Adebowale Oriku

Our Red Nose Shame

A series of programmes on BBC culminated last Friday night when a telethon was broadcast. For me the vaudeville galore, otherwise called Comic Relief, on British TV was no laughing matter – it did not even call forth an intimate chuckle. It certainly did not bring relief. Just like its counterparts, i.e. Children in Need and Sports Relief, Comic Relief is a charity-appeal broadcast where a variety of acts perform, with a procession of a showboat of routines, squibs, sketches, parodies, often meant to be funny. This is the night of Red Nose Day. The build-up to this year’s Red Nose night was eventful too. One of the well-advertised highlights was a dozen or so British ‘celebrities’ who climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in order to raise money, the celebrities had also visited hospitals, hospices and hovels of poor Africans. 

On Red Nose day, you would be contributing to some charity or the other if you bought a knob-like, clownish, red rubber nose. Pupils and students also partake of the event, encouraged to wear red or reddish mufti, urged to buy the red nose and bring to school whatever pupil’s mite they can afford. last Friday, my six years old daughter was happy to dress up and adorn her nose with the red poly postiche.

But somehow I was glad she went to bed before the nocturnal TV charity entertainment began. I was relieved because I still can’t find a good way to explain why African children in every sort of distress are shown between appeals for money from the British public. This is the format of Comic Relief. Well-intentioned continual rolling of pictures of Africa, I mean naturalistic pictures of Africa: children orphaned by AIDS; a child who dies of malaria, one of ‘a million’ who die every year; children separated from their parents by poverty, farmed out to relatives and interested punters who might use them as they please. Although there are some intermissions of some British children needing some help or recognition (like a young teenager caring for her mother), Africa and its blighted children are the main focus of the call for monetary donations.

Of course one cannot but acknowledge the empathy of ‘celebrities,’ who do go to Africa, for instance, choked with tears while slumming it, hearts bleeding inside, so overwhelmed that all they can do is blub and sob out their words. One wants to acknowledge the concern of the British public service media, the generosity of the British people for donating money in tens of millions, the enthusiasm of the presenters, announcing the millions, how such and such amount will go towards purchasing a million mosquito nets to be sent to Africa. 

But then you also see how cringemakingly tiresome these images of Africa are. You want to ask, Why us? What is wrong with us? Naturally the answers to that are not far away. Rotten leadership, official thievery, lack of creative initiative, mental slothfulness – no I would not want to use this piece to enumerate the reasons our children are paraded on British TV several times every year, paraded with jaundiced eyes, fleshless limbs, convexed bellies, sad eyes, with mouth fly-rung, sometimes suckling off their wizened, long-faced mothers, aged beyond their years. And any attempt to plumb why we are this way might take me beyond that deep bend in the river, blindly stabbing at the murky source of it all.  

 This is what the Red Nose Day means to me – tortured African faces. What should be lighthearted harlequin fun with moments of magnanimous reflection always turn out as no more than another opportunity for the world to see the solidly sombre globular cancer that is growing on the metaphorical nose of Africa’s sun-stricken ancient face. While this is not to say that the harrowing pictures shown on Red Nose Night cannot not be seen elsewhere. Bangladesh, for instance. Even India, despite the arguably shinier obverse of its economic coin. There is however a polarity about the problems of Africa that is reflected in the frequency and plangency with which they are flashed and shown during the Red Nose Night. Africa hogs the camera for most of the eight hours of the telethon.

Again I would not even begin to shine any light into the cavernous destinations of the money raised, how it would be disbursed, what African recipients would do with whatever they get from these efforts, whether the 1 million mosquito nets would reach 1 million people. This would be too convoluted, too discursive, I’d trudge farther than I intend to go. For instance the hobbyhorse of aid - Africa’s main source of freeloading - would rear its rotten head, certainly.

I know a lot of us do not care about coming from the most wretched continent of the world. After all it is indeed true that not all fingers are equal – African being humanity’s purulent sore thumb. But I don’t think any African parent here can really come up with an honest prideful explanation for why the children of the continent she came from always eyeball their foreign-born cousins through TV screens, patently world-weary, listless, sometimes lifeless.

Whenever my daughter asks probing questions about my continent, all I can do is fudge, parry. Even her primary school is twinned with a needy school in Zambia. Pictures and stories from the Zambian school are distributed in the school. A day is even dedicated to the Zambian school, when offerings and donations are collected from pupils to help pupils in the African school. The English school has even sent a teacher to Zambia to deliver handouts.

My daughter cannot escape being the cynosure whenever there is any mention of the Zambian school, or even of Africa. It hardly helps when the poor six year old repeats that her parents were from Nigeria, not Zambia; though I’ve told her not to bother, that both Nigerians and Zambians are Africans, anyway. And meanwhile, I once spent months explaining to her that Africa is not a country, a usual Western reductionism. The sort of beggary we have reduced ourselves to in the continent would have redounded to such reductionism anyway.

I want my daughter to be proud of where her parents came from, to stand before her friends at school and tell them that there is more to the continent and its people than the dreadful pictures they see on TV. But of course this may be a lost cause. These are epic sleepless pictures, now becoming rather time-honoured (it began tentatively with the pictures of Biafran children), pictures etching themselves in the collective consciousness of the world. For almost two generations Africa has been offering the world a modern tangible face of dysfunction and ditchwater stagnation. I pity the children more than all. They can’t even begin to think what they had done to deserve what they are getting.

Yesterday, I saw the picture of Madonna and the child she adopted from Malawi in central Africa. The boy is smartly-dressed - baseball cap and the works - clutching a toy in his right hand. You cannot but wonder what life he would have been living back in Malawi - or what bare existence, not to put too fine a point on it. This is somewhat Manichean thinking all right, as the boy might just as well be fine farmed out to some relatives, not able to eat even a square meal, ragged most of the time and unable to get an education. But the likelihood is high that the boy would later thank his stars that someone had rescued him from the brutal exigencies that come with living poorly in Africa. Rescued by no less a person than Madonna.  

Robot  # 1 | 15.03.2009 04:19

Adebowale Oriku Our Red Nose Shame A series of programmes on BBC culminatedlast Friday night when a telethon was broadcast. For me the vaudeville galore, otherwise called Comic Relief, on British TV was no laughing matter – it did not even call forth an intimate chuckle. It certainly did not bring relief. Just like its counterparts, i.e. Children in Need and Sports Relief, Comic Relief is a charity-appeal broadcast where a variety of acts perform, with a procession of a showboat of routines, squibs, sketches, parodies, often meant to be funny. This is the night of Red Nose Day. The build-up to this year’s Red Nose night was eventful too. One of the well-advertised highlights was a dozen or so British ‘celebrities’ who climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in order to raise money, the celebrities had also visited hospitals, hospices and hovels of the poor Africans. On the Red Nose day, you would be contributing to some charity or the other if you...Read the full article.

Danmeka  # 2 | 15.03.2009 11:50

Nice article Adebowale, Like you said why us? What is wrong with us? Naturally the answers to that are not far away. Rotten leadership, official thievery, lack of creative initiative, mental slothfulness.Charity begins at home until we get our country in order we will continue to see the societal underdevelopmemt of our people.You must have heard how a church purchase a plane while some of its members are suffering, that tells you the kind of leaders we have.At one point I had to put off the Tv because it grieves me, Governors gets a monthly allocation of N400 million and can't put aside few millions to purchase basic mosquitoes nets for every child.

aguabata  # 3 | 15.03.2009 17:10

that your madonna bit is poor. you talked about pitying the children, maybe you are the one feeling the hurt, you are ashamed that our rot are being exposed. you shouldnt be ashamed, you are old enough to know that Madox (madonna's chid) may or maynot grow up a happy adult despite all the luxury surrounding him. Life is tough for even the white people,the human mind is such that you dont value what you have, when they flood their media with stories of misery in africa they feel a lot better and priviledged about themselves. you ought to be angry that the structure of western aid will keep african societies begging, It is unnatural for another group of humans to solve Africa's problems.

folashade  # 4 | 16.03.2009 03:14

I think the gory pictures of distended bellies and naked poverty depicting Africa will still sadly, like the poor remain with us for much longer than we envisage until our eyes are fixated on seeking internal solutions to our developmental challenges ,not outwards and upwards waiting for the next dollop of foreign aid to land in our laps that would eventually go into thieving hands anyway. There is a major global paradigm shift that has truncated that oft touted myth of colonialism being the reason for our inability to rise to full stature as a continent. God will not send a rescuer to save our wretched behinds until we liberate ourselves from the perverseness that characterises our thinking and lives as a people and reshape our values. The black man no longer has a leg to stand on if God in His infinite wisdom has carefully allowed a black man to ascend the perch of the greatest country in the world just to show that "the fault lies not in our stars" and that the Black man is just as blessed as his white counterparts to fulfill his destiny. It's all about the vision. Until we return to where the rains first began to beat us, the world will continue to feast on the gory sights of wars, famines and vultures pecking at the remains of a continent that had all the potentials to fulfil greatness but sadly chose to remain in the dank abyss of retrogression. This House has indeed fallen!

adebowale oriku  # 5 | 16.03.2009 04:23

=Danmeka;337164>Nice article Adebowale, Like you said why us? What is wrong with us? Naturally the answers to that are not far away. Rotten leadership, official thievery, lack of creative initiative, mental slothfulness.Charity begins at home until we get our country in order we will continue to see the societal underdevelopmemt of our people.You must have heard how a church purchase a plane while some of its members are suffering, that tells you the kind of leaders we have.At one point I had to put off the Tv because it grieves me, Governors gets a monthly allocation of N400 million and can't put aside few millions to purchase basic mosquitoes nets for every child. Danmeka, I've heard the one about the pastor who just bought a plane. I am not surprised actually, the terms pastor and bishop and so on are only a cover for a multitude of sins and misdemeanors. And Mr Aguabata, your assumption that I am 'old enough' to know better is not necessary - it's rather tart, I think. Anyway do you notice that I indicted myself of bit of 'Manichean thinking' and that I used the word 'likelihood' when second-guessing what Madonna's adopted son might think? Read between the lines my dear brother. I did not set out to philosophise in the piece, only to set down my experience in its immediacy. I indeed know there is more to life than the glitz and gold Madonna might offer the boy. As you said, even in the West life is not a bed of roses, but certainly not a bed of nails for a lot of people either, as it is for hundreds of millions in Africa.

Beam  # 6 | 16.03.2009 07:28

=aguabata;337231>that your madonna bit is poor. you talked about pitying the children, maybe you are the one feeling the hurt, you are ashamed that our rot are being exposed. you shouldnt be ashamed, you are old enough to know that Madox (madonna's chid) may or maynot grow up a happy adult despite all the luxury surrounding him. Life is tough for even the white people,the human mind is such that you dont value what you have, when they flood their media with stories of misery in africa they feel a lot better and priviledged about themselves. you ought to be angry that the structure of western aid will keep african societies begging, It is unnatural for another group of humans to solve Africa's problems. Not to derail your post maddox is Angelina jolies and brad pitt son, david banda is Madonna and Guy's * point of correction*