Bono got there 200 years late...

Edward Carr, Ami Shah and Bruce Hall providing a cutting analysis on what's wrong with celebrity humanitarianism. Now while some things just speak for themselves (I actually can't get over this, here to be guided through by Brendan Rigby, or even more obviously Oxfam's Scarlett Johansson problem), much celebrity involvement seems insidiously good news: the authors above cite a figure of $150 million for the amount raised by the LiveAid concert in aid of the Ethiopian famine. More money = more food = more lives saved no? If only that clear cut....

“In part because rebel groups in Ethiopia also used the aid, it is estimated that the supply of humanitarian aid helped to extend the war by at least a year" (p. 22)

And more generally/long term, Carr and friends highlight two worrying narratives behind much of Bono's work, to take one example; a) the creation of a simple narrative of Africa as a "single, homogenous, helpless region" and b) the idea that we actually know what to do about it (witness 60 years of failure to find the 'key' to development). As they put it,

“celebrity humanitarians often reinforce stereotypes of the global poor as helpless, which reinforces and reproduces the highly unequal structures of power that characterize our world” (p. 3)

What I found more novel, however, was the idea that this is no new phenomenon. "Bono-as-wonk," they say, goes back to the celebrity activism of the 18th and 19th centuries, to those such as Samuel Ajayi Crowther and Smeathman. In fact Gomes Eanes de Zurara was already popularising the inhumane treatment of African slaves disembarking at the Portuguese port of Lagos in the 15th century apparently. So in fact, Bono got there over 500 years late.

Either way, give it a read.