Forty years after topping the UK Christmas charts and raising millions for charity, Band Aid’s Christmas anthem is facing criticism. Critics say its lyrics reinforce racist and patronizing stereotypes about African people.
The song, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, was written and recorded by many of the UK’s biggest pop stars to help during a severe famine in Ethiopia. It sold millions and raised £8 million ($10.1 million) for aid in just one year.
The song also famously kept Wham!’s “Last Christmas” from reaching the top spot on the charts. This year, “Last Christmas” finally hit number one, with George Michael, the song’s writer, donating all its proceeds to the Band Aid fund.
But Band Aid’s lyrics have not aged well, and critics are now calling it “a terrible, racist song,” as writer Indrajit Samarajiva puts it.
He writes: “It’s not just that these lyrics haven’t aged well. They were never good at all.”
“They take an ignorant and colonial attitude, more about making white people feel good than helping anyone.”
He also points out that the song makes broad references to Africa without focusing on the specific suffering in Ethiopia:
“For instance, the lyrics: ‘There won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas time. The greatest gift they’ll get this year is life.”
‘Where nothing ever grows, no rain or rivers flow. Do they know it’s Christmastime at all?'”
“I mean, this is all wrong. It does snow in Africa, although not a lot.”
Meanwhile, Nigerian Igbo British writer Ije Teunissen-Oligboh has shared how uncomfortable she felt growing up in the UK when the song was released:
“The intention is a great one and should be praised rather than criticized, but the execution was awful and helped spread stereotypes and false information.”
“The discomfort I felt as a child watching the music video with my mostly white friends in school assemblies was unnecessary and avoidable… I struggled to explain to my peers that the images they were seeing in the video didn’t accurately represent an entire continent.”
The song has been re-recorded by different artists and released several times since 1984, raising money for various charitable causes, with the lyrics changed. But the original version remains the most popular and is still widely played in the UK during the Christmas season.
