Take up the White Man’s burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah slowly) to the light:
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?”
Take up the White Man’s burden-
Have done with childish days-
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!
From The White Man's Burden, by Rudyard Kipling,
So. Kony. More specifically, KONY 2012. There can be very few members of the species homo sapiens sapiens who have missed the media onslaught over the past few weeks. I imagine even tiny purple men on Pluto: ‘Jeeesss, Jason Russell really didn’t pick the right time to be flail, tackle out, down a busy motorway, did he? FFS. LOL.’
What has the video achieved? Well, it got 70 million hits in 5 days, something of a record even for this era of super-speed communication; it mobilised hundreds of thousands, and, as the film shows, it turned a political no into a yes. Quite a feat in itself. It has made people care about the plight of the so-called ‘invisible children’, and anything which creates a bit of awareness amongst people almost pathologically inward-looking in their priorities is ok in my book. Russell has explicitly admitted the video oversimplifies the matter for emotional effect – mass mobilisation over political clarity was a very deliberate artistic choice, and by all accounts, it worked. A forum now exists for debate over the issue, and with the recent (and first – take your bloody time, ICC) conviction of the DRC’s Thomas Lubanga for exploitation of child soldiers, the topic has never been more salient.‘A simplistic (or simplified) issue,’ said Al Jazeera, ‘made meaningful by so many people believing it.’
Neither is the critique of the charity’s spending ‘only’ 32% of its profit in the affected area a particularly valid one; unfortunately, you’d be pushed to find an NGO in the world spending over 40% on service delivery, and Oxfam’s service expenditure at one point dropped as low as 17% (not that these low figures are a good thing; ideally every penny would be spent on beneficiary aid and empowerment, but I am being realistic, and to use Invisible Children’s statistics as a basis for panning them isn’t entirely fair).
But – this is a very big but. Huge. A giant, ethical elephantine but.
But – the entire premise of the video and its campaign has been built on the denial of the agency, personality and political significance of the Ugandan people. Calling the abducted children ‘invisible’ has been met with huge resentment and anger by the people affected; in the northern Ugandan city of Lira, a public screening of the film was abandoned because of the fury it provoked – fury from the very people Russell was purporting to help. They weren't invisible, their families were probably pretty aware of the fact their children were being stolen, and to say otherwise is painfully paternalistic. They were enraged that their suffering had been framed through the eyes of one white bloke and his (admittedly very cute) kid. I have it on good authority (a Human Rights Watch reporter who spent time in the area) that these people are amongst the most laid back, calmest and kindest people he’s come across in his travels. And they rioted. It had been recreated as a western issue; the phrase ‘the white man’s burden’ has been bandied about a fair bit over this matter, and this phrase, taken from a (potentially) satirical poem by Kipling (see above), essentially describes it as the duty of the 'civilised' white man to help the poor suffering ‘savages’. There can be few among those entertaining liberal sensibilities who does not cringe at such verse, satirical or not.
Agitating for western military intervention as the ‘only’ recourse to such a problem merely resurrects this heinous notion. Kony makes a conveniently villainous figurehead for a terrible problem; but the problem itself is not solved by his removal. This is the constant battle of the human right defender, the aid worker, the foreign office diplomat; at what point are the facts twisted, even sacrificed, for the greater good? And how can the greater good be determined when the supposed beneficiaries have not even been consulted about what they want and need? Such a top-down approach to aid and policy is in itself just another neo-colonial assumption.
Kampala is the world capital for child prostitution – its human development statistics are amongst the lowest in the world, the education and health care services are in tatters. Monstrous as Kony is, he has not done this singlehandedly. Infrastructural fractures run far higher; and herein lies the film’s other great flaw – the total failure to even mention Yoweri Museveni, who came to power after Idi Amin’s brutal rule, and was hailed as a great hope for the nation. Since then he has failed to make even the slightest dent in Uganda’s crushing poverty, his own armies have committed some fairly hideous sexual crimes in the DRC in particular and have been given total impunity, and he has repeatedly attempted to impose the death penalty on LGBT individuals. I also hear it is now illegal to break wind publicly in Uganda (Quite how one can impose punishments for this I’m not sure. A lot of ‘he who smelt it dealt it’ accusations going on, I imagine).
Yes, justice must be done – but compressing the incredibly complex geopolitical situation in Uganda and the Great Lakes region as a whole into a half-hour racially patronising polemic is not the way to go about it. While social media has shone a much needed light on the issues, it has not done so in a particularly helpful way. Can the outcome justify the means if those means have patronised and belittled an entire people, depicting them as incapable of helping themselves? Some might argue yes, it can. The people of Lira vehemently disagree. They are the ones who have suffered. We owe them a little more sensitivity.
On a slightly less analytical note; if that doesn’t convince you, though, have a peek at this monstrosity. Nothing could be more painfully indicative of a neo-colonial hero complex – although almost more offensive is the High School Musical setting. And the lyrics. And the costumes. Genuinely vomit-inducingly awful. Actually, if you make it to the end I’ll buy you a beer. I really will.
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