TORONTO – In a well meaning attempt to uphold and reinforce neo-colonialism, volunteer Rebecca “Becky” Smith-Anderson has submitted a proposition to build a white saviour complex somewhere in Africa.
Smith-Anderson, a self-proclaimed “traveller, not a tourist”, found her passion for Africa and its people when she became head organizer for the KONY 2012 campaign for the Scarborough region. She then went on a goodwill trip to Africa, although when she arrived she found that it wasn’t all that she was expecting.
“I love Africa, it’s the best country I’ve been to by far,” Smith-Anderson gushed. “But I feel like I needed a space to feel even better about myself while doing the absolute minimum amount of work for the people in need, oh and I also wanted better wifi.”
The complex is a proposed area dedicated to those who took the time to spend their parent’s and their poorer friends parent’s hard earned money on a trip to save Africans from whatever mysterious thing got them in this mess in the first place. The building contractor (Becky’s brother Logan, who just got into Queen’s engineering) plans to make the complex out of “mud, water, and the hope that none of it will collapse.”
The complex will come stocked with a school where you can teach children English, despite the fact that you Sparknoted every book assigned to you in school and a church where you can pray away hundreds of years of African traditions and culture whilst instilling Eurocentric propaganda. However the White Saviour Complex’s shining prize blood diamond is the interactive learning centre.
The learning centre has a variety of proposed areas in which ‘volunteers’ can be entertained. There is a fake health clinic where aspiring doctors with no prior experience can perform medical procedures on mannequins as opposed to real people like some volunteer groups allow them to do. Another part of the centre is the business corner, where volunteers can support local artisans by buying their goods in bulk and selling them for twice what they bought them for. The centre would not be complete without a replica of a village where visitors can take pictures for their Instagrams with the cutest African children whose parents have signed media release forms and are NOT up for adoption. Costs for a two week stay at the White Saviour Complex starts at $10,000, with options to upgrade for a giraffe encounter.
“This complex is perpetuating an extremely outdated and condescending stereotype that is not indicative of the rich and varied identities of African nations,” said Robert Oladipo, a member of the Pan-African Parliament. “But if it keeps volunteers from going out into villages expecting some Heart of Darkness nonsense and bringing us shitty protein bars then I’m all for it.”
