Book: Mandela, Sampson

As a leaving gift, a friend gave me Sampson's authorized biography of Nelson Mandela. I had already read his autobiography, A Long Walk to Freedom, and did not expect to get a lot more out of this book. I am pleased to say that I was wrong. I found this book even more inspiring than the autobiography, partly because Mandela is too modest, but Sampson also conducted hundreds of interviews, so the book is filled with different peoples perceptions and interactions with Mandela. It was a great read.

I finished it too long ago to give a proper review, but the one thing that has stayed with me is Mandela's sense of dignity. I decided to write a bit about this now, because of the many courageous people across the Arab world who remind me so much of my impression of Mandela. The Yemeni and Bahraini people who continue to stage peaceful rallys despite brutal crackdown is inspiring and in some ways reminiscent of Mandela and his contemporaries in South Africa.

What set Mandela apart with an unyielding sense of moral courage, and dignity in the face of adversity. Mandela was not just willing to die for his cause in the way that anyone fighting for freedom takes risks, during the Rivonia trial instead of following sensible legal advice and trying to deny the charges or reduce the sentence, Mandela chose to make a statement from the dock, explaining why he committed the alleged charges, and in doing so expected the death penalty. He was not just taking an abstract risk, he thought we was about to become a martyr when he concluded:

"During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to the struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

The book is also filled with anecdotes about Mandela treating servants, millionaires and politicians equally. His capacity for forgiveness and treating his enemies with respect is well documented. If only more politicians were like this; Mandela describes a situation where instead of greeting settling Israelis with violence and hatred, they could have sent a small Palestinian girl with a bouquet of flowers offering to show the great hospitality of her people. Mandela lives his life they way I wish everyone did, and this book honestly changed the way I live mine. Everyone should read it.

I leave you with a poem that Mandela drew strength from in jail, it was moving enough that I can write it now from memory. Mayhap some people currently living under oppression have something equal to draw strength from:

Out of the night that covers me, black as a pit from pole to pole, 

I thank whatever gods may be, for my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud,

Under the bludgeoning of chance, my head is bloody but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears, looms but the horror of the shade,

and yet the menace of the years, finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.

 

 

Advertising, Media, and a Book

How do we portray Africa in the media? And how should we?

I was pointed this week to this article in the Columbia Journalism review, and some of the blog commentary on the topic. Rothmyer writes about the tendency of NGOs to exaggerate the extent of problems, emphasis negative stereotypes and spread a gloomy image of Africa in the name of securing funding:

The main reason for the continued dominance of such negative stereotypes, I have come to believe, may well be the influence of Western-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international aid groups like United Nations agencies. These organizations understandably tend to focus not on what has been accomplished but on convincing people how much remains to be done. As a practical matter, they also need to attract funding. Together, these pressures create incentives to present as gloomy a picture of Africa as possible in order to keep attention and money flowing, and to enlist journalists in disseminating that picture.

Over the past thirty years, NGOs have come to play an increasingly important role in aid to Africa. A major reason is that Western donors, worried about government corruption, have channelled more funds through them. In the mid-1970s, less than half a dozen NGOs (like the Red Cross or CARE) might operate in a typical African country, according to Nicolas van de Walle, a professor of government at Cornell, but now the same country will likely have 250.
This explosive NGO growth means increasing competition for funds. And according to the head of a large US-based NGO in Nairobi, “When you’re fundraising you have to prove there is a need. Children starving, mothers dying. If you’re not negative enough, you won’t get funding.” So fierce is the competition that many NGOs don’t want to hear good news. An official of an organization that provides data on Somalia’s food situation says that after reporting a bumper harvest last year, “I was told by several NGOs and UN agencies that the report was too positive.” 

She also criticizes journalists:

Even with shrinking resources, journalists can do better than this. For a start, they can stop depending so heavily, and uncritically, on aid organizations for statistics, subjects, stories, and sources. They can also educate themselves on how to find and interpret data available from independent sources. And they can actively seek out stories that deviate from existing story lines.

Rothmyer's article is hardly breaking new ideas, a decade ago, PM Tony Blair told us that poverty in Africa is a "scar on our consciences" and just last week I wrote about the media's favouritism of photogenic causes. News and media are often blamed for perpetuating the exciting negative stories at the expense of reporting moderate economic growth. See the CNN Effect. But recently attention has turned away from just journalists and towards NGOs, Rothmyer;s article is well written and effective, I recommend you go read it all

Good Intentions are Not Enough have talked about NGO adverts, and how it is normally assumed that the best way to encourage donations is to shock the audiences with appalling conditions and pictures of suffering and tragedy:

Is it any surprise that when constantly bombarded with pictures like this, people think that all children in Africa are either starving or fighting? Some more interesting thoughts about Poverty Porn.

And the effect of all this advertising on public perceptions? VSO's comprehensive report The Legacy of Live Aid provides the data; their summary is below, and the second point in particular I find very worrying.

Are donor funds just getting harder to extract because we have desensitized the public to violence and poverty? Should we uphold the dignity of those people aid agencies are trying to help, even at the expense of helping less of them? Maybe we are being short sighted, more short term funding that involves encouraging negative stereotypes might hinder aid efforts by scaring away investors and discouraging economic growth? I have yet to see a practical solution.

In the midst of all this bad news, I point you towards the new book Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding—And How We Can Improve the World Even More which is a story of successes. Charles Kenny writes about how, in much of Africa, development is working: life expectancy is increasing, child mortality is decreasing, people are earning and saving more. He goes on to detail how we could be doing a lot more by increasing funding for projects that have been 'proven' to work, Kenny does not including projects aimed and spurring economic growth in this, he focuses on health and education. From Poverty to Power have a well thought out and comprehensive review of this book.

Wronging Right's solution? Reality TV.

Book: Half the Sky, Nick Kristof

A few weeks ago, my mother, ever the feminist, gifted me the Pulitzer prize winner Half the Sky by Nicholas D. Kristof (whose NY Times columns can be found here). A book about the plight of women around the world, and some of the steps being taken to improve their situation.

Kristof uses a style of reporting which seems very effective for infusing the casual reader with an urgent desire do something about the plight of women and the empowerment to feel like we actually could do something useful. 

Each chapter in the book is dedicated to a different life-threatening issue or group of oppressed women, ranging from forced prostitution and slavery to maternal health. And each chapter follows the same formula of focusing first on an individual, telling a heart-wrenching story of one women's struggle for life or dignity, then expanding to describe the scope of the problem and the statistics surrounding the issue, before ending with an example of the work being done to fix the problem. Tales of courage and persistance in the face of adversity, and examples of the massive potential ("women hold up half the sky") currently being wasted.

Kristof justifies his individual-focused approach to mobilising donors in this article, which makes several interesting points about donors. Including pointing to Paul Slovic's work, which shows that people are more likely to support a water project to save the lives of 4,500 people in a refugee came of 11,000, then they are to support a project saving 4,500 lives in a camp of 250,000 - it is about the proportion of people you can help, and the perceived impact of your donation. Kristof says:

Storytelling needs to focus on an individual, not a group. A classic experiment involved asking people to donate to help hungry children in West Africa. One group was asked to help a seven-year-old girl named Rokia, in the country of Mali. A second was asked to donate to help millions of hungry children. A third was asked to help Rokia but was provided with statistical information that gave them a larger context for her hunger. Not surprisingly, people donated more than twice as much to help Rokia as to help millions of children. But it turned out that even providing background information on African hunger diminished empathy, so people were much less willing to help Rokia when she represented a broader problem. Donors didn’t want to help ease a crisis personified by a child; they just wanted to help one person—and to hell with the crisis.

Still, it was some of the facts in Half the Sky that shook me most, for example that more women in slavery now (forced prostitution) than at the height of the slave trade, and the chapter on the prevalence of Fistula, a horrible and yet entirely preventable childbirth condition, was incredibly moving.

Critics have pointed out that Kristof focuses on individuals helping others, and fails to draw attention to the failure of Developed nation's governments to provide more effect aid. They also praise Saudi Arabia for anti-slavery laws and yet don't acknowledge Saudi Arabia's horrific treatment of female domestic workers.

Saying that however, upon finishing this book, I very nearly packed in my current life to go work in a Fistula hospital in Somaliland. Conclusion: while not quite rigorous enough for experts in the field, but a really great book for raising awareness about the plight of women around the world. Read it.

Find out more about the causes Kristof mentions at the book's website.

For a critic of the content, check out this Aidwatchers post on the Girl Effect.

A NY Times review of the book is here.