Cecilia Cavero Sánchez

HISTORY 103H: Africa and the Humanitarians

AFRICA AND THE HUMANITARIANS

UNIVERSAL HERITAGE AND CULTURAL RESCUE IN EMERGENCY

o Present an argument, no typos

o No imagery in Islam – direct connection between human and god
o Destroying mausoleums/manuscripts: symbolic violence, objects have cultural importance
attached to them. Sometimes violence towards a group starts like this.
o International value sometimes supersedes local value
o Recognition by UNESCO as culturally important (World Heritage) may make the target
bigger → invitation to film Al-Jazeera → jihadists wanted everyone to see, designed to
provoke sensitivities
o Value inherent in objects? No, it comes with their relationship with the people around them
o Outrage from the Malian perspective: jihadists come to Timbuktu, center of Islamic
production and learning and teach people about Islam – no right to do so; fundamentally
racialized (identification of jihadists as Saharan/North Africa, Arab or Tuareg). Antiquity
and sophistication of heritage, deep Islamic practice! Also, Timbuktu is different than the
rest of Mali, where they speak Bamana, majority were not Muslim until quite recently →
symbolic representation/making a claim of a much deeper Islamic presence by connecting
themselves to Timbuktu.
o Outrage from the international perspective: read as universal heritage loss. Only relevant
outside of a Muslim context. (90% Mali is Muslim).
o This doesn’t mean that the universal quality from the UN should be dismissed; but these
claims are made but the layers of the cultural heritage are not really understood. You can
universalize taking that into account and it’s not done.
o Money goes to manuscripts/small number of people: resentment by people who haven’t
had access to those resources.
o Manuscripts and mausoleums ARE important, they shouldn’t be destroyed, but sometimes
choices are not as simple → reductionism of complexity of implications of those choices.
o Then, how do you go about it? Who should be safeguarded?
o Manuscripts: were safeguarded by locals – no money from anybody and materials, moved
them to people’s homes
o Foundation money – mythology, way of telling the story in a different way!
o What actually happened is not very well-known because it doesn’t fit the narrative of being
able to help – raise money to save manuscripts (at the same time, children were starving).
o Humanitarian methods and strategies are very powerful and can be applied to very different
things → flexibility of humanitarianism

MOVIE Timbuktu
 Cecilia Cavero Sánchez
HISTORY 103H: Africa and the Humanitarians

HUMANITARIAN ORIGIN STORIES

- Traditional narrative: humanitarianism born in the last 20 years → not true!

- ICRC decidedly apolitical, but not MSF
- Alchemical v. emergency humanitarianism: immediate relief in a crisis v. preventive
treatment → more involved in politics, deal with governments, uncover a whole set of new
needs
- Motivated to identify with strangers → money usually comes from states! $2.4 billion →
quadrupled.
- Development a part of humanitarianism? → development create/engage (trace back along
the same lines, at least 200 years, and it has to do with change and the possibilities for
poverty/overpopulation, Malthus, associated with managing the negative, consequences),
humanitarianism → fix a more immediate problem
- HHRR: legal registers, individuals
- Humanitarianism: empathy and moral codes
- Transcendental quality to the humanitarian sentiment! Religious concept very important
for the history of humanitarianism
- Why was the concept born: change in rhetoric and start of calling it humanitarianism –
compassion, abolition + anti-slavery movement
- Three phases of humanitarianism:
1. Imperial humanitarianism: Geneva Convention (1864), ICRC (1863) → (late 19th
century)
2. Neo-humanitarianism: Cold War politics, ideological alignment, development.
3. Liberal humanitarianism
- First two authors: emergence of HHRR/anti-slavery. Why?
1. Scale: example of quakers; people see that slave-holding is contrary to their thoughts, but
they have them anyway (before). Circle of equality is expanding to include people that
weren’t before.
- Argument about the body: novels/illustration/print/photographic/painting/audio/TV →
imagination that something can be affected/can be done! This wasn’t the case in earlier
periods – horrible thing but nothing can be done. Idea of sentiment itself, identification and
empathy of one person for another suffering.
- Impartial spectator (moral compass): imaginative identification or sympathy – feel what
the other feels. Recognition that others can empathize with you leads people to develop
their own moral compass/behavior.
- Dialectic – observer and sufferer; they do not remain unchanged by their exchange
- Change: process of writing about the body! Details of suffering and the body – becomes
the location of concern – create a narrative that explains the problem –
identification/empathy and provides the possibility of solution, of action
- Socioeconomic factor: is this an upper-class sentiment? Preoccupy with this → you have
to be able to read!
- Importance of empiricism/scientific method
- Identification was not something which was common before the 18th century, so something
changed
 Cecilia Cavero Sánchez
HISTORY 103H: Africa and the Humanitarians

- IDENTIFICATION is central to the sentiment mobilized by humanitarianism (conditions

of its possibility) – educated to identify potentially with the distant stranger