NGO accounts of Africa, Asia have colonial imagery

by Hugo Slim*

In global campaigns on issues like landmines, trade, medicines or small arms, international NGOs face dilemmas of control. How much of the management and publicity of a campaign should they keep and how much should they give away?

The international NGOs behind these major and very visual campaigns look more like epic colonial film makers - directing great oriental crowd scenes in which large groups of colourful local actors wave fair trade banners on cue and synchronise their demonstrations for prime time news slots around the world.

International NGOs (INGOs) are often the intellectual originators of campaigns. They are also some of the few global organisations with the requisite money, sophistication, media expertise and brand recognition to run a global campaign. For efficiency's sake, they need to drive global campaigns.

For brand purposes, they need to take the credit for them. As a result, INGOs always showcase local civil society partners in their global campaigns and also overshadow them at the same time, acting like the puppet-master. Despite an ideology of partnership, much INGO marketing claims the results of the work of civil society, identifying civil society organisations as their own "product."

In countless NGO communications, civil society heroes from Asia and Africa are presented as dependent second class citizens, defined primarily by their relationship to the international NGO. Pioneering local campaigners are introduced as an "Oxfam partner" or a "CARE project". There is a colonial echo here in the implication that it is really INGOs who are saving the situation as the primary movers and shakers.

Part of the reason for this kind of post-colonial choreography by INGOs is because they are still required to be the visual mediators of the poor world to the rich world. In Western society, the INGOs are inter-cultural gatekeepers who know both worlds and report the one to the other. This presents them with many representational dilemmas with their own publics and their own civil societies "back home". The process involves simplifications and stereotypes. This is very obvious in Western societies where INGOs and foreign correspondents remain the two main sources for most people's stories and images of Africa and Asia.

Disasters and wars have been the two main points at which people in the poor world were most visible to western publics. Such visibility was usually mediated by INGOs.

The young white INGO nurse talked passionately on television beside starving children. Outraged rock stars called for money from the stage so they could give it fast to NGOs who were "on the ground." Sophisticated NGO staff analysts were filmed calmly in television studios or "down the line", discussing the detail of genocide or ethnic cleansing.

In this way, INGOs and the media control and shape how the global public sees the global poor and suffering. Many large INGOs have made real and determined efforts to ensure dignified and "positive imaging" in their communications work which gives a rounded picture of courageous local activism alongside extreme suffering. But most NGO accounts of Africa and Asia still have traces of colonial imagery and discourse. In many cases, the eyes and ears that hear and see these stories continue to be primed for colonial messages which makes the INGO task even harder.

But the new post-colonial demography in many INGO home societies may be cause for hope that the north-south story could soon change. Countries like Britain, France and America - the founding societies of several of the big eight NGOs - now have significant populations who come from Africa and Asia. New generations of Black Britons, Asian-Americans and Arab French people are bound to know and tell a different story.

*Hugo Slim is chief scholar at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Switzerland. Previously he was Reader in Internationalism at Oxford Brookes University, on the council of Oxfam GB and worked for Save the Children UK and the United Nations in Sudan, Ethiopia, Morocco and the Palestinian Territories.

Reuters AlertNet