seemingly bottomless descent into war, poverty, and disease. To borrow labels used by the reporter Andrew Rice in an insightful review for the Nation two years ago, two predominant arguments are being advanced: the “governance-first” camp “holds that Africans are impoverished because their rulers keep them that way,” and the “poverty-first” camp “believes African governments are so lousy precisely because their countries are so poor.”

Each argument contains its own implicit demand: one puts the onus on Africans to throw out their more-often-than-not corrupt and kleptocratic leaders and find a way to take advantage of the rich resources of the continent to make it prosper. The other looks to the Western world to fulfill a moral responsibility to provide billions of dollars in aid to Africans so that an improved standard of living will lead to stronger and more stable countries.

With the exception of angry and often cruelly written op-eds by one-time Peace Corps volunteer and travel writer Paul Theroux, not much time and space is ever given here in the West to the “governance-first” argument. Mostly, there is one, overwhelming attitude that dominates the way we write and think about Africa in the West: we are the only possible saviors, obligated by our humanity to donate money and urge our government to both increase spending on aid and cancel any debts owned by these poor countries.

This “poverty-first” attitude also fits in nicely with the role that certain celebrities – i.e., Bono — have carved out as representatives of the continent, hoping to prick the conscience of Western leaders. It makes sense. When the guilt for Africa’s many problems lands totally on the West and not on Africa itself, an opportunity opens up for those with money and star power to set themselves up as spokespeople for hundreds of millions of Africans. It’s a precarious role, one that can easily tip over into a paternalistic and condescending tone that’s not that far away from the worldview of colonial powers who saw themselves as engaged in a civilizing mission.

All this as introduction to a look at the current issue of Vanity Fair, its “Africa Issue.”

First — it must be said — good intentions should never be undervalued. When you have a glossy magazine like Vanity Fair, whose existence depends on revenue from ads for expensive products — like the diamond-encrusted Dior watch that appears on the wrist of Sharon Stone on page twenty-five of the “Africa Issue” — it is always a risk to focus on subject matter that is not quite as sexy as, say, a photo shoot that features Scarlett Johansson’s bare bum. When you set yourself the task of capturing the essence of the continent in an issue, you can’t avoid AIDS, you can’t avoid disease, and you can’t avoid child soldiers. None of these are easy sells to the designers and car companies that pay for the magazine’s big bucks production costs.

That caveat out of the way, it’s worth examining how Graydon Carter and his guest editor for the issue – yes, none other than Bono – went about bridging this divide between the style of Vanity Fair and the substance of Africa. It turns out that the “poverty-first” view of Africa’s problems suits their purposes perfectly. With the emphasis on the West’s obligation — on Bono’s role in changing things, and not on some unknown African activist or opposition politician — than the issue can have all the glamour of every other Vanity Fair and still be ostensibly about Africa.

The cover, in a way, tells the story. Together with photographer-to-the-stars, Annie Liebovitz, Carter and Bono conceived of twenty different portraits that would appear on twenty different versions of the cover. According to Liebovitz, the concept was to present a group of people having a “conversation” about Africa. “It’s a visual chain letter,” she said in a note in the issue, “spreading the message from person to person to person.” The people having this conversation include, conveniently, Brad Pitt and Madonna, Oprah and Barack Obama. It’s not clear exactly what the connection of any of these people is to the continent. And, by my count, only three of them are actually from Africa – Desmond Tutu, Djimoun Honsou, and Iman. But the key indicator of what the issue’s character will be is that this a conversation about Africa by a group of well-known celebrities. They are the ones here with agency to tell the story of Africa in Vanity Fair.

What follows inside has much of the same tone. An article about all of humanity’s genetic connection to the continent reveals what the editors think of their task: “The world population that was spawned in Africa now has the power to save it. We are all alive today because of what happened to a small group of hungry Africans around 50,000 years ago. As their good sons and daughters, those of us who left, whether long ago or more recently, surely have a moral imperative to use our gifts to support our cousins who stayed.”

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Comments

Hannah

Tue 26 Jun 2007 03:52 PM

This is a very good critique of the Vanity Fair Africa issue. However, I think it's absolutely incorrect to say that the "governance first" argument gets no play in the West. George W. Bush and Paul Wolfowitz, for example, have frequently discussed corruption as one of the main problems facing the continent. In fact, I see the "governance first" argument as the dominant view -- particularly, but not only, among conservatives. And economists like Jeffrey Sachs who advocate for increasing aid do not ignore the problem of corruption.

echung

Tue 26 Jun 2007 04:15 PM

The two schools of thought Gal Beckerman points out in the introduction to her article are both simplistic and misleading. Notwithstanding the overwhelming simplification of the linkages between poverty and good governance, the debate on the presentation of Africa in American media comprises a diverse range of complex ideas, in no way limited to these two “main” schools of thought. For one, much of the analytical literature on the causes of the poverty that handicaps so many African countries attributes them to decades of exploitative colonialism and contemporary international political and economic systems that tend to benefit the so-called “First” World at the expense of the Third. Certainly, good governance is also a key factor in bringing about economic growth, but the issue is less about finding a way to “take advantage of the rich resources of the continent” as it is about challenging those exploitative international systems. A recent example of such a challenge can be found in the film Bamako, in which a village in Mali holds a mock trial to hold the IMF and the World Bank accountable for the consequences of their loans to Africa. In addition, I find that the poverty-first approach is much more prevalent in entertainment media and news than it is in political analysis and news, where the governance-first approach seems more prevalent, as Hannah notes above.

While I do think Beckerman’s analysis of VF’s saviors-from-poverty approach is important and revealing in many ways, the VF issue is only supremely emblematic of a wider malaise in American advocacy, which tends to hinge on the word “save,” without being able to put their money where their mouth is. Both Project (RED) and the Save Darfur campaign have spent much more money on advertising themselves than on donating money to actual HIV/AIDS or humanitarian programmes in the field, information that is difficult to come upon, given the lack of transparency in the organizations. Like Beckerman, I don’t doubt that all of these campaigns were born out of good intentions, and I agree that good intentions are valuable. At the same time, it is not unreasonable to suggest that good intentions have often done more harm than good, as when statements by the Save Darfur campaign earlier this year advocated a number of propositions that would have compromised aid agencies’ abilities to carry out relief operations.

I would also like to take issue with Beckerman’s statement: “When you set yourself the task of capturing the essence of the continent in an issue, you can’t avoid AIDS, you can’t avoid disease, and you can’t avoid child soldiers.” I believe she does herself more justice when she writes that it’s silly to try to capture an entire continent in a single magazine issue, and I’m not sure what she means when she writes that the “essence” of Africa includes AIDS, disease, and child soldiers. AIDS is a global pandemic, not a specifically African one, and has a devastating effect on all poor countries, not just African poor countries. Again, child soldiers are not a uniquely African phenomenon, and can also be found in Burma, Sri Lanka, and Colombia, among other countries. The use of child soldiers by the LRA in Northern Uganda, which has led to the “invisible children” phenomenon, is certainly a terrible and serious issue, inextricably linked to the ongoing peace process in the country and worthy of in-depth analysis and discussion. At the same time, the recent precedent set by the Special Court for Sierra Leone in convicting child-soldier conscriptions has legal repercussions that will be central to ICC prosecutions in the DRC and Uganda, and is a clear sign of how a single African country can lay the framework for uncharted territory in international law, which is not without symbolic significance. I believe the issue is not so much avoiding certain topics like disease or child soldiers as it is about presenting them in a meaningful context. To say HIV/AIDS that is a problem in Africa ignores the fact that it is also a problem in the United States, where, according to a CDC study, black women are 21 times more likely than white women to contract HIV/AIDS. To say, simply, that child-soldiering is a problem in Africa ignores the legal victory set by the Special Court in Sierra Leone. To talk about capturing the essence of Africa is to ignore vast differences in politics, history, and culture, not to mention ethnicities and languages, that set each African country apart.

Margarita

Tue 26 Jun 2007 09:37 PM

The issue was a dud. What's with all the glamour shots of celebrities? The commentary on why we be grateful to Africa was a joke; a trite piece that barely had any original thought. At least the writer had the good sense of commending Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel." The only article worth reading was Sebastian Junger's story on the economic and political influence China has in the region. Christopher Hitchens disappointed with his essay on Tunisia. What about stories on the way political institutions are evolving? African countries' justice systems? Women's rights?
Disappointing issue all around.

davehazzan

Tue 26 Jun 2007 10:59 PM

I live in Korea and so I haven't seen the issue of Vanity Fair being discussed. However, I get an idea of what it contains. I too find it particularly grating to hear the "two schools of thought" about Africa. There is a more realistic third school of thought, that is shared by many Africans: that western policies have made the continent poorer.
A few examples:
USAID, as a subsidy to American farmers, only delivers American-grown crops as aid. The EU has a similar policy. The result is that African-grown crops rot in the field because they cannot compete with free American and European food. This US food is then often badly distributed and ends up on the black market, bypassing the people it is meant to feed. If USAID were instead focused on helping African farmers grow their own crops, many problems would be alleviated. (And not just hunger. Fewer farm families would give up their livelihoods and move to the slums.) It would also be much cheaper on the US taxpayer. A bill is currently before the Congress that would donate a portion of USAID to African farmers, but one wonders if it's enough.
Secondly, I wonder if the Vanity Fair issue takes to task the WTO, IMF and World Bank, and the disasters their policies have inflicted on the continent. The latter's role has been particularly miserable. In the words of Naomi Klein in The Nation, the World Bank lost its legitimacy long before the Wolfowitz scandal: it lost it when it imposed school fees on African children in return for aid; when it privatized water supplies, in return for aid; and when it supported the building of pipelines and oil refineries by oil companies that hardly have a need for charity, (Shell, BP), never mind their ties to massive human rights abuses, in Nigeria and elsewhere.
Thirdly and finally, I wonder if the Vanity Fair issue takes to task the west's oil addiction, and the role that it has played in savaging Africa. First, by destroying large portions of Gulf of Guinea in oil exploration and exports; and second by global warming, the effects of which everyone is or should be familiar with. Spreading desert, drying lakes, receding glaciers, declining snowpacks: all of these things affect Africa more than any other place on Earth. Even though they produce a minor fraction of the world's greenhouse gasses, it's Africans who are - pardon me - getting screwed. It's thought by many that the Darfur Crisis is the world's first conflict that owes itself to global warming. If we don't curb our oil habits, more is to come, despite George Clooney's best efforts.
I could go on. I feel like a bit of a ninny since I haven't read the issue at hand. It's entirely possible that all these concerns were addressed, and in detail, along with the photo shoots of Brangelina and the cast of Ocean's 13. But somehow, I doubt it.

christophercaen

Wed 27 Jun 2007 12:37 PM

I also read this issue with disappointment. One of the great problems with philanthropy right now is it is presenting in these monolithic terms: global (fill in the blank) and entire continents. People are losing the ability to feel that as individuals they can make a difference. And then they read about Gates/Bono/Buffet/Sachs and it seems even more impossible...where are the singular individual stories? Where are the paths that we as normal people can follow and feel we can make an impact? Surely not in this issue. No one person can "save Africa"...but if you can break that down into help a person/village/school it then becomes achievable...what a wasted opportunity.

NewsWire1971

Wed 27 Jun 2007 03:37 PM

Interesting topic. Growing up in the segregated (and poor) Deep South, I've seen the correlation between bigotry and charity, and I've since wondered if the same condescending attitude didn't carry over to the relationship between Western and post-colonial countries. I bet Hegel would have some interesting things to say on the topic.

This was a brave and unpopular thing for Beckerman to write, but it has resonance.

celebchefs

Wed 27 Jun 2007 05:39 PM

I was disappointed in the issue as well. Seems like saving Africa is the new religion, and a way for celebrities to show off their generosity. All I know is the debt relief plans Bono is pushing will fail miserably and not help Africa. Learning to build up the economy and fiscal resources will eventually help Africa pay off its debts.

Alex S.

Wed 27 Jun 2007 05:50 PM

As a working journalist who has both written about Africa and has friends who live there, I, too am gratified that Gal Beckerman wrote this.

I am a little disheartened by some of the more predictable comments — "echung's" remarks, I fear, are particularly unfair to Beckerman, and don't give her enough credit for resisting mainstream thinking.

The suggestion that the two-schools-of-thought line of thinking on how to lift Africa out of its seemingly bottomless descent into war, poverty and disease is simplistic and misleading is well-taken, though — if a little cruelly written, to cite a line Beckerman uses about Paul Theroux (a writer I deeply admite and, who, it must be said, views his old home continent with a decided lack of senitmentality or muddled thinking).

Centuries of colonialism play an important part, as "echung" notes.

For anyone interested in a further view — one that holds a lot of water, if you'll forgive the pun — check out the writings of UCLA anthropology/geography professor Jared Diamond, who has posed a tantalizing theory about how unlucky geography — few navigable rivers, in relation to the continent's land mass; less coastline than Europe, despite Europe's much smaller area in square miles; the sociological, religious, historical and political — not to mention phsyical — barrier of the Sahara Desert, etc.

Africa lost out in the geographical lottery, in other words, and that, as much as anything, explains its economic and social difficulties today.

Apathy in the West, coupled with poor governance, is hardly going to help. The difference, of course, is that both apathy and poor governance are problems that can be solved; geography, alas, is not.

ligaya

Thu 28 Jun 2007 06:40 PM

Thoughtful article & comments. Are these discussions being conducted with the real, on-the-ground Africans you feel are being left out of the 'poverty first' discussions? Are there any Africans posting here? And your opinions - are they well known to the majority of people living in the U.S.? At least now and for the past couple of years, people have heard of Darfur, child soldiers, malaria, aids, etc. Maybe you would have wanted our ordinary citizens to wait until the right theory was in place.
Are you activists a well as academics, writers, etc.? Do you have a plan and is there a timeline to put your plans into action so that Africans can help theselves - assuming, or course, that the plan and timeline are authored by those Africans instead of Westerners?

Reality, that inconvenient entity, is so messy. How do you get so many people all over the world to accomplish the plan? Assuming they've agreed to it. How to get things started at the same time, and once started, no lagging behind? See, I'm having trouble envisioning a nice and neat plan that doesn't run akilter in reality.
And agreed, there are many flaws and faults in the Vanity Fair issue. But I know, not being naive, the author wasn't seriously placing his expectations on straw magazine VF. The author's vision would have to be in something like Mother Jones or something like the old Guardian on which the left & progressives relied.
And speaking of messy reality, would it be better for mainstream magazines not to do something similar to VF, and just wait until someone comes up with THE RIGHT PLAN? Also, ordinary people would have to wait to take action until it's a perfect act - hope their desire doesn't wane.But what do I know? I actually found a number of articles informative, maybe you're all experts in this field and know everything.

gamoonbat

Fri 29 Jun 2007 08:57 PM

I was steered here by favorable mention of this review elsewhere. I enjoyed the read and agree with most of what you said. I actually found Hitchens piece enjoyable, particularly his palpable enthusiasm for Tunisian booze. You mentioned most of the low points and high points of the issue. I would have thought, however, that you would make particular mention of Tina Brown's revelation of Princess Diana's last lost love and memoir on her great service in the cause of banning landmines.

sheliar

Fri 29 Jun 2007 11:56 PM

I write in reference to the article this week by Gal Beckerman “The Obscured Continent.”

As far as the tone of Vanity Fair’s Africa issue is concerned, I agree with Beckerman that it is a pity that there isn’t an unknown African on the cover, but neither would the format allow for an unknown American or Canadian.

So we are faced with a choice: reject the opportunity to use our current Western cultural establishments to help raise awareness of Africa, or to use them to report positively on Africa, an attitude that is practically non-existent in the US entertainment and news media.
Beckerman suggests that the “Lazarus Effect” photo essay (which showed Africans before and after being put on AIDS treatment) was “self-congratulatingly titled.”

The Lazarus Effect is a commonly used term in AIDS circles to describe some remarkable modern treatments, such as Anti-Retro Virals (ARVs) which see a man, woman or child ravaged by AIDS brought back from the brink of death, to health and to life, following only 2-3 months on this remarkable medication . Medication – incidentally – which is readily available in corner pharmacies in the West but denied to Africans because they are too poor.

A matter of guilt? No. Justice? Yes.

The same thinking can be applied to the idea of aid to Africa . For example, what is better–to do nothing to help provide the 40-cent AIDS treatment that can prevent 5,800 deaths a day? Or to do what we can, while systemic issues are worked on by the African leaders, community activists and local heroes such as those portrayed in the African issue – people not normally represented in Vanity Fair.

It has been recognized among the “aid community” for many years that the combined efforts of Africans and non-Africans are required to help the continent. Increasingly, aid – and I include debt cancellation here – from the West is conditional upon accountability from Africa .

The idea that it’s an ‘either/or’ situation is a simplistic view and a diminishing hangover from years of badly managed aid, accompanied by little or no demands for accountability or transparency. DATA, the lobbying organization that Bono and Bobby Shriver established 10 years ago was so called not just for the acronym’s meaning of Debt, AIDS, Trade – Africa but the flip representation of Democracy, Accountability, Transparency – Africa.

Vanity Fair’s Africa issue is a snapshot; it’s a mechanism for helping to tell part of one continent’s story to another.

Sincerely,

Sheila Roche
Head of Communications
(RED)

ligaya

Sat 30 Jun 2007 02:44 AM

Thank you, Sheila RocheHead (RED). Thanks for articulating my frustration with what seems like an academic approach devoid of any action. I would think these philosopers would be familiar with dialectics - not either/or indeed. How about everything/both/and? And while analyzing the situation, could they also please take some action? Even if it's just sending in a check to UNICEF/UNHCR? Talk is easy - I want them to walk the walk and back up their talk.

I've lived in developing countries. If I or my child were literally starving and dying of thirst or from lack of medicine, I would gladly accept food/water/medicine provided by Bono and the celebrities backing Not on Our Watch. I wouldn't care about rooting out corruption first, and establishing a people's democracy. I'd care about that later, after my family had enough food, water, and medicines to survive.