Making a Difference?

In Malawi as elsewhere, several NGOs recruit fee-paying “volun-tourists” drawn to a seductive fusion of service and adventure. This chapter considers one such organization—World Camp, Incorporated—and its use of musical strategies during residencies that take place in primary schools and conclude with student-led performances. The efficacy of World Camp’s public health interventions is a matter of considerable ambivalence. In wedding biomedical lyrical content to locally legible musical forms, students enact a hybridized genre with the potential to subvert autochthonous models of knowledge circulation. Volunteers, meanwhile, perceive their students’ performative capabilities through a romantic prism of endemic musicality, an interpretive move that elides the complexity of local praxis and rehashes racial tropes. Ultimately, this chapter argues that volunteers’ reception of their students’ performances completes a circuit of semiotic validation, reifying outsiders’ sense of altruism and perpetuating a model of humanitarian intervention with compromised regard for local impact.