Forty years ago, I went to Ethiopia with André Payette and a film crew from Télé-Québec (Radio-Québec, at the time) to make a documentary on the famine which was raging in that country at the time and which causes between two hundred thousand and one million victims.
The West had been shocked by the frightening images of skinny children reported in October 1984 by the BBC.
Within two months, most of the major television networks, especially the American ones, were on location in some sort of horrific filming frenzy. The artists were moved: Michael Jackson with We Are the World in the United States and Bob Geldof with the Live Aid concert had flooded the planet with their songs to help people in distress.
Since then, this region of the world has experienced multiple famines: 1991 in Somalia, 1998 in Sudan, 2003 in Darfur, then in the Horn of Africa in 2000, 2006 and 2011, 2016 in Ethiopia once again. And now, in 2022, climate change, regional wars, the Ukraine war and COVID have united to descend not only on the Horn of Africa, but also on a dozen other countries, including Congo, Kenya, Madagascar and Sudan. Hunger now threatens more than 20 million people.
What remains of the indignation aroused by the images of 1984? Not much. The West has other fish to fry.
Are we used to the horror of famine, or have images of the devastated cities of Ukraine replaced those of babies with swollen bellies who no longer have the strength to chase away the flies attacking their nostrils? ? Would compassion be soluble in the flow of continuous information? Meanwhile, Super Bowl footage is circling the planet, including Rihanna’s halftime show.