After months of frenzied discussion, no consensus has prevailed on the question of the Cecil Rhodes statue. Debates held in St Anne’s JCR last weekend about whether to condemn the Rhodes Must Fall Oxford Campaign, as well as conflicting opinions voiced across a whole range of media channels – from Facebook to nationals like The Telegraph – show that opinion remains divided about the future of the statue perched on the High Street facing building of Oriel College. Regardless of your opinion on the campaign itself, it’s hard to argue that the issues these debates have raised – questions about institutional racism, colonialism and social immobility – are not pertinent beyond the scope of the campaign. The very existence of an Equality and Diversity policy at the University of Oxford, for example, is at once an admission of and a commitment to tackling discrimination based on age, disability, gender, race, religion and sexual orientation at the university.
The work done by many of the exhibitors at Oxford’s International Careers Fair can be interpreted similarly. If – unlike me – you weren’t feeling too fragile after the ï¬rst essay (or two) of term, you may have headed to the event at the Careers Service on Banbury Road last Saturday. Among the exhibitors were NGOs of all shapes and sizes – from organisations looking for volunteers, to the international employers like the Red Cross – acknowledging the existence of and committing themselves to tackling social inequality in a number of sectors, from education to gender and race. I couldn’t help but think this reflected a very different type of university to the one uniquely for white men reflected in the portraits in Exam Schools, where the fair was held last year.
Fast-forward two days, and the scene is cast in a different light. A friend who’s promoting an international volunteering project aiming to improve access to education writes me a Facebook message: “My two friends who I asked to post the event on their JCR pages both said ‘no’ – they were worried about getting a backlash and being called racist.” Being part of a movement to improve access to education far from being discontinuous with the racist, sexist world represent- ed by the portraits of the Exam Schools, it was implied rather that this international volunteering project was continuous with it.
This is not without reason. It’s pretty easy to ï¬nd critiques of ‘voluntourism’ – projects that masquerade as promoting equality but actually really represent a holiday and selï¬e opportunity for volunteers and displace local labour. Spending two weeks ‘building classrooms’ in an orphanage in Tanzania, as a friend did on a gap year, may have given them some interesting stories, but ultimately the claim that an unqualiï¬ed school leaver really does the manual jobs they set out to do is belittling and, in many ways, disquieting. In this case, it overlooked the existence of local, qualiï¬ed workers – people who could have done a much better job. In other words, the project relied on a belief in Western superiority that stood at odds with its expressed purpose; namely, working towards a fairer, more equal world – in this case, by trying to help give children somewhere safe to live.
Be that as it may, I was troubled by my friend’s Facebook message – having worked with the organisation it was promoting, Education Partnerships Africa, she seemed to have received a knee-jerk reaction dismissing international volunteering. The merits of the project itself didn’t seem to have been considered. After all, if providing a service no one local could provide (time, more than anything, perhaps? You could send money), working in partnership with local stakeholders to develop a deep understanding of, and then solutions to, speciï¬c issues rather than to a rigid, preconceived model, international volunteering doesn’t have to be predicated on an idea of Western superiority, but can instead promote intercultural dialogue and collaboration. I therefore think it is important to consider the issue on a case-by-case basis. It’s time to put an end to generalisations. Facing up to the reality of ‘voluntourism’ would be a valuable step in that ‘decolonising’ direction.
