What's Wrong with Doing Good? Reflections on Africa, Humanitarianism, and the Challenge of the Global

Abstract

What’s Wrong with Doing Good? Reflections on Africa, Humanitarianism, and the Challenge of the Global Michelle Moyd For the last year or so, I have been preparing to teach a new course on the history of humanitarianism, with a particular emphasis on what I label the ethics of doing good. As a historian of eastern African soldiers, militaries, and violence, I have long thought about humanitarianism in relation to how African peoples have coped with catastrophe in different times and places. But my interest in the topic goes back much further. In December 1992, as a twenty-four-year-old Air Force lieutenant, I was deployed to Somalia as part of Operation Restore Hope. President George H. W. Bush pitched this international military intervention in Somalia’s civil war as a noble venture, which would interrupt interfactional violence so that humanitarian agencies could deliver food aid to rural Somali areas in need. Though I was untrained in African history or politics, the supposed nobility of the operation resonated for me. After all, what other organization besides the US military could do this work with such efficiency, rapidly transporting thousands of troops and tons of military equipment and supplies across the globe, and then setting up a logistics chain and security apparatus within Somalia to assist with food distribution? In this post–cold war New World Order, and in the immediate aftermath of the first Gulf war, this military deployment seemed to show that the United States was on a new path of bringing good to the world. I redeployed to the United States before the events of October 1993 now known by the shorthand “Blackhawk down” changed perceptions of the US military intervention. The battle of Mogadishu became the basis for the Clinton administration’s waffling, obfuscation, and inaction during the Rwanda genocide of 1994. Lost in the portrayal of outnumbered but heroic US troops fighting their way out of Mogadishu are the thousands of Somalis who died in this battle, and others that had died over the preceding three months.1 In addition, I later learned, the US military’s reckless actions in October 1993 in Mogadishu had many historical precedents in the colonial wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While still on active duty, I began studying for a master’s degree in African history at the University [End Page 92] of Florida. As I began developing the critical reading and thinking skills of a budding professional historian, I realized that I had horribly misjudged the innocence of Operation Restore Hope. As I learned the patterns and details of Europe’s history of civilizing missions and military interventions in Africa, I came to recognize the paternalist arrogance and violence built into colonial projects of the nineteenth and twentieth century. I realized my Somalia experience had troublesome dimensions that I had never contemplated. How could the impulse to do good in the world be so vexed?2 Two decades later, I understand more fully the multiple analytical registers needed to capture the humanitarian international in its various manifestations.3 As new dimensions of human misery on a global scale reveal themselves through the news and social media, humanitarianism is on everyone’s minds. Even as I am writing this now, Hurricane Matthew threatens destruction of communities across the Caribbean and the southeastern US coast, many of which are poor and vulnerable. Calls from relief organizations for financial contributions to assist with humanitarian need began circulating on social media and e-mail before the storm made landfall anywhere. The wrongness of such suffering is clear, even if the magnitude in each new case must remain incomprehensible to most of us. Far less clear is how to change the structural dimensions of global politics and economics that have led to sustained poverty in places like Haiti, which, still suffering the effects of the 2010 earthquake (which killed hundreds of thousands), now has to reckon with starting over in the wake of a hurricane. On the African continent, it is far less clear how to change the multivalent factors that have forced mass migrations from places as diverse as Eritrea, Central African Republic, Somalia, Burundi, and Nigeria. As...