Sanjay (Xonzoi) Barbora
There is a short, 30-minute film that went viral on the Internet over the last week. It is simply titled “Kony 2012” and has been made by Jason Russell, who runs a non-governmental organisation called Invisible Children. The movie begins with a smartly accented voiceover that announces “Right now, there are more people on facebook than there were in the world 200 years ago” and moves into documenting (among other idiosyncratic images) the birth of Russell’s child, a blonde, white boy with blue eyes and after a montage of shots of the child growing up, rests upon another photograph on the door of a refrigerator in suburban America. It is of a boy from the north of Uganda, called Jacob and this film is supposedly about him. Throughout the course of the film, one can hear uplifting chamber music before the smartly accented voice begins to talk about Joseph Kony and why he needs to be famous in the United States of America.
Joseph Kony is the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, which is a small rebel group of predominantly Acholi people, who live in northern Uganda, parts of Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Acholi are a Nilotic people, whose traditional lifestyle was dependent on hunting and rearing livestock. As with other nations that were forced into competition and conflict with other communities during colonial rule, the Acholi too were used to control the population of eastern Africa by the British. Many were part of the British colonial army and paramilitary in what is today the country of Uganda. Following independence of Uganda in 1962, the Acholi were placed in direct competition with other ethnic groups, for control over the political system of the country. In the course of this competition, many Acholi were forced into living in internment-camps, as their lands were taken over by the government and the military.
Uganda’s political events after independence were dominated by the absurdities and atrocities committed by Idi Amin Dada, the dictator who inspired several Hollywood films. However, there has been little attention paid to what happened after him. After Amin was deposed by the Tanzanian army and rebels of the Uganda National Liberation Front, the country was led by Yusufu Lele, Godfrey Binaisa and finally by Milton Obote, all of who came and left in quick succession. The current president, Yoweri Museveni, deposed Obote in 1985. Throughout these permutations in political life, the northern part of Uganda remained restive and susceptible to separatist Acholi nationalist movements. Joseph Kony managed to cash in on these grievances and began a brutal bush war at almost the same time that Museveni came to power. Kony’s fighters have been accused of widespread abuse of human rights, with mutilations, rape and abduction of children, being part of their apparatus of control over the local population in the north (of Uganda).
“Kony 2012” is not too concerned with this complicated history. Instead, its makers have chosen to dress up its message by appealing to the facebook generation’s penchant for supporting causes with a click of the mouse button. The film, though edited perfectly, thanks the money that Invisible Children receives from online donations, is another example of the manner in which African problems and its population are reduced to playing the part of childlike victims in need of support from the west. More disturbingly, the filmmakers and their perceived audience (young, compassionate, college-going Americans) indulge in warmongering. They applaud the Obama administration’s decision to send “American military advisors” to hunt Kony and drag him to the International Criminal Court. Some online critics argue that the filmmakers would have been better served to educate the American public about the war crimes committed by the George W. Bush administration and have them tried for war crimes!
However, proponents of the film argue that it has managed to bring back media focus on a war that was forgotten by the world. While this is true, it still does not change the fact that the film is a thinly veiled attempt at adding an aesthetic value to American military intervention in Africa. Prof. Adam Branch, a political scientist associated with Makerere Institute of Social Research, in Kampala, Uganda says that the film will not change the lives of the Acholi people of Uganda. Their lands are still being given away to foreign speculators by the Ugandan government and the military. Kony 2012 therefore, will remain an example of how well meaning interventions can actually lead to less clarity on complex, protracted armed struggles.
xonzoi.barbora@gmail.com
