“Charity is a very Victorian notion — the further away people are, the more charitable we feel towards them,” says Thompson with not a little asperity. “By my thirties I was thoroughly disenchanted by celebrity charity stuff — I just can’t bear it!” she says with a groan. Loathing the lunches-‘n-launches celebrity circuit, Thompson was looking for a way to make a more meaningful contribution.
“I have always been an activist,” she says, talking of her involvement with campaigns around Chilean and Nicaraguan solidarity, nuclear disarmament and the British miners’ strikes of the Eighties. She was attracted to Action Aid because it was based on advocacy and human rights and “it had nothing to do with coming down from your mountain and dispensing benefits to the poor. It was about engaging, listening, learning and becoming involved.” Action Aid also gained her respect because “Action Aid Argentina is staffed by Argentineans; Action Aid South Africa is staffed by South Africans.
“A lot of the activists in Action Aid come from the very quarters of society that they are trying to help. I think that makes a big difference from NGOs I have visited in the past which were staffed by white people in woolly jumpers,” she pauses for a beat “… being woolly!”
She was so impressed by the organi-sation’s approach that she offered her services “as a piece of human connected tissue”, so she could learn about their work, go talk to poor people and communicate their stories to people in the United Kingdom who “still take the view that ‘poor Africa doesn’t know how to help itself'”. She describes this view as partially racist, partially ignorant because “they have no idea what the lives of people with these challenges are like”.
Thompson is a great supporter of the Make Poverty History campaigns, which she says are “very useful because frankly the G8 listens only to people who pay taxes, they don’t listen to people who don’t have money or don’t make money”.
People don’t necessarily hear better when a celebrity talks about an issue, she points out, but “it all depends on how you say it. Of course, the magnetic effect of fame can help to draw people on board, but you really have to know your stuff and how to communicate it”.
Thompson describes herself as a student of human rights, women’s rights and Africa and spends a lot of time travelling and learning about these issues first-hand, but she is wary of some of the affectations of the development “industry”.
“I’m not keen on the language of developmentese,” she says scathingly. “It’s very off-putting to people on the ground. I almost think there is something competitive about it: ‘I know more acronyms than you.'” She does her best to avoid using NGO jargon as much as she can because, as she points out, “if you are dealing with human rights, you should be using human terms”.
Her trip to South Africa, which took her across the country, from the informal settlements of Johannesburg’s Orange Farm to the fruit farms of the Western Cape, both shocked and heartened her. “The most striking trope is the prevalence of violence against women. You’ve got a really big problem here.” Reports about a woman who was gang raped after being locked in a cell with six men at a police station have been in the news, and Thompson appears deeply shocked by the case: “You have such a wonderful Constitution and impressive legislation in place, but there seems to be a gap between the rhetoric and practice, and that will lead to disillusionment, which is not good for any government, but especially one that presents as much hope and energy as this one.”
The huge gap between rich and poor horrified her but paradoxically she says, offers hope. “You have enormous resources very near places that have none,” says Thompson, explaining that this actually puts us in a better position than other African countries, which have fewer resources to go around. As far as she’s concerned, it’s simply a matter of redistributing them a bit better. “This gap you have is something that can be closed quite easily … we’ve been thinking about ways to connect poor and rich communities on a fully engaged rather than on a charitable basis.”
The intersection between poverty, violence and HIV and the impact on women’s lives is top of Thompson’s agenda.
When she goes back to the UK she will be asking consumers to think a bit about the appalling working conditions of the — mostly female — seasonal workers in the Cape who pick and pack the fruit sold in their local supermarkets.
“They work incredibly hard for 38p an hour. They stand for 11 hours, they have nowhere to sit, nowhere to eat, no [protective] work clothes, there is no security — it’s slave labour really, paying people the least you can.” She points out that these conditions make women extremely vulnerable as they struggle for survival. “When you condemn women to that constant cycle of insecurity, you are inviting HIV in and giving it a cup of tea and a biscuit. It’s that simple.”