photos

I recently ducked into an exhibit of photos that a woman had put together after a trip to a hospital in Rwanda. The pictures were mostly of very thin Rwandans lying in hospital beds with different tubes or bandages attached. The commentary on the photos described the impoverished condition of the people, the high level of HIV, and the womans struggle between feeling the need to stay and help, and the need to take her ailing son back home to the United States where he could see a proper doctor. Also prevalent in the commentary was the genocide that happened 13 years ago.

I was with some close friends of mine and one of them asked the other - What is the point of showing those pictures? Now for some of you that might seem like a strange question. Just a few short years ago I would have thought the exhibit a wonderful brave and courageous thing - I would have donated a few dollars to whatever non-profit the artist had worked with, patted myself on the back, and left feeling great about my awareness of the poor people in Africa. But lets take another look. What has led to the extent of poverty and war in this small central African nation? Lets start with colonization, first by the Germans and then the Belgiums. Both groups took what had been some loosely defined groups, divided more by occupation and power, and racialized them. They distributed identity cards to make clear who the Hutu were, and who the Tutsi were. They then used the Tutsi (who comprised around 15% of the population) as their slave masters essentially, forcing them to force labor on the Hutu in order to provide the resources demanded by the Europeans. This, of course, did not make the Hutu and the Tutsi best of friends. Indeed it created a lot of anger, so when independence came in the 1960s, and the Hutu majority gained political power, there was a lot of bloodshed. The poverty created by colonialism, and growing global capitalism have forced these two groups to share, or fight over increasingly scarce resources. Not only did we set the stage for genocide, we probably provided the weapons. in 2005 82% of weapons were manufactured in five industrialized countries including the United States, Germany, and France. Over two thirds of the worlds weapons were bought by those living in Africa, Latin America, or Asia. Further more, when looking at those pictures, we not only fail to see our historical and present day contribution to the photo, we have an unspoken tendency to either blame the person in the photo or to see them as only a victim, waiting to be saved by white hands, or money. Both of these lines of thought are founded in white supremacy.
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Essentially this is all to say that we go and look at pictures of Africans on hospital beds, we give money, money that was at one point stolen from those same Africans, we feel pretty good about ourselves, and we shake our heads thinking "wow, those Africans sure are violent, they just can't seem to get it together, good thing we are there to help." And we go on our merry way. I am sure the woman who created the exhibit had the best of intentions, as did many people who saw the exhibit and dropped some cash, or wrote a check. But we are only returning stolen money, maintaining our position of power and control, deciding who should be saved when from the nightmare we created.