Announced today, December 10
SAIH – The Norwegian Students and Academics International Assistance Fund
announced the winners of two international awards: the Rusty Radiator Award for the most damaging fundraising video and the Golden Radiator Award for the most creative fundraising video. Much media attention and more than two million clicks on the satirical video “Radi-Aid: Africa for Norway” released a year ago have encouraged SAIH to take new actions. The awards were accompanied by a new video clip “Let’s save Africa! – gone wrong”, in which the young black Michael shows us common patterns in fundraising. He makes Western expectations his profession: “Every time these filmmakers come to us in Africa, I’m the first person they call. I’m incredibly talented. Wait – this is sad Africa.”

The short film successfully problematizes in a satirical way how charity commercials are shot. From reports of filmmakers who have been involved in such shoots, we know how people are literally trained to look sad, women have to take off their jewelry for the shoot, or children have to exchange their school uniforms for dirty rags – sometimes despite the objections and incomprehension of those photographed. It does not make the situation any better that many aid organizations have long since switched to shooting their commercials and posters in Europe and casting Black people and People of Color here for their purposes.

Thanks to the Radiator Awards, the discussion about problematic donation advertising in the run-up to Christmas has also made it into Germany’s leading media. On “Let’s save Africa! – gone wrong”, for example, the Süddeutsche Zeitung has published an article. The racism researcher cited in it, Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard, has her say in a lengthy interview on Deutschlandradio Kultur and comments on the clip as follows:

“On the one hand, this clip is a European self-criticism, and of course I welcome that. I also think that satire is a very effective means of showing how, in this case, certain concepts of oneself, i.e. white Europe, and of the supposed others are constructed. So to show a little bit the artificiality of the construction and the process. So this clip breaks with our usual ways of seeing and turns them fictional.”

Similar to the criticism of “Radi-Aid: Africa for Norway” by us and others from last year, Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard’s enthusiasm about the campaign is, however, also limited. With Adorno, she argues that there is “no right life in the wrong.” Like Radi-Aid, SAIH’s new activities remain rooted in the classic discourse of development. While the portrayal of people and societies from the Global South is questioned, the fact that it is precisely these people and societies that are in need of development, that need to change – rather than the interplay of the wealth of some and the poverty of many – is not. It would have been welcome if SAIH had limited itself to the Rusty Radiator Award; however, by having a Golden Radiator Award for positive examples of fundraising advertising of classic aid projects, it is clear that the goal is not to criticize “development aid” per se, but merely to make it less stereotypical.

The four nominated films are indeed all creative and for the most part (the clip from Plan stands out as a problematic exception), however, break with some common narrative patterns. However, all four have key points in common:

1. The Global South is portrayed as deficient and “underdeveloped” (no sanitation, no clean water, no gender equity, no accessible credit systems), which at the same time makes the Global North appear as a desirable norm. The racist hierarchy that SAIH seeks to critique on the level of imagery is thereby perpetuated on the level of content.

2. This is even reinforced by the fact that in all clips it is made clear that the solutions to “development problems” in the Global South come from the Global North (e.g. donations for projects or microcredits, sponsorships). People in the Global South are shown – in contrast to conventional donation advertising – as subjects who (supposedly) speak for themselves. People from the Global North, on the other hand, are addressed as people who can speak not only for themselves but also for others.

3. The clips literally ask us to do this and to intervene helpfully. Not a single one of the clips calls for political action through which issues of power are clearly named and structures are to be changed. Thus, the subtext of the videos remains the same as that of the criticized Rusty Radiator Award videos.

4. Ultimately, therefore, development cooperation also appears in all the clips as a quasi-natural response and the only sensible way to change the world.

At first glance, the first of WaterAid’s Golden Radiator Award-nominated clips stands out. It comes without the representation of Black people and People of Color. It addresses the lack of sanitation in the Global South and its consequences for women’s safety, among other things. The jury commented on their selection as follows:

“Wateraid turns to creativity rather than pity, which is a good way for bringing the message across. The video is very atmospheric and tense. […] Putting the story in a European setting, you feel that this regards you. Wateraid addresses the problem as a universal challenge in the terms that the needs for sanitation regards us all, along with that the need of safety.”

The fact that a white middle-class woman steps out of her suburban row house at night in search of a quiet place to go to the toilet is implausible and is not intended to address the fact that we also have people without access to sanitary facilities (homeless people, for example) and thus illustrate “sanitation regards us all”; rather, the clip is intended to promote empathy for poor people in the Global South so that viewers will donate money to WaterAid. WaterAid, on the other hand, is a classic “aid organization” whose work follows the patterns described above.

SAIH’s actions fool us into thinking that it is easy to do non-racist fundraising in a field of work as deeply steeped in racism as development cooperation – you just have to be creative. Anja Bakken Riise, SAIH board member, takes a clear stance: “We, as a development organization, are not opposed to development aid.” Accordingly, SAIH materials consistently refer to stereotypes rather than racism. However, the focus on stereotypes remains on an individual level and does not take into account the structural level. In her lecture “The Danger of a Single Story”which is often used in the development education scene, for example, to criticize the one-sided portrayal of Africa in Germany, Chimamanda Adichie says: “[T]he problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” Many people conclude from Adichie’s speech that yes, we all have stereotypes of everything and everyone. This goes so far that they also cite “The danger of a single story” to point out that black people are also racist towards white people. After all, he said, there are stereotypes against whites. At a later point, Adichie clearly states: “It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. When focusing on stereotypes, it can easily happen that the connection of images and prejudices with structural and (global) societal issues of power and resources is hidden. When stereotypes, rather than colonial, racist structures are made the problem, as in the Rusty/Golden Radiator Award, the elemental link between racism and the concept of development is denuded. The violence of the visual language is criticized, but the violent structures behind it remain unquestioned normality. SAIH gives us tips on their site on how fundraising could be done better, not how to address injustice in the world. For this, they refer to a checklist by Linda Raftree, one of the judges of the Rusty/Golden Radiator Awards. However, in order to question and address global power relations, we find Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti’s HEADSUP checklist significantly more useful because it thinks through historically evolved structures and problematizes non-political recommendations for action.

From our experience in pedagogical and advisory work with development policy organizations, it is not enough to concentrate only on the level of visual language in processes of change critical of racism. In our workshops, NGO staff repeatedly note how much the way they present themselves in publicity materials and fundraising is embedded in their own thought patterns and their (almost invariably very privileged) location in social and global power relations. Further findings are that racist portrayals are often not so far removed from the guiding principles and concepts with which the organizations work and that in their practical project and partnership work the much-vaunted “partnership at eye level” is usually only a rhetorical means of concealing the actual power relations. Our experience has been that change and the reduction of racism in work structures is quite possible. But they are the result of long-lasting processes in which organizations have to question themselves holistically and which cannot be achieved by small changes on the image level. SAIH’s initiative to spur more creative fundraising can certainly go some way toward problematizing and reducing racism in fundraising. The danger remains, however, that cosmetic repairs at the level of images and language lead to sweeping the underlying power relations within DC under the carpet and thus stabilizing them.

Current advertising campaigns such as that of Welthungerhilfe show that racist donation advertisements continue to be posted en masse in the German public sphere. In line with its recent “Powered by YOU” campaigns, Welthungerhilfe is continuing its poster policy of recent years, suggesting that people in the Global South would be nothing, would have nothing, could do nothing without our help. But the criticism, which in our opinion is very justified, is not absent. On the White Charity page (see above), there is an adbust linked that pointedly verbalizes the process of “turning people into objects” with the quote “Our Donation Object of the Month 2013.” We also received a copy of a public email last week from [edmc id=”1217″]Günther Reibstein[/edmc] to VENRO and the DZI, in which he complains about the current poster advertising of Welthungerhilfe and demands: “With this email I therefore submit a formal complaint and ask you to withdraw the DZI donation seal from Welthungerhilfe and to initiate proceedings within VENRO for violation of the VENRO Code of Conduct.

How successful this intervention will be remains to be seen. The open letter from Black organizations in Germany, which was written to VENRO and the DZI one and a half years ago, has remained without any significant consequences until today. All three requirements – 1. spelling out the vaguely worded guidelines and codes, 2. the inclusion of Black perspectives, perspectives of color, and perspectives from the Global South in the further development of the guidelines; and 3. the establishment of an independent arbitration board for complaints against racist developmental billboard advertising – has not been rudely complied with. Instead, VENRO and the DZI have in the meantime issued the publication “Ethics in Donation Mailings“: with cosmetic recommendations for action that fall far short and in some cases invite discrimination: in short, without taking the perspectives from the open letter seriously.

The question the letter raises – who should be represented on a possible arbitration panel to judge whether fundraising solicitations are discriminatory – again brings us full circle to SAIH’s awards that are being offered. Beyond the question of whether it makes sense to award a best practice prize in this context, the question arises whether SAIH is the right address for this at all. As avowed development NGOs, they are biased and looking beyond development cooperation is hardly to be expected due to their institutional self-interest. A possible clip from the Colonialism Reparation alliance, would probably never make it into the jury’s selection.