domingo, julho 10, 2005: Who saved Birhan Woldu's life?

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In many ways, this is a touching story - about a young girl's amazing survival in the face of death, and a journalist's evolving relationship with the subject of his documentary films. But this story has been exploited and distorted by what Stewart himself terms the 'media cyclone' unleashed by the twentieth anniversary of the Ethiopian famine, of Band Aid and Live Aid. In his December 2004 article, Stewart writes, with a degree of incredulity: 'The British tabloids, a world unto themselves, have just discovered, this year, that Birhan is "alive" and even claimed, bizarrely, to have just "found her".' (7) (The Sun's Oliver Harvey is still sporting the byline 'The man who found Birhan' (8).) Stewart continues: 'For two weeks Birhan is whisked through a celebrity tour in London. As a "discovery" she was raced to meet Geldof and prime minister Tony Blair. Then as international fame spreads, she comes to Chicago where in a surreal moment she joins me in the Oprah Winfrey show's stretch limo on the way to a taping.'

Surreal indeed - and why? Not because Birhan Woldu is desperately seeking fame and celebrity - as her friend, a translator and fellow famine survivor Bisrat Mesfin, told Brian Stewart in December 2004: 'She has no idea who Bob Geldof was or who these people are or why is she meeting them all this. She didn't have any idea.' (9) Not because remembering the famine represents some kind of healing process for Ethiopians: 'We don't talk about it', said Mesfin. 'It's something that is a traumatic emotional thing and in my generation or Birhan's generation, we never talk about it. It's very, very pain and I think we prefer to thinking about the future.' And while Birhan Woldu seems to have risen admirably to the occasion that she has been thrust into, talking about her 'responsibility' to 'fulfil the hope of [being a] symbol', as we have argued on spiked, the nauseating pop-n-politics posturing around Live 8 only obscures critical discussion of the problems with aid and the barriers to Africa's development.

What Birhan Woldu's story really symbolises, distorted as it has been by the 'media cyclone' that Brian Stewart describes, is that this Live 8 circus has nothing to do with starving children, and is really All About Us. We are shown old footage that makes us cry so that we can feel better about ourselves today; we are presented with a beacon of hope from Africa and told that all the credit should go to us. This is a grotesque insult to those like Birhan Woldu, who should have lived to tell their own story - not to have it fictionalised into a poster child for Western self-congratulation.
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spiked-politics | Column | Who saved Birhan Woldu's life?

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