





On March 7, 2012, a video produced by the non-profit group Invisible Children went super-viral (it’d been out for 2 weeks). The message: for the past 26 years, a man named Joseph Kony has led a group in Uganda that has kidnapped children and turned them into boy soldiers. This man is still at large and still active. He must be stopped.

Who could argue with that message? No one. And let me be clear: no one should and (to my knowledge) nobody is arguing about whether Joseph Kony should be found and put to justice. And yet, I find the video and the whole campaign to be so simplistic, misguided, and manipulative that, despite its singular and noble goal of stopping Joseph Kony’s reign of terror, I do not support Invisible Children or Kony 2012. Before you judge, I hope you’ll hear me out when I tell you the 5 most accessible reasons not to support Kony 2012. There are 3-4 really good reasons that I think are too dense, so I haven’t included them.

Disclaimer: I use the word “Africa” in an overly-simplistic way. Africa is huge, diverse, and can not be generalized. But I do it anyway.

You didn’t get informed, you got manipulated: If you have a heart and watched the Kony 2012 movie, one thing is certain: you teared up and you felt that you had to DO something!

Why did you feel that? Is it because you suddenly became aware that unspeakable atrocities have happened and continue to happen in Africa? No. We all know this.

You felt this way because you saw a child sit across from you, identify one person as “the bad guy” and then, in an incredibly emotional moment, innocently assume others couldn’t be controlled by the “bad guy” because they are the “good guys”. You felt that way because everything about the film was built to manipulate one of your deepest instincts: to protect children.

What happened to the children in Uganda was terrible, but did we need a child to tell us about them? Did we need 3 minutes about his birth and upbringing to start the film? No, we did not. With 30 minutes, what we could have used was some real context and some real information. If you decided to support the cause solely from the movie, let me ask you 3 questions: can you pick out Uganda on a map? What do the US military advisors in Uganda actually do? What does Invisible Children actually do?

If you just watched the movie (and aren’t involved otherwise), you don’t know the answers to those questions. I sure didn’t, I had to look them up. The movie tells you as little about the situation as it possibly can, and it’s 30 freakin minutes long. Think about that.

Aid organizations in Africa do more harm than good: Invisible Children, for all this talk about Kony, is an African Aid organization with a certain focus. Aid in Africa essentially works like this:

Let’s say in America, our poverty programs dedicated the majority of our money to food stamps and direct welfare check programs. The only Medicaid that’s offered in this theoretical is if you’re dying AND 5 of your brothers and sisters have already died. And you have no parents.

However, instead of giving this directly to you and your family, government trucks roll up into your low-income housing project and declare loudly “Good news! We’ve got a shit of load of food and money, things you badly need! Who’s in charge here, so we can just kinda drop it off and get out of here.”

Who do you think gets that food and money? Probably the person in the project with the most power and money, and who do you think that is? Well, in too many times in Africa, it’s warlords and dictators, and they use this aid to further control the people who the aid was intended to help.

The Government says “we’ve done all we can!” and when things don’t get better people say “oh well, we tried! These people are just hopeless.” Everybody sleeps better at night, knowing they’re just that much better than poor people. Meanwhile, those people never saw more than a tiny bit of that food and money, and NOTHING meaningful was done to help them get educated, get jobs, and change their lots in life. That’s African Aid, in a nutshell.

For more information, read “Dead Aid” by Dambisa Moyo. This metaphor was my own, so don’t blame it on her if it sucks.

Image portrayal in media matters: especially when talking about Africa. Invisible Children chose their images carefully, and I guarantee you they knew that they were using misleading images in order to illicit the most powerful reaction possible. To them, the ends justify the means, and that’s all that matters.

Let’s look at one image in particular a little deeper: the image of Jacob. We see Jacob in two distinct settings

In Africa: a young, helpless boy who is asking for help surrounded by faceless, nameless, huddled masses of other boys who are presumably also asking for help. In a moment so emotionally powerful I can barely write about it without crying, scratch that, CAN’T write about it without crying, Jacob is portrayed describing why he’d rather die than live before breaking down into tears. This is where the filmmaker promises to fix it, as if he were the child’s parent, as if WE were the child’s parents.

In America: well dressed, confident, but still a little bit childish. Clearly, in America he can grow into an adult, but he’s portrayed just enough as a child (at the beginning, having it explained to him how Dolphins are nice and different than sharks) for us to still think of him as “our” child.

These images were chosen very, very carefully. We know this both because this is a well crafted film and because these are people who clearly understand the power of image, devoting almost a million dollars last year to filmmaking. That’s a lot an aid organization. They were chosen to increase the effect of the campaign, but what is their greater impact? What are the first things you think of when you think of Africa.

I remember sitting in a class full of African American studies majors at UVa, the vast majority of whom were African-American, and listing off what we first thought of when we were asked to think about Africa. After about 5 minutes of listing off terms, we all became aware that we had listed off almost nothing but negative things: poverty, warfare, genocide, etc. Only those who had been through similar exercises had the insight to say things like “culture” or “beauty”. The thing is, most of us haven’t been to Africa, so what we think about it is based largely on the images we see. What images did this video put in our minds?

Huddled masses of helpless poor. That’s it. And that’s not helping ANYTHING, except this one, specific cause.

They want to make Kony famous, but they also want your money: The purpose of the movie is twofold: to increase awareness about Kony (obviously good) and to raise money for Invisible Children (not inherently good). One of the first tweets from @invisible (official IC twitter) was a retweet that said #KONY2012 war room @invisiblechildren - strategizing on how to harness the beautiful madness instagr.am/p/H4Ytf2h7KL/.

They have since un-retweeted it. THIS IS TOTALLY FINE: however, it further illustrates the point that they don’t just want to raise awareness, they want to raise money and increase their ability to work and control the process. Which is what they do, so that makes perfect sense, but you should really, really, really think before you support them or give them money. There’s a lot of info out there to suggest they may not be the best organization, for example: http://www.scarlettlion.com/invsible-children-the-next-chapter/. Don’t be manipulated into thinking hating Kony and supporting them are one in the same: they’re not.

They’re not addressing the real problem: The root problem in Africa (and one final apology for lumping Africa together and assuming they have a “problem”) isn’t Kony anymore than it was the Janjaweed in Darfur (remember Save Darfur? Anyone?) or the Hutu militias in Rwanda.

If it can be simplified into one blog, it’s a combination of deep issues stemming from the “carving up of Africa” done by Western powers in the 19th century, especially the imposition of Western systems of belief and government on unwilling peoples, power vacuums created due to these issues that were often filled by the worst people, the influx of aid going to dictators and murders who filled these vacuums at the expense of Africa’s natural resources (which are capitalized exclusively by outside powers), and MOST IMPORTANTLY the continued misunderstanding of these issues by the people of the nations who largely created and perpetuate them.

That’s us y’all. Sorry about it, but if you want to help Africa, you’re going to have to do more than re-post a video. You’re going to have to annoy people by challenging your friends’ assumption when they just want to feel good and yell “GO TEAM!” You’re going to have to correct your friends when they tell you the slaves were better because at least we got them out of Africa. You’re basically going to have to do some things that aren’t fun and aren’t popular, but hey, nobody said it was going to be easy. Then again, there’s no harm if you also…..





I originally ended this blog with a call to continue to make Kony famous, but moving forward empowered with more knowledge. After reading more from African scholars, I have removed this.