After briefing Michael Buerk, and countless other journalists, before they set off to cover the 1984-85 famine in Ethiopia, in which a million people are thought to have died, Paddy Coulter fell to thinking. The stark images that western reporters sent back home triggered Live Aid, the biggest charitable event the world had ever seen. But how accurate a picture did they portray? Coulter, who has died aged 78, was then the head of communications for Oxfam. But in 1989 he shook the aid world by writing a piece in the New Internationalist that launched a powerful attack on aid agency fundraisers for their reliance on “starving children” imagery and ignoring the indispensable work that local partners did.
In Ethiopia in 1984, Coulter revealed, Oxfam had 108 employees, of whom 100 were Ethiopian. Yet only white faces ever appeared on television. Almost 30 years before it became fashionable to complain of “white saviour syndrome”, Coulter drew attention to the distorted picture that was being created of what he called “whites to the rescue of blacks”.
