White Saviour

I can see how a 40+ year fund raising effort looks today but I think it's worth remembering that at the time virtue signalling wasn't a thing and charity wasn't as politicised as it is now. No one boasted about buying the record because they were an empath!

Absolutely this

I think that the original BA song should be remembered for what it was, a well-intentioned thing that raised awareness. It would never have won an Ivor Novello award but the hasty, cobbled-together nature of the track has become part of the story.

I like seeing the video now - images of major stars arriving at the studio, chatting whilst they waited. A snapshot of a particular time.

I wouldn’t want it to be revisited.

There wasn't a single person on the planet that would have said "wait, stop buying & making that song because it's offensive & inappropriate to help" when it was made. I'm sure the world has moved on & maybe the likes of Ed Sheeran has a point. But it was of it's time & people were starving, literally, there was pictures of people barely alive. And we didn't have globalisation on the scale it is now so most people didn't know this was happening, the record raised awareness of the issues going on in Africa at that time.

I think Bob Geldof did a good thing & it came from a good place; the lyrics are dated & he'd probably agree, but this was the era where there was lots of inappropriate things going on, especially within the pop scene.

I think he was trying to help, & it did save lives, I think they did a good thing & it as other good deeds, should be celebrated for what it was.

@Ginmonkeyagain the song wasn’t questioning the awareness of the Christian calendar in Ethiopia. It was suggesting that such was their suffering, their starvation, their desperation, they might have lost track of the dates, as utterly devastating pain turns life into a meaningless blur. Have you never experienced a loss so tragic that you forget what day it is? Imagine multiplying that feeling by many thousand. You might not know it was Christmas.

I think Bob Geldof was right to do what he did. He tried . And by getting a lot of celebrities to do the song, he raised awareness.

I agree. As a nation, British people are incredibly generous. Every major fundraiser, we dig deep and donate. Even people with very little themselves. And now we’re being told that’s somehow wrong.

I was a teenager when the whole Band Aid and Live Aid stuff happened. It was revolutionary. A vast amount of money was generated overnight, often from young people like me, who’d never considered donating to charity before, spending our pocket money on a charity record. We did it in good faith, and we truly believed we were helping. Yes the lyrics were clumsy, but it was thrown together at speed, and I think the end justified the means. A whole generation of people became acutely aware of the suffering thousands of miles away, and wanted to help.

It makes me angry when people who weren’t even born then, and don’t understand how different life was, start criticising us for apparently doing it wrong.

I wonder how many starving children the rapper Fuse ODG has fed.

Good intentions don't necessarily lead to good works. A teenage relative went to an African country on a class trip to build houses. This was to improve the relative's university application; they went and returned with no practical skills. This is a good kid with good intentions.

Yet I try to imagine what the reaction would be if teen girls from a prosperous area in an African country, and with zero practical skills, arrived in Scotland to build houses in a poor area, therefore reducing work for local trades, and put up shoddy buildings in order to tick a box on their university applications, while also posting social media photos of dirty and poor Scottish children. I don't suppose that would go over well.

Yes, but you may as well say that about food/clothing/whatever banks over here - charities have become part of the welfare state and allowed governments to stand off. 🤷‍♀️

Great post.

I cringe every time I hear "do they know it's Christmas" - Ethiopia is an country with an ancient tradition of Christianity that pre dates most European countries.

Surely the lyric is about being hungry/starving being the opposite of Christmas. Christmas being about gifts/food/plenty therefore the opposite of famine. It's not about lack of awareness of Christianity. They were raising funds for food not bible classes. I'm not saying the song is genius and I'm sure your lecturer had some good insights, but your example feels like a wilful misreading.

Also I remember seeing a doc about how the song was written and as with many of these things, it was very much on the hoof, done to a tight deadline to do the job and not precision-tooled to stand any of this kind of analysis. The doc on Netflix about the making of We Are The World is also worth a watch for a glimpse of the mayhem these projects sprang from. The fact that they had an impact and did some good is quite a miracle in itself, given the coke-fuelled big ego madness of the 80s pop scene.

Yes of course.

But It would be rare for large numbers of children to starve to death in the UK.

That has happened in parts of Africa.

Bob Geldof was genuinely trying to help. And thats not a bad thing. He did more than a lot of other celebrities.

I say this as a poc, charity begins in your home country and this whole thing boils down to race baiting.

But there ARE people in the UK starving and unable to provide a Christmas. IME only the privileged like Geldof and Ure ever believe that everyone else is privileged too. They don’t get it and never will

I do think that aid other than for emergencies basically removes responsibility from the state for taking care of it’s responsibilities. I do support emergency giving though. I remember reading about how giving clothes had destroyed local fabric merchants, tailors etc in communities in some areas in africa.

@Womblewife do you genuinely not understand? The whole point of that line was to verbalise what we all secretly think when we see horrific footage of other people’s suffering. We feel sympathy, anger, powerlessness, desire to help, frustration, even devastation - but we also feel relief that it’s not us suffering. That line was meant as a wake-up call, for us all to acknowledge how lucky and privileged we were.

The song lyrics are quite unpleasant really - “thank god it’s them instead of you” - that is not nice, I have never thanked god someone is going through terrible times so I am not. What an absurd lyric!

It's the same as 'There but for the grace of god go I'. It's not about being glad someone else is suffering but about feeling lucky not to be, which is part of empathising and understanding that we are all the same and could be in someone else's shoes in a heartbeat given a different twist of fate, rather than it being our innate qualities that make us different. It's a common human sentiment that everyone feels at some time or other whether they like to admit it to themselves or not. But sure, there's a v simplistic way to read it and react too.

The song was of its time as were the well-intended efforts around it. It doesn't need re-doing now and no one needs more Ed Sheeran. As an Xmas/charity song, it's less annoying and stands up musically better than most.

I think you have to be very careful about where you volunteer. The big problem in Asia was with fake orphanages - the children weren't always orphans, they were there to make money from tourists.

I think it makes a lot of sense too, small basic incomes directly given to women. I like the microloans schemes as well where you are able to loan money to people so they can improve their own lives and they pay it back over time. I always have a couple of loans going through Lend with Care and have done for years, when I get paid back I lend the money out to someone else. It avoids fostering dependency which is one of the major issues with aid and enables people to help themselves. Slightly different but that might appeal @Hairyesterdaygonetoday .

I used to volunteer abroad. Not in Africa but in Asia.

Nobody used to remark on it. Then the "white saviour " remark began to be said in the media. About Stacey Dooley going to Africa.

All of a sudden I began getting mean comments. I posted a post on Facebook about where I was staying in Nepal. I put one line in the post, that I was going to volunteer at a centre.

One of my facebook friends (a girl id went to college with)sent me a really nasty post calling me a white saviour.

I said i was trying to help this charity. She said "but then you're taking jobs away from local people" and I said no "this charity has specifically asked for outside volunteers to come over and help'.

I had done lots of volunteering before this. And it had been a really worthwhile experience. The places needed help.

But my conversation with her really affected me. It's horrible being told that you're helping people just to benefit yourself. I wondered if that's how other people saw me.

And I just stopped volunteering anywhere after that

I like the sound of direct giving, Moonlight. How do you do it? Are there charities set up for this?

Meanwhile I tend to support charities with one single aim (eg to fix fistulas, or cataracts) in the hope that with one clear purpose, less money gets wasted along the way. Hope that’s not just wishful thinking!

That lyric was put there to get people to think.

It's meant to mean that what is happening to them, could be happening to anyone, it could be happening to you.

You are jumping to quite superficial conclusions here. The issue with the “white saviour complex” is not the act of giving, it’s the failure to consider cultural norms and wider implications of giving. For example, there are projects which recruit voluntary healthcare professionals for poorer countries. Disabled children in Vietnam get free speech and language therapy. Amazing, right? Except that by importing free therapist en masse makes it unattractive to the local government to provide and pay for training places for local SaLTs and they are unwilling to pay graduates a salary when they have hordes of free therapists shipped in by charitable organisations. So the country becomes fully dependent on these projects. A better solution would be, for example, for charities to train local therapists. Failure to plan in the long term and availability of, mostly, white middle class people to donate their time for free created a much bigger issue. That’s white saviour complex in action.

I had a economics lecturer who grew up in Eritrea. His thoughts on Live Aid were .... interesting.

I cringe every time I hear "do they know it's Christmas" - Ethiopia is an country with an ancient tradition of Christianity that pre dates most European countries.