<http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/on-the-genre-of-raising-awareness-about-someone-elses-suffering/>http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/on-the-genre-of-raising-awareness-about-someone-elses-suffering/
" 1. Binyavanga Wainaina's <http://www.granta.com/Archive/92/How-to-Write-about-Africa/Page-1>"How to Write About Africa." You've probably read it already – and if you haven't, get on that – but I need to get that out of the way first. It's the entrance to any serious conversation, the prerequisite. Not just because he's right, but because it's funny. And its funny because it comes from a place of exhaustion, of total and complete exasperated frustration. That's important, because it helps you understand how omnipresent this shit is, what an unstoppable energizer bunny of neverendingness it is. Humor isn't enough, is never enough – after all, how can you satirize people who satirize themselves? – but the recourse to it tellingly reflects an experience that you need to come to terms with, the experience of living in the world created by such discourse. As he wrote in a <http://www.bidoun.org/magazine/21-bazaar-ii/how-to-write-about-africa-ii-the-revenge-by-binyavanga-wainaina/>reflective<http://www.bidoun.org/magazine/21-bazaar-ii/how-to-write-about-africa-ii-the-revenge-by-binyavanga-wainaina/> essay, later:
"How to Write about Africa" grew out of an email. In a fit of anger, maybe even low blood sugar it runs in the family I spent a few hours one night at my graduate student flat in Norwich, England, writing to the editor of Granta. I was responding to its "Africa" issue, which was populated by every literary bogeyman that any African has ever known, a sort of "Greatest Hits of Hearts of Fuckedness." It wasn't the grimness that got to me, it was the stupidity. There was nothing new, no insight, but lots of "reportage" Oh, gosh, wow, look, golly ooo as if Africa and Africans were not part of the conversation, were not indeed living in England across the road from the Granta office. No, we were "over there," where brave people in khaki could come and bear witness. Fuck that. So I wrote a long truly long rambling email to the editor.
3. Alex De Waal's Famine Crimes. It's a <http://www.amazon.com/Famine-Crimes-Politics-Disaster-Industry/dp/0253211581>book worth reading, but the basic argument is also penetratingly simple: by underminging popular and international expectations of government accountability, anti-famine charities actually make famines more likely and more deadly. In countries where elites pay a political cost for allowing famines to happen – and famine are always a function of elite politics – those elites will take a consequent interest in preventing them from happening; in countries where this is understood, and where famines hurt the powerful as well as the weak, the powerful therefore have an interest in preventing food prices from going through the roof, etc. De Waal's argument, then, is that "Feed the Children" type stuff is on the one hand, practically inefficient –since by the time a famine becomes visible enough to raise awareness and cash and buy food or whatever, the famine is already well underway – and on the other, politically counterproductive, since it raises precisely the wrong kind of awareness: by allowing local elites off the hook for famine prevention, and naturalizing as inevitable something which is always a man-made occurrence, the international community gives local political elites an excuse for inaction.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)