The invisible aid workers

In this blog, RNW’s Bram Posthumus explores why local aid workers are overlooked by the Western media.

It’s got to be dramatic: A makeshift refugee camp, where people huddle under the threadbare paper roofs of their makeshift huts. A desert wind is blowing. 

Or:
An overcrowded house in a village or town; the people have fled to avoid being shot. Outside, the rain is beating down the muddy streets.

At all times, have the camera zoom in on the children, preferably near death and crying.
Then fade in the next image. Here’s the aid worker, preferably white. She will have the list ready of what is needed – desperately, of course – and will explain the political/social/”ethnic” backdrop to the problem in a few choice non-threatening phrases.
Television reporting on disasters, such as the current famine in Somalia, pretty much universally follows this template. It’s a shallowness I can live with; this is, after all, wall-to-wall 24/7 news television.
Good soundbite
But I want to focus on one group of emergency aid workers that is systematically kept out of this picture. When, for instance, the Ivorian crisis spun out of control earlier this year and people started fleeing into neighbouring Liberia, the first line of emergency aid did not come from a Western NGO with a good soundbite – but from Liberians. In Buutuo, right on the Liberian/Ivorian border, the deputy mayor told me how she took refugees in her house because “they were sleeping on the streets. And when we were having similar problems here, they helped us”.
In Somalia today, there are numerous reports of missing food aid. Stolen…again. Former said worker and author Michael Maren recorded the same large-scale theft almost twenty years earlier when “the world” was supposedly feeding the country. Compare and contrast with this quote: ‘We’re Somalis, we know the situation.’ That was the reply I got from a Somali woman living in the Netherlands, Sagal Gelle. I met her at a fundraising event in The Hague and I had asked her how she could be sure that her aid would get to the people who needed it. ‘No cheating is possible, I speak the language,’ someone else said. She visits an area in Somalia that the world’s media have declared “inaccessible”. Not for our Somali friend – but then again: she does not work for a foreign aid agency. Therefore – you don’t know she exists.
Wrong image
These are the invisible aid workers. And their invisibility ties in with a much more fundamental problem: a persistent denial of agency. As far as the 24/7 global media are concerned Africans are not the masters of their own destiny – they need help and guidance from elsewhere. When the Arab Spring began, commentators started to ask whether the events in Tunisia and Egypt were going to “inspire” Africans south of the Sahara to follow suit. Seriously: as if they were going to sit there and obediently wait until someone gave them the signal for their own revolutions.
This kind of reporting is pervasive. It suggests that societies on the African continent do not develop of their own accord. It also reinforces the image among the media consumers in the world that something only gets done when non-Africans are involved. And that is what turns a wrong image into a pernicious one. Here’s a reminder: in most African nations, independence happened more than 50 years ago. It’s about time the world’s media caught up.