the world does not need any more white saviours

Last Thursday, Tottenham MP David Lammy spoke out after an photographs of documentary filmmaker and celebrity Stacey Dooley hugging a young Ugandan child emerged as part of Comic Relief’s lead up to Red Nose Day. Dooley also published several Instagram posts depicting her smiling with the young, nameless Ugandan children, captioning one of them with ‘OB. SESSSSSSSSSSED 💔’. Lammy criticised the photos as representing an image of ‘people who are impoverished, who need white celebrities’- a white saviour.

Yet Lammy’s denunciation of what he called ‘tired and unhelpful stereotypes’ on Twitter has garnered harsh criticism from the media and celebrities alike, with Stacey Dooley herself responding ‘is the issue with me being white? (sic).. because if that’s the case, you could always go over there and try raise awareness?’. Is Dooley missing the point? As Lammy later reiterated, ‘my problem with British celebrities being flown out by Comic Relief to make these films is that it sends a distorted image of Africa which perpetuates an old idea from the colonial era’. As the Kenyan-born comedian Njambi McGrath helpfully put it, ‘the only time white people are interested in people from Africa is when we are orphaned, when we are dying of disease or dying of famine’ and that ‘Africa don’t give a s**t about PR’.

Comic Relief, and other aid organisations, fail to mention that Africa doesn’t just consist of orphaned children or people suffering with disease, but that there is a growing middle class. It is expected to be the fastest urbanising region from 2020 to 2050, with real income per person jumping by 30 percent over the last decade. While conflict zones and structural problems still plague the continent, its promise is not being shown in popular media in the West, but still stuck in the 1980s mindset of ‘Do they even know it’s Christmas?’.

Celebrity activism has long been part of British and American culture, from Live Aid championed by Bob Geldof in the mid-1980s to George Clooney and Ryan Gosling denouncing suffering in Darfur with branded t-shirts in the late 2000s. As Alex De Waal put it, a ‘celebrity playing a humanitarian role […], acts as a bridge between a (Western) audience and a faraway tragedy’. This can be a positive thing, but bringing awareness does not always translate into addressing the roots of inequality and poverty. Bono’s INSPI(RED) t-shirts, echoing the all too familiar ones we have been sold since Comic Relief’s inception, can make even a white middle-class person feel like they are saving Africa from AIDS.

Comic Relief addressed this very issue almost a year to the day, after Lammy criticised them for portraying Africa as poverty-stricken victims. The CEO of Comic Relief, Liz Warner, announced the charity would start using ‘Africans’ as their storytellers, rather than celebrities. However, they quickly came under fire shortly after, as Ed Sheeran’s appeal for children in Liberia won the ‘most offensive’ aid campaign at the Radi-Aid awards, an organisation that is critical of the archaic way of providing aid to Africa. Stacey Dooley’s recent Instagram posts, however, may show that Comic Relief is taking longer to stick to its word, and continues to fall back on the easiness of using celebrities to raise awareness.

The ‘white-saviour’ complex has been around for years and echoes post-colonialist thought. The portrayal of the African continent as a place plagued with disease and helpless orphans who need help from the West has been consistent. Comic Relief in particular, which successfully raises millions of pounds, reaches viewing audiences all over the UK. It has historically been an organisation that has thrived on celebrity activism, with the likes of David Tennant and James Corden providing original pieces of content to raise money. Their marketing has been widespread, seen in the thousands of people wearing the trademark red nose in schools and workplaces across the UK, with this, spreading the notion of ‘white saviours’, under the disguise of ‘doing your bit’ for a good cause.

Comic Relief helps to perpetuate the post-colonialist stereotypes of white supremacy when we are moving into a time where grassroots organisations have been proven to be more in touch with the locality of problems. Is Stacey Dooley personally to blame? As De Waal states on the Darfur PR activity ‘the biggest peril for the movie star on the famine stage comes the lure of playing the hero’, Dooley accepted an opportunity to do some charity work in Uganda, but her actions triggered a controversial racial conversation that makes British society uncomfortable. Hopefully this mild PR nightmare for Comic Relief may push them in the direction of working with organisations on the ground, and lay off the poverty porn they have been so used to promoting since their inception. And to remember that Africa is a continent, not a country.