political circumstances, and there’s no apolitical way of responding to them—no way to act without having a political effect,” writes journalist and author Philip Gourevitch. “Humanitarianism relieves the warring parties of many of the burdens (administrative and financial) of waging war, diminishing the demands of governing while fighting, cutting the cost of sustaining casualties, and supplying the food, medicine, and logistical support that keep armies going. At its worst—as the Red Cross demonstrated during the Second World War, when the organization offered its services at Nazi death camps, while maintaining absolute confidentiality about the atrocities it was privy to—impartiality in the face of atrocity can be indistinguishable from complicity.10
In 2003, the year before Save Darfur was founded, three young white Christian missionaries in their early twenties traveled from San Diego to Uganda in search of a documentary project. They were part of a Christian movement called the Emerging Church. Jason Russell, one of the founders, had first traveled to Africa in 2001, as a missionary in Kenya. After this trip his mission became to embody the gospel by “ending genocide.”
What the missionaries found inspired them to not only make a film but also start a charity that would distribute it, mostly to church groups. In 2006 they founded Invisible Children, a nonprofit aimed at raising awareness of war crimes in Uganda, through distributing their film of the same name.
After years of distributing Invisible Children, on March 5, 2012, they released a new video, KONY 2012. Across the United States thousands of people, many of them youth affiliated with church groups, tweeted the link to the video. Within five days the video had over one hundred million views. That hundred million would be a decent number for a new music video by Beyoncé or the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards, but for a half-hour slickly produced but ponderously paced and simplistic infomercial, it was a phenomenon, the most viral video ever at the time.
The goal was vague but simple: make Ugandan militia leader Joseph Kony famous, and then some nation’s military (that of the United States or perhaps an African nation) would respond to the publicity and make his capture a priority, and his reign of terror would come to an end.
In terms of digital outreach, it was a phenomenal success. But as Joshua Keating wrote at the time in Foreign Policy, in words that apply to most activist projects launched by saviors, “What are the consequences of unleashing so many exuberant activists armed with so few facts?”11
Criticism of the video came hard and fast, much of it from Ugandans and other Africans. “This is another video where I see an outsider trying to be a hero rescuing African children,” wrote Ugandan blogger Rosebell Kagumire. “We have seen these stories a lot in Ethiopia, celebrities coming in Somalia, you know, it does not end the problem.” She went on:
How do you tell the story of Africans? It’s much more important what the story is, actually, because if you are showing me as voiceless, as hopeless . . . you shouldn’t be telling my story if you don’t believe that I also have the power to change what is going on. And this video seems to say that the power lies in America, and it does not lie with my government, it does not lie with local initiatives on the ground, that aspect is lacking. . . . It is furthering that narrative about Africans: totally unable to help themselves and needing outside help all the time.12
Ironically these saviors had declared war on a man who is the end product of previous generations of white saviors’ interventions in Africa. It was the white missionaries who brought the Christianity to Africa that Joseph Kony credited with inspiring him. He even named one of his children George Bush.
While Invisible Children never led to the capture of Kony, it added support to further U.S. military engagement in Africa—the kind of collateral damage saviors often bring. They organized thousands of young people to lobby Congress for more U.S. military engagement—seventeen hundred visited congressional offices in one day, and the next day a bill calling for more U.S. “involvement” in the region had over one hundred sponsors.13
Obama appointee Samantha Power’s first public address after she became U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was to the Fourth Estate Leadership Summit, an event organized by Invisible Children. Writer Vijay Prashad described Power’s military interventionist foreign policy as “KONY-ism,” adding that “Power praised the group for its ‘new kind of activism’ whose ‘army of civilian activists’ had pushed the Obama administration to tougher action against Joseph Kony, the head of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), and whose example had helped Kenyans and Russians and most of all Arabs, who ‘barely knew democracy as recently as three years ago,’ to use the Internet to hold governments accountable.”14
Under the strain of international attention, Invisible Children burned out in spectacular fashion. Ten days after KONY 2012 launched, cofounder Jason Russell had a public mental breakdown, ranting naked on the street corner outside his San Diego home, yelling at cars. “My mind couldn’t stop thinking about the future,” he said later. “I literally thought I was responsible for the future of humanity.”15
In 2014 the organization began the process of shutting down. “Even though we’re announcing this before the capture of Joseph Kony,” said CEO Ben Keesey, “the Invisible Children story is one of gigantic progress and huge impact in people’s lives.”16
Their defenders say that Invisible Children and Save Darfur led to more engagement with the problems of the world. But these campaigns do not lend themselves to long-term engagement precisely because, by their nature, they are all about the quick fix. The campaigns encourage emotional reactions instead of critical thinking, and band-aids instead of lasting solutions to systemic problems. They also reinforce old stereotypes about western superiority and about Africa’s need for external salvation, by calling for white rescuers.
Western colonial engagement with Africa, even with the best of intentions, rarely ends well. Western Christians in Uganda, perhaps inspired by Invisible Children, have also successfully lobbied for some of the world’s most homophobic laws, such as the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2014, which called for the death penalty for gays and lesbians.
This is not an issue unique to Invisible Children—you can see it in the fund-raising and membership campaigns of most nonprofits. You are asked to donate and perhaps to sign something but nothing more. However noble and uncomplicated it may seem to offer help to those in need, the kind of help, and how it is delivered, matters. As Harvard law professor David Kennedy has said, “Humanitarianism tempts us to hubris, to an idolatry about our intentions and routines, to the conviction that we know more than we do about what justice can be.”17
How many people who joined Save Darfur or Invisible Children were left with the idea that all they needed to do was sign a petition or forward a video? How many were later left with the idea that change is impossible, noting that despite the mass involvement, atrocities are still committed in Darfur, and Joseph Kony is still free?
The “white people know best” activism of KONY 2012 can also be seen in the voluntourism industry, a range of businesses that have sprung up to help make the privileged feel useful by rebranding vacations as generosity. “On the Indonesian island of Bali, for example, a burgeoning orphanage industry exists to cater to voluntourists who want to help children,” writes Rafia Zakaria.
Children leave home and move to an orphanage because tourists, who visit the island a couple of times a year, are willing to pay for their education.
These children essentially work as orphans because their parents cannot afford to send them to school. Instead of helping parents cater to the needs of their children, the tourist demand for orphans to sponsor creates an industry that works to make children available for foreigners who wish to help. When the external help dries up, these pretend orphans are forced to beg on the streets for food and money in order to attract orphan tourism.18
The
