SALON

Wednesday, Nov 21, 2012 6:49 PM UTC

Africa: Help us send radiators to Norway!

Meet Radi-Aid: A campaign asking you to send your radiators to frostbitten Norwegians -- and rethink poverty porn VIDEO

By

Topics: feed the children, sally struthers, poverty porn, Activism, Video, Charity, Norway, Africa, kony 2012, ,

Africa: Help us send radiators to Norway! (Credit: YouTube)

Remember Band-Aid, the 1984 supergroup responsible for “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” the song that taught the world Africa is a place “where nothing ever grows, no rain or rivers flow?” (Really, no rain? Toto would disagree.) Well, it’s been 28 years and Africans are ready to repay the favor — with another power ballad.

Enter: Radi-Aid, a campaign to send radiators to frostbitten Norwegians. Watch as a rapper called Breezy V explains the perils of sub-zero temperatures, and let’s Africans know that they have the power to help:

In Norway kids are freezing / It’s time for us to care / There’s heat enough for Norway / If Africans would share

Radi-Aid is the brainchild of The Norwegian Students’ and Academics’ International Assistance Fund, an organization of students and academics in Norway focused on North-South cooperative development. Besides being a spot-on parody of other campaigns (Cough. KONY 2012. Cough.), Radi-Aid is a humorous but thoughtful critique of poverty porn, the Sally Struthers-style of advocacy that relies on pity and one-dimensional storytelling to make its point. From the website:

Imagine if every person in Africa saw the “Africa for Norway” video and this was the only information they ever got about Norway. What would they think about Norway?

The truth is that there are many positive developments in African countries, and we want these to become known. We need to change the simplistic explanations of problems in Africa. We need to educate ourselves on the complex issues and get more focus on how western countries have a negative impact on Africa’s development. If we want to address the problems the world is facing we need to do it based on knowledge and respect.

Radi-Aid might be a parody, but that doesn’t mean it won’t have a real impact. Slowly, campaigns like this (and other notables like Mama Hope) are replacing poverty porn with a more authentic, honest approach to cooperation and global advocacy.

And as for those poor Norwegians? Take heart, the radiators are in the mail.

Continue Reading Close

More Katie Mcdonough.

Next Article

Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 slide show

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10
  • 10. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso: "Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, The Rumpus

  • 9. "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter: "'Beautiful Ruins' leads my list because it's set on the coast of Italy in 1962 and Richard Burton makes an entirely convincing cameo appearance. What more could you want?" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

  • 8. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff: "'Arcadia' captures our painful nostalgia for an idyllic past we never really had." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

  • 7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn: "When a young wife disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband becomes the automatic suspect in this compulsively readable thriller, which is as rich with sardonic humor and social satire as it is unexpected plot twists." -- Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor

  • 6. "How Should a Person Be" by Sheila Heti: "There was a reason this book was so talked about, and it’s because Heti has tapped into something great." -- Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  • 4. TIE "NW" by Zadie Smith and "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon: "Zadie Smith’s 'NW' is going to enter the canon for the sheer audacity of the book’s project." -- Roxane Gay, New York Times "'Far From the Tree' by Andrew Solomon is, to my mind, a life-changing book, one that's capable of overturning long-standing ideas of identity, family and love." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 3. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain: "'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' says a lot about where we are today," says Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor. "Pretty much the whole point of that novel," adds Time's Lev Grossman.

  • 2. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel: "Even more accomplished than the preceding novel in this sequence, 'Wolf Hall,' Mantel's new installment in the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell -- master secretary and chief fixer to Henry VIII -- is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 1. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo: "Like the most remarkable literary nonfiction, it reads with the bite of a novel and opens up a corner of the world that most of us know absolutely nothing about. It stuck with me all year." -- Eric Banks, president of the National Book Critics Circle

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10

Related Videos

More Related Stories

Comments

 5 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username ( profile | log out )

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

From Around the Web

Recommendations