Majority World: Challenging the West's Rhetoric of Democracy

Abstract

In the early 1990s, I began advocating for a new expression "majority world" to represent what has formerly been known as the "Third World." The term highlights the fact that we are indeed the majority of humankind. It also brings to sharp attention the anomaly that the Group of 8 countries—whose decisions affect majority of the world's peoples—represent a tiny fraction of humankind.
The term majority world, now increasingly being used, challenges the West's rhetoric of democracy. It also defines the community in terms of what it has, rather than what it lacks. In time, the majority world will reaffirm its place in a world where the earth will again belong to the people who walk on it.

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Sugarcane worker: Waste
molasses from the sugarcane
factories make the water
in nearby ponds unusable.
Women bring in water from
afar in the early hours of the
morning. Near Aurangabad.
Maharashtra, India
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88
In September 1988 Bangladesh was hit
by one of the worst oods in its history.
In a high street in Kamalapur, a woman
wades to work. Business is as usual.
© 2008, Shahidul Alam / Drik / majorityworld

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Majority World:
Challenging the West’s Rhetoric of Democracy
Shahidul Alam
Economically poor countries of the world are invariably coun-
tries that have been colonized, and continue to be colonized
through globalized forms of control. They have been catego-
rized as being “Third World” or “Developing World” or even
LDCs (Least Developed Countries). The expressions have strong
negative connotations that reinforce the stereotypes about poor
communities and represent them as icons of poverty. They hide
their histories of oppression and continued exploitation. The la-
bels also hinder the appreciation of the cultural and social wealth
of these communities. Though these terms are still used without
remorse, there is an increasing feeling within the communities
themselves that these terms are inappropriate.
In the early 1990s, I began advocating for a new expression
“majority world” to represent what has formerly been known as
the “Third World.” The term highlights the fact that we are in-
deed the majority of humankind. It also brings to sharp attention
the anomaly that the Group of 8 countries—whose decisions af-
fect majority of the world’s peoples—represent a tiny fraction of
humankind.
The term majority world, now increasingly being used, chal-
lenges the West’s rhetoric of democracy. It also denes the com-
munity in terms of what it has, rather than what it lacks. In time,
the majority world will reafrm its place in a world where the
earth will again belong to the people who walk on it.
(Writings selected by Amerasia Journal from Shahidul Alam’s web-
site: http://shahidul.wordpress.com/)
SHAHIDUL ALAM is a photographer and the Managing Director of the Drik
Agency.
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Amerasia Journal 2008
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Power of Cullture: Bangladeshi Spirit
February 1, 2004
Culture glides through peoples’ consciousness, breaking along
its banks, accumulating and depositing silt, meandering through
paths of least resistance, changing route, drying up, spilling
its banks, forever owing like a great river. Islands form and
are washed away. Isolated pockets get left behind. It nurtures,
nourishes, and destroys. Ideas move with the wind and the cur-
rents and the countercurrents. Trends change, owing in the
slipstreams of dominant culture. A few swim against this cur-
rent, while others get trapped in ox-bow lakes, isolated from the
mainstream.
Photography, more than any other media or art form, has
inuenced culture. Photographs in particular take on the dual
responsibility of being bearers of evidence and conveyers of pas-
sion. The irrelevant discussion of whether photography is art
has sidelined the debate from the more crucial one of its power
to validate history and to create a powerful emotional response,
thereby inuencing public opinion. The more recent discussions
and fears have centered on the computer’s ability to manipulate
images, subsuming the more important realization that photo-
A student in a prison van used by police to arrest students in Jagannat Hall, Dhaka
University, screams out to friends for help, after a raid on the January 31,1996,
as part of a pre-election arms recovery drive. Jaganath Hall is known for its high
Hindu population.
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Majority World
91
graphs are largely manufactured by the image industry, one that
is increasingly owned by a corporate world. The implied verac-
ity of the still image and its perceived ability to represent the
truth hides the ubiquitous and less perceptible manipulation en-
abled by photographic and editorial viewpoint. Not only can we
no longer believe that the photograph cannot lie, we now need to
contend with the situation that liars may own television channels
and newspapers and be the leaders of nations. Given the enor-
mous visual reach that the new technology provides, the ability
to lie is far greater than has ever been before.
Photography has become the most powerful tool in the man-
ufacturing of consent, and it remains to be seen whether photog-
raphers can rise above the role of being cogs in this propaganda
machine and become the voice for the voiceless.
“Development, Culture, Globalization”
October 25, 2007
I will talk about my personal experiences as a majority world
photojournalist trying to challenge the control that the power
brokers within the media have. Conscious that mainstream me-
dia had no working class representation, in 1994, I started teach-
ing photojournalism to ten working-class children in Dhaka.
Grouse Hunt: Lord Terrence Devonport enjoys the traditional sport of grouse
hunting in the North East of England. (part of my ongoing story on the British Upper
Class)
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The rst day we met, we sat on the veranda of their school,
talking pictures. As we looked at a photograph taken by Azizur
Rahim of the bodies of children who had died in a re in a gar-
ment factory, Moli, a ten-year-old girl said:
“Oh, that was the re in number 10.”
“What happened in number 10?”
“What’s there to say, the owner took the bodies and dumped
them in the drain at night.”
“What happened to the owner?”
“Nothing ever happens to owners,” she said.
Then, waiting a bit, she added, “If I had a camera, I would
take his picture and put that guy in jail.”
As a working photojournalist, I get cynical about what we
actually achieve through our photography. But here was a child
who had that conviction that we as professionals have somehow
lost. She still believed.
Given the way the media is controlled however, I recognize
that at a global level, the messages are too well orchestrated, and
that putting the guy in jail, requires a lot more than having a
camera.
Using the media to shape people’s perceptions is of course
nothing new. “Natives must either be kept down by a sense of
our power, or they must willingly submit from a conviction that
we are more wise, more just, more humane, and more anxious
to improve their condition than any other rulers they could pos-
sible have.”
The date is interesting. The birth of photography parallels
a move by colonizers to dominate the globe. The colonization
of our visual space became merged with two words, “Devel-
opment” and “Civilization,” while a new word later joined the
ranks, “Globalization.” Photography is particularly relevant to
this understanding, as globalization’s reach allows photography
to manifest itself.
Even the gatekeepers need to devise methods to justify their
actions. Hence rules were made that allowed justication and
mindsets created that accepted the reasoning. The silences are
also part of this visual vocabulary.
The ve permanent members of the Security Council of the
United Nations happen to be the world’s ve biggest arms deal-
ers, and tend to do precisely as the U.S. requests. Rarely has
there been a greater “conict of interests” when it comes to pro-
moting world peace. While the standard press photographs of

Majority World
93
United Nations meetings are abundant. The photographs have
never been placed in this context.
Wide-angle black-and-white shots, grainy, high contrast im-
ages characterize the typical majority world helpless victim. Huge
billboards with a dying malnourished child in a corner with out-
stretched arms. A clear message in polished bold font in the top
left corner cleverly left blank. The message reads, “We shall al-
ways be there.” A reality constructed for and by those who want
us to forget the implications. That “you (the majority world) shall
always be there.” In that role—a passive existence deliberately
maintained—we who receive aid (“the client group”) remain.
I was staying with friends in Newry in Northern Ireland.
Paddy and Deborah had kindly made their ve-year-old daugh-
ter’s room available for me. Corrina was friendly and curious
and would spend a lot of time in the room. One day as I was
clearing my pockets of change I had accumulated, she suddenly
remarked, “But you’ve got money, but, but you’re from Bangla-
desh.” The family had just returned from a trip to Bangladesh.
Paddy was a development worker and they had visited many of
the projects. At the tender age of ve, Corrina knew that Bangla-
deshis did not have money.
Positive Lives: One of the junkies who regularly comes to “cool off” at the drop-in
centre of Rumah Pengasih, a drug rehabilitation centre run by former addicts. Part
of the international Positive Lives project (www.positivelives.org) that documents
the impact of the global HIV/AIDS epidemic. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2001.
© 2008, Shahidul Alam / Drik / majorityworld

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The hungry child, the woman with the shriveled breast, the
pitiful look— it is an image that has deliberately been propagat-
ed since it feeds into a new economic system, one that requires
a patron-client relationship. On the other hand, some lives are
cheap.
“All things considered, we think the price was worth it,”
Madeleine Albright said about the 500,000 children who had
died in Iraq as a result of U.S. sanctions. Bangladesh revisited.
It was not considered “inhuman” to forcibly enslave 50 mil-
lion Africans. Thirty-six million died en route and only 12 million
eventually made it. In Bangladesh, the trade of Dhakai Muslin was
stopped in favor of the Lancashire yarn and a tradition passed
down from father to son was brutally crushed. Humanism had
a visible face with the “we” clearly dened, and of course, no
photographs.
John Lucaites felt “the primary reason for a photograph
achieving iconic status was through presenting a strategy for
managing endemic tensions.” It was a further tool for control,
another cog in the mechanism for manufacturing consent.
Rev. Dr. Alex Vadakumthala, 48, is the Executive Secretary of the Health Com-
mission of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India. For years he worked at the
Vatican. Upon returning to India nine years ago he took up the AIDS issue as his
primary role. “The Church nds its meaning when it responds to the challenges of
the times.” Delhi, India
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Majority World
95
The Image Business
October 25, 2007
Businesses have been quick to recognize the capital involved in
the image business. The two biggest owners of images today
are Bill Gates (Corbis) and Mark Getty (Getty Images). Besides
buying up huge archives, Gates is now building an underground
warehouse for images. Libraries, which were once browsable by
researchers, students, and interested public, will be buried be-
neath the ground, with only images that Gates et al consider “ap-
propriate” released to the public domain.
The quest for “development” has become an inevitable drive
towards certain goals. Those who stood in the way of this “prog-
ress” were “backward” and the obstacles needed to be eliminat-
ed. In the process of learning to be “fully human,” only some
kinds of suffering were seen as an affront to humanity, and their
elimination sought.
“Good pain,” whether it meant amputation by a doctor, or a
surgical strike from the sky, was noble. Where the “goodness”
of the pain was not so obvious, the images had to be eliminated.
The image of the charred Iraqi soldier by Kenneth Jarecke (called
“crispy” by his agency Contact Press Images) slipped through
the defense screening, but the media itself decided to cull the im-
age. It did not t.
The scriptwriters also had problems with the images of Bos-
nian Muslims protesting against the September 11 attacks. These
too were culled, by all major channels. To create and nurture this
“civilization,” a new soldier was born, armed with camera and
a satellite phone. Things had gone horribly wrong in Vietnam
where the media had free reign. The new soldiers knew how
to manufacture consent. They knew how “truth” had to be pre-
sented. A new science was born, the science of manufacturing
consent. In some parts of the world, it is called “journalism.”
Icons of misery sometimes replace the icons of poverty, while the
photographer becomes an accomplice in a process controlled by
the news desk. But it has to be the right misery.
A woman sued Paris Match magazine for publishing a pho-
tograph taken of her sitting on her boyfriend’s shoulder. They
were celebrating France’s victory in a sporting event in public at
the Champs Elysees. Her grounds for the case were simply that
she did not want to be in Paris Match. The dying in Somalia, the
starving in Sudan, the devastated in Bangladesh are regular fod-

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96
der for the glossies and the news magazines. Their choice has
never been an issue.
It also has to do with the times and current sensibilities.
There have been no pictures circulated of Diana dead in her car.
The lms had been conscated. JFK and Martin Luther King
were shown dead, but not Di. The “people’s princess” was sac-
rosanct. No one cried “censorship.”
On the other hand, the Orient and its misery were being
romanticized. Typecasting in Algerian postcards required little
more than swapping captions under the photographs of the same
model. She was after all, what you wanted her to be. Volup-
tuous, exotic, demure, enticing, above all she was there as a still
life, ready to be consumed. Much like the rest of the “Orient.”
Don McCullin’s photograph of a Bangladeshi refugee car-
rying the body of a woman dying of cholera was part of a sig-
nicant body of work by a committed photojournalist trying to
highlight the plight of a wronged nation. Twenty-ve years later,
Paul Harrison’s image, a virtual copy, establishes the stereotype
basket case.
People at play, children dancing, tender moments at home,
are images that Corrina will never see. The skeletal frame dan-
gling from a weighing scale will make it to expensive books
and museum collections. All at a time when the majority world
screams out for the icons of poverty to be replaced by images of
humanity, and our visual radar remains restricted to “terrors”
dened by a few.
“The Game of Death”
December 29, 2007
She may well have been the best leader available. With a mili-
tary dictator and a corrupt businessman as the alternatives, Bena-
zir Bhutto, with her Western admirers and her feudal followers,
was clearly a front-runner. How she died will probably remain
a mystery, but she was playing the game of death, and it was
unlikely she would win every time.
It is difcult to write about people who have just died. Many
are grief stricken at the untimely death of the former prime min-
ister. Even her critics are shocked by the way she was hunted
down. An insensitive piece would aggravate their pain, and one
does not generally speak ill of the dead. I remember as a child
asking my mother “Amma. Do bad people never die?” A man
not known for his strength of character had died, and newspaper

Majority World
97
reports had described him as an honest social worker. I am no
longer of the age to get away with such questions. But even for
those who have loved Benazir, I believe the questions need to be
asked if this cycle is to ever stop.
It was 1995. They were troubled times in Pakistan. I had
gone over to Karachi on the invitation of my architect friend Sha-
hid Abdulla. There were no telephone booths at Karachi airport,
or anywhere else in the city. The government was worried the
MQM would use them for their communication. Sindh was at
war with itself.
Shahid wanted me to run a photography workshop at the
Indus Valley School of Architecture and Design that he was in-
volved in. Those were the days when we had time for long con-
versations. We talked of many things. The gun-toting security
men outside every big house in Karachi. Shahid’s meeting with
Zulqar Ali Bhutto. His memories of Benazir. But the conver-
sation would often veer to a person we both admired. Abdus
Sattar Edhi, the humanitarian who had set up an unparalleled
ambulance service all over Pakistan.
On the morning of October 10, I went over to see the man.
He had an easy charm that came from living a simple life and
having little to hide. He sat on his wire mesh bed, talking of how
things started. We were regularly interrupted by people coming
in with requests, and Edhi responding to minor crises. Then we
©2008, Shahidul Alam / Drik / majorityworld
Shahidul Alam, Photographer

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heard about Fahim Commando, the MQM leader, having been
killed. Fahim and his comrades had apparently been caught
in an ambush and all four had died. They had been in police
custody, but the police had all escaped and not one of them had
been injured. Edhi was not judgmental. Fahim was another man
who needed a decent burial. As I watched him bathe the slain
MQM leader, I could see the burn marks on the bullet holes on
the commando’s body.
The extra-judicial killings during Benazir ’s rule are well
documented. The fact that no investigation was done when her
brother Mir Murtaza was killed outside Bilawal House, the fam-
ily home, fueled the commonly held belief that her husband Asif
Zardari had arranged the killing. Even Edhi’s ambulances had
not been allowed access. Not until Murtaza had bled to death.
Anyone who witnessed the murder was arrested; one witness
died in prison. Benazir was then prime minister.
Murtaza had been vocal against the corruption of Zardari.
Benazir defended her husband stoically throughout. Despite the
Swiss bank accounts, she assured people that he would be seen
as the Nelson Mandela of Pakistan. With Zardari now tipped
as the new chief of the PPP, Pakistan’s Mandela and his Swiss
bank accounts might well be the new force. Whether Pakistanis
will see this polo-playing businessman as the savior of the day
remains to be seen.
Supported by the U.S., Zulqar Ali Bhutto had been largely
responsible for the break up of Pakistan and the genocide in Ban-
gladesh. The current string pulling by the U.S. has hardly made
Pakistan a safer place. The western support of militarization in
Bangladesh and the growing importance of Jamaat is an all too
familiar feeling. If Pakistan is an omen, it is a sinister one.
Perhaps Mrs. Packletide would have known how the former
prime minister of this nuclear nation died. But the government’s
attempts to cover-up will do little to quell the conspiracy theo-
ries. Like the Bhutto family, the military too have burned a lot
of bridges in getting to where they are. There are too many skel-
etons in their closet. There is no going back, and no price too
high.