THE PUBLIC ARCHIVE
a.jpg)
Activist blogger Sokari Ekine discusses lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex Africans in her talk “Does the LGBTI community have reason to celebrate?” The Jan. 21 lecture was sponsored by the School of Social Work. PHOTO/Scott Galvin, U-M Photo Services/The University Record Online
Sokari Ekine is a social activist, educator, editor, and journalist whose work and writing is engaged with queer, feminist, pan-Africanist, anti-imperialist, and environmental politics — in both Haiti and Nigeria. She has written for publications including Pambazuka News, Feminist Africa and New Internationalist and she is the editor of Blood and Oil: Testimonies of Violence from Women of the Niger Delta, SMS Uprising: Mobile Phone Activism in Africa, and with Firoze Manji, African Awakening: The Emerging Revolutions. Most recently, Ekine and Hakima Abbas edited the Queer Africa Reader, a path-breaking collection of essays, testimonies, statements, and stories by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex contributors from across the continent. Currently teaching in Port-au-Prince, Ekine edited the blog Black Looks from 2004 to 2014. She tweets at @blacklooks and her tumblr can be found here.
In one of your “occasional musings” on Haiti on Black Looks, you point out that two criticisms of the deliverance of aid and charitable support to countries like Haiti are the introduction of inappropriate technologies without local consultation or participation and the other the long-term sustainability of projects. What have you seen in Haiti over the past couple of years in regards to both? How would you assess the implementation of foreign aid projects as we pass the four-anniversary of the earthquake?
Volumes have been written on the ineffectiveness and lack of sustainability of development aid but the issues can be broken down according to two factors: waste and dependence. In addition to the usual governmental and non-governmental aid agencies, there are hundreds of faith based groups and churches in Haiti. With the right connections and a few photos of starving black children, a US based charity or church can raise thousands over a weekend, employ x number of people and arrive in rural Haiti with free food, medicines, clothes and religion. I contend that we don’t know what many religious groups and other charities are really doing in Haiti. There are few regulations, no visas requirements and no monitoring of projects or churches. Every flight I have taken to or from Port-au-Prince, there has been at least one mission and some I have spoken too have been coming for years. They tell you this with pride completely unaware or maybe not, that they are contributing to a culture of dependency which keeps them in jobs and Haitians in poverty.
The Public Archive for more