Die Afrikraten
Paternalism was supposed to be finished. The belief that grown men and women are childlike creatures who can thrive in the world only if they submit to the guardianship of benevolent mandarins underlay more than a century’s worth of welfare-state social policy (…) [Jeffrey] Sachs is not the only sahib who invites us to view Africa through the prism of childhood. In 2004, Prince Harry of England visited Lesotho, a small, landlocked country in southern Africa, to befriend children with AIDS; in front of cameras, the prince gave a four-year-old boy a pair of Wellington boots and cradled a six-month-old girl in his arms. When Madonna traveled to Malawi in 2006, dripping dollars and sentiment, her publicist spoke candidly of her paternalist (or maternalist) aspirations: “She’s kind of adopting an entire country of children.”
Rotimi Sankore, a journalist who has written widely on Africa, points out that the Africrats’ favorite poster child is “a skeletal looking two- or three-year-old brown-skinned girl in a dirty torn dress, too weak to chase off dozens of flies settling on her wasted and diseased body, her big round eyes pleading for help.” Sankore calls such images “development pornography.” The “subliminal message, unintended or not,” he argues, “is that people in the developing world require indefinite and increasing amounts of help and that without aid charities and donor support, these poor incapable people in Africa or Asia will soon be extinct through disease and starvation.”
Michael Know Beran zeigt im City Journal das ganze Elend westlicher Gutmenschen im Umgang mit Afrika auf. Warum dieser Paternalismus nicht ausstirbt? Ganz einfach:
Paternalism persists as a psychology precisely because it satisfies the cravings of vanity in a way that real reform doesn’t. (Where people have learned to save themselves, they do not need saviors.)
Passend dazu heisst es im Gastkommentar eines südafrikanischen Studenten beim African Executive:
Development is not something that professionals dream up and deliver to poor people. It must not define poor people as objects of charity. People are assets and must be helped to become active participants in moving out of poverty. The poor must be engaged in the quest to solve their problems.
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Siehe auch:
- White man’s burden reloaded, 2. Dezember 2007,
- Popstars mit Helfersyndrom, 14. Juli 2007,
- Afrika hat keine ausländische Hilfe nötig, 9. Juni 2007,
- “Der hält uns wohl für blöde”, 5. Juni 2007,
- Globalisierung, Neokolonialismus und das Übel Afrikas, 29. Mai 2007,
- James Shikwati: “Man muss die ausländische Entwicklungshilfe einstellen”, 14. April 2007,
- “Free markets are the only way for people to preserve their dignity”
- Korruption und Antikorruption, 7. November 2006,
- Wenn Geld arm macht, 9. Oktober 2006.