Mr Beast: White Saviour or Plain Saviour

He built a hundred wells in Africa but his actions have raised some painful questions about corruption on the continent and it's relationship with white wealth

Mr. Beast is one of the biggest YouTubers in the world with over 135 million subscribers and videos that regularly rack up tens of millions of views. I’ve been aware of him for some time but don’t pay attention to his content.

They usually revolve around some kind of gimmick such as massive games of tag in a shopping mall or getting buried alive. They’re hardly adding to societies intellectual discourse but it’s that immediate visceral entertainment value that has helped propel his platform to the juggernaut it is.

That being said, Mr Beast decided to do something a little different recently. Something more altruistic than his usual low brow shock value fare. He set his sights on Africa and decided he would build a hundred wells in the exloited continent for his next video. I know most of my readers won’t be aware of who this guy is, so it’s important to get an idea of his brand to understand some of the controversy surrounding this initiative.

Jimmy ‘Mr. Beast’ Donaldson

The nature of what Mr. Beast does allows him to cross cultures, languages, genders and religions. If someone can watch your video with the sound off and still be entertained, you’re winning and Mr. Beast does that with every video he makes.

There’s one recurring theme in his work though and that’s money. More often than not the participants of his videos get rewarded or incentivised with huge sums of cash, usually in a briefcase in set ups straight out of a Hollywood movie or big budget gameshow. The same thrill audiences get from watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire or Jeorpardy is what Mr. Beast has distilled and perfected with one important twist; he skips out the build up and goes straight to the jackpot so his viewers get the rush of when regular game show contestants reach the final stage which for those shows only happens once in a while. In Mr. Beast’s content it’s every video.

Once he managed to get the YouTube algorithm on his side, and as a result attain an immense amount of wealth from the steady stream of views he gets, he can afford to offer people $10,000.00 to win a game of beer pong which in turn draws in viewers. It’s a perfect cycle. However, you can’t help but feel with this initiative of building wells in Africa, he was venturing into new territory and towards a new audience.

A New Audience

For the first time, I was genuinely interested in a Mr. Beast endeavour. Unlike some people who jumped to the negative connotation of a white man going to save black people in Africa, I viewed it as a wonderful act by a guy who doesn’t need Africans or black people to get views. The way I saw it, there are a lot of very wealthy black and African social media personalities, entertainers, musicians and politicians who would never, and have never, done anything remotely close to what Mr. Beast did. While they flaunt their cars and mansions on instagram, this white man decided to make a show out of helping Africans and boy did he help them.

Impact Of Clean Water

Mr. Beast’s wells will provide clean drinking water for half a million African. These wells were constructed in various countries, including Cameroon, Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. What he’s done will literally save lives. Thousands of them.

In the wake of his actions he’s faced both praise and criticism. Some have said what he’s done is incredible and that it’s great that a YouTuber is using his influence and money for good. On the other hand detractors have said he’s exhibiting traits of the white saviour, a common phenomena where white people feel it’s their duty to ‘save’ black people and that in many ways they’re the only ones that can do it. What makes the white saviour scenario so damaging is that it’s often to the detriment of the long term autonomy of black people with the fundemental white saviour mentality being that blacks can’t look after themselves.

The White Saviour In Media

The number of movies, books, tv shows and cartoons that depict this white saviour trope is so high that I could write an entire separate article on it. The Last King Of Scotland, Blood Diamond, Out Of Africa the list is endless. You add in white saviours in black american culture and we could write volumes. It’s literally an obsession that I believe is caused by an inherent guilt of knowing what white culture has and is doing to black and African people. The need to depict shows of white kindness to blacks is an incredibly powerful tonic as much as showing the reality of what they have and are doing to Africa is not. This is with the caveat that you can do so only if there is a white saviour character somewhere in the narrative.

Of course when you have a power dynamic and bias such as that, it is a perfect environment for corruption and abuse of that power in reality. While white saviour movies and media are just entertainment for western society, they’re based on a very real life and death existence for millions of Africans.

Former Colonies

The white saviour ideology belies much of the horrendous relationship between Africa and the west especially former colonial powers. It’s understandable why Africans would be wary and skeptical of a white millionaire coming to the continent to build wells out of the kindness of his own heart. In fact another one of the criticisms the detractors had of Mr. Beast’s actions was the fact he recorded it for a video he put on his page to get monetised and attract more traffic to his platform.

In my opinion this is mainly deflection on the part of the black critics. What he’s done is grossly embarrassing and flies in the face of the white devil idea, something that is the crutch of too many black people that don’t want to take responisbility for pulling oourselves out of the hell hole we’re in.

This isn’t a bootstraps argument. This is one where we acknowledge white people have and are screwing us over and we make a decision to take responsibility for doing for self regardless of what they do or do not do for us or with us. As such none of the white saviour accusations made against Mr. Beast matter, regardless of whether they’re true or not.

Why It Doesn’t Matter

Let’s assume the worst case scenario that Mr. Beast has some delusional white saviour complex and did what he did for that reason. Not only that, let’s assume he was aslo trying to get the headlines and attention his actions would bring and thuse publicised and promoted his saving Africa video for that reason, to monetise that attention. What is the end result? Africans with clean drinking water they didn’t have before? How does Mr. Beast getting shine off that reality change the improved living conditions of those Africans?

His critics are all talk and no action. Most have done nothing in their small way to help Africa, so why attack someone who has? Oh and the whites who have gone after him on that self righteous hill are even worse than the blacks who have done it. This is because they seem to only comment on Africa at times like this while the fact remains white society is sustained by the subjugation of the communities Mr. Beast is helping. Mr Beast is now an angel to those communities and it’s sad that one white man did what the African governments of those countries couldn’t or rather didn’t do.

Nowhere To Hide

The thing I like most about this situation is that he’s exposed the corruption and ineptitude of those African governments in addition to the complicity of western nations. Why on earth are there Africans in so many resource rich nations living without such a basic necessity as clean drinking water?

What exactly have the Red Cross, UN, Nato and G7 nations been doing with all the donations they’ve taken over the last few decades to save Africa? Where did all that money go?

Mr Beast has proved it’s not complicated and that all the talk and feet dragging of these beurocrats is just hot air. If they really wanted to help Africa, they would have. Now the next time you see some UN, US or UK initiative for Africa you’ll know exactly what it is; a PR stunt. I trust Mr. Beast more than I do any western government or charity when it comes to emowering Africa. Maybe he is the type of man we should be talking to instead of the likes of Biden and Macron.

That is the future. Decentralistaion of influence and power.

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