The Pervasiveness of Poverty Porn in the Portrayal of Africa

Do you know the real Africa?

For decades; missionaries, aid workers, and other producers of poverty porn have been unethically documenting the struggles of developing and struggling countries. That footage is then used for awareness purposes and aid generation.

Underprivileged people, and previously subjugated people are put in a position where they have to perform their struggles for the cameras before any help graced their doorsteps. And despite the endless coverage, many of the situations never seem to improve. Even today; pictures, videos, and articles appear in square social media posts in our timelines.

We must ask ourselves at what point it become a complete norm to film and post the suffering of stricken people? At what point did it become a part of the world’s aid campaign? At what point did seeing children starve to death and get blown into pieces become the most dominating way of seeking help?

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What is Poverty Porn?

Have you ever seen pictures, videos, and articles about children, women and men dressed in tattered clothing, showing visible signs of hunger, fatigue and suffering on a newspaper page or any other distributors of media where they ask for donations? if yes, congratulations! you have consumed poverty porn. The prize? fleeting sympathy that disappeared the minute you scrolled past it, or in the past, turned off the tv or closed the newspaper.

In short, poverty porn is any media that is used exploitatively in humanitarian work in an effort to gain sympathy or support.

The term immediately conjures a negative connotation in your mind, doesn’t it? If you’re wondering why, its because it became a way of describing unethical way of portraying those living in poverty, suffering, and injustice.

The emergence of poverty porn, a term that started circulating humanitarian discussion somewhere in the mid 1980s, has completely changed how we interact with people living with poverty and other forms of suffering.

The issue isn’t solely poverty porn, it's also it's perpetrators and the purpose it serves in the long run. When one records a video of children in abject poverty, and the caption is related only to the poverty, the audience is blinded. They no longer see that child, just the poverty surrounding them. And that video is used as justification for foreign influence, the same way the British dehumanised colonies all over the world before using propaganda to justify it's colonialism. There are multinationals and governments all over the world who directly benefit from these representations of struggling communities. We must ask ourselves why despite producing 2/3 of the world’s cocoa, West Africa remains underdeveloped whilst corporations like Mars, Hershey’s and Nestle have made immeasurable profit from those cocoa beans.

Ultimately, poverty porn is conveyed in our media and media is an opioid of its own. It shapes our perception and at times, our central belief and thoughts about a particular place or person comes from the media we consume about them. Media control is why people speak about entire community in general terms, homogenising entire diverse peoples. In Noam Chomsky’s ‘Media Control,’ we learn that Media control is how the Wilson administration, through the Creel Commission turned a ‘pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mongering population.’

The continual viewing of these images and videos desensitises people to suffering. In a world where people thinking of the self more than the collective, it has become easy to scroll past videos of starving children whilst you have your breakfast. In an increasingly visual society, this constant consumption of visual information comes with repercussions.

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The Impacts of Poverty Porn

1. The Creation of an Unauthentic Voice

In Africa, the dominating narrative is the corruption, the poverty, and the suffering. And poverty porn plays a huge and continuous role in propagating this narrative. The pain, suffering, and problems of Africans have been used to create a singular voice for Africans and view of Africans. This is done through endless selective reporting where the only news coming out of Africa is negative, and positive news is overlooked or scarce.

In her Ted Talk ‘The Danger of a Single Story,’ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says:

“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

Africa, through colonialism, embargoes, and foreign interference was denied the opportunity to speak for itself. Competent and passionate leaders were killed and couped, and in their place, incompetent puppet leaders who sell out their own people to live in a mansion surrounded by slums. Resources are unfairly distributed, and treasures and sources of livelihood are looted by those who can.

In his essay ‘Travelling White,’ Achebe says:

“My own theory is that he needed to hear Africa speak for itself after a lifetime of hearing Africa spoken about by others.”

The result of that systemic oppression was abject poverty, one that is now filmed, photographed, and leveraged for sympathy and aid, aid that somehow never reached it's intended.

Consider an analogy; If I tell the story of a Romanian person through curated pictures, videos and articles, I end up creating a voice for Romanians; and not an authentic voice, but rather a filtered voice that reflects only what I have to say about Romania.

The question becomes, is this Romania’s voice? Or an unauthentic voice?

2. The Narrowing of the ‘Why’ Lens.

Poverty porn creates a scenario where people see that certain communities are suffering, in need of help, and yet, reasons, defining and root causing reasons of these issues are left unaddressed. Help, aid, and justice implies understanding the cause, the causer, and providing solution and support. But how often do articles about the poverty of Africans confront the big issues? How often do they do complete and honest research and bring to light that despite not lacking in resources, these countries still do not the infrastructure to sustain themselves?

Humanitarian organisations such as UNICEF, that have the resources and capabilities to educate, and make people aware of the injustices occurring in these countries use photos and videos of vulnerable children and adults in a pitiful and sensationalised manner.

If African countries are battling disease and poverty, why is it so? If despite having the raw materials for half the world products, Africa remains poor, why is it so?

The why factor seems like an impossible feat.

3. The saviour, his damned and damsel

Missionary workers, and other volunteers enter underprivileged communities with a pre-existing narrative on who the people they’re saving, not helping, are. They’re not there to understand and support grieving mothers who’ve lost their children to hunger. Neither are they here to empathise with the lost orphans whose parents were killed by government backed militias. They’re here to save pitiful people who need their money, their guidance, and their religions. Missionary work has been around for quite some time now, and apart from using their religion to misinform, disarm, and humiliate trusting communities, what does it really have to show in terms of practical success? Can missionary workers, who exist till today, say with a certainty that they’re providing unbiased and non-condescending help to these communities?

The relationship this dynamic creates; he that needs to be saved, and he that does the saving is one of dire consequences. It's fundamentally unbalanced and these volunteers see these brave communities who survive despite all this , people who’ve come up with creative changes that sustains their living, as nothing but poor, poverty-stricken people. A singular dimension exists here; one that shapes the sort of help these volunteers provide.

This dynamic gives the saviour a camera, one used to take pictures and videos of people in vulnerable states, which are then used to create a narrative about them, a misguided, dishonest and exploitative one. One that takes autonomy, agency, and ability away from these communities.

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Put together, these three effects of poverty porn give its producers the power to control the narrative about certain communities. The misrepresentation it creates undermines and overlooks all the core problems underprivileged communities face whilst infantilising its people and leaders.

The big question therefore becomes; is that not propaganda?

If deprived of the microphone and spoken for misleadingly, is that not propaganda? For the definition of propaganda is information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view.

Has skewed information collected by reporters and photographs with agendas not been used to create an unauthentic and singular dominating voice about Africans? One that’s so pervasive that it stands tall in an age where misinformation can be easily disproved?

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Policy Over Aid

Aid is necessary in alleviating and softening the blow in humanitarian crises. But it is a short term solution, one that is naught in addressing the deeper claws of poverty and inequality. To truly bring Africa to a level matching its resources, the discussion needs to shift from aid that encourages helplessness to policies that drive change, that serve accountability. This is a man made, and just as man made it, it can be undone.

A good example of this is Rwanda’s National Export Strategy (NES II) which aims to increase economic growth and prosperity and create higher quality of life for Rwandans.

These policies cannot be one-size-fits-all, it has to be tailored, and reflect the different voices and needs of Africans.

How to raise awareness ethically

You may be asking yourself, ‘if one can’t use photos and videos of suffering people to leverage awareness; how are these communities supposed to receive aid?’

Confronting the perpetrators, empowering communities to speak for themselves, accountability and adopting policy over aid is how someone with the right intentions raises awareness.

If the awareness you’re raising does not feature explicitly which persons, organisations and governments are behind this, then dishonesty is the tool you wield best. If you’re reporting on how plastic pollution is hindering progress, are you mentioning that Coca Cola, Unilever, Pepsi and Nestlé are purposely using countries like Nigeria as their dumping grounds? Are you mentioning the sellout leaders who own helicopters whilst their people struggle to llive day to day? Let the awareness you’re doing reflect that Africa doesn’t need handouts, Africa needs her space and resources to be left for her. Africa needs her perpetrators to pay for its crimes.

All three are steps that international community is struggling with and Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Somalia, Iraq and other countless countries are living proof of it. There’s a system in place to encourage their continued exploitation and prevent the hegemony from taking accountability.

No one knows their plight better than them, and the only voices that deserve hearing are those of the afflicted. To quote Achebe, let Africa speak for itself after a lifetime of hearing Africa spoken about by others.

And a more important conclusion, Africa has multiple voices. Africa is not a country. Africa is not a monolith.