Do Not Donate: An Open Letter to the First World

Picture this. You gather up all your spare food and the clothes you don't want anymore and the money you don't need, and you start walking. Now I don't know where you live or what it's like, so if necessary, factor seven league boots or a car into the equation. As you journey, look out for people who need what you're carrying and give them it. For the purposes of this whole analogy we'll probably also need to imagine a world without muggers. How far, literally and geographically, would you get before you ran out of stuff to give? If you have a lot of stuff please feel free to imagine a string of mules, a truck or whatever you need.

Did you get to the third world? Did you get to the Africa that all the big charities advertise, where children have big eyes and empty stomachs? Did you perhaps get as far as Ethiopia, where Bob Geldof's well-intentioned first Live Aid merely saved one generation to breed another generation to be hit by famine?

Of course all I did there was illustrate that old "charity begins at home" adage. Globalization arguably means that hungry Africans are more real to you than the hungry and homeless in your own country.

Perhaps you feel some residual colonial guilt. Maybe you want to feed Africa because Europe colonised and slaved it so much. Here's a tricky bit of moral ground for you - Robert Calderesi's (ex African head of the World Bank) "The Trouble With Africa" surmises that the descendants of slaves now living in the West are far better off than the descendants of free Africans in Africa. Does that mean slavery wasn't all bad?

Maybe that guilt is a good thing. We need to learn from history after all. You can argue charity either way - it is in turn a force of control and colonialism, or it's nice to help your fellow man. Both viewpoints are valid. Then you look at starving Zimbabwe and Rwanda, where the UN knowingly let genocide happen to a million people in a hundred days and one wonders whether the West really cares at all.

You've probably read about just how much corruption there is associated with charities too. You may have noticed the Toyota Landcruisers and Landrovers that charity officials drive so they can get around areas where Africans use feet, bicycles, Chinese motorcycles or cars that look as if they're held together by string. There are a lot of good, roots level projects out there, teaching necessary skills. They're also creating an insatiable desire for Western consumer goods in places where the real need is just food. Or perhaps you give to animal-centric charities, without considering that the people poaching the lovely animals are doing it because they're starving.

Or perhaps I'm wrong about it all. But I say leave us alone to grow food, stop screwing up the maize prices by the do-good bio-fuels industry that actually needs four planets to sustain it and is in the meantime ruining small farmers and creating more starving people. Stop sending little donations and then photographing hungry black kids with your expensive cameras. The first world gives us charity and sanctions to that we're under its control and neither approach feeds people ultimately. The solution to all Africa's problems is in Africa. And Africa, this patient continent that gave birth to us all; Africa will endure. Look to your own volatile societies and economies and your dissatisfied youth.

Or not.