Africa and the New Cult of Celebrity

When Africa appears in the venerated pages of the New York Times, it is generally in the “world news” or op-ed pages. It is noteworthy, therefore, that a lead article about Africa recently appeared in the Sunday New York Times “Style Section,”—a section that is usually devoted to debating the merits of Birkin bags and Jimmy Choo shoes. Noting that Madonna, the preeminent arbiter of avante garde style and taste, was using images of AIDS stricken African children as a backdrop during her concern performances, the author was led to remark that demonstrating concern about Africa, much like toting a Gucci bag or wearing a Prada shoe, was an indication of having cutting edge style: “That Madonna should suddenly be casting an ice-blue eye toward Africa should hardly be surprising. After all, she has always known how to spot a trend. And much as it may strain the limits of good taste to say it, Africa—rife with disease, famine, poverty, and civil war—is suddenly ‘hot’” (Williams 2006: 1).

Indeed, whether it is Bono shilling for AIDS dollars, Angelina and Madonna toting their African offspring, Gwyneth and David Bowie declaring that they are “African,” or Matt and George rallying for Darfur, it appears that a new generation of philanthropists have taken up the “White Man’s Burden.” Indeed, Time Magazine declared 2005 “The Year of Charitainment”

It appears to me that the new celebrity interest in Africa warrants serious attention. In ways that hearken back to the 19^th century, knowledge about Africa is being produced and reproduced via the production of spectacles. Celebrity produced spectacles are particularly useful for thinking about how systems of knowledge, disciplines, and practitioners in and about Africa interact on grounds of inequality. Unpacking the manner in which philanthropic impulses towards Africa have become a key way for celebrities to build their personal brands and how that, in turn, supports the conflation of activism, philanthropy and consumerism poses an interesting challenge for anyone concerned about how systematic knowledge about Africa’s natural and human environment get produced and reproduced.

One of the hallmarks of colonialism and imperialist culture was the manner in which the production of knowledge about race and sex, the production of celebrity, and philanthropy were deeply intertwined. The ideology of the ‘White Man’s Burden’ with its emphasis on “Christianity, Civilization, and Commerce” married philanthropy and consumerism. A stock argument of the abolitionists was that the triangle trade could and should be supplanted by free trade. Missionaries were in near universal agreement that Christianity was destined to play a key role in teaching Africans to depend on the market (rather than self-provisioning) to gain access to the means of life and a civilized person was one who specialized in the production of commodities for the market, rather than being content to live off the land or nature’s bounty.

While Celebrity has replaced Christianity in the holy trinity, nevertheless, the idea that Civilization and Commerce are inextricably wed continually reappears in contemporary discussions. Last month, The New York Times ran an article entitled “Citizen Bono Brings Africa to the Idle Rich” wherein Bono was quoted as saying: “One of the things I have learned of in Africa is the crucial role that commerce will play in taking its people out of extreme poverty. Everyone talks about China being the next big thing, but if you spend any time in the bars or hotels in Africa, you see a lot of Chinese doing deals there. There is tremendous opportunity there” (Carr 2007: C 3).

The Civilizing Mission, particularly as it was enacted through the social activism of abolitionists and missionaries introduced a distinctive transformation —the philanthropic enterprise that, I believe, still operates today—albeit with some important changes. Missionaries and abolitionists were similar in that they were very strategic in how they packaged and disseminated images of African suffering. The idea of ‘branding’ a social movement or a philanthropist had its genesis in these humanitarian movements that rapidly gained momentum in the latter half of the 18^th century. Because the livelihood of the philanthropic enterprise and the philanthropist himself depended upon the ability to fund raise from a mass audience, both movements are notable for the sheer quantity of print they showered on the English reading public precisely because these publicity was crucial to the fund raising enterprise. As Philip Curtin (1964: 325) explained in his book, The Image of Africa: “Publication was essential to the missions. Unlike the government or the traders, they lived on voluntary contributions. If the missions in the field were to continue their day to day operations, the missionary societies at home had to maintain a regular flow of contributions. …The link between publicity and fund raising was established early in the century.”

Sensationalism thus became the hallmark of this particular type of charitable enterprise. During the heyday of imperialism exhibits of so-called native peoples were all the rage. A stroll through what the Illustrated London News of June 1847 called “the ark of zoological wonders—Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, yielded a view of “extraordinary Bush people brought from South Africa.” While visitors to Regent Street could see “Bushmen in their trees” and “savages engaged in the pursuits of their everyday life.” As Jan Pieterse (1992: 95) put it, “in colonial ethnography the colonized were turned into objects of knowledge, in the colonial exhibits they were turned into spectacles.” Ethnographic showcases, where indigenous peoples were displayed as a type of fair attraction, were intimately linked to the evangelical enterprise. The publicity material that accompanied advertisements for colonial exhibits often made reference to famous missionaries and, likewise, missionaries counted on ethnographic showcases to further popular interest in missionary work in Africa. An exhibit at Exeter Hall of five “Bushmen” was advertised as being particularly addressed to those interested in “the all important questions of Christian mission and human civilization in that quarter of the globe [Southern Africa] (Athaneum, March 1853).

It is important to look at ethnographic showcases as not merely celebrations of the global hegemony of Western economic and political power but also as key players in the redefinition of the nature of knowledge and the individual’s relationship to it. According to Veit Erlmann, ethnographic showcases incited what he calls “spectatorial lust” whereby “empire and unreality [came to] constitute each other in ways rooted in the deepest layers of modern consciousness” (1999: 110). The ways in which ethnographic showcases ordered and presented the Other demanded that viewing subjects adopt certain attitudes—both to the world and toward themselves. On particularly notable change was that “ordinary people were beginning to live as tourists or anthropologists, addressing the object world as the endless representation of some further meaning or reality.” Thus, the world itself came to be “conceived and grasped as though it were an exhibition” (Mitchell 1989: 232, 222). The characteristic move of the modern subject was to transfer onto objects the principles of one’s relation to them and conceive of them as totally intended for cognition alone. Thus, Africans were present as subject matter but absent as voices. What appears as seeming descriptiveness, honest transcription of existential reality is totally untested, however, by African people’s own views.

It is important to think through the contemporary implications of this. Turning to the present, everywhere one looks, one can find the techniques and sensations associated with the ethnographic showcase—particularly when we consider the production of reality effects in discourses about Africa. The heightened interest in celebrity adoptions is a useful example. Londa Schiebinger (1993: 116) writes that for a time it was “fashionable among the wealthy to collect Africans as exotica—along with apes, camels, leopards, and elephants. Dukes paraded them as buglers and drummers in their militia, and noble families exchanged them as gifts, dressing them in gay uniforms to serve as butlers and maids, pages and coachmen.” Last May, The Boston Globe ran a feature story about the increased interest shown by American families in adopting African children. The opening paragraph declared: “American couples are adopting more African children, prompted by an increase n the number of orphans, the end of wars, and even by movie star Angelina Jolie’s adoption of a baby girl in Ethiopia last year according to analysis and agencies that help place the children. …We definitely see a spike in the number of adoptions from Africa, said Adam Pertman, executive director of a New York based advocacy group. …Some of it is star driven. After Angelina Jolie adopted a kid from Ethiopia, agencies got a spate of calls from parents wanting to know how to adopt a kid from Ethiopia” (Donnelly 2006: A 1, A 11).

The Wall Street Journal likewise reported that “international adoptions by Americans have been escalating with stars such as Madonna traveling abroad to adopt” (Bernstein 2006: D3). A recent Bloomingdales catalogue was even more blunt, declaring that “these days, adopting a foreign child is more chic than any premiere party.”

A very specific set of narratives about White American femininity and African dependency get mobilized in these discussions about adoption. These discourses strongly echo those produced during the course of the 19^th century when missionary work became an important vehicle for White European women to exercise agency and moral leadership in ways that did not threaten patriarchy or the gendered division of labor. As Nancy Rose Hunt (1997: 295) explains: “European women were to have a double and connecting role, intended to instill a sense of propriety in white males and save the honor of the colonial power while also serving as a model for and teacher of African women. …The heroic image of the arduous, monotonous lives of white women in the colonies evoked numerous burdens as well as endless devotion. …Charitable activity directed at [African] mothers and children was considered an appropriate, honorable activity for white women. It would also prevent boredom and idleness.”

These days, American women are celebrated less for teaching African women how to mother than they are for usurping the roles of African women through a variety of discursive strategies that reinforce the idea that it is both necessary and appropriate for White women to usurp the roles of and ventriloquize for African women—thus rendering them invisible and voiceless. We might, for example, consider two recent ad campaigns. One where Kate Moss was featured in the British newspaper, The Independent, made up to look like an African woman in order to highlight the battle against Aids in Africa. The second, a popular campaign for the Keep a Child Alive organization, which supports AIDS initiatives. The ad features Gwyneth Paltrow in war paint and beads proclaiming “I Am African.” Hannah Pool, a Black British commentator, quite correctly asks the question what exactly these “blacked up” white celebrities are meant to portray. She continues: “I suppose it is meant to be subversive, but what does it say about race today when a quality newspaper decides that its readers will only relate to Africa through a blacked-up white model rather than a real-life black woman? What does it say about the fight against HIV/AIDS if that is the only way to make us care” (Pool 2006)?

Texts like these inaugurate and index certain attitudes about African people’s humanity and, thus, make particular courses of action ‘thinkable’ and ‘doable’.When viewers tune into Angelina Jolie being interviewed by Anderson Cooper or George Clooney is featured in a magazine or on a television show talking about Darfur, the people about whom they are speaking become, essentially, a colorful backdrop. Their suffering becomes a critical part of the exhibition which serves to both produce and reinforce the beauty and glamour of their celebrity benefactor. Take, for example, an article that recently appeared in Allure magazine about Shiloh Jolie-Pitt which bore a title “The Birth of Venus.” After noting that the National Society for Human Rights in Namibia chided Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt for behaving like “colonial overlords”, the author went on to argue: “Those grumpy third-world naysayers just don’t get it. Without stories like baby Brangelina, what’s to distract us from spiraling personal debt, $4 a gallon gas, and wars in the Middle East? Back in the United States, the African secrecy only raised anticipation levels from obsessive to manic. Does Shiloh have his nose? Her hair? Whose eyes? No detail of the child’s appearance escaped conjecture. When people this famous breed, it’s like a national eugenics experiment: building the ultimate beauty. …Time will tell if Shiloh is the start of a celebrity master race.

It is interesting that the Allure article referred to the birth of Shiloh Jolie-Pitt as the “birth of Venus” as one of the most talked about and controversial ethnographic exhibits was of Saartjie Baartman, the so-called ‘Hottentot Venus” whose public display was the penultimate example of how science, ethnography, and show business came together to produce a narrative about science, racial difference, gender, and domination that have proven to be remarkably enduring. The exhibition of Saartjie Baartman brought together ideologies about physical beauty, racial superiority, and conquest by means of visually contrasting the degraded body of the Black African woman with the exalted body of the White European woman. Baartman was central to the construction of what Foucault has called “political anatomy” whereby “the body stripped clean of history and culture as it was of clothes and often skin—became the touchstone of political rights and social privileges” (Schiebinger 1993: 116).

Richard Dyer (1997: 71) likewise reminds us that “the superiority of whiteness has been felt in terms of beauty as well as morality. …The gallant term for women in general, ‘the fair sex’, has a distinct skin colour suggestion. ..And 19^th century racialist thought repeatedly intertwined science and aesthetics, defining Aryans or Caucasians as the pinnacle of the human race in every respect, and therefore including beauty.” The following excerpt from People Magazine, wherein the physical attractiveness of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt is indicative of their social, cultural, and racial superiority and thereby grants them authority and expertise, is typical: “He’s a two-time Sexiest Man Alive. She’s the world’s Most Beautiful woman. Together they are building a multicultural brood that transcends continents and boasts the two cutest kids ever to sport a Mohawk and kerchief. …Putting that ample external perfection to work, Jolie and Pitt have leveraged it into something else. …And in making do-gooding every bit as chic as they are, the couple are forging a new brand of beauty” (Tauber, Green, and Jordan 2006: 73).

Thus, individual Africans are made to function as little more than objects, useful for implementing plans beyond themselves. Most often, their function is to look miserable, as the intensity of their misery bears a direct correlation to their utility in helping a celebrity to build her brand. According to Time magazine: “There are plenty of reasons for celebrities to do charity: guilt, faith, personal suffering, ratings, p.r. “If you want a long-term career and you want to be taken seriously by the public, to do nothing is a mistake,” says publicist to the stars, Ken Sunshine. “Charitable work rounds out and humanizes your image” (Poniewozik 2005: 1).

A recent article in USA Today agreed that charitable giving was an important source of cultural capital and was a vital assist to celebrities trying to class pass: “Being an activist provides a patina of class. Speaking to business leaders in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum, as Jolie does, gives people a new way of looking at you. It’s a way to stand out and get attention from other kinds of people who don’t read entertainment magazines” (Freydkin 2006).

Fortune Magazine likewise made the point that Angelina Jolie’s charity work “has an extra upside: It diverts movie fans, supermarket tabloids and the media from focusing on more controversial and less attractive elements of her life. …the public-relations value of a good deed has quelled carpers who could have painted an uglier picture, say of a home-wrecker and sex symbol who’s had an out of wedlock baby with a heartthrob actor she stole from America’s sweetheart” (Swibel 2006: 118). While the the latest Bloomingdales catalogue unabashedly declared: “In Hollywood, philanthropy is the new black. You’re nobody unless you’re using your fame—and your wallet—to promote good works. Taking a cue from Brangelina, celebrities know that endorsing a charity will not only be great PR, but might actually do some good too. There’s nothing like a peacekeeping mission to South Africa to make those pesky charges of assault with a cell phone go away.”

When charity is used to build a brand, it becomes a very effective form of political silencing. “Many celebrities have found that working on international causes (say, civil liberties or poverty overseas) is a safe way to indulge a more palatable, liberalism that operates at a safe remove from controversial issues at home (say, civil liberties under the Patriot Act or poverty in Newark, New Jersey” (Poniewozik 2005: 1). The recent case of Starbucks vs. the Ethiopian coffee growers is also indicative of the political compromises that inevitably occur when people are led to believe that they can consume their way to virtue. At the same time that Starbucks heavily promoted the autobiography of Ishmael Beah, a child soldier from Sierra Leone, calling Beah a “beacon of hope” and celebrating his story of survival as an example of the beauty of the triumph of the human spirit, they were engaged in an aggressive trademark dispute with coffee farmers from Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries in the world.

Ethiopia, which Starbucks trumpets in its marking materials as the birthplace of coffee, is seeking to trademark the names of its most famous coffee regions, which appear on the Starbucks packaging. The country’s aim is to gain more control over the distribution and promotion of its most valuable export and, ultimately, to secure a better price for farmers. Starbucks continued efforts to discourage Ethiopa from trying to trademark the names has led Ethiopian officials and local media to label the conglomerate “coffee colonialists.” The fact that Starbucks was willing to spend 2.4 million dollars on social projects in Ethiopia, while denying farmers the opportunity to pursue the types of commercial activities that could, in the future, free them up from needing Starbucks charity should cause us all to be very skeptical of Bono’s claim that African success in business represents “a big business opportunity for America.”

At the present moment celebrity appeals from distant African locales and Hollywood movies that dramatize African conflicts and problems have merged in the popular imagination. As a recent article in USA Today put it, “the dark continent is about to come under the Hollywood spotlight. …Studios are pumping millions of dollars to send filmmakers to some of the continent’s most remote corners to give a fresh take on a decades-old obsession. …All good drama is based on conflict…and post colonization Africa has a lot of conflict” (Bowles 2006: 1D). An article in the Canadian business journal, Corporate Knights, agreed that “the highly politicized social environment of a post-9/11 world has heightened our awareness of interdependence (or for some, domination and dependence). …A large portion of the public rummages for meaning in the traditional cultural reservoir: the cinema” (Stoicescu 2006: 16).

The references to 9/11 are not incidental. It is worthwhile to consider the ways in which the American Empire is attempting to reconstitute itself in the post-9/11 era and begin to think through what that might have to do with the popularity of charitable impulses towards Africa. Nightline, a televised newsmagazine, agreed that: “Unlike 20 years ago, the US has a clear self-interest in alleviating poverty in Africa. If anyone has learned anything since 9/11, it’s that places of economic desperation are potential breeding grounds for anti-American terrorists.” In an interview with NBC News, Bono expressed a very similar sentiment. In response to anchor Brian Williams question “What’s in it for America? If you succeed in Africa, what’s in it for them? Bono replied: “See, I think it is cool to ask that question. What’s in it for America. Because I think there’s a lot in it for America. Strategically, making friends during wartime. I think that might be smart. Africa is 40 percent Muslim country [sic]. There’s extremists working to take advantage of that situation. ..Also, it might be important for America, might be important for Eruope, it is important to me, we might actually find our own soul there. Something about serving the poor that you rediscover your reason to be. America, remember, is not just a country, it’s an idea. …And I just believe that Americans don’t wait for the right time to be great.”

The New York Times was also quite explicit in drawing a direct link between the cultural anxieties engendered after 9/11 and popular interest in Africa. An article that appeared in the August of last year argued that: “Some Africa experts believe that the continent could be benefiting from an American public that is antsy to feel its goodness and influence, yet is simultaneously feeling itself shunned around much of the rest of the world. …Africa fills a sort of existential vacuum for Americans struggling in a post-Sept. 11 world. …We had this sudden awareness that there were all these people out there who hated us, and we needed people who, as far aw we know, don’t hate us, and are in great need and we can help. …It’s the perfect meeting of needs—an intersection where we need Africa and Africa needs us” (Williams 2006: 8).

However, just 4 months later, the Christmas eve edition of the Times ran yet another article, the headline of which glumly announced: “Across Africa, A Sense that U.W. Power Isn’t So Super”. The article went on to explain: “Somalia may be the place that best illustrates a trend sweeping across the African continent. After Sept. 11, the United States concluded that anarchy and misery aid terrorism, and so it tried to re-engage Africa. But anti-American sentiment on the continent has only grown, and become increasingly nasty. And the United States seems unable to do much about it. A number of experts on Africa trace those developments to a sense not of American power, but of its decline—a perception that the United States is no longer the only power that counts, that it is too bogged down in the Middle East to be a real threat here, and so it can be ignored or defied with impunity. …The broader issue playing out here—the sense that the United States is not the kingmaker it once was—goes beyond Mogadishu. It is Africa wide.

In ways that parallel the cultural conventions of the 19^th century, although American society is overrun with anecdotes, stories, and images of African people, the people themselves are not allowed any meaningful space or voice. How do we account for this curious paradox whereby the viewing subjects were expected to be familiar with ethnographic detail, yet, adopt a studied attitude of indifference about particularity? It turns out that this paradox actually can tell us quite a lot about what Mitchell (1989: 236) terms “a method of order and truth essential to the peculiar nature of the modern world.”

Ethnographic showcases encouraged viewers to adopt attitudes of indifference to particularity—especially the particularity of individual African lives. At the same time, however, evangelical and scientific writing was engendering a cultural obsession with ethnographic detail, which produced the effect of direct and immediate experience with Africa. In this process African people are rendered incapable of representing or producing knowledge about themselves.

In her interview with Anderson Cooper, for example, Jolie could have been channeling David Livingstone when she described African people as relatively new entrants to civilization. “The borders were drawn in Africa not that long ago. These people are tribal people. We have—we colonized them. There’s a lot of changes that’s happened, even just between the blacks and whites so recently. There’s a lot we need to—to understand and be tolerant of, and help them to do. They have just recently learned to govern themselves.”

The Africa created by the American celebrity machine, while not populated by spear chucking savages, is also completely bereft of doctors, lawyers, politicians, musicians or actors. Indeed, African celebrities are nowhere to be seen in these campaigns. Femi Kuti, for example, was led to remark of Bob Geldof “maybe they don’t know black artists.” Geldof responded that African celebrities don’t have any “political traction.” Geldof’s comments were followed by Sue Ellicot, Nightline’s host, who concluded that: “His [Geldof’s] point is that the future of Africa is ours to shape. His, yours, and mine, whether we are famous or not.” Thus, ordinary Americans are portrayed as having far more “political traction” than any of Africa’s indigenous celebrities.

If history is any guide, the new celebrity interest in Africa should give us pause. T cult of celebrity reinforces the idea that Africa does not have systemized knowledge of its own. Indeed, what we are witnessing know is a revival of the conventional paradigm of an Africa without systematized knowledge absent the interventions of benevolent Whites. The recent trend towards celebrity adoptions recalls imperial and scientific projects wherein Africa was simply a gathering place for specimens, detached from their cultural context. If we are to avoid repeating the horrors of the past, where knowledge about Africa was produced without the input of African people, thus giving Westerners the power to create the very reality they appeared to describe, clearly African people need to be at the center of both the production of knowledge and the production of culture.

Zine Magubane, Ph.D. Harvard, focuses her research in the areas of gender and sexuality, colonialism and post-colonialism, globalization, and race and class. Her work has dealt with two major geographic areas of the world, the United States and Southern Africa. Within the broader framework of the sociology of knowledge, the question of how ideology ‘works’ has been the thread connecting her varied research projects. She is the author of Bringing the Empire Home: Imagining Race, Gender, and Class in Britain and Colonial South Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2004), Hear Our Voices: Black South African Women in the Academy (University of South Africa Press, 2004), and Postmodernism, Postcoloniality and African Studies (Africa World Press, 2003).