Volunteering in Africa, Asia or Latin America is a bucket list experience for many young people. But after spending a summer at a school in South Africa, our writer reflects on their experience, asking how volunteerism – or “voluntourism” – sometimes entrenches power relations instead of altering them. They question the impact of their time at the school on local pupils and explore the effects of unilateral acts of assistance.
When I was eight years old, I remember leaflets from charities claiming to educate impoverished children in Africa being pushed through my parents’ letterbox. I stared at photographs of groups of Black children, not much older than me, with emaciated bodies, innocent eyes and dirty clothes.
“Jahzara from Africa wants to go to school, but her unemployed parents cannot afford a school uniform. Become a sponsor!”, the caption demanded. “Why are we not helping Jahzara?”, I asked my mum impatiently.
White Saviourism – the idea of white people swooping into the lives of those in the Global South and making grand gestures, but without understanding the wider context – is not a new phenomenon. Since the end of the Second World War, intervention in the Global South in the name of poverty relief has become the status quo.
I, like many others, grew up with advertisements of charities depicting half-naked Black kids. And they fascinated me. These charities tried to help, after all.
Young people’s motivation to spend their gap year or summer holidays ‘helping’ in Africa, Asia or Latin America is often fuelled by the portrayal of these places in the media. Pictures of malnourished Africans seem to have inspired a generation of ‘philanthropists’ from Europe and the US.
Speaking with author and journalist Leslie Gordon Goffe for an article in New African Magazine, sociologist Zine Magubane puts it succinctly: “You would think there were no African think-tanks, no African universities, no African human rights lawyers.”
I had, to an extent, internalised this helper-mentality. If I hadn’t been able to make an impact for Jahzara as an eight-year-old, I could at least do so now.
As a university student, I was presented with a six-week volunteering opportunity as a teaching assistant in a township school in South Africa. Being aware of the ‘white saviourism’ critique levelled at volunteerism in the Global South, I was convinced that the programme I was taking part in was different. Well-established and priding itself on its “non-intrusive approach”, I believed that if there was a way of getting international volunteering right, this must be it.
Organisers say the aim of the programme is to send high-calibre volunteer teachers to enhance the learning experience of local students. But none of us had dreams of becoming a teacher nor had any of us ever stood in front of a classroom with 30+ teenagers.
To prepare, everyone had to undergo four days of ‘teacher’ training. Occasional questions by the soon-to-be English teachers about the difference between a noun and a verb made me question whether those aiming to bring a fresh perspective to South African classrooms were, in fact, suited at all.
A couple of weeks later, my first time in front of a classroom arrived. My expectations, perhaps a result of my own colonial mindset, were high.
Admittedly, I hoped that the students’ excitement of “having someone new”, “someone from outside” at their school would allay my apprehension. Walking through the school’s open-air corridors, I felt a sense of admiration, trumped by scepticism.
Many of the teachers seemed wary about a volunteer observing and aiding their teaching, while others were stressed about having to assign tasks and discuss lesson plans with us newly arrived volunteers.
Comments like “You have nothing to tell me, you are not from here!” reinforced my belief that the recipients of the impact I was trying to make might very well feel differently about the programme’s aims and results.
As my apprehension grew, so did my desire to voice my concerns. During a welcome dinner with the organisation which administers the programme on site, I asked about potential reasons for the resentment from students.
One of the staff members took me seriously. “You are entering this foreign community to witness the poverty, the suffering, and in due course, to leave again,” he responded, plainly. “You act, perhaps unconsciously, as if you were walking in the students’ shoes, sharing their pain and trying to alleviate it, but when it becomes uncomfortable, you head back – to accommodation in the well-off part of the city – and in the end to Europe.”
Privilege is always relational. Growing up poor comes with undeniable burdens and suffering, but experiencing first-hand how well-off others are, based on pure luck or exploitation of one’s ancestors, sparks anger.
Inequality, greed, white privilege? In the students’ eyes, we might have epitomised these perfectly.
Read more: How can teachers begin to decolonise the curriculum? There may be more opportunities than you think…
I kept observing and was keen to give a platform to my theorising. At one point, a teacher, who I shared my concerns with, addressed a group of students and asked about their opinions on the volunteers from Europe.
A young girl responded eagerly: “They are better than the Black volunteers.” I gasped.
During our placement, a group of student teachers – those training at local universities to become teachers – had to complete an internship which coincided with our time spent at the school. Those deciding to intern at a township school had almost exclusively themselves been educated at one.
The girl’s perception of the volunteers from Europe as ‘better’ – more knowledgeable, trustworthy and fun – fits existing research on the effects of volunteerism in the host communities.
In fact, interviews with intended beneficiaries find that white volunteers from the Global North are perceived as ‘being smarter’ and having more knowledge and expertise. This ‘knowledge’ often remains unchallenged.
Like on my programme, four days of training seemed to suffice to invest young people with agency, even in the absence of expertise. We, consciously or unconsciously assume, that Western modelling reasonably fills the expertise gap.
This dynamic creates fertile ground for “epistemic injustice”. The assumed expertise gives volunteers power: the power to create ‘truth regimes’ that privilege certain forms of knowledge which in turn shape the host community.
For the host community, this can have unintended consequences – like undermining local consciousness. The girl who sees the European volunteers as ‘better’ likely at the same time identifies with those local student teachers who she considers ‘worse’.
If my presence undermines, to an extent, the students’ self-esteem, I asked whether these ‘beneficiaries’ might in fact be better off without my presence.
Before I and my fellow volunteers knew it, six weeks were over. Our final day coincided with the last day of the local student teachers who had finished their internships.
In honour of everyone’s efforts, the school organised a farewell party. Decorations were prepared, food served, presents gifted, speeches delivered.
I could not escape noticing the uncomfortable feeling in my stomach. While the student teachers did take part in the party, most of the gratitude and speeches were directed at the volunteers from Europe.
We were thanked for “making it all the way here”, for bringing “crucial technology knowledge” to “this developing country.” Hearing this, I was both surprised and shocked.
Does the local population really think so little of their own culture? Or are these speeches a reaction to our supposed expectations of how locals ought to behave in treating foreigners?
What troubled me most was the lack of acknowledgement for those local trainee teachers who aim to work in township schools for the rest of their careers.
I was keen to dig deeper. Why would the local organisation support the carrying out of the programme if they did not approve of it? Perhaps my university is just one of their strategic partners. And if the partnership benefits them in other ways, perhaps they choose to overlook the shortcomings of the volunteering programme.
In Europe, would an exchange programme like this be approved, checked and funded in the same way? The expertise that might justify a six-week injection by volunteers from abroad was simply taken for granted by coming from a privileged Western country.
The programme works because it is targeting low-resource schools in Africa where the colonial narrative has conditioned us to believe that non-trained students can bring a meaningful perspective.
Volunteerism – or “voluntourism” – in the Global South is increasingly couched in the language of diversity, inclusion and sustainability. But despite good intentions, it seems that impact is still located at only one end of the equation.
After six weeks in South Africa, I am convinced that the programme benefited neither the local pupils nor the teachers, but myself most.
I was grateful to those allowing me to enter their communities with kindness and hospitality instead of hatred and contempt. I realised that the unilateral helper/beneficiary mentality, so often woven into discussions about making an impact, needs to be challenged.
An emphasis on the reciprocity of exchange could contribute to reframing the relationships of local communities with volunteers as genuine partnerships rather than one-way acts of assistance.
White Saviourism is linked to broader issues concerning the relationship between Global North and South.
The depoliticisation of social causes, such as saving the environment and poor people through volunteering, certainly fits an agenda that does not aim at altering power relations.
While colonialism overtly signals a state of exploitation, volunteerism and the portrayal of the Global South in the media brush injustice, including injustice about who knows what, under the carpet. More broadly, the idea of charity – whether through volunteering or ‘aid’– preserves a racialised world where expertise only belongs to those in one part of the world.
One example of effective campaigning against white saviourism tropes in media and humanitarian fundraising comes from a non-profit organisation in Norway, SAIH – the Norwegian Students and Academics International Assistance Fund.
Through a series of parody videos, flipping fundraising campaigns into reverse, the organisation expertly – and hilariously – demonstrates how one-dimensional views of Africa and Africans create dangerous and harmful stereotypes.
The organisation’s ‘Radi-Aid’ campaign showed Africans teaming up to sing a charity pop hit in a fundraising bid to supply radiators to desperately cold Norwegians. And it launched the annual ‘Rusty Radiator Award’, presented to the fundraising video with the worst use of stereotypes.
In 2017, the winner was UK charity Comic Relief who sent popstar Ed Sheeran to West Africa as part of an £80 million fundraising campaign. The resulting short film (which can no longer be found online) showed Sheeran meeting two homeless children in Liberia, being moved to tears by their plight, and offering to pay for their stay in a hotel.
A year later, after being accused of “poverty tourism”, Comic Relief announced it would end celebrity appeals. But many harmful portrayals remain to be seen on our screens every day, and these images, of poor, needy Africans and heroic, white saviours are deeply ingrained in the collective psyche.
I hope that the next generation is not brought up with leaflets that depict the Global South as dependent on the West and without agency.
Perhaps, if I had read about African human rights lawyers and engineers, instead of impoverished Jahzara at the age of 8, I would have channelled my good intentions differently.
All artwork by Lacuna’s student artist Jiraporn Puengprayotekij.
Read more:
