Remember #Kony2012? We’re still living in its offensive, outdated view of Africa
Some 10 years ago, the world was momentarily transfixed by a 30-minute film soundtracked by a heady mix of Nine Inch Nails and EDM, featuring shots of Adolf Hitler, crying children, and bodies lying in the road. It was called Kony 2012 – and it was meant to save a country that had not asked to be saved.
The inspiration for the film had come a decade earlier, when an allwhite group of US filmmakers had met a teenager called Jacob while travelling in northern Uganda. Jacob was on the run from a rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), headed by a man called Joseph Kony. Jacob told the filmmakers how he had been brutalised by Kony’s rebels, and they were understandably so moved that they set out to do something about it. They created the charity Invisible Children to highlight the plight of kids such as Jacob – whose suffering they considered invisible because Americans knew nothing about it.
You can almost forgive the filmmakers’ naivety about the African continent. A decade earlier, Tony Blair had declared the state of Africa to be a “scar on the conscience of the world”. Before that, in the 1980s, a whole genre of celebrity-fronted campaigns had emerged that saw famous faces sent to Africa to fix something. The most infamous was Bob Geldof’s Live Aid and the earlier Band Aid song Do They Know It’s Christmas?, which can still be heard in Britain every December. The song claimed that across the totality of Africa “the only water flowing / is the bitter sting of tears’’ and that “the greatest gift they’ll get this year is life”.
The Kony 2012 filmmakers had spent years trying to get the west to intervene in Uganda to capture Kony. They were failing in the task and urgently needed a new tactic. Kony 2012 was their solution – they would use public guilt to spur the US government into action. The result was a film packed with many of the tropes we had come to expect from African aid films: images of ubiquitous suffering, warlords in military uniform, starved children hopelessly wandering the night. Darkness was a heavy theme throughout the film: where light appeared, it was not in Uganda, but in the US.
The aim of the film, as narrated by filmmaker Jason Russell, was remarkably simple: to make Kony a household name in America and around the world. To do that, the charity proposed we all buy $30 action kits, each one filled with posters, bracelets and stickers, which the organisers hoped would blanket the planet in Kony’s likeness, leading to his inevitable arrest. In just over a week, 30 million people had watched Kony 2012; #StopKony trended on social media for three days. At the time it was the most viral video in YouTube history.
Why was it so widely shared? Perhaps because it played to the simple narrative of a failed Africa that the world had come to know and embrace. Successfully convincing viewers across the world to act required leaning heavily on people’s existing biases about the continent. It was easy to trust that a man had walked freely through this chaotic jungle for 20 years, murdering young children, because that was just the sort of thing that happened in Africa.
But for all the inspiration and horror Kony 2012 caused, it was also met by fury from critics. “The white saviour supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening,” the Nigerian essayist Teju Cole tweeted in the days following the film’s release.
Much of the film was criticised for being misleading – for instance, Joseph Kony wasn’t actually in Uganda at the time – and, in the words of Ugandan journalist Rosebell Kagumire, for “furthering a narrative of Africans being totally unable to help themselves”. The analysis was also judged to be several years out of date, grossly overstating the then size and reach of the LRA, which had dwindled in the years leading up to the film’s release.
There were other questions raised about the charity’s funding and expenditure – most of which was at the time spent in the US, as opposed to funding projects on the ground. The criticisms from the continent were so intense that it derailed the entire campaign, and Invisible Children was moved to release an FAQ going into so much more detail about Kony’s whereabouts and the wider civil war. Yet the damage was done: in the same spring that Kony 2012was released, Lonely Planet declared Uganda its top country to visit that year, a recognition that was quickly drowned out; it’s surely not just coincidence thatUganda suffered its biggest drop in tourism revenue for more than 10 years in 2012.
The question now, 10 years later, is has anything really changed since Kony 2012 to challenge the way the west sees Africa?
Just look at the newsreader who declared, shocked, that the victims of the appalling migrant crisis in Ukraine were “prosperous, middle-class people. These are not obviously refugees trying to get away from the Middle East … or north Africa. They look like any European family that you’d live next door to.” Look also to the past two years in which articles warning that the pandemic would lead to mass fatalities in Africa were followed by pieces questioning with a sense of bemusement as to why that hadn’t happened. And look, too, at news stories and reports talking about vaccine uptake in “Africa” when the picture is very different in specific countries. As with every other region in the world, the responses across the continent varied; in fact, South Africa has been a world leader in the detection of Covid-19 variants.
As I tour my book, Africa Is Not a Country, I’m consistently asked how the west should approach how to fix Africa’s problems, and my response is always to first stop looking at Africa as a problem. If we fail to do so, we are in danger of another decade passing without having shifted the world’s perception of the second-largest continent on the planet.
Dipo Faloyin is the author of Africa Is Not a Country, published by Harvill Secker