Video source: The New York Times via Youtube

The NY Times is currently hosting a clip from the documentary Framed, a kickstarter-funded production that turns its lens on popular representations of Africa and Africans and the Westerners that set out to “save” it. This clip alone is sure to stir some debate, as it follows Kenyan photojournalist Boniface Mwangi on his visits to American classrooms filled with eager students chomping at the bit to travel across the globe to save the world’s poor.

It’s slightly hard to watch as a high school student from North Carolina has her dreams of traveling to India, Africa, and the Middle East to help women shot down in front of her classmates (0:37), but Mwangi raises several very good points. “As a woman of color, why travel all that way to talk about women in India when you have racist issues in your country [that] affect your people? People who look like you, and young black men, and if you speak about it here, they’ll hear you more because you’re local.”

The underlying message is that while change is a global endeavor, the work on the ground is most effective when it is a local, self-sustaining movement, as opposed to a study abroad adventure that lasts a few weeks.

The phenomenal energy and desire to help that surges from the youth in the United States and other developed nations is an immeasurable resource that I am continuously surprised and humbled by. But more of that energy should be directed at solving major, systemic issues on the less glamorous home front.

There are Westerners who recognize this struggle, as we hear from some students at Duke University towards the end of the clip (3:33). Speaking of his work in Africa, one student reveals “There is a clear sense of glorification…There’s this sense of faux heroism, and then when I’m here locally in Durham doing very similar work, people aren’t as excited by it.”

A young black man in the room admits something that may hit close to home for many (4:50): “People who travel to Africa, to those countries, they are the ones who benefit more. This experience played a part in them getting a job, so they are the people who benefit. It’s not Africa.”

I’m sure by now some of you are feeling an overwhelming sense of ingratitude on the part of the developing world, while some of you are probably nodding your heads. And if you feel the urge to debate this, stick around to the end of the video to see Boniface Mwangi's final message for specifically the US.

Speak out in the comments and get your view on this issue heard.

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Alison Shea