Localization which is a form of assistance running counter to the humanitarian aid assistance model has in many regards shown to outperform foreign humanitarian assistance. The truth of the matter is that local populations are at the forefront of many crises that occur in the Global South and are also in most instances not only pivotal but key to fighting against and getting to solutions in the mist of disaster. So why humanitarian aid, in most instances it serves as a form of soft power which serves to further subjugate the already colonised South... I remember a joke by Trevor Noah where he criticized the use of a singular picture to draw a conclusion of the African dilemma, the picture referenced a child who was constantly being pestered by a fly, with the child being unclothed and clearly suffering from hunger by the look of the ribs protruding through their abdomen. What these pictures seldom give reference to is the historical context within which these people find themselves in. Let it be known that it was the British government that provided ammunition to the Nigerian state in the civil war that first sparked the flame of modern day aid. Let it also be known that it was a British governor who combined two separate states into one and called them Nigeria, thus forcibly enclosing different tribes under one colonial power and obviously favoring some against others. That is a form of hard power, the use of visible and tangible force through violence to subjugate another for the sake of the colonisers interests (oil, minerals, land etc..,). But how does soft power reveal itself, well, for the most part in the form of imagery and suggested narrations to infer power dynamics, for instance, the bible through what is called the Christianization of the Slave https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6997059, served two purposes, it legitimized the slave owners right to own the slave and it also served to mentally subdue the slave's efforts for freedom by promising a better place in heaven and obviously inferring their destiny to slavehood as an 'inferior' 'race' (the term race is made up btw). So the graphic imagery was one that inferred that the 'all knowing God' had destined for two classes of individuals, those who were chosen to reap benefits on Earth and those who would only know of happiness in heaven. Aid does much of this already, I am from the southern tip of Africa, I have grown used to seeing my brothers and sisters disparaged on the media, used to hearing the 'dark continent' narrative, used to seeing the African being shown as a technologically unadvanced form of human who hunts for their food with spears and when I was younger seeing us portrayed in cartoons with big red lips and and a bone in our noses. This was perplexing to me when I was younger, simply because I knew of no place that I could imagine at the time that looked like that. But this was the reason, to not only incapacitate our minds but our views from the onset, the message was 'we can not do for ourselves, so we need outside assistance, mostly white and from the North. We would be lost without it..,' Lemme say less now.

HOW CHURCHES PLAYED A KEY ROLE IN SLAVERY

''The missionaries who arrived on the African soil labelled the African cultural and religious practices as fetish and pagan.16 They used the Bible to justify their subjugation of Africans to such an extent that the white Christians who arrived in South Africa felt they were God's chosen people on a divine mission.'' - http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1017-04992018000200008

https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/churches-played-active-role-slavery-segregation-want-make-amends-rcna21291

https://www.historytoday.com/justifying-slavery

LET IT ALSO BE KNOWN THAT RELIGION CAN BE WEAPONIZED

Love and Light,

Lenyora.