A new campaign to “Save Africa”…with blackface!
I ended up writing a post titled “Saving Africa in blackface” for the Guardian’s group blog, Comment is Free. Here are some of my thoughts:
“I am waiting for my last day in school; the children in Africa are waiting for their first one,” reads the slogan hovering alongside a young German girl who’s just cute as a button. It would be just another run-of-the-mill solidarity campaign, were it not for the puzzling fact that her face, stretched into a farcical grin, is covered in mud. Let’s save Africa. In blackface.
I was a bit appalled, but laughed in spite of myself. I can appreciate satire. Lord knows after Kate Moss’s Nubian makeover and Gwyneth Paltrow gone native – OK, more Cherokee Indian than Chewa, actually, but why get lost in the details? – the debate over celebrity advocacy for Africa could use some.
But an email exchange with UNICEF headquarters in New York revealed that this children’s minstrel show was not, as I had hoped, the latest in a long tradition of internet hoaxes trafficking in bad taste. It was an actual ad campaign to promote an actual plan to give African children an education: UNICEF Germany’s “Schools for Africa” initiative. All I could do was shake my head.
Original post: A new ad campaign from UNICEF Germany. And here I thought Gwenyth Paltrow as an African Native American was bad!
I really, really, really hope this is an urban legend or a hoax (via Black Women in Europe and brownfemipower):
dear all,
This link was forwarded to our media-watch organisation by disturbed readers:
http://www.unicef.de/4500.html
This is an actual ad-campaign by UNICEF Germany!
This campaign is „blackfacing“ white children with mud to pose as “uneducated africans“.
The headline translates “This Ad-campaign developped pro bono by the agency Jung von Matt/Alster shows four german kids who appeal for solidarity with their contemporaries in Afrika”
The first kid says:
“I’m waiting for my last day in school, the children in africa still for their first one.”
second kid:
“in africa, many kids would be glad to worry about school”
third kid:
“in africa, kids don’t come to school late, but not at all” (!)
fourth kid:
“some teachers suck. no teachers sucks even more.”
Besides claiming that every single person in “Africa” isn’t educated, and doing so in an extremely patronising way, it is also disturbing that this organisation thinks blackfacing kids with mud (!) equals “relating to african children”. Also, the kids’ statements ignore the existance of millions of african academics and regular people and one again reduces a whole continent to a village of muddy uneducated uncivilized people who need to be educated (probably by any random westerner). This a really sad regression.
Bottom lines of this campaign are: Black = mud = African = uneducated. White = educated. We feel this campaign might do just as much harm as it does any good. You don’t collect money for helping people by humiliating and trivilaizing them first.Unfortunatley, if it was clear to the average German that this is wrong, UNICEF and the advertising agency wouldn’t come out with such a campaign.
Please write your opinion and help make clear and explain why it is wrong to use „blackface with mud“, and write to UNICEF at publicrelations@unicef.de as well as the advertising agency at info@jvm.de with a copy to Black German media-watch-orgaiztion info@derbraunemob.de what you feel about this campaign and why. Please include a line that you’re going to publish your mail and the response.
by the way, the slogan of the advertising agency who came up with this, reads
“we communicate on eye-level”.sincerely,
Noah Sow
NOTE: The pictures uploaded here are not in the same order in which they appear on the UNICEF site.
July 18th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Armut Bekmpfen mit Blackface
Fighting poverty and illiteracy in Africa with blackfaced kids. Brilliant! Why I didn’t think of that? Right, I know why… (BTW- if you have any interest in Africa, read Jen Brea)…
July 18th, 2007 at 10:42 pm
I can do better than that:
http://humansecurityreview.com/bonos-africa-a-case-study/
July 19th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
I’m still at loss of words for what some of the Europeans think of us. Good thing we have people like us to blog and change public opinion about the African mind.
How are you by the way?
August 13th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Yikes. I don’t need to tell you how right on you are about how Africa is viewed by the world (though I just did). Thank you for bringing this topic to light. I’m still speechless over these pictures. You’d think I would be used to all the gross misrepresentations by now.
August 16th, 2007 at 11:24 am
I already left a detailed comment about this advertising campaign by UNICEF-Deutschland over at brownfemipower blog on July 19th. Since I am a renowned expert on Germans you may want to read that comment. But I’m not here for that today…
The World Bank PSD (Private Sector Development) blog has a Heads Up post about a July 30th article at the Economist’s Free Exchange blog (yep, the Economist is in on the act too). Akwe Amosu of the Open Society Institute is quoted in the article and I thought that you would like to read it if you haven’t done so already. Here is the link to the Economist post “Labouring in Chinafrica” and the PSD blog post “China Builds Africa” (Aug 02). Included is my weigh-in on the topic in case the PSD author doesn’t have the nerve to publish it at his place:
Labouring in Chinafrica (Economist – Free Exchange)
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2007/07/chinafrica.cfm
China Builds Africa (World Bank PSD blog)
http://psdblog.worldbank.org/psdblog/2007/08/china-builds-af.html
My comment to the PSD Blog post:
Great find Chris, many of us in the Africa sector of the blogosphere had missed the short piece at the Economist. Pablo Halkyard would be proud of this find if he were still at the World Bank.
My own criticisms and warnings about PRC Beijing’s inroads into Africa over the past decade are infamous and one thing that I have consistently pointed out that bringing in 10,000’s of Chinese workers for “African development projects” when a large number of the workforce in several sub-Saharan African nations are either unemployed or underpaid is simply ridiculous. The only Africans who stand to benefit from this type of Chinese Win-Win Trade and Development policy are the ruling SSA government and business elites and the fools who believe some of their crumbs will trickle down to them.
Just today I was reading an article about the cost of rebuilding and maintaining sub-Saharan Africa’s highway and road infrastructure and the benefit such massive projects would have on unemployment and poverty reduction for African workers. Here is an excerpt from a December 2006 article at CFACT.org titled “African Highway System: Still a Dream?” featuring research from one of your very own at the World Bank Group:
What is the value of a first-class highway network? Consider the 70,000-kilometer U.S. Interstate Highway System, which transportation expert Wendell Cox in 1996 described as “an engine that has driven 40 years of unprecedented prosperity and positioned the United States to remain the world’s preeminent power into the 21st Century.”
Total construction cost for the basic system was $129 billion, yet as of 1996 the return on this nation’s greatest investment in transportation since the transcontinental railroad was already “at least six dollars for every dollar spent in construction.” Moreover, the project had created many other benefits deemed “beyond quantification.”
We were reminded of these numbers as David Wheeler of the World Bank’s Development Research Group, speaking at the U.S.-Africa Infrastructure Conference in September, unveiled a proposal calling for construction of a 100,000-kilometer road network that would link every sub-Saharan capital on the African mainland and 41 other cities with over half a million people with all-weather highways at a total cost, including maintenance and overhead, of about $47 billion over 15 years.
Wheeler went on to state that the highway network – $20 billion for initial construction, about a billion a year for maintenance, and $12 billion for administration, monitoring of road conditions, and programs to compensate abutting settlements for lost revenue from barricades – would yield about $250 billion in economic benefits while generating 14 million person-years of employment for Africa’s poor.
Wheeler further stated that his estimates were low, given that they did not include intra-country trade increases or trade with non-African countries. Yet, even if his estimates were on the high end, it seems a slam-dunk that funding such a highway system might provide the highest return on investment (public or private) among all efforts to “make poverty history” in Africa.
Nuff said Dude? I think so.
August 19th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Without wishing to be dismissed out of hand as a spiritualist, etc., is it not fundamentally correct that what comes directly from the heart is bound to be positive, beneficial and supportive? Whatever UNICEF’s origins were in the mists of time, the fact of the matter is that today all UN Agencies work not from the heart but from competition with each other for funds. The ‘professional’ staff work not from the heart but with an eye to their C.V’s and hanging on to their astronomical salaries and benefits. If a survey were to be conducted amongst the UN Agencies whose touted goals are reducing poverty, disease, etc., to find how many of its professional employees had ever spent even five minutes amongst disadvantaged people and children within their daily environment, I would take a bet that not a single one of those researching, packaging and disseminating on behalf of UNICEF would qualify.
So there’s no reason to be surprised at such ad campaigns, because they are merely a product of the hypocrisy which reigns.
August 27th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
Next they’ll be advertising Oshkosh with Buckwheat
The Angry Black Woman is rightfully outraged by i-D Magazine and American Apparel for their racist advertising campaign. I’m going to take a cue from The Angry Black Woman, and refrain from too much editorializing, since in this case, the pictures s…