As my colleagues David Goodman and Jennifer Preston explain, a viral marketing campaign to raise awareness of the suffering inflicted on African children by the warlord Joseph Kony has dominated social media conversations this week, despite concerns that the young Americans behind it might be spreading factual inaccuracies and wasting donors’ money.

While much of the backlash reported in the American news media this week cited objections raised by development experts in the United States and Europe, several African bloggers and activists have objected to what they see as more fundamental problems. Among them, the possibility that the “Kony 2012″ campaign reinforces the old idea, once used to justify colonial exploitation, that Africans are helpless and need to be saved by Westerners.

Many African critics of the new effort to make Mr. Kony, the brutal leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a household name in the United States — five months after President Obama pleased Human Rights Watch and annoyed Rush Limbaugh by dispatching military advisers to aid in his capture — said it echoed the ideas in Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” written in 1899 to urge Americans to embrace their imperial destiny and rule over the “new-caught, sullen peoples,” of the Philippines — even though the typical native was “half-devil and half-child.”

In a critique of the campaign posted on YouTube, Rosebell Kagumire, a Ugandan blogger, observed that the filmmaker behind the “Kony 2012″ viral video calling for action “plays so much on the idea that this war has been going on because millions of Americans” and other Westerners, “have been ignorant about it.”

Speaking directly to the camera, Ms. Kagumire added:

this is another video where I see an outsider trying to be a hero rescuing African children. We have seen these stories a lot in Ethiopia, celebrities coming in Somalia, you know, it does not end the problem. I think we need to have kind of sound, intelligent campaigns that are geared towards real policy shifts, rather than a very sensationalized story that is out to make one person cry, and at the end of the day, we forget about it. I think it’s all about trying to make a difference, but 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. And this is the problem, it is furthering that narrative about Africans: totally unable to help themselves and needing outside help all the time.

A Ugandan journalist, Angelo Izama, took up the same theme, arguing that all such campaigns aimed at “saving hapless Africans,” were problematic because, “the simplicity of the ‘good versus evil,'” narrative, “where good is inevitably white/Western and bad is black or African, is also reminiscent of some of the worst excesses of the colonial-era interventions.”

In an angry blog post, dismissing the Kony campaign as a “fund-raising stunt,” the Ugandan-American activist TMS Ruge wrote: “We as Africans, especially the diaspora, are waking to the idea that our agency has been hijacked for far too long by well-meaning Western do-gooders with a guilty conscience, sold on the idea that Africa’s ills are their responsibility.” He added:

Africa is our problem, we hereby respectfully request you let us handle our own matters. We will make mistakes here and there, sure. That is expected. But the trade-off of writing our own destiny far outweighs the self-assigned guilt the world assigned to us. If you really want to help, keep the guilt and charity in your backyard. Bring instead, respect, and the humility to let us determine our destiny.

As Max Fisher reported for The Atlantic, the Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole, responded to the Kony campaign on Twitter with “Seven thoughts on the banality of sentimentality.” In his biting critique, Mr. Cole wrote that the American charity behind the Kony campaign, Invisible Children, was part of what he called the “White Savior Industrial Complex,” along with the economist Jeffrey Sachs, The Times Op-Ed columnist Nicholas Kristof and the organizers of the TED conferences on technology, entertainment and design.

1- From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex. — Teju Cole (@tejucole) March 8, 2012

2- The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening. — Teju Cole (@tejucole) March 8, 2012

3- The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm. — Teju Cole (@tejucole) March 8, 2012

4- This world exists simply to satisfy the needs—including, importantly, the sentimental needs—of white people and Oprah. — Teju Cole (@tejucole) March 8, 2012

5- The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege. — Teju Cole (@tejucole) March 8, 2012

6- Feverish worry over that awful African warlord. But close to 1.5 million Iraqis died from an American war of choice. Worry about that. — Teju Cole (@tejucole) March 8, 2012

7- I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly. — Teju Cole (@tejucole) March 8, 2012

Watching the viral hubbub over the campaign build from North Africa, the Egyptian activist Mosa’ab Elshamy was distinctly unimpressed. Mr. Elshamy, who took part in the revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak last year, and documented it on Twitter, told The Lede: “I felt awkward about the whole thing without even reading the tons of critiques on the Internet. It just doesn’t make sense: the whole exploiting teenagers to buy bracelets and paint graffiti just to make them feel they’ve done something.”

On the brighter side, he observed, the campaign did at least generate some inspired comedy, in the form of an online photo book imagining how the entire thing might have been dreamed up at the White House to justify President Obama’s deployment of troops to Africa.

But the greatest thing about stupid campaigns like KONY is that it always brings out the best comedy. Like this. i.imgur.com/K3mgn.jpg — Mosa’ab Elshamy (@mosaaberizing) March 9, 2012

: After this post was originally published, the blogger Rosebell Kagumire pointed to an outraged open letter to Jason Russell, the American filmmaker behind Invisible Children and the “Kony2012″ video, written by Amber Ha, a student at Columbia University. Ms. Ha wrote: “Last year I went to Gulu, Uganda, where Invisible Children is based, and interviewed over 50 locals. Every single person questioned Invisible Children’s legitimacy and intention.”

On her blog, Ms. Ha also posted a link to a response to the video from Adam Branch, an American expert on “the politics of human rights intervention,” who currently lives and works in Kampala, Uganda. Writing on the Web site of Uganda’s Makerere Institute of Social Research, Mr. Branch observed: “As someone who has worked in and done research on the war in northern Uganda for over a decade, much of it with a local human rights organization based in Gulu, the Invisible Children organization and their videos have infuriated me to no end.” He added: