Comic Relief boss admits: We may be bad for Africa
IT WAS set up to 34 years ago to use star power to help change lives in Africa as well as the UK.
But Comic Relief has become ‘irrelevant, dated and possibly quite harmful’ in the way it represents the continent, according to its own boss.
Chief executive Ruth Davison has acknowledged criticism that the charity depicted a ‘colonial-era’ image of Africa, with accusations that celebrities such as Stacey Dooley and Ed Sheeran have been portrayed as so-called ‘white saviours’.
And she suggested that showing Africans living in abject poverty during the biennial BBC telethon had become counter-productive.
‘We’re so brilliant at what we do and have been for so long that we hadn’t noticed it had tipped from really timely and relevant, into slightly irrelevant and dated, into actually possibly quite harmful,’ she told a conference for NGOs, or non-government organisations. ‘To be honest, we have fallen into the trap of ramping up [the level of] need, showing stuff that shouldn’t be shown and stripping people of their dignity, stripping people of their privacy, because it elicits a strong emotional reaction from the viewer or the reader and they will give.’
She admitted the use of celebrities has changed and Comic Relief was ‘trying to admit it and trying to learn from those failures’.
A 2017 Red Nose Day film, in which Sheeran offered to put up two homeless boys in a hotel after he discovered them sleeping on a boat on a Liberian beach, had been labelled ‘poverty porn’ in the media.
And earlier this year, Labour MP David Lammy said a film from Strictly winner Dooley, in which she posed with a five-year-old Ugandan boy, offered ‘a distorted image of Africa which perpetuates an old idea from the colonial era’. Ms Davison, who is the interim boss of Comic Relief until a new chief executive arrives in March, told the NGO Insight conference that all Western charities needed to address how they portray Africa.
‘We in the UK don’t need to be told that Africa exists, we don’t need to be told that people are living in poverty, we don’t need to be told that we can do something to help,’ she said in comments reported by Civil Society News.
‘That narrative in the days of Live Aid was a breakthrough, and really revolutionary, but it became irrelevant quite some time ago actually and has now moved into harmful.’
Comic Relief has raised more than £1billion in total, but Ms Davison said it was inevitable that income from the seven-hour telethon would fall as viewers increasingly watched TV on demand or via streaming platforms such as Netflix.