Rwandan President Kagame and Quincy Jones....

So, the recent issue of Vanity Fair magazine has done a full feature issue on Africa. The general theme of the issue is a celebrity bonanza of what is being done to save Africa. My pessimistic feelings about celebrity activism aside, who is kidding who in this arrangement? Bono as the guest editor. Really? Brad Pitt interviewing Desmond Tutu. Strange combination as Pitt clearly used someone else's crib notes to hold up his end of the conversation... David Bowie is an African. Hmmmm. Quincy Jones counts Rwandan President Paul Kagame as one of his heros?

The trouble I have with this is the umbrella theme of celebrity activism: We can save Africa. All they need is the right kind of support. Private-public partnerships in form of ideas and money from foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates' Foundation are the wave of the future and celebrities can steer these resources to good use. This is the same logic that the development enterprise accorded to the civil society and NGOs in the 1980s and 1990s. So suffice it to say that public-private partnerships are not the latest and greatest thing; nor is celebrity activism.

Despite their good intentions, when celebrities lend their star-power to African projects, there is considerable room for things to go sour for the very people they are hoping to support. The project is not vastly different that the modernising approach to Africa that swept the continent at the time of independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The playing field is somewhat different than it was then, what with China able to circumvent development assistance budgets in one fell swoop of 'incentives' that pad their multi-million dollar 'development' projects. In Rwanda, for example, Chinese money is far outstripping what aid dollars can and will do.

What does this mean for celebrities with big hearts and even bigger wallets? I think it means that in all their efforts to save Africa, they are in fact pushing things backwards for ordinary people. Political and economic elites, known among Africanist academics, as the state class (those who benefit from the resources of the state) get richer and the poor get poorer. Celebrities, despite their good intentions, are unaware of the complex political situations into which they enter when they lend their good name to a government or a cause. At least China is more realistic about it aspirations for Africa; it wants to get as much access the raw materials needed to fuel its domestic economy for the least amount of social and economic capital. China is knowingly feeding the state class in the countries it engages, while celebrities are riding a wave of feel-good activism. To paraphrase The Gap advertisement in Vanity Fair, you CAN be a good-looking Samaritan. At the end of the day, both China and celebrity activism is about consumption. More production in China means cheaper (and safer?) goods for markets across the globe, while Westerners can feel good about consuming more celebrity-approved or -endorsed products that are designed to get us to consume more while saving Africa. An interesting configuration of social justice to be sure....

Vab