Thursday, March 8, 2012

Reinforcing Power Structures and the White Man’s Burden through Goodwill: A Critique of Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 Campaign

In an attempt to address the 21-year conflict and war in northern Uganda, Invisible Children has launched yet again another campaign to raise awareness. This new campaign, “Kony 2012,” is misguided, however and reductionist in approach. Invisible Children (IC), like numerous NGOs, fail to acknowledge their own affiliation and maintenance of power structures, American hegemony, and domination. Through trendy t-shirts, bracelets and symbols, IC sensationalizes the suffering of a community while advocating to alleviate it. They legitimize military intervention as a means to an end and reinforce the “White Man’s Burden” through goodwill and charity.

Because of this and many other reasons I will outline below, I say: something is wrong here. very very wrong.

I feel in taking this position, I have to make clear that YES Joseph Kony, the leader or the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) should be stopped, apprehended and brought to justice (whatever that may look like). However, I will not support IC’s campaign if it means reducing the conflict and people’s lives to an advocacy kit and deadline.

I first traveled to Northern Uganda in 2010 and spent over 5 months living in Gulu conducting research on peace education programs in secondary and primary schools. That experience did not magically change my life, but what it did was give me a unique perspective and insight on this issue. It helped me to see the obvious devastation of 21 years of war, but to also see the way in which people in northern Uganda are living out meaningful and complex lives. Their existence cannot and should not be defined by “Kony 2012” and a shallow understanding of Ugandan history.

Watching this new film by Invisible Children invoked a lot of memories for me. I don’t have the best history with Invisible Children. In 2008-9 I became involved with the Jazz for Justice Project (JfJ) at the Univ. of TN, which organizes concerts and film-screenings to promote peace and reconciliation in northern Uganda. Through JfJ I met a small group of incredible activists who were passionate about what happened and what was still happening there. I joined their campaign called “Educate" which was a response to IC's "Rescue" campaign that promoted selling "I heart the LRA" shirts and encouraged U.S. teenagers and young adults to "abduct" themselves until the U.S. government responded to their proposal on stopping the LRA. We wanted to show how insensitive and well absurd this campaign was, but we were heavily criticized by IC supporters. Eventually my friends arranged meetings with the IC leaders (including Jason) and they discontinued the shirts (to my knowledge) and they changed their website to reflect current developments of the war. By that time, the war had ended in a cease-fire between the LRA and the Ugandan government forces, but IC’s website never indicated that fact. I began to question how fair this was to the people they were claiming to help.

Over the years, I've encountered many IC supporters who still to this day are not educated about the history of the war and the powerful political nature of the war in which anthropologist Sverker Finnstrom called, “a global war even if fought on local grounds.” How does one tell IC and its supporters that this war has international implications and ramifications and cannot simply be summed up in “Kony 2012?” The film will tell you that Kony is not fighting for a cause, but for power and that he is not supported by anyone. This however, is a one-dimensional view of the conflict. The LRA began as a politically oriented group that released a manifesto denouncing the marginalization of the Acholi people by the Uganda government (President Museveni’s government). There is also a substantial amount of proof that Kony had help and was for a time supported by the Sudanese government. To think that Kony maintained this rebel group without support is truly misleading.

How does one explain this to someone who has been moved by IC? How does one say that many Ugandans do not agree with IC’s strategies? What is problematic about calling your supporters “an army of young people?” How does one say that this is not a black and white issue?

So yes, I was skeptical about this new initiative and film. But my mind held out hope that IC had finally taken this constructive criticism, not just by JfJ but by other groups and persons, and applied them. Sadly, I was mistaken. And now their new campaign is seeking to make Joseph Kony “famous.”

How ludicrous.

As I kept watching the video, I began to weep. It was just after Jason said we are “making Kony famous … a household name” that I could not hold back my tears. I cannot begin to explain how insensitive this approach is. Invisible Children’s ideals are rooted in American culture and that culture is hegemonic. The individuals who subscribe to “rescuing or saving African children” take for granted the privilege that they are afforded due to the degradation of the rest of the world. This is evident to me as I see young people subscribing to something that appears benevolent, but that maintains the system that made it possible for this war to go on without international attention.

Over half the film focuses on Jason and his young son. This is a theme in IC’s work, in which they spend far too much time and energy promoting what they have done instead of focusing on the issue. This is not a movement, it is a trend. It inspires people with great myths about changing the world if they could only catch this warlord. And the fact that there is still no mention that there is no war going on in Uganda is absolutely baffling. There is also no mention of the other countries that the LRA has committed atrocities in (the DRC, Southern Sudan and CAR).

IC: These children were never invisible. Their community saw them and continues to see them. You made them invisible so you can say you helped the world to “see” them. That is privilege. It is your American/Western privilege that allows you to assume such things and reconstruct people’s lives on film in a way that glorifies your efforts instead of bring attention to those suffering and those Ugandans working on behalf of peace, justice and healing in their community. The White Man’s Burden is so heavy, isn’t it?

This is not all to say that organizations such as Invisible Children should cease to exist or be dismantled; however, it is to say that in the current context of the world, one has to reevaluate how power is constructed, challenged or transformed in order to create a better world for people like those rebuilding their lives in northern Uganda.

I’ll be returning for the third time to Uganda this summer and the more I travel there the more I learn, but the more questions I have. This is the complexity, the depth the reality that is missing from Invisible Children. Instead of building bridges between communities they are making celebrities of themselves.

So I invite you dear friends to look at the structure, the bigger picture that we are in and ask yourself tough questions about the commodification of charity. Question how consumerism is increasingly made to look altruistic when the former is a primary cause for devastation around the world. Unlike what IC promotes, “Kony 2012” will not “change the nature of our country.” It will only reinforces cultural hegemony and ignorance. We may never be able to get around this structure, but there are better ways to go about advocacy.

Jayanni Webster
Senior, University of Tennessee
jwebst16@utk.edu

1 comment:

  1. Very well done... I must encourage you to submit this to the NY Times, it would help better illustrate the ills of supporting IC even when the cause, at root, is noble.

    ReplyDelete