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  • Introduction
  • Amal Hassan Fadlalla (bio) and Omolade Adunbi (bio)

Biafra . . .In our time it came again . . .Emboldened by half a millenniumOf conquest, batteringOn new oil dividends, are nowAt its black throat squeezing . . .Must Africa haveTo come a third time?

—Chinua Achebe, ‘‘Biafra, 1969’’1

In his analysis of human rights languages and metaphors, Makau Mutua argues that the human rights project reproduces colonial imageries of Africa’s savagery and barbarism. In his early work, Mutua argued that human rights discourse is characterized by a narrative of saviors, victims, and savages, where the victims and savages are Africans in need of rescue and civilization. Although the position of ‘‘savage’’ has now shifted from individuals to the African state, Mutua’s tripartite classification remains intact in many analyses of the role of human rights discourses and practices in Africa. The emphasis is on Africans’ cultural incapacity to rule, and human rights are proposed as a means through which to rebuild the African nation-state, exemplifying liberal democracy and good governance. Although such tropes continue to infuse contemporary human rights and humanitarian languages and practices, a narrow focus on a savior/savage analysis overlooks the strategies and social positions of various translocal actors and their conscious appropriation of these languages and metaphors. Such a dichotomous analysis of human rights and humanitarian practices also prevents us from understanding how various transnational players mobilize gender, ethnic, and class disparities to fight for justice and contest the global connections that produce violence and dispossession at this particular moment. This special issue highlights these nuances and explores interconnected themes related to the cultural politics of human rights and humanitarianism in Africa.

Ongoing political conflicts in Africa, such as those in the Congo and the two Sudans, together with other transformations initiated by the Arab Spring in 2011, continue to generate debate about human rights and humanitarian interventions in the continent. Building on Mutua’s critique, the authors in this dossier move beyond the savior/savage narrative to re-interrogate the meaning of rights and national and transnational solidarities in the post–Cold War era. The five essays here examine the tensions between master narratives and counternarratives, the mobilization of new [End Page 1] celebrities and humanitarian activists, the ‘‘intimate politics’’ of rights in low-income urban households, the re-Orientalization of Islam and Muslim cultures, and the continuous denial of pastoralists’ land rights.

In the humanitarian memory, Biafra is known as the first publicized African famine in which images of emaciated children found their way to audiences across the world through the media. The Sahel famines of the 1980s received even more attention as images of famished children from Ethiopia and the Sudan became staples in Western media and fundraising campaigns to aid struggling farmers and nomads. As many humanitarian organizations, among them Oxfam and Save the Children, tended to the poor in these areas, celebrities began to enter the humanitarian field to raise awareness about the African famines. Bob Geldof, Harry Belafonte, Michael Jackson, and others—and their imagining of a united humanitarian order, expressed in such inspirational songs as ‘‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’’ and ‘‘We Are the World’’— represented a new wave of humanitarian solidarity.2 This solidarity, grounded by familial and religious sentiments, highlighted a surge of faith-based (and other) alliances that had a visible impact on public opinion and the expansion of humanitarian activism.3 Enabled by new media and technologies, celebrities produced a vibrant visual culture that rendered more accessible images and stories of a particular kind of African suffering. Witness accounts by prominent celebrities, the production of translated stories of suffering co-authored by journalists and survivors, and campaigns for building solidarities with survivors combined to generate alternative knowledge about African calamities at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Celebrities are now taken seriously as goodwill ambassadors, human rights activists, development experts, and healers of suffering—sometimes becoming the subject of academic inquiry themselves. The first two essays here, by Amal Hassan Fadlalla (on Sudan) and Lisa Richey and Alexandra Budabin (on Congo), focus on the proliferation, meanings, and practices of celebrity activists in Africa: their history and performance strategies and the implications...

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