FROM HUMAN ZOOS TO CHARITY APPEALS: THE PERCISTENCE OF "THE DONOR GAZE."

In 1930, the film "Africa Speaks"—produced by a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of London—brought to Western audiences a spectacular vision of “dark” Africa. It reinforced Victorian myths of savagery and difference that had already become foundational to colonial imagination. The so-called “darkness” of Africa was never about the continent itself, but about an epistemic failure: the inability—or refusal—of outsiders to understand human diversity on its own terms.

Explorers, missionaries, and early anthropologists were not impartial observers. Many were socially obscure in their countries of origin, seeking noble titles or aristocratic recognition to enhance their worth. Others pursued fame and fortune. Figures such as H.M. Stanley, whose personal life was marked by abandonment, achieved celebrity status through conquest. Armed with gun power, expeditions captured Africans, transporting some to Europe for exhibition in “human zoos.” Millions of Europeans flocked to witness these spectacles, marveling at the supposed barbarity of other peoples. The famous Author Charles Dickens, after visiting such displays, wrote of the “noble savage” and suggested that Africans should be “civilised off the surface of the earth.”

For those exhibited behind cages, the humiliation was profound. They may have wondered, as modern aid recipients sometimes do, whether it was in fact the spectators who epitomised cruelty. This continuity is striking: from Victorian freak shows to modern charity films such as "Darwin’s Nightmare", media has long objectified African suffering for foreign consumption. Rarely has it respected the dignity, individuality, or agency of those portrayed.

Admittedly, not everyone condoned such dehumanisation. Some contemporaries expressed pity and demanded an end to human zoos. Yet pity itself is a problematic response. Pity objectifies; it reassures the giver of their superiority. Empathy, by contrast, recognises our shared humanity, allowing one to identify with the other as an equal. The “donor gaze,” however, privileges pity. It asserts that "development" is hierachical and that the ones on the bottom have material deficiency! It sustains a lucrative cycle in which human suffering is commodified as spectacle.

The tradition of the “helper-as-documentarist” persists today. Consider celebrity poverty tours: famous figures in designer clothes weep publicly in African slums, presenting poverty as both tragedy and entertainment. Or reality television formats in which Western farmers equipped with iPads attempt to live for a week alongside drought-stricken Kenyan farmers. Poverty, once again, becomes a stage on which benevolence is performed and consumed. If poverty were to end, one suspects that the aid industry would invent new spectacles to gaze upon.

This tradition is deeply colonial. Documenting “dark Africa” was never neutral; it was a practice of domination. Missionaries, explorers, and adventurers juxtaposed images of “savages” with imperial grandeur to justify intervention. Even David Livingstone, remembered as a saintly figure, advised against photographing “ugly” Africans and maintained that only Christianity and commerce could elevate the “black race” to equality. His words reveal how entrenched racial hierarchies remained, even among supposed humanitarians.

From the cages of Victorian zoos to the close-ups of tear-streaked children in charity appeals, individuality has been consistently erased. The starving child is framed not as a person with a name, family, and future, but as a symbol—an interchangeable motif of helplessness. One suffering African body is made to represent all African suffering. Such reductive portrayals are designed to open wallets, persuading donors that their contributions are transformative, even when they often serve to reinforce dependency.

A simple ethical commitment is overdue: "do not reconstruct misery where it does not exist." As long as charity remains wedded to the spectacle of suffering, the distinction between “helper” and “helped” will persist, preserving inequality under the guise of benevolence. Genuine empowerment, by contrast, will emerge only when Africans define their own stories, free from the distorting Eurocentric lens.