In 1999, just after I left an 18 month stint playing Mary Flaherty in the BBC One soap EastEnders, Christian Aid approached me about doing a trip to Tanzania to highlight the Jubilee 2000 campaign encouraging the writing off of developing countries’ debt. At the time, NGOs frequently sought out ‘celebrities’ to work along side as a way of getting coverage for their campaigns and issues. I had been a supporter of Christian Aid for a long time anyway, so when I was asked to go on a press trip I jumped at the chance.
We travelled with a tabloid journalist and photographer, a Press Association photographer and a journalist from the Guardian newspaper, who was most decidedly not there for me. I was reassured by Christian Aid that the tabloid press were not out for stories about me but that my profile would mean they could get their campaign a wider reach with the British public.
On arrival in Dar es Salaam, the Christian Aid country director was singularly unimpressed with this method of ‘consciousness raising’ and I was dismissed as just another airhead actor wanting to look good doing charity.
I was very naive but very earnest. I genuinely believed in the work of Christian Aid and their partners on the ground. I was passionate about justice and I felt it was my moral responsibility as someone with a certain level of ‘fame’ to use it to point to issues that might otherwise be overlooked. My Christian faith was central to this as well. I believed that God cared for the poor and while giving money were I could helped, here was an opportunity to do something bigger.
I recently found the Press Association photos from my trip and, while I have very fond memories of the experience, the people I met, the places I visited and while I was so grateful to have been given the chance to see what I did, I also cringe inwardly because it was so clearly an exercise in White Saviourism that I now understand to be very problematic.
I worked hard on the trip to prove to the country director that I wasn’t precious and didn’t need ‘minding’ and I won him over to a certain extent. But I also was treated as ‘special’ being ‘the celebrity’ and so unknowingly caused numerous offences throughout the trip because I wasn’t told that certain behaviours were taboo. I don’t know what kind of people the NGO had worked with before but there was an attitude of ‘keep her sweet’ that meant I was not checked when I should have been. One example, which I’ll forever feel shame about was that I smoked when and wherever I liked, not knowing that in parts of the country we visited it was taboo for a woman to smoke in public. I was only told on the last day of the trip and was horrified to think that I may have shocked and offended the very people I considered that I was there to serve. I had utterly undermined the charity and myself by being an entitled white woman.
When I look at the photos from the trip now, I see something so discomforting. I see a white girl with a big G-Shock watch on her wrist, expensive boots on her feet, smiling and laughing with Black people, mainly children, who are performing for her. I see Black people looking at her with weariness and suspicion because here’s yet another white person swanning in, looking at their lives, observing their poverty and then just flying home.
On one occasion, we visited a village in a very rural area of the country where the local partners supported by Christian Aid were providing health education to the people. Mama Thelly was the brusque project manager. I know now that she got the villagers to come out and have their photos taken with me because she needed the funding to continue but I never thought how humiliating it must have been for them. In one of the photos, I’m smiling at a little girl and giving her a sweet and she’s frowning at me. I was told after that she was scared of my blue eyes and we all had a laugh about it - poor little black girl hasn’t seen a white lady before. I feel sick now to think that that child was put in a position that made her feel threatened.
When we came home, the coverage we’d hoped for didn’t come. The tabloid newspaper relegated us to the back pages and the opening sentence of the article was something like ‘Ten poor Tanzanian children look up at Melanie Clark Pullen’s smiling face…..’ I was very upset but in reality what did I expect really? We got a few pages in Hello! Magazine and I managed to talk in that interview more about the Jubilee 2000 campaign and how important I felt cancelling the debt of developing nations was to their growth and sustainability. But the pictures tell the age old story of the entitled, wealthy, white person dancing with the poor Black people. I thought my heart was in the right place. I realise now that even my good intentions were deeply flawed and damaging. There was also no critical engagement on my part of the inherent problems of the idea of African countries ‘owing’ the rich Europeans anything. Shouldn’t we have been talking of reparations instead!?
Years later, long after I had disappeared back into obscurity and had no more profile currency to offer big campaigns, I still held on to what I felt was a moral obligation to ‘help’. But a good friend enlightened me to what was in fact a racist way of thinking that did little to lift people out of poverty and only perpetuated systems of injustice.
T would often ‘do a Zulu’ on me, which meant just calling at my door unannounced for a visit, which I loved because with the advent of mobile phones, and arranged meet ups and get togethers, we’d forgotten the lovely spontaneity of just popping in on one another.
T was between jobs when I knew her because it was difficult getting work that paid enough and still allowed her to be at home when her daughter came home from primary school at 2 o’clock. It was on one of these visits that I discovered the extent of her education, that she had a Masters Degree, that the jobs she was applying for were so beneath her ability and qualifications as to be degrading. What was apparent was that because she was African, people didn’t expect her to be as accomplished as she was and didn’t take her as seriously as others with white skin. She wasn’t considered for jobs she was highly able for because she was Black.
‘You know what, Melly,’ she said, smiling. ‘This is the thing about the Irish. You grew up watching Africans starving on the TV, seeing ads for NGOs asking for money. You all think Africans need saving. You don’t see us as equal. You don’t see our humanity. You don’t think we are able to manage ourselves. And you don’t realise that it’s the Western Europeans who caused most of the problems in Africa in the first place.’
I wish I knew now what I knew back when I was a 23 year old. I wish the NGOs had done better. I wish my white, Christian colonial theology hadn’t been so powerful and harmful.
I hope the Black Lives Matter movement upends, overturns and revolutionises centuries of harmful ideology and theology. It’s beyond time to look critically at ourselves as White Saviours and think about the harm we have caused.
I regret my part in perpetuating the system of White Supremacy. I will continue to do the work needed to root out this evil in myself and the world around me.