Oh That Liberia! Or, Why Every Supermodel Needs A Liberal Arts Education

Diamonds are not always a girl's best friend. At least, not when they are given to her by agents of a head of state who is supporting a criminal insurgency; when she has gone and lost them; and when an international criminal court wants to know what she was doing with uncut, contraband stones in the first place.

Life as an international supermodel is, of course, super-full of important commitments -- beside which investigating rape, murder, slavery and impressing children as soldiers in a civil war surely pales. After reminding the judge that "it was a big inconvenience" for her to appear at the war crimes tribunal at the Hague, where a UN special court is trying former Liberian president Charles Taylor, supermodel Naomi Campbell admitted that she she had received a bag of "dirty pebbles" at 1:30 A.M. after having dinner with Taylor at South African President Nelson Mandela's house in 1997. Campbell, who says she is used to strangers dropping off gifts in the middle of the night, said she didn't know the rocks were blood diamonds. As she explained, she is used to diamonds being "shiny" and "in boxes."

Oh! Aren't we all, darling? And that cross Campbell is wearing (she is in the white dress, standing to Taylor's right) is encrusted with shiny diamonds, so you can see why Girlfriend was confused.

The famously ill-tempered Campbell claimed that she gave the "small, dirty looking stones" to Jeremy Ratcliffe, who runs Mandela's children's charity in South Africa, but they haven't turned up since. Taylor claims he had nothing to do with the trade in illicit diamonds, with which he is accused of having been paid in exchange for funding the dirty war in neighboring Sierra Leone.

Asked whether she had been flirting with Taylor at the dinner, and whether he had promised to send her a few diamonds, Campbell said that was nonsense: she had no idea who Taylor was, had no idea what blood diamonds were, and -- this is where the liberal arts education would have helped -- had never heard of Liberia before that night. This is particularly odd, since Campbell is said to be associated with a number of charities in the region, and claims to have a passionate interest in sub-Saharan Africa.

But perhaps its just the continent she cares about (a common problem among Europeans and Americans, many of whom speak about "Africa" as if it were one country.) Or perhaps it is only people who live a little further "sub" who capture Campbell's interest. Below is an April 23 2010 film clip of Naomi Campbell caring so deeply about the war-torn region in and around Liberia that she has not yet come up with a cover story about the blood diamonds, agreed to testify at the trial, or even admitted that she knew Taylor was present at the dinner.

Colonialism and Its Consequences: A Few Thoughts After Listening To NPR Today

Why do even good news reports allow US government officials to talk unchallenged about the grossly underdeveloped economy in Haiti (which amplifies disasters like the recent earthquake because of substandard housing and thin state resources that snap when taxed) as if it has nothing to do with centuries of European and American colonialism? In this story Timothy Carney, who was the U.S. Ambassador to Haiti from 1998-1999, speaks of the Duvalier regimes as emblematic of Haitian governments who "bled their people dry." Well yes, but weren't the Duvaliers and others virtually in the formal employ of Cold War-era United States foreign aid programs while they did that? And didn't the United States think that an oligarchical regime that kept its people brutally policed was a good defense against Communism? And didn't the United States keep Haiti in its thrall by foisting a crushing load of international debt on the country -- money that was banked by the Duvaliers in Geneva as the country's infrastructure collapsed?

Mary Renda, phone home!

The view that Black countries have a cultural predilection towards corrupt political regimes, incompetence and brutality is a longstanding tradition in United States reporting, but one hates to see it from the best news sources we have available in this country. Coincidentally, today's Haiti news was coupled to this story, which reports on the role of United States evangelicals in the Ugandan bill that proposed to make homosexuality a capital crime. Weirdly, Rick Warren and his bigoted clerical colleagues are depicted uncritically in this story as supporting Ugandan anti-colonial cultural resistance. In reality, these American evangelicals (like the African conservative Episcopalian bishops who homophobic American Episcopalians are now aligned with) are effective in fragile post-colonial states like Uganda because they champion the notion of a culturally autonomous "African" nationalism free of unnatural sexualities foisted on them by the global North. One of the agents of perversion, as I discovered from another source, is UNICEF, a well-known group of pedophiles. Those who successfully pressured Uganda to kill the bill, in turn, are depicted in the story as promoting modern "Western" views of human rights, tolerance and sexual freedom that are the supposed antithesis of this authentic African culture. Christianity, sexuality and African nationalist discourses are a complex story -- but could we stick it in somewhere that it was Christian missionaries who came to Africa and the Americas as part of the colonial process who insisted on disciplining indigenous sexualities to Western notions of morality and propriety in the first place? (By the way, if you care about these things, put the Astraea Foundation, that sent a $75,000 grant to Ugandan GLBTQI activists, on your annual donation list.)

A final question that takes us back to poor, suffering Haiti ("May she be one day soon/free.")* This story about a close call at the Port-au-Prince airport is one of many that are more or less typical in a disaster of this magnitude, when multiple nations and NGO's descend on a country simultaneously without any overarching plan in place. The depiction of this humanitarian crisis raises a great many specific historical questions about the history of colonialism in our hemisphere, as I suggested above, but the facts of how the relief effort has unfolded are also a perfect example of what a screaming, uncoordinated mess international aid is. You wonder why, if the United States could obliterate the air tower and runways in Baghdad back in 2002 and then begin landing numerous personnel carriers and supply planes in a matter of hours after capturing the airport, there is such difficulty mobilizing similar resources in Haiti. The answer, of course, is that those who do good, whether we are talking about the International Red Cross, the United Nations, the Clinton Foundation, or less well known relief funds, do so on their own schedule, in their own way, and with minimal coordination with any of the other players. If this is like any other disaster, five will get you ten that there are numerous groups on the ground in Haiti, or trying to get on the ground, who are actually impeding the process of helping people.

One important question should be raised following the immediate emergency. Why, since it was well known that that Port-au-Prince sits on a major fault and would be destroyed in the event of an earthquake, and since the Haitian government was warned by the U.S. Geological Survey that the area was due, was there no plan in place by international agencies as to how they would coordinate a response in the event of an earthquake?

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*"Ode To The International Debt," Sweet Honey In The Rock, Live At Carnegie Hall (1989).