Mice, Cows, and Real Rwandans

As an alternative to NGO- or state-initiated arts, this chapter explores traditional oral performance genres mobilized by Kinyarwanda-speakers from DR Congo resettled in a Rwandan refugee camp. Storytellers and poets find ways to unite their communities, obliquely re-narrate their histories, endure amid “emergency conditions,” and assert their agency in an environment otherwise bent toward defining them as passive refugees and victims. Close linguistic attention to the moments and manner in which these stories and poems are performed reveals that oral traditions are not simply sources of automatic authenticity in which to couch development messages, but rather the very means by which substantive demands for development can be articulated and promulgated. Like any other foreign intervention, arts projects initiated amid humanitarian crises would do best to begin by listening to local voices.

Conversations from the Field Part I: Diagnoses

Nadia Fazal is a PhD candidate in social and behavioral health sciences at the University of Toronto. As part of her research, Nadia directed and coproduced the film Kwa Nini Art? (“Art, For What?”) in collaboration with Yole!Africa to explore the perceptions of Congolese artists in Goma about international NGOs. She has also analyzed qualitative data generated from a community art project with adolescent girls in Goma implemented by international NGO Colors of Connection...

Conversations from the Field Part II: Proposals

In your opinion, how do (or should) organizations and artists balance their often divergent responsibilities to their donors, the government bodies of their host nations, their audiences and presumed beneficiaries, and/or their own inspiration and vision? GN: Art and artists can facilitate or smooth the process of mutual understanding between NGOs and their civil society counterparts, as well as influence projects and their implementation. . . . The critical, positive, and open mind most often shown by artists could then be a soft power to shape the organization’s vision, building bridges between NGO representatives and local people. . . . We should not forget that most artists and humanitarian NGOs have in common strong militant values as their core principles and these people are largely engaged for such reasons....

Unraveling and Welding Together

The arts are often framed as resources that bring people together, perhaps by depicting common experiences or appealing to shared pleasures. In crisis contexts, artistic production takes on a new role, as a venue in which to mediate (intervene) and remediate (heal) conflict. By channeling chaotic experiences into aesthetics, NGOs and artists hope to order and transcend disaster through projects designed to reunite warring parties, victims and perpetrators, or governments and their subjects. Yet they also insert new structures into the political landscape, such as NGO and civil society organizations, that are not necessarily any more stable or accountable than the systems they are reinforcing.

Sexual Violence and the Politics of Forgiveness in Guinea

This chapter examines the limits of musical activism by considering some of the varied ways in which music has addressed women’s rights and gender-based violence in Guinea. It centers around the case of a young Guinean rapper who was recently charged with sexual assault, and whose case generated intense criticism from feminist activists and intense support from his fans. The chapter considers two songs closely connected to the case: one that calls for an end to violence against women, and one that calls on women to forgive him. These two songs seem to reflect radically divergent views on gender-based violence. But they are both linked to an underlying ambivalence about women’s rights on the behalf of musicians, audiences, and the state. Survivors of sexual violence are absent in both cases, erased by a politics of forgiveness that calls on them to forget and to be forgotten.

Making a Difference?

In Malawi as elsewhere, several NGOs recruit fee-paying “volun-tourists” drawn to a seductive fusion of service and adventure. This chapter considers one such organization—World Camp, Incorporated—and its use of musical strategies during residencies that take place in primary schools and conclude with student-led performances. The efficacy of World Camp’s public health interventions is a matter of considerable ambivalence. In wedding biomedical lyrical content to locally legible musical forms, students enact a hybridized genre with the potential to subvert autochthonous models of knowledge circulation. Volunteers, meanwhile, perceive their students’ performative capabilities through a romantic prism of endemic musicality, an interpretive move that elides the complexity of local praxis and rehashes racial tropes. Ultimately, this chapter argues that volunteers’ reception of their students’ performances completes a circuit of semiotic validation, reifying outsiders’ sense of altruism and perpetuating a model of humanitarian intervention with compromised regard for local impact.

Covering Emergency

This chapter addresses the production of humanitarian photography in relation to spaces of conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In particular, it addresses the changing trends in NGO image content from negative to positive and their relationship to the region’s social and political contexts. Drawing upon experiences as an anthropologist and as an NGO photographer, the author uses ethnographic vignettes to illustrate how image assignments and field logistics lead to photographic practice that often produces a rosy, controlled visual reality. As a result, such upbeat depictions render invisible the nearby emergencies that fuel the very challenges the population strives to overcome, although associated captions and other text bring the conflict back into the images. Ultimately, this chapter advocates for imagery that encompasses the “beauty and the mess” of the region, challenging both the mere marketing of smiles and the simplistic sale of visualized suffering and disaster.

Humanitarian Theater in the Great Lakes Region

In nominally “postwar” contexts throughout Africa’s Great Lakes region, participatory theater has been mobilized almost exclusively as a tool for either awareness or healing. The rhetoric prescribed for peace and development is so dominant in the humanitarian market that the artist’s ethos is channeled in directions more ethical than aesthetic. The shared circulation of participatory theater through the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi shows how an aesthetic model is exported and becomes a transnationalized tool, one designed to be tailored to any kind of crisis context. Thanks to NGOs’ powerful influence, this model shapes theater and performance landscapes by influencing generations of writers and actors, uniting creators through artistic networks. This theater is characterized by a strong aspiration to performativity which occurs in texts and performances through the centrality of the chorus, frequent mise en abyme, and the quest for catharsis.

Mobutu’s Ghost

Both environments of mass uncertainty and emergent efforts at radical social change inspire calls for the arts to “get the word out.” Yet the distribution of information is inseparable from the distribution of resources, and the logics of broadcast are inherently colored by the politics of patronage. Moreover, the audiences addressed by such media are not open-ended, democratic masses but rather distinct publics constituted by the very forms of discourse chosen by the works: gender roles are consolidated around songs addressed either to men or women, political preferences swayed through the promotion of certain celebrities, ethnic identities unified or exacerbated via the use of different languages, and so on. However widely it spreads, distribution is never even nor unbiased; it is always colored by processes of disparity.

The Art of Emergency

This introduction lays out the conditions for creativity amid contemporary crises in Africa and calls for greater critical attention by both academics and aid agencies to the work of aesthetics in humanitarian interventions. The first section, “Art in Emergency,” dismantles tenacious preconceptions of creativity, intervention, and Africa. The second section, “Art for Emergency,” shows how conditions are shaped by shifts of patronage incentivized by international funding and portable NGO models that prioritize certain cultures and metrics. The third section, “Art as Emergency” spotlights conflicts, intentional and otherwise, between audiences, artists, and administrators, and details further unstable consequences of artist-NGO collaborations, such as the pervasive spread of an aesthetics of efficacy, efficiency, and urgency. The conclusion asserts that aesthetics provide a vital and incisive lens for any analysis of humanitarian intervention.