Celebrity Colonialism: Buying Africa is the Latest Trend Among the Famous

By Adam Elkus, ColorLines. Posted May 2, 2007.

Celebrities have always identified with underdogs. Playing a victim or otherwise disadvantaged character is a sure route to an Oscar, and everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Eminem has celebrated the underdog in song.

It's not surprising that models, actors, and popular musicians have focused on impoverished Africa, raising money and awareness for debt relief and famine. However, these efforts have done relatively little to address the structural causes of African misery. There is also an uncomfortable element of colonialism that runs through celebrities' interactions with Africans and current interest in African culture.

Is the celebrity fascination with Africa genuine or shallow? Are the efforts of well-meaning celebrities to alleviate Africa's poverty and disease the continent's salvation or a recipe for disaster?

The recent spate of celebrity adoptions, Angelina Jolie's much-hyped birth in Namibia, and Kate Moss's infamous blackface modeling in the Independent reveal cultural colonialism masquerading as liberal multiculturalism. And despite their good intentions, Bob Geldof and Bono are being led around by the nose by technocrats and multinational corporations who bear responsibility for much of Africa's problems.

Madonna's "adoption" of a Malawian baby epitomizes the worst of the celebrity adoption trend. Malawi's stringent adoption laws force foreigners to stay 18 months in the country to be assessed as prospective parents. After concerted lobbying, a Malawian court issued an interim order allowing Madonna to take the child out of the country for a year, triggering court challenges from human rights groups and charities who felt Madonna had "bought" the ruling through her extravagant patronage of Malawian orphanages.

Unwilling to wait, the pop singer deployed a team to spirit the child back to England. Madonna follows a celebrity trend started by Angelina Jolie, who adopted children from Cambodia and Ethiopia. A naysayer might point out that the babies will lead better lives in the West. However, growing up in an alien culture separated from one's own ethnic traditions is a recipe for psychological problems. It has disturbing echoes of the Spanish, American, and Australian colonial practice of kidnapping aboriginal children in order to raise them with white Christian values; such kidnappings were justified by a similar desire to rescue the children from what was perceived as a poverty both literal and spiritual.

These issues are compounded by the objectification of celebrity adoptees by the media, which publicize them as exotic objects rather than human beings. There is no doubt that Jolie and Madonna love their children, but they inevitably become exotic props and grist for the likes of Us Weekly.

The most troubling aspect of the celebrity adoptions concerns Western privilege, with Madonna and Angelina Jolie swooping into impoverished countries to essentially buy babies from families too poor to care for them. In Madonna's case, she technically abducted the baby, as her men took the child before a Malawian court could rule against her.

But the most grotesque manifestation of colonial privilege occurred when Jolie turned a small corner of Namibia into an armed camp so she could give birth unmolested. Brendan O'Neill in the online magazine spiked put it this way:

Over the past six weeks a Western security force has effectively taken over the small African nation of Namibia. A beach resort in Langstrand in Western Namibia has been sealed off with security cordons, and armed security personnel have been keeping both local residents and visiting foreigners at bay. A no-fly zone has been enforced over part of the country. The Westerners have also demanded that the Namibian government severely restrict the movement of journalists into and out of Namibia. The government agreed and, in a move described by one human rights organization as 'heavy-handed and brutal', banned certain reporters from crossing its borders.

Jolie essentially dictated security measures to a sovereign country, taking advantage of its poverty in order to have a "special" experience giving birth in Africa. She decided who entered and left the country and carved out an exclusive space where she commanded a small army of private security officers.

This favoritism is reminiscent of the behavior of colonial elites catalogued in Albert Memmi's classic text The Colonizer and the Colonized:

If he is in trouble with the law, the police and even justice will be more lenient toward him. If he needs assistance from the government, it will not be difficult; red tape will be cut; a window will be reserved for him .. From the time of his birth, he possesses a qualification independent of his personal merits or his actual class. He is part of the group of colonizers whose values are sovereign.

When one views the now-familiar scene of a Western movie star and a television crew arriving to a god's welcome in a dusty African village, one cannot help but be reminded of the film The Man Who Would Be King, in which two British soldiers on the run are mistaken by Afghani villagers to be actual deities.

See more stories tagged with: africa, madonna, adoption, kate moss, bono, angelina jolie

Adam Elkus lives in Pacific Palisades, California. He can be reached at: adam@clearstone.com.

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