Last week, a TikToker went viral after sharing a video of a group of four White women taking photos of Black children in Africa in front of a restaurant, behaving like they were in a zoo. The video, titled ‘Please, don’t do this when you travel to Africa’, was shared by Benchutta (@benchutta) and it has received over 500,000 views, 340,00 likes and 21,000 comments in many languages so far. The country in Africa that was not identified.
See some commentaries below
Mimi Batres
‘Later they are going to put it in a magazine make money’
Muna
“THIS IS SO DEHUMANIZING”
Joykimberly❤️
“Why I’m not surprised”
Danny Crane JD
You KNOW they captioned their photos #grateful #blessed #lifechanging #love
This scene is part of a long trend that has become very popular over the past years. A young white person who left their country in the West to volunteer in some African nations, which is seen as an admirable gesture.
However, the issue is that many times these young volunteers. when publishing photos of their humanitarian actions, reproduce and reinforce the idea of the “white savior”, who arrives in regions surrounded by poverty and disease to bring “good” to the unfortunate to Black people in Africa, – the vast majority of them, African black children.
The photos published on social media, which are filled with hashtags – proliferate and, surely, it all sounds like an act of heroism to the white volunteer who posted it. Also, they create a lot of engagement, with many likes, laudatory comments and pity remarks towards the black people portrayed.
With this increasing popularity of the so-called ‘Volunteer tourism’, some people and organizations decided to fiercely criticize this kind of foreign activity in Africa, calling it the “White Savior Complex“. There are even social media accounts such as Humanitarians of Tinder and Barbie Savior that satirize those white tourists who promote themselves as a superior human being from the rich world.
One of the examples of a ‘white savior’ tourist in Africa is Frenchman Dylan Thiry.
Being a volunteer in Madagascar, a former French colony located in Southeast Africa, Thiry has over 1.4 million followers who watch and like his photos on Instagram working in poor communities giving the locals food, water and clothing.
@benchutta didn’t respond to a request for comment on the video.