Beyond the Other: "Beninese Solidarity with Endangered Westerners" as Postcolonial Critique

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RMA Cultural Analysis Thesis by Riccardo Ceniviva 10847936

June 2016

Supervisor: Dr Hanneke Stuit Second Reader: Dr Joost de Bloois

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BEYOND THE OTHER | Riccardo Ceniviva

Beyond the Other:

Beninese Solidarity with Endangered

Westerners as Postcolonial Critique

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BEYOND THE OTHER | Riccardo Ceniviva “And when one day our human kind becomes full-grown, it will not define itself as the sum total of

the whole world’s inhabitants, but as the infinite unity of their mutual needs”

- Jean-Paul Sartre

“Let us decide not to imitate Europe; let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth.”

- Frantz Fanon

“The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.”

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I

Introduction

L’enfer, c’est les autres. Hell is the others, laughs Garcin towards the end of Sartre’s No Exit in a cynical acknowledgement of the play’s three protagonists’ fate, a dire statement of jaundiced avowal that has become one of the book’s key tenets. When listening to the rhetoric currently being deployed by many politicians, public figures and significant parts of the media in various Western countries, for instance in light of the current refugee crisis in Europe or the looming elections in the United States, one could naively believe that this is the case. It would indeed be obtusely cynical to deny that we currently find ourselves in another full-fledged moral panic, fearing the invasion of the non-Western Other who will harm our society, our values, our freedom, our safety. We now ostensibly face the imminent end of our enlightened, rational, pragmatic and free world which we have taken centuries to painstakingly construct. Along with the Other, then, will come Hell.

Notwithstanding, such an interpretation of Sartre’s statement is also obtusely naïve. As Sartre himself has stated, “the others are, after all, what is most important in ourselves, even for our own knowledge of ourselves. We judge ourselves with the means the others have given us. Whatever I say about myself, however I feel about myself, the judgement of the other is always incorporated” (Sartre, L’Enfer, my translation). Thus, Hell is not the existence of others, or the coexistence with others, but rather, the other’s judgement, the other’s gaze, the act of objectification. Or, in other words, Hell is the act, the process of being othered.

In this sense, departing from such transcendental metaphors as Hell, and discarding the heavily mediatised moral panic, a rather apposite question to pose at this stage is, who is the Other who, in many dominant discourses, is uncritically being othered? Even though the colonial era, along with its construction of the un-modern, primitive, atavistic Other who needed to be civilised, dominated and modernised, is to a certain extent over – let us nonetheless not forget the conditions of extreme violence that paralleled its demise – we are still living in its shadow, in what Young calls the “postcolonial condition”. Furthermore, it can be argued that whilst the colonial era is in itself over, many of the ideologies, discourses and power relations characteristic of it are still very well thriving.

Even though some claim that in the age of globalisation – an umbrella term used to characterise the growing interconnectedness, the shrinking of time and space, between various

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parts of the world on various levels – we have become a “global village” (McLuhan), that our world is increasingly becoming homogenised, or McDonaldised (Ritzer), others, in light with postmodern thinking, affirm that the world is gradually fragmenting and breaking down into often antagonistic pieces, that there is a growing rise of anti-globalisation sentiments and actions, and that we are returning to forms of tribalism (Maffesoli). Whilst both sides of this debate hold a certain degree of truth and relevance, what is important to note is that whilst for capital, and those with capital, every barrier inhibiting its flow is gradually being dismantled, the subaltern, those without capital – not just in the monetary sense – are increasingly seeing the world becoming larger and inhospitable, with what Shamir identifies as the “global mobility regime” seeking to keep them, those undesirable people stemming from undesirable origins, out of the global North.

Whilst the colonial language of racial hierarchies has to a certain extent been rendered obsolete, under the auspice of political correctness, it has been euphemised by that of unsurmountable cultural differences (Gilroy, My Britain). Furthermore, whilst the age of colonialism is over, it has been replaced by Western-led forms of imperialism and neo-colonialism, under the auspice of ‘globalisation’. We can think of foreign military interventions in the name of freedom and democracy, developing the underdeveloped world, Western values and culture as the maxim to be globally attained, or the implementation of neo-liberal agendas on ‘weaker’ states through the powerful hand of supranational institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. In this light, according to thinkers such as Fukuyama, once Western-style liberal democracies will be globally instated, it will be the end of history, the apotheosis of human development. The Other is thus the subaltern, undesirable Other, the ostensibly weak, non-Western Other who does not belong to and who poses a perceived threat to the Western project camouflaging itself behind the veil of universality. As Robert Young (Remains 37) has written:

the idea that there is a category of people, implicitly third-world, visibly different to the casual eye, essentially different, and ‘other’, is itself a product of racial theory, its presuppositions drawn from the discriminatory foundations of modernity. The legacy of this, of course, is the existence of minorities, who struggle for full

participation within a society that continues to other them as ‘the other’.

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Bearing this in mind, every time I evoke the title of the artistic project, the main object of this thesis, a fake NGO called Beninese Solidarity with Endangered Westerners, people usually laugh. One is led to wonder, then, what is funny about it? It is, in fact, something almost unheard of, something that goes against the established order of things. Charity, development, or aid is always usually a one-way process that trickles down the metaphorical gravitational pull from the global North to the global South. Let us not forget how we still, to a certain extent, speak of the Third World, and how our world has been normatively split in discourse between the developed and the developing world, signifying that the latter is by definition evolving to reach the universal maxim the former has allegedly reached and of which it is a benchmark. So yes, it is rather unusual, thus comical, or even funny, that someone in the so-called developing world had the idea to help us, the masters of progress and civilisation.

In fact, as Holler-Schuster writes, for a long time – and even currently, it can be argued – the West has spoken of Africa in regards to its poverty, “at least to the degree that the people there [in Africa] were willing to believe it, and as a continent largely dependent on humanitarian aid from the West.” Thus, “a lack of self-confidence, and a clinging to the role of victim – a consequence of traumatic developments around the slave trade, colonisation and decolonisation – along with issues in connection with neo-colonialism, still appear to be major factors in the slow development of African countries” (103). Furthermore, the Euro-centrist assertion that African countries are primarily still uncivilised has led to its exoticisation both in the imagination and in discourse, which has been further enhanced by tourism.

In this light, Romuald Hazoumè, a contemporary artist from Benin, created the aforementioned NGO SBOP in 2011, the acronym standing for Solidarité Béninoise pour Occidentaux en Péril, or Beninese Solidarity with Endangered Westerners. On Valentine’s Day of that same year, five well-known Beninese artists – Zeynab Abib, John Arcadius, Angélique Kidjo, Danialou Sagbohan and Jean-Pierre Zinko – commissioned by Hazoumè, walked around Cotonou, the largest city in Benin, to collect funds for the NGO. They all wore a white t-shirt with the acronym of the NGO on the front, the full name spelled out on the back, in green and yellow colours – the same colours reserved for the license plates of diplomats in Benin – and carried red jerrycans, which also bore the NGO’s logo in the same yellow and green colours, in order to collect the donations. The whole event was filmed, recording the interactions with the locals at various markets and along various busy streets, who often displayed very strong emotional reactions towards the fundraiser, ranging from happiness to have personally encountered the artists, surprise at the fact that poverty actually exists in the ‘West’, to anger

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that they are not collecting money for their own people, to name a few examples. Along with the opening and closing credits, one can hear music from the Gangbé Brass Band, a well-known Beninese group playing traditional music from West Africa. The whole video lasts 16 minutes and 37 seconds, to which I was granted full access courtesy of Hazoumè for this piece of research, whilst a shorter, 3 minutes and 15 seconds video can be found for free online, with subtitles.1 The original languages spoken in the video are French, along with other indigenous languages, the precise nature of which I am unfortunately not aware.

A whole exhibition was organised around this project, which was displayed in various museums around the world, and more recently at De Meelfabriek in Leiden, in the Netherlands.23 A makeshift wall, made from various large discarded jerrycans, was built, covered by a tin roof, giving the appearance of being a small building – the headquarters of the NGO. A doorway is to be found in the middle of the wall, covered by a curtain, above which is fixed a sign spelling out the acronym and the full name of the NGO. On both sides of the doorway, where the windows would usually be, are television screens on which the full-length video is being played on a loop. In front of the house stands a bicycle bearing the NGO’s name, on which are fixed various small red jerrycans, similar to the ones used to collect the donations – Benin, and especially Porto-Novo, its capital, are one of the world’s hotspots for illegal petrol trade, which often gets transported in jerrycans, in a highly dangerous way, on bicycles and scooters. Furthermore, one can find various makeshift tables and seats, also made out of the same large jerrycans used to build the wall, and other recycled or reused materials. If one enters the doorway, on the other side of the wall one can find various newspaper clippings reporting on the story around the NGO.

In this paper, then, I would like to discuss how my object – the NGO as a whole, including the video and the installation – can be an effective form of immanent critique against the damaging hegemonic ideology that constructs the non-Western Other as the weak, undesirable, subaltern Other. In the opening chapter, I will spell out in greater detail what can be understood under the “postcolonial condition”, and argue in favour of the relevance of postcolonial discourse in the current socio-political context. I will also situate SBOP within current academic discourses and debates in this field. The subsequent chapters will provide the reader with

1_{For the version with English subtitles, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hppc3o5a3dw} 2_{See Appendix 1}

3_{What is important to note, however, is that, as far as I am aware, SBOP has only been exhibited in museums in}

Europe and the United States. Not much information on the project can be found online, and I do not think that it has been exhibited in Africa. Perhaps this can be due to copyright reasons, as the project has been commissioned by the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas.

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semiotic and discourse analyses of the NGO, where I will research in greater depth how the NGO can be a powerful means of immanent critique towards neo-colonial and neo-imperial ideologies and the conceiving of the Other’s otherness. In the second and third chapters, I will conceptualise SBOP through the concepts of détournement and mimicry, which will lead to the main concept of this paper, that of the fake, in the fourth chapter. In so doing, I want to contribute to the existing literature in postcolonial critique. First, I would like to bring these concepts – détournement, mimicry and the fake – in a new relation with each other, and I will argue how they build up on each other and how they enable us to understand the various levels of SBOP through different, yet interrelated lenses. Second, I would like to argue how they can be a powerful form of postcolonial critique, as they have all – apart from that of mimicry – hardly, if at all, been used in such a context.

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II

Postcolonial Critique and the Other

Modernity, in the large sense, can be regarded as the pinnacle of rationality and reason in human thought, following the Age of Enlightenment, the first shy ray of sunlight, the growing beacon of illumination which chased away the obscurantist clouds imposed upon Europe by the Church and the absolutist State in the Dark Ages. Along with rationality and reason, another irradiating friend enters the game, under the name of order. Modernity, therefore, can be regarded as the quest for order, and the crusade against ambivalence (Bauman, Modernity). To order signifies to classify, to impose a structure upon the benign, passive world. To classify, in turn, signifies the mutually constitutive acts of inclusion and exclusion – if something belongs to, or is made into a class, then something else, by definition, is excluded from it. Ambivalence, or chaos, is then the Other of order, it is uncertainty, unadulterated negativity, unpredictability, the “source or archetype of all fear”. Thus, since “the sovereignty of the modern state is the power to define and to make the definitions stick – everything that self-defines or eludes the power-assisted definition is subversive. The other of this sovereignty is no-go areas, unrest and disobedience, collapse of law and order” (Bauman, Modernity 8). The subversive, ambivalent and chaotic Other hence thwarts our Western, modern will to power (Nietzsche) and will to knowledge (Foucault, Histoire), our perpetual desire to control, to categorise and to organise.

In this sense, the “construction of order sets the limit to incorporation and admission. It calls for the denial of rights, and of the grounds, of everything that cannot be assimilated – for de-legitimation of the other” (Bauman, Modernity 8). Coloniality, then, was co-constitutive of modernity – those who were different, outside, other to our Western system of rational thinking, those who were deemed to be primitive, barbaric or uncivilised needed to be controlled, or even supressed. A new social order arose in which the colonial organisation of society was based on racial hierarchies, and the world gradually became separated between those towards whom the allegedly universal yet parochial Enlightenment concept of humanity applied, and those outside of modernity, to be controlled by the Western-led colonial matrix of power. Tlostanova and Mignolo identify four interconnected spheres of life in which the aforementioned matrix operates, notably the struggles for the control of authority, of the public sphere, of knowledge and subjectivity and of economics. Furthermore, they also identify four successive and cumulative historical periods in which the matrix colonised the world, yet the rhetoric justifying the actions altered – first, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was theology and the

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mission of conversion; then, it was under the auspice of civilising the uncivilised world; and following the second World War, it was the developmental and modernising mission, which lasted until the era of decolonisation.

The fourth historical period, then, is our contemporary one, where, since the 1970’s, the “neo-liberal agenda translated the previous mission of development and modernisation, into the Washington consensus of granting the market economy priority over social regulation” (Tlostanova and Mignolo 136). As capital, one of the driving forces of our world has become heavily transnationalised, decentralised and abstracted, as the Western imperial states are now not anymore fully in control of the colonial matrix, and as Dirlik points out, the narrative of capitalism is no longer of one of the history of Europe, it can be posited that the world order has gradually become diversified and polycentric. Nevertheless we can still speak of global coloniality,4 where the control of and over authority will inextricably prevail, yet disguised behind moralising narratives such as progress, development and security. In other words, whilst imminent to the colonial era was the denial of coevalness between the West and the Rest – to be understood as the political construction and production of distance and difference in Space and Time (Fabian), with the colonised Other narrated to be outside of, rather than otherwise than, modernity (Bhabha) – in our globalised, postcolonial world, we are now increasingly becoming confronted with the Other. Taussig calls this the “second contact” between the former colonisers and colonised, which caused the emergence of a radically different border between the West and the Rest, an unstable border prone to osmosis on behalf of global capitalism and migration. Our so-called “world risk society” (Beck) is causing Space, to a certain extent, to shrink, with countless people around the world fleeing violence, war, oppression and environmental disasters, along with the war in Syria currently causing one of modern times’ largest diasporas. Additionally, due to advances in media and technology, and driven by the imagination, a social practice and “key component of the new global order” (Appadurai 31), many are travelling to the global North in search of a better, more prosperous life. Notwithstanding these developments, our globalised world still operates in a very contradictory logic – whilst global capitalism is vigorously de-territorialising, global colonialism is belligerently territorialising, perpetually installing both physical and metaphysical barriers between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

4_{As distinct from the colonial era, during which the colonies were under full and direct control of the}

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Which is why, whilst much has changed since the colonial era, as previously stated, globalisation can still be regarded as a contemporary form of imperialism, perpetuating the asymmetrical dichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In this respect, Gregory evokes the colonial present: “I speak about the colonial – rather than the imperial – present because I want to retain the active sense of the verb ‘to colonise’: the constellations of power, knowledge, and geography that I describe here continue to colonise lives all over the world” (xv). The War on Terror, for instance, can be seen as a return of the colonial past, again partitioning the world in binaries such as good against evil, civilisation against barbarism. Huntingdon’s Clash of Civilisations perfectly exemplifies such thinking in uncritically assuming the integrity of homogenous, monolithic entities, and, as Gilroy very rightfully notices, “old colonial issues come back into play when geopolitical conflicts are specified as a battle between homogenous civilisations” (After Empire 25).

However, forms of neo-imperialism, or global colonialism also work on much subtler levels, aside from war and violence designed to obliterate the threatening Other. The idiom of humanitarianism, for instance, has constructed the “ideal of imperial power as an ‘ethical’ force which can promote good and stability amidst the flux and chaos of the post-colonial world” (Gilroy, After Empire 66). Imperial particularism is thus disguised as universal utilitarianism. As Schmitt already identified in 1927, “the concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism” (54). For instance, as Hill writes, since the 1980’s, once the old colonies were ‘liberated’, African states have mostly been described as weak, failed or incomplete, positioned as the deviant Other in contrast to the developed West, which has enabled the promotion and justification of their political and economic domination on behalf of Western states and institutions.

Furthermore, whilst we might have acknowledged coevalness with the Other, at least in the physical sense – that is to say, that our Western societies are now partially imbued with the Other – the project of multiculturalism, one of the apexes of decolonial thinking, is being, in various dominant discourses, declared dead. Especially in our uncertain, postmodern times, where we are in a sempiternal state of exception (Agamben), or, more apposite, of crisis (Boukalas), unanimity and homogeneity are the best sources of strength and solidarity (Gilroy, After Empire). Whilst different races and ethnicities might no longer be in hierarchical relations – at least not to the extent promulgated during the colonial era – they nonetheless remain allegedly incompatible. We can thus evoke “racism without race”, “differentialist racism” or

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even “neo-racism”, where the category of immigration is gradually replacing that of race5_{. In}

this line, Balibar argues, culture functions like nature in the sense that sociocultural arguments are now being deployed rather than, or even in conjunction with biological ones in order to chase the tribal ghost of prophylaxis and segregation constructed around the “stigmata of otherness.” There is thus the idea that historical cultures of humanity can be ascribed into two opposing blocks, one being universalistic and progressive, the other particularistic and primitive. The West is seemingly the pinnacle of human civilisation, along with its universal humanist values, in contrast to the Other from the developing world. In so doing, culture functions “as a way of locking individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin” (Balibar 22).

Whilst, obviously, this was not intended to be a sweeping generalisation of the status quo, and whilst lots of progress – even though, it can be argued, only gradually and on a small scale – has been made since the era of colonisation, the imperial, or the colonial, still plays a large role in our world which is simultaneously shrinking and expanding. We are still living in the ghost of an egregious, abject part of our past which many seek to disavow, or even to glorify. As Gilroy writes, there exist growing revisionist accounts of imperial life, and post-imperial melancholia and nostalgia is still shared by many (After Empire). Reading between the lines of US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, “let’s make America great again”, for instance, provides a clear example of this. The following section, then, will explore the question of otherness in greater depth, along with the relevance of postcolonial theory in this context. The final section of this chapter will situate Hazoumè’s NGO within postcolonial discourse.

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5_{It is nevertheless important to acknowledge that certain groups of immigrants are still more welcome than}

others. People of Muslim faith, for instance, are being conflated in a single race, with people like Donald Trump campaigning to ban all Muslim people from entering the US, or groups like PEGIDA and far-right populist parties fighting against the putative Islamisation of Europe. Notwithstanding, this is still often disguised behind the somewhat subtler category of immigration. Indeed, immigration and its control are one of the key issues currently being deployed in UK politics, and securing one’s borders from migration has now become one of the most prominent demands by nationalist parties within the Schengen zone.

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Social identities are relational, with people and groups always defining themselves in relation to others. As Okolie points out, identity hardly has any sense without the other; therefore, in defining oneself, a group also defines others. Notwithstanding, in line with Foucauldian thinking, every relation is a power relation; thus, there is always a power differential in making identity claims, as groups do not possess equal powers to both define themselves and the other, and notions of superiority and inferiority are often imbedded in certain identities. Identities are hence socially, historically and politically constructed, they are subjective and can serve exclusionary purposes, especially when the powerful groups define the others in a negative light. This can then lead to the denial of access to certain vital rights, resources and privileges accessible to the more powerful group. In this light, what is salient is not being defined as different, as every social relation is differential, but rather, the performativity of the definition, what is achieved through it, is of significance.

One of the most vigorous criticisms of anthropology in the past century, for instance, is that, through the dehumanising effects of the scientific method, the non-Western, non-coeval Other was objectified, whose exotic otherness, rather than being the result, was the prerequisite of ethnographic studies. The exoticness of the exotic, the primitivity of the primitive, was always a priori presupposed (Fabian). Modernity thus produced its other, “verso to recto, as a way of at once producing and privileging itself” (Gregory 4), the same as we now produce, or “world” the Third World “into a sign whose production has been obfuscated to the point that Western superiority and dominance are naturalised” (Kapoor 629). One of the manifest instances of imperialist epistemic violence towards the global South is the creation of what Said calls “imaginative geographies,” which transforms distance into difference in asserting and delineating the partition between “the same” and “the other,” “designating in one’s mind a familiar space which is ‘ours’ and an unfamiliar space beyond ‘ours’ which is ‘theirs,’” the latter being the inverse, or the negative, of the former (Orientalism 54).

In this regard, Said argued in his seminal book Orientalism that much of the West’s (academic) interest towards the Orient could be justified as acts of political intellectualism serving the affirmation of European identity rather than objective erudite inquiry. Moreover, whilst neither the concepts of the Orient and the Occident – or the West – hold any ontological stability, both being social constructions and manifestations of imaginative geographies, these “supreme fictions” are still prone to the “manipulation and organisation of collective passion,” which can lead to the cultivating of fear, anger, disgust, arrogance and pride. Whilst there is a clear difference between the “will to understand for purposes of co-existence and humanistic

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enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control and external dominion,” the latter has often been the determining factor of much of the West’s fascination of the Other, often assuming Them to be a homogenous, unchanging bloc which can be dominated and against which we can identify in a belligerent act of arrogant self-affirmation (Said, Once More 872).

There is thus, as Spivak writes, a stark predilection of dominant discourses and institutions to marginalise and disempower the subaltern, non-Wester Other, and, as Hage asserts, “the debates work to silence them [the subaltern, the migrants and so forth] and construct them into passive objects to be governed by those who have given themselves the national governmental right to ‘worry’ about the ‘nation’” (17). This statement can, patently, be translated to an international level, where sovereign Western nation-states and institutions, often led by the United States, are the self-professed harbingers of freedom, democracy and civilisation to the rest of the world. In light of this, in Tristes Tropiques, anthropologist Lévi-Strauss identifies two strategies historically used in order to cope with the Other’s otherness: the anthropoemic and the anthropophagic one (Bauman, Liquid Modernity). In the first scenario, the “incurably strange and alien” Other was deported, murdered, incarcerated, barred from any contact, or, more concurrently, in a more modernised and refined way, segregated in urban ghettoes, denied access to certain spaces, privileges and rights, and so forth. In the second, it was about obliterating the Other’s otherness through, for example, enforced assimilation or cultural imperialism. As much of the discourse being currently deployed by those on the far right of the political spectrum professes, those who cannot and will not assimilate and integrate to Western values allegedly have no place in Western societies.

Therefore, as Said accurately states:

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilise, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last

resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and the misery

and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice (Once More, 873).

We might be in the postcolonial era, in the sense that most former colonies have become independent from its metropolises, yet a manifold of the nefarious social processes, dynamics and relations still remain pertinent issues and occurrences, only disguised behind different justifications and narratives. As Young asserts, there is a strong desire to declare the postcolonial dead and obsolete in Western (academic) discourse, which can be interpreted as

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the fact that its spectre still continues to derange and to haunt (Remains). Thus, the postcolonial remains, and strongly destabilises the self-assured identity of the West through the gradual intermingling of heterogeneous discourses, temporalities and epistemologies. Van den Berg identifies three levels on which postcolonial discourse problematizes (neo)colonial thinking: it de-stereotypes the Other’s identity, it puts in question one’s own identity and perspective, and finally, it questions one’s own discursive possibilities of representation of the Other (198). In this respect, postcolonialism exposes the continuing (neo)colonial processes and relations in the world in order to examine, to subvert and to disavow them. It is thus “on the side of memory” (Gregory 9), it goes both against revisionist accounts of the imperial and colonial past whilst reminding us that a frank, honest exposure with history is of urgent necessity in order for us to construct a more humane, just and equal present. In fact, “the revisionist ways of approaching nationality, power, law, and the history of imperial domination are, of course, fully compatible with the novel geopolitical rule elaborated after 9/11. They have also been designed to conform to the economic machinery of weightless capitalism and work best when the substance of colonial history and the wounds of imperial domination have been mystified or, better still, forgotten” (Gilroy, After Empire 3). Furthermore, in unequivocally acknowledging the past and revealing the starkly asymmetrical relations of the current world order, postcoloniality enables “the authentification of histories of exploitation and the evolution of strategies of culture” whilst bearing witness to the Other constituted “otherwise” than modernity (Bhabha 9). And, finally, postcoloniality “represents a response to a genuine need, the need to overcome a crisis of understanding produced by the inability of old categories to account for the world” (Dirlik 352). For instance, Eurocentrist and Anglocentrist worldviews are currently being challenged, whilst the new global configuration poses a palpable defiance to the distinction between the First and Third World. On the one hand, parts of the so-called ‘Third World’ are gradually cultivating a solid position in the global economy and on the other, parts of the ‘First World’ are increasingly becoming marginalised and prone to extreme poverty and deprivation. And, as previously stated, the distance between Us and Them is, to an extent, dwindling, and in the postcolonial condition, the Other is no longer ‘outside’, but contrary to what many assert or hope, very well part of our interconnected world. Regardless of the Other’s otherness being imposed upon him/her, the Other also has a voice, and the Other is markedly coeval.

Postcoloniality is thus about making the invisible visible, the subaltern speak, it is about disavowing politics’ blindness and amnesia, whilst acknowledging and validating the

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“interrelated set of critical and counterintuitive perspectives, a complex network of paronymous concepts and heterogeneous practices that have been developed out of traditions of resistance to a global historical trajectory of imperialism and colonialism” (Young, Remains 20). Other knowledges, other narratives, other epistemologies are equally valid, and they should be given a voice. Especially in our current socio-political climate, then, postcoloniality has a certain urgency, when considering, for instance, the rise of the far-right in Europe, the normalisation of neoliberal ideologies and its unfortunate by-product, the rise of extreme poverty, marginalisation and disenfranchisement; or even the current refugee crisis, to only name a few examples. Young sums this up beautifully – even though, admittedly, what is said is far from beautiful:

Today, it is no longer a question of a formal coloniser-colonised relation. That is for the most part over, though versions of it persist in the settler colonies, and its legacy continues to inflect attitudes, assumptions and cultural

norms in the world beyond. What we have instead is something almost more brutal, because there is no longer even a relation, just those countless individuals in so many societies, who are surplus to economic requirements,

redundant, remaindered, condemned to the surplusage of lives full of holes, waiting for a future that may never come, forced into the desperate decision to migrate illegally across whole continents in order to survive. The postcolonial question now is how to make the dream of emancipation accessible for all those people who fall

outside the needs of contemporary modernity (Remains 27).

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In this context, Beninese Solidarity with Endangered Westerners is a very thought-provoking, enlightening artwork, or even, as Konaté writes, a “performance of a piece of radical theatre as cultural intervention” (115). It can be regarded as a powerful, immanent criticism towards the asymmetrical power relations between the global North and South, towards the nefarious construction of the non-Western Other as the weak, subaltern, underdeveloped Other and its material consequences in actuality. As previously stated, one of the paramount tenets of Western modern thinking and practice is opposition, Manichaeism, or in other words, dichotomy – ‘us’ against ‘them’, the ‘West’ versus the ‘Rest’. Whilst being a manifestation of power, it simultaneously disguises it in creating an illusion of symmetry. And as Bauman writes, “in dichotomies crucial for the practice and the vision of social order, the differentiating power hides as a rule behind one of the members of the opposition,” the second member being but the other of the first, its degraded, negative opposite whilst also being its creation (Modernity 14). And while both sides are co-dependent, this dependence is starkly asymmetrical.

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Charity, therefore, is one of the main facets of Hazoumè’s project, who in Benin, a small West African country which already has over 4000 NGOs,6_{many of which are primarily used to}

either generate, move or launder money (Holler-Schuster), created his own NGO which, somewhat controversially, reversed the direction of foreign aid. In a recent interview, Hazoumè stated that the funds collected would then be donated to the ambassadors of France and of the United States (Cherruau). As previously stated, the art installation surrounding the project resembles that of a small building housing an NGO, similar to the countless ones to be found around the streets of Cotonou, albeit constructed with rather unconventional, re-appropriated materials – which will be further elucidated upon in the second chapter. Furthermore, the collecting of funds, which can be seen in the film,7 also strongly resembles the practice by various charities in which volunteers approach people in cities in order to collect donations for their good cause; in this case, the volunteers are well-known Beninese artists whom the local people often recognise, which further adds to the playful aspect of this project.

Even though charity can be regarded as a positive concept, as a humanistic, utilitarian practice, it can also be regarded as a debatable action. While its mission to help those in need, it also stems from precisely those economic and political structures which created the inequality it is supposed to alleviate. As Nair perfectly sums it up:

Charity is an off-shoot of, and also supports, the ideology of capitalism that presupposes on national and global scales the co-existence of the rich with the poor, as well as the empowerment of the rich over the poor. Within such contexts, charity becomes the soft underbelly of the ‘liberal’ market economy, one that functions not solely

within the remit of the nation-state but also on a global scale. The result is the fault line that divides the ‘global north’ from the ‘global south’, a division that is not so much geographical as it is social and economic (74).

Charity, along with its sister, development aid, is usually a linear practice stemming from the West and targeting its poorer global counterparts. Albeit, as previously stated, while the idea behind it is often benevolent in nature, it is both a symptom of the asymmetric power relations in the world and can have damaging consequences, as the money often lands in the hands of the corrupt elites. It can also be regarded as a further manifestation of the West’s Messiah complex, reaffirming its superiority and its delusions of grandeur. As Žižek writes, in our current economy, charity is no longer the idiosyncrasy of ‘good’ people; rather, it is one of the basic constituents of our economy. Remedies do not cure the illness, they are instead part of it, and altruistic virtues, apart from presenting the giver with a cynical illusion of redemption, of

6_{See Appendix 2} 7_{See Appendix 3}

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making a difference, actually prevent the challenging, if not even the outright dismantling, of the structures supporting both the illness and their ephemeral remedies. As Cole writes, in strongly criticising American foreign policy, “the White Savio[u]r Industrial Complex is a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system built on pillage. We can participate in the economic destruction of Haiti over long years, but when the earthquake strikes it feels good to send $10 each to the rescue fund” (n. pag.). In creating SBOP, Hazoumè strongly destabilises and problematizes this relation between the West and its poorer counterparts, along with the concept of charity itself.

On the one hand, SBOP destabilises this relation in the eyes of the locals in Benin, for whom the assumption mostly is that the West is rich, prosperous, and hardly has any poverty. As Fanon has written, colonisation has produced an inferiority complex in the mind of the colonised, the phantom of which, in current global relations, can still be felt, along with Afropessimism, the perception that large parts of Africa have too many problems to achieve good governance and economic development (Onwudiwe). In this sense, many respondents were surprised that there are indeed poor people in the West. Some of the comments were, for instance,8 “but when they come here they sleep in big hotels, wear suits and ties while we, we wear our simple long tunic. They don’t seem to be in need.” Or, “me, I slept hungry yesterday; it is not easy for us here. (…) Out there the unemployed is paid, while me, I am suffering here.” And furthermore, “Do you think we here, we have money? (…) Our country is poor, we have no wealth! It is the White people who should be giving us money and not the other way round.” Some even told the artists to go see the President instead, as he was the one they should ask for help, rather than the local people who often struggle to make ends meet. Notwithstanding, in spite of the initial resistance put forth by the locals, everybody in the video ended up donating a few coins, often, as they state, on the basis of love9, humanity and even just for the sake of helping those in need, regardless of their origins or geographical locations: “I am happy to support anyone in need, White or non-White,” as one woman said.

8_{For the sake of consistency, when quoting dialogues from the video, I will use the exact spelling and}

punctuation as indicated in the subtitles

9_{It is important to note that the concept of love can be somewhat vague, as there are many ways in which it can}

be understood, and one can also wonder, what about helping those we don’t know or love? However, it plays a significant role in SBOP, especially in the interactions which can be witnessed in the video. “If you have a coin, make a gesture of love for others, because we know how to stick together here in Benin,” states one of the artists. Furthermore, SBOP has been commissioned by the Menil Collection in Houston for their collaborative project, “the Progress of Love” (see www.theprogressoflove.com/?attachment_id=459). Understood this way, SBOP also questions how one can conceive of love in our contemporary global context. “In Africa, we have love. We can show them [the West] how to take care for others; we will teach them that love is not only about money,” states another artist. Interestingly, the word ‘love’ appears 13 times in the full-length video.

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On the other hand, it is also a very strong critique to those in the West, in indomitably challenging the assumption that those in the West are all wealthy, powerful and benevolent. As some artists in the video have told the locals, “out there in their country, they don’t like helping their neighbour”. Or, “here you are happy because when you are hungry you know your neighbour will give you to eat, he will not let you die of hunger. In the Western world it isn’t like that. If you have nothing, nobody will help you.” And, “you know in the White man’s land there is everything. Yet they have no love. And here in Africa, we have love, but we don’t have everything. We should help them”. Furthermore, “we will teach them that being human, taking care of one’s neighbours, is not solely a question of money.” Thus, alongside the message the artists bring to the locals, that they, for instance, are not inferior to the West, or that they share positive values such as love and kindness which the West doesn’t have, SBOP can also be regarded, as a viewer from the West, as a powerful criticism towards its own so-called superiority complex. Western societies might be further developed, in the purely material and perhaps monetary sense, yet we can all learn from each other.

And finally, it also criticises the concept of charity and development aid itself, which is often counterproductive. As previously stated, there are over four thousand registered NGOs in Benin, and whilst acknowledging the progress and positive change some have fostered, many are used to launder money and to serve the corrupt elites. As one of the artists stated during one interaction in the video: “Let’s not blame the Whites for our situation, they are not the cause. It’s our leaders who betray us. They take loans on our behalf. The debts they leave behind will be paid by your sons, grand-sons and great grand-sons. We should put a stop to that.” In this sense, SBOP can be regarded as a further contribution to the critical thesis provided in Cameroonian author Axelle Kabou’s And if Africa Denies Development, further echoed by Kenyan economist James Shikwati (Welter). According to them, most interaction between the West and Africa was that between a big brother who has money and a small one who begs for some, and that development aid has mostly helped the political industry rather than the local economies. Furthermore, those who practice development aid more often than not merely seek jobs for developers. It is about political influence and resources, and the allocation of the money remains in the hands of the local governments and parties in power, so the only way to get close to the money sent towards aid, according to Shikwati, is to either be a politician or a friend of the aforementioned. Thus, one should give people in African countries the chance to control local production and to sell their own goods, rather than imposing structural reforms from above in order to nudge them towards what is deemed ‘right’. It has in fact almost become a

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competition, of a rather cynical nature, to prove that Africa is poor and needs money, and daily, Western charities publish articles describing the negative sides of Africa, giving the locals the feeling of being powerless. In this sense, in spite of the charitable idea, the side effects of this are very negative. “What I find most perverse,” says Hazoumè, “is that now we Africans are ashamed of our own culture, we view it with their [the West] eyes, and blindly adopt their negative opinions” (Jocks 127). Therefore, in order to help local democracies prosper, Shikwati argues that financial development aid should rather stop. And, arguably, SBOP can be regarded as a playful means to conceive of the impossible – that Africa could become self-sufficient. It is an artistic attack on the shaky structure of Western humanitarian aid, both a social commentary and an expression of consciousness-raising on current social and economic processes.

All in all, then, this chapter provided the reader with various broader arguments concerning the starkly asymmetrical relation between the West and its Other, the relevance of postcolonial critique in the wake of newer forms of colonialism, and it situated SBOP as an immanent intervention within the aforementioned. The following chapter will explore one of the key processes within SBOP, notably the reversal of the direction of aid, through the concept of détournement. Furthermore, I will argue that, in this case, détournement can be considered as a powerful act of delinking from Western ideologies and discourses.

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III

Détournement, Delinking and Disobedience

As Umberto Eco once wrote, “in humour we smile because of the contradiction between the character and the frame the character cannot comply with. But we are no longer sure that it is the character who is at fault. Maybe the frame is wrong” (Doll, Spaßguerilla 94). Beninese Solidarity with Endangered Westerners, in this sense, makes us laugh because it is a derisory attack on the Manichaean North-South relations, in criticising the unidirectional path of charity and the underlying structures it is a symptom of. As previously stated, people usually laugh when hearing the title of Hazoumè’ NGO, as it is something rather uncustomary, the “character” not quite fitting into its “frame”. And, rightfully, the NGO is precisely an attack on the “frame”, the global colonial matrix of power and the engendered unequal international relations. As an attack on the negative consequences of globalisation, it can therefore be understood as a powerful piece of global contemporary art. Whilst stemming from Africa, it nonetheless shares the vocabulary from both African and Western contexts, finding itself at the intersection between two different outlooks on art – traditional aesthetics and contemporary conceptual art (Holler-Schuster).

The dangers of cultural essentialism are well known, under the false assumption that culture is something fixed and unchanging, along with one of its hubristic by-products, the parochial presumption that one’s culture is superior. Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge the coexistence and coevalness of different cultures and to celebrate both their existence and their difference. As Hazoumè himself has stated, “one could assume I wanted to teach the Europeans a lesson with this exhibition, by elevating myself above them. Yet in fact, I am putting both cultures in their rightful places.” Furthermore, he argues that we should preserve cultural differences: “if we all spoke the same language, we wouldn’t have anything more to say to each other” (Konaté 131-133). However, we should also be aware that one’s culture is very well a social construction that has been, to a certain degree, influenced by other cultures, a recurring trope in Hazoumè’s work. For instance, one of his most famous works is his masks series, where he made masks resembling traditional ones originally used in rituals and ceremonies, yet sculpted out of discarded gas canisters, symbols of the global consumer and throwaway culture along with its object fetishism, and a sad reminder of the illegal petrol trade in West Africa. These discarded gas canisters also play a significant role in SBOP. As previously stated, they have been used to collect the donations, and also as materials to build the installation.

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Furthermore, SBOP also strongly plays with the interaction between Western and local West African cultures, which can be witnessed in the various dialogues in the video, in the music from the Gangbé Brass Band, a popular group which intermingles traditional West African music with jazz and big-band music, and in the juxtaposition of various signs and symbols, which will be further elucidated upon in later sections.

As Fabian writes, then, only in acknowledging coevalness and cotemporality between societies can a truly dialectical confrontation occur, which transcends “false conceptions of dialectics” marketed as “watered-down binary abstractions which are passed off as oppositions” (154-155). Tradition and modernity, for instance, whilst being different, are not, apart from perhaps at a semiotic level, antagonistic or in conflict. And it is precisely in this location of difference, the realm of the beyond, where we can situate the question of culture, especially in postcolonial critical discourse. As Bhabha states, “the interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (5). Furthermore:

these in-between spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood (…) that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself. It

is the space of intervention emerging in the cultural interstices that introduces creative invention in existence. (…) Private and public, past and present, the psyche and the social develop an interstitial intimacy. It is an intimacy that questions binary dimensions through which such spheres of social experience are often spatially

opposed. These spheres of life are linked through an ‘in-between’ temporality” (11/19).

This realm of the interstitial, of the in-between is what Bhabha calls the Third Space, the postcolonial acknowledgement of culture’s hybridity which enables us to elude and to transcend the politics of polarity.

*

In inversing the conditions of aid and charity, in reversing the asymmetrical polarity between the powerful giver and the receiver in need, Hazoumè’s project is precisely an opening up of, an intervention in this Third Space, a call towards an imminent dialectical confrontation between equals. Whilst acknowledging the difference between various cultures, it is also an invitation towards a postcolonial dialogue, suggesting that we can all learn from and help each other. Apart from “putting both cultures in their rightful places,” SBOP is equally a whimsical deconstruction of both Africa’s inferiority and the West’s superiority complexes. It is about making the visible invisible – the global poor, the marginalised, the subaltern. Indeed, for many Africans, it is almost impossible to conceive of poverty in the West. On the other hand, the West also often turns a blind eye on its own poor, be it the ‘natives’ or those who have migrated

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there. It is important to note, for instance, that while two decades ago, 93 percent of the world’s poor resided in low-income countries, according to the Institute of Development Studies, 72 percent now live in middle-income countries (Greenstock and Samarasinghe). Furthermore, in our globalised world, what was once an ‘African’ problem, such as poverty, famine or war, can rapidly transform into a ‘global’ problem – and vice-versa. This, for instance, can be witnessed in the current refugee crisis, where countless people are risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean Sea in order to start a new, better life in Europe. Risk, insecurity, war and environmental disasters indeed know no boundaries.

In this sense, when evoking SBOP, one is led to ponder on the concept of reversal, or, borrowing from avant-garde artistic groupings Letterist and Situationist International, on that of détournement, which was the practice of using and recombining already available cultural elements, such as phrases, books, images, films, music and so forth. Not only is SBOP re-appropriating various signs, symbols and materials in order to give them a novel, critical meaning in a new context, but it is also deflecting, or even hijacking – taking the English literal translation of détournement – the practice of humanitarian aid and charity. Similar to Eco’s “frame”, détournement is about “clashing head-on with all social and legal conventions” in order to be a “powerful cultural weapon in the service of a real (…) struggle” (Debord and Wolman n. pag.). The Situationists identified various forms of détournement, such as minor détournement, which re-appropriates elements that have little intrinsic importance, whose meaning is rather gained from the new context. Deceptive détournement, on the other hand, misappropriates an inherently important element, which then procures a wholly new scope from its new context. In this sense, SBOP re-appropriates various every-day, commonplace elements such as the jerrycans, bicycles, or even the colours used on diplomats’ licence plates in order to give them new meaning in a critical context. As previously stated, these elements can be viewed as an attack on the local corrupt elites, on the illegal petrol trade which has caused many deaths, displacements and environmental damage, on wasteful consumer culture, and so forth. Furthermore, the hijacking of charity, a deceptive détournement, whilst being a reversal of a very significant practice, rather than the mere re-appropriation of ‘minor’ commonplace signs and symbols, helps to shed a new expository light on it.

One could therefore state that Hazoumè’s art shares some of the radical affinities and passions glorified by the Situationists. The latter, for instance, were against the Surrealist idea of engendering a state of disorientation. Rather, in the deceptive form of détournement, the notoriety of the re-appropriated cultural element was of salience, whilst in the minor form, the

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effect aimed at was the prominence of certain elements over others (Vicas). Which is again precisely the case in NGO SBOP, in highlighting the relevance of the various signs and symbols omnipresent in the installation and video, and attacking a common practice in which, as Holler-Schuster reminds us, the sender is always in the more powerful position, a situation African societies have almost never felt in regards to the West. Whilst critiquing various social practices, NGO SBOP is also about giving African societies self-confidence, in conjunction with questioning the stoic, undisputed self-assurance of the West. As one of the artists stated in the video, in referring to benevolence, love and helping one’s peers in need: “do you know that we Africans, we have something magnificent, which is worth more than what they have in the Western world?” Moreover, culture can easily be copied, quoted, plagiarised, as Eco reminds us in Travels in Hyperreality, or Baudrillard in his theory of simulacra. Détournement, however, as a challenge to organised knowledge, is not only about appropriating the image, the sign, or the concept; it is about usurping the power of appropriation itself: “the trick is to turn the possibility of copying into an act that restores agency to the act of appropriation, rather than merely adding to the stock of worthless copies that surround us” (Wark 146).

In fact, one of the Situationists’ most germane criticisms was that of the society of the spectacle, which was a radical criticism of our commodity culture and consumer fetishism (Debord, Eagles). Debord argued that the commodity had fully colonised our social life; it is all about images, representations of social life, simulacra and mass consumer culture, which will invariably lead to homogenisation, alienation and the degradation of critical thinking, an argument that still holds a certain measure of pertinence. The spectacle is thus constitutive of modern capitalist societies, and even radical criticism is prone to recuperation, where revolutionary ideas are for instance incorporated in advertisement, which then exploits the revolutionary desires of the consumer in order for them to buy said commodities. Hence the spectacle has the power to absorb, to recuperate criticism which in turn acts to buttress spectacular society. Notwithstanding, if the majority of the proletariat constructs new situations through détournement, spectacular capitalist society, according to the Situationists, could become subverted. In this sense, Eco, in his habitual humorous prose, evokes the concept of “semiological guerrilla warfare,” similar to that of détournement, where citizens should control the message and its numerous possibilities of interpretation; it is about disrupting political powers and the normative interpretations of signs. There is no point in attacking the centre of Power, as no true centre exists; rather, Power has no heart. It is, to use Artaud’s dictum, a body without organs; it is, in the Foucauldian sense, capillary.

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Détournement, or “semiological guerrilla warfare” is hence a non-violent form of subverting the discrete and discreet manifestations of power “distributed along the threads of a fine-spun, widespread cobweb” in a playful, artistic and, in line with the avant-gardists’ passion, a revolutionary way (Eco, Guerrilla Warfare 178). Charity, for instance, can be regarded as part of the spectacle. Although the positive work achieved by charitable organisations around the world needs to be acknowledged, volunteering for them in the developing world mostly requires very high fees, making it only accessible to those with money. In this way, it helps sustain the giving hand’s Messiah complex. What is more, it is often marketed as a once in a lifetime experience, as an addendum on one’s curriculum vitae, or as an adventure to be posted on narcissistic social media such as Instagram and Facebook. The underlying social structures necessitating charity work, the normative assumption that the developing world needs the West’s helping hand, are, however, seldom catechised – an issue SBOP immanently addresses. SBOP also opens up a space of critique, through the lens of détournement, within the Euro-centrist assumption that Africa is largely uncivilised, that its states are weak and failing, that it is a faraway, exotic and non-modern continent. In other words, it directly attacks how the othering of the Other and the ensuing power relations have become largely normalised both in the imagination and in discourse. In this sense, the music from the Gangbé Brass Band, which can be described as local and traditional10_{, or for the uncritical Western gaze, tribal and}

primitive, can be considered as a somewhat ironic interjection, as a play on the exotic for the Western viewer, yet also as a celebration of local culture, in contrast to the homogenising forces of globalisation and the society of the spectacle.

*

Taking the concept of détournement even further, it can also be viewed as a form of delinking, of epistemic disobedience. As Tlostanova and Mignolo write, “decoloniality means decolonisation of knowledge and being by epistemically and affectively de-linking from the imperial/colonial organisation of society” (132). In fact, the “colonial present,” or neo-colonialist relations will arguably endure as long as the desire of accumulating capital remains the adage of the human condition, and the control of authority will prevail, predominately hidden behind magniloquent concepts such as progress, development or security. De-colonial thinking, however, opens up the possibility of transcending the current world order. Having

10_{It is important to note that they use brass instruments and a big band format, which itself can be viewed of part}

of the colonial legacy. However, they music also incorporates various styles of traditional West African music, ranging from Voudou to jùjú, and which heavily relies on Yoruba percussion. Furthermore, ‘Gangbé’ signifies ‘sound of metal’, referring to the percussive instruments they use.

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emerged after Taussig’s “second contact,” after the postcolonial confrontation between the West and its former colonies, a diversity of “conceptual tools” emerged which no longer stemmed from the canonical status of Western ways of imagining, constructing and representing the world. To de-colonise signifies to de-modernise, not in the sense of going back in time, but rather, to de-link from Western epistemologies, from the geopolitics of knowledge and the geopolitical imagination – the “imaginative geographies” – of the world. As Mignolo notes, whilst the First World has knowledge, the Third has culture; whilst Native Americans have wisdom, Anglo Americans have science. Thus, Euro-centrist epistemology obscured its own geo-historical and bio-graphical locations behind the idea of universal knowledge, values and ideals; it has the privilege of inventing the system of classification of the world order while simultaneously being part of it (Bauman Modernity). And furthermore, Western secular philosophy and science are still largely regarded as the apex of all knowledge-making.

Epistemic disobedience, in this sense, signifies to delink from this illusion of “zero-point epistemology,” a definite “rejection of ‘being told’ from the epistemic privileges of the zero point what ‘we’ are, what our ranking is in relation to the ideal of humanitas and what we have to do to be recognised as such” (Mignolo 161). The “racially devalued” should also have their epistemic rights affirmed, thus the terms, rather than the content of the conversation should be altered. Détournement, in this context, in hijacking and re-appropriating elements from the colonial matrix of power whilst simultaneously wresting the power, the agency of appropriation itself, can be viewed as a powerful, artistic form of delinking. Furthermore, in reversing the relations between the global North and South, in performing a reverse critique of the phenomena of the NGOs in a country where one is but a simulacrum of the other, SBOP is equally a powerful form of epistemic disobedience undermining the dynamics of dominion. It is about giving a voice to the voiceless, about challenging the assumption that the West has everything and Africa has nothing.

This can be witnessed in many of the dialogues present in the video. Most of the local people asked to contribute donations to help the ‘White people’ were often very astounded that the West has many poor people who are also suffering and in dire need. Most of the opening statements of the filmed interactions went like this: “Give me a coin to help the White people because they are facing too many problems.” Or: “We are asking for contributions to help the White people because they have so many poor people in their country.” “White people are poor! (…) Poorer than us Blacks, Africans. They are so poor.” Many initial reactions were like this one: “This is not possible. It is we Africans who are really suffering.” Or: “I am not

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contradicting you, of course, but the White people are not suffering like we do!” As previously stated, many of the arguments used by the artists were that although the White people have everything, they have no love and they refuse to help their neighbour in need. Moreover, “without Africa they are not rich!” as one of the respondents energetically stated. “They have nothing out there; it is here that they come to tap for their country.” It is evident that the West’s dominant status in the world is gradually coming under suspicion, and perhaps to an end, sentiments largely echoed in SBOP:

A (person on the street): Give money to White people? Which White people? B (artist): White people of Europe, America. They are in crisis.

A: The world belongs to them. B: The world does not belong to them.

A: Angélique Kidjo, if that is the case, then we should take care of our resources.

C (other person on the street): At the moment, the world is changing. Before, White people were ahead… B: Ahead of what? They are behind now.

C: They will remain behind. And for this reason, we will always help them.

It is thus about delinking from the idea that the ‘White people’ should be helping Africa; rather, people in African countries have much more than they think they do – one can see a call voiced by various locals that they should be using their own resources rather than depending on the West. It is also about helping the poor, helping one’s neighbour, and cultivating love for each other, something that people in Benin should be proud of. And those who have more than others should be helping those in need, regardless of the colour of their skin or their location in the world: “the one who has more resources helps others,” as one artist told a woman at a market in Cotounou. The somewhat ironical name of the NGO is a strong reminder of this – it is both a call towards universal solidarity and an act of self-affirmation for Benin, a poor West African country, in implying that it could help Westerners, those part of the allegedly most developed and most powerful societies in the world.