Le texte ne s’affiche pas intégralement dans la langue que vous avez sélectionnée ? La Boîte à outils ne cesse d’évoluer, et il semblerait que nous n’ayons pas encore totalement traduit cet article. Contactez-nous si vous avez envie de traduire de nouveaux textes!

En bref

A focus on “poverty” relies on a charity framework that can never bring justice. To counter the process of impoverishment requires political action against those who cause and benefit from impoverishment.

This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to ‘soften’ the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their ‘generosity,’ the oppressors must perpetrate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this ‘generosity,’ which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source.

True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the ‘rejects of life,’ to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands—whether of individuals or entire peoples—need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.

— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Origines

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

For saviours to exist, there must be those in need of “saving.” Put another way, saviours require victims. Victimization — that is, the process of making other humans victims — is a requirement of the saviour complex. And by definition, a white saviour complex is premised on the victimization of the African — the black body. Thus, it has become conventional in the West to describe Africans only in terms of what they are not:

“They are considered chaotic not ordered, traditional not modern, tribal not democratic, corrupt not honest, underdeveloped not developed, irrational not rational, lacking in all of those things the West presumes itself to be. White Westerners are still today represented as the bearers of ‘civilization,’ the brokers and arbiters of development, while black, postcolonial ‘others’ are still seen as uncivilised and unenlightened, destined to be development’s exclusive objects” “The missionary position: NGOs and development in Africa”.

But to sustain this image of Africa requires the complicity of the African states and African NGOs, each to carry out its own form of violence. It requires the violence associated with destroying the emergence of self-worth, self-determination and dignity that was, for instance, the achievement of the short-lived revolution led by Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso. That violence is also necessary if the new rulers are to use the state as a source of private accumulation by dispossession (see: THEORY: Neoliberalism).

Saviours cannot thrive where a people retake control of their destinies.

The local NGOs, whose survival is dependent of receiving handouts from the white saviour industry, are complicit in nurturing the image of the subservient, incapable, primitive, African, the victim that needs saving. The complicity of African NGOs, and indeed of African leaders, in perpetuating a form of self-hate of the African identity, a modern manifestation of Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks, is a painful and too often unacknowledged form of violence.

Saviours cannot thrive where a people retake control of their destinies, assert their dignity and humanity, create structures for self determination, organize to meet basic needs and make collective decisions, take pride in their own cultures, and seek neither aid, grants nor charity.

To counter the process of impoverishment requires political action against those who cause and benefit from impoverishment. It requires from activists a willingness to act in solidarity with, and popularize, the efforts of the impoverished to seek justice through their own actions, and a willingness to fight the corporations that reap huge profits through exploitation of those whom they impoverish.