Africa Awareness

Lucy, who is roughly 3.2 million years old, has plans to come to America. Some in the United States, however, don’t think the old girl from Ethiopia is up for it. “Rick Potts, the director of the New York Smithsonian Museum's Human Origins Program and an influential paleoanthropologist, said he and many other scientists agree that Lucy is too fragile to travel,” the Washington Post reported on Saturday. This has nothing to do with new immigration policy, I’m sure. America’s own old lady, Miss Liberty, says “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me…” But the fragile-boned dead need not apply.

Lucy, a three foot, six inch female skeleton that was discovered in Hadar, Ethiopia in 1974, is thought to be one of humanity’s earliest known ancestors. Her presence, then – in the discourse of the Western world, if not in the glass cases of America’s museums – is significant: it reminds us that, according to our DNA, we are all, scientifically speaking, of African descent.

This fact, of course, is not new to Western science. It does seem, however, to be picking up unprecedented attention in the world of American pop culture and mass marketing. This week, on billboards and bus stops around major American cities, black and white photographs of major celebrities from musicians David Bowie and Lenny Kravtiz to models Tyson Beckford and Gisele Bundchen to actresses Gwenyth Paltrow and Lucy Liu could be found on the same poster with bold text which read: “I AM AFRICAN.” It seems Lucy’s message has made it over without her.

The poster, the most noticeable effort from the Keep A Child Alive foundation in recent memory, then directs audiences to learn more about this latest campaign to alleviate AIDS-suffering in Africa at the foundation’s website. “Each and everyone of us contains DNA that can be traced back to our African ancestors,” the opening web page reads. “These amazing people traveled far and wide, now they need our help. Most Africans cannot afford the lifesaving antiretroviral drugs that have transformed AIDS in the West to a treatable and manageable disease.” After reading that “for just one dollar a day” we can help provide these medicines and “help save the life of a child, a mother, a father, a family, our human family, our first family,” we are asked to go to www.keepachild.org “to keep Africa alive… before its too late.”

The “I Am African” campaign comes right on the heels of Gap’s recent collaboration with (PRODUCT) RED to create the Gap PRODUCT (RED) collection aimed at ending Africa’s AIDS plight. 50% of the profits from sales of the new, limited edition collection of Gap clothing and accessory items, “each badged with subtle yet distinct details inspired by (RED)”, goes to the Global Fund to help eliminate AIDS in Africa. To promote the product, Gap, like Keep A Child Alive, used a star-studded cast: Steven Spielberg, Penelope Cruz, Don Cheadle, and Mary J. Blige among them.

Most Africans have been in need of Western aid for a long time. But now, all of a sudden, the fight for Africa has become the hot button issue that celebrities flock to identify with. This “Africa-awareness” among celebrities, and therefore in pop-culture, has been simmering for some time: first Hotel Rwanda, widely popular from its very first week, received even more attention after Don Cheadle received the Oscar for his role as Paul Rusesabagina. Then, like September 11^th on the heels of Pearl Harbor, in came the news from Darfur. Shortly after Africa Action, an agency for Activism for Africa, published the article “A Tale of Two Genocides: The Failed U.S. Response to Rwanda and Darfur,” George Clooney spoke at a press conference at the United Nations on September 14^th and told the international community: “[T]his genocide will be on your watch. How you deal with it will be your legacy — your Rwanda, your Cambodia, your Auschwitz.” Meanwhile, pictures and reports from Darfur gained frequency on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post.

For over a week the (RED) campaign seemed to dominate magazines and street corners in New York City, trying to catch the recent wave of popularity and make support for AIDS elimination in Africa a style statement. Upon first sighting of the “I Am African” campaign this weekend, the whole continent of Africa itself – and every human being’s relationship to it – became almost impossible for anyone to ignore. (Add as well the easily sighted posters around town for Catch A Fire, the new drama about terrorism in Apartheid-era South Africa).

All of that brings us to the front page of today’s New York Times – the Sunday, and most widely read, edition – where we see the picture of six-year old Mark Kwadwo, an indentured servant in Kete Krachi, Ghana, scooping water out of his master’s canoe, above the headline “Africa’s World of Forced Labor, in a 6-Year-Old’s Eyes”. Open to the center spread - or slideshow, online - and the pictures are arresting, the quotes heartbreaking: most of all when Kwadwo whispers, out of earshot of his employer (for fear of being hit over the head by an oar), “I don’t like it here.” Child trafficking can be tacked on to the Western world’s awareness of Africa, between AIDS and genocide.

The question, of course, is will the rise in celebrity and public awareness, accompanied by the efforts of organizations like PRODUCT (RED) and Keep A Child Alive, actually continue until Africa’s greatest problems have been solved? Political focus shifts quickly – in popular memory, New Orleans will soon seem as long ago as Galveston; Indonesia already seems as mythic as Atlantis. Style and Fashion are even worse: as fickle with their interests as Don Juan was with his. Today it is AIDS in Africa, but few want to think of Africa’s tragedies over the Holidays, and nobody will want to wear it, literally, around the Thanksgiving table.

Poverty, of course, is both the source and result of Africa’s greatest problems: a continual downward spiral. In 1970, Africans accounted for 11% of those who lived in extreme poverty – below a dollar a day. In 2000, the number had increased to 35%. If the trends continue, Africa will account for 68%, the majority of the world’s poor. It is too soon to tell if the latest Africa awareness efforts will be effective in curbing these trends, but they certainly have not encouraged intervention or assistance from President Bush, who has declined to offer any American contribution to a United Nations peacekeeping force in Darfur, while rather hypocritically telling the U.N. that it’s “credibility” is on the line there.

No, Sudan will likely go the way of Rwanda. Child trafficking will continue as the consequences of an unjust free market. AIDS will continue to plague the masses.

Africa may be suffering, but it has been suffering for a long time, and a brief rise in public awareness of that fact will not be enough to inspire our politicians to really concern themselves with the suffering of people in a faraway, politically unimportant region.

Hopefully, if Lucy does make the trip, she won't visit the White House. It might break her.

Dylan Byers