What would happen if aid organizations and other philanthropists embraced the dark arts of marketing spin and psychological persuasion used on Madison Avenue? We’d save millions more lives.
By Nicholas D. Kristof | Outside Online | December 2009
The author reporting in the Democratic Republic of Congo (courtesy of Everett Collection)
In 2004, I visited the Darfur area three times, trying to bear witness to the slaughter of children and the burning of villages. I stepped over the desiccated carcasses of camels and goats to interview survivors still in hiding. I interviewed people who had seen men pulled off buses and killed because of their tribe and skin color, and I spoke to teenage girls who had been taunted with racial epithets against blacks while being gang-raped by the Sudanese-sponsored Arab militia, the janjaweed.
I was enraged by what I found and, as a New York Times columnist, wrote time and again about these atrocities on the op-ed page. Yet at first the public reaction seemed to be a collective shrug: Too bad, but isn’t that what Africa is always like? People slaughtering each other? Anyway, we have our own problems.
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