City Journal's Hearts of Darkness Versus My Bono Article

I wrote an article critical of Bono's visit to the Claremont McKenna several months ago. The title of my piece was "Bono: Friend of Poverty, not the Poor."

Michael Knox Beran makes the case much more eloquently than I ever did in today's issue of City Journal. (It sure is nice to find out that you aren't alone in fighting against a ridiculous policy of foreign aid.) The subtitle of the piece is "trendy paternalism is keeping Africa in chains."

The entire piece is worth reading, especially the comparisons between the Bonos of the world and Kurtz, the protagonist of Heart of Darkness. The similarities are very disturbing indeed.

My favorite lines (and the most hopeful) of the entire piece are reproduced here.

Kenyan economist James Shikwati agrees that handouts thwart the emergence of a culture of self-reliant problem solving and that they breed corruption to boot. When a drought afflicts Kenya, he says, Kenyan politicians “reflexively cry out for more help.” Their calls reach the United Nations World Food Program, a “massive agency of apparatchiks who are in the absurd situation of, on the one hand, being dedicated to the fight against hunger while, on the other hand, being faced with unemployment were hunger actually eliminated.”

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.”

Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina maintains that the relentless focus of the Africrats on the image of the pitiable, childish African distorts Africans’ idea of themselves and their potential. “There must be a change in mentality,” agrees Kenya’s Shikwati. “We have to stop perceiving ourselves as beggars.”

Yes!

I have no doubt that history will judge us very harshly for all the experiments we have sanctioned on the African peoples -- from the powe(red) to ethical chocolate and everything in between -- in much the same way history judges the progressives who stole Native American children from their families in the hopes of Christianizing them.

I only pray that we move away from this social(ist) entrepreneurship garbage once and for all and begin to see our friends in Africa (and elsewhere) as potential partners, not souls in need of secular salvation.