Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Monday, March 12, 2012
Examination of 'Kony 2012'
A few days ago, a new cause celebre exploded onto my Facebook timeline (the discussion about world events and crises on Facebook is for a whole other post entirely): the viral video 'Kony 2012.' My first reaction was disgust - not only of the man himself, but that the rest of the world is just now beginning to pay attention to the wars of central Africa. This is not a new conflict: this is a decades-old conflict, depending on how you want to determine the genesis. For the long duree, the Cold War led to both the USSR and the United States propping up reprehensible regimes, in Africa and elsewhere. Apartheid-era South Africa, Mobutu's Zaire, and white Rhodesia were all supported, in some degree by the U.S. You can go further back and point towards the tensions established by colonial rule, where 'tribes' were created by white colonialists for the purpose of 'rule' (Again, 'ethnicity' and 'tribe' in African history and African politics is a discussion for another day). When African countries began to earn their independence (there was a vast wave of decolonization in the post-war years, although it took decades to change over in some places), they were dependent on one-product economies, usually composed of raw materiel: oil, diamonds, cocoa, coffee, bananas, et cetera because of the lack of opportunity given to African men and women and because of the desire of imperialists to control these new nations post-independence in an economic sense. Longer story short, it became harder and harder to run and order these struggling nation-states, and certain tensions began to arise: ethnic tensions, government resentment, et cetera. The Rwandan conflict in the mid-1990s should not even be remembered as an exclusively 'Rwandan' conflict: this was a conflict that raged all over central Africa, transcending ethnicity and national and international borders. That is our backdrop for Kony's rise, in the riotous, convoluted, on-a-knife-edge order that came to be in the aftermath of the central African genocide.
Something immediately bothered me about the sudden interest in central Africa. I couldn't put my finger on it - perhaps it was arrogant intellectual indignity on my part ("Jesus, I can't believe these people are JUST NOW paying attention to this - what dunces") or guilt because I hadn't been paying the attention I should to these conflicts in my post-university life - but there was something inherently wrong about people who couldn't find Uganda on a map, knowing nothing of the history or the legacy of imperial rule, the political situation in central Africa suddenly pontificating about events that they, in all probability, fundamentally misunderstood (again, my intellectual arrogance shining through: apologies to the reader for my faults in this regard). An old professor of mine - a wonderful woman whom everyone should have the joy to meet - linked to an article by Max Fisher at The Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-soft-bigotry-of-kony-2012/254194/) which perfectly described the situation for me. To Fisher, these philanthropic movements are nothing more than colonialism in new clothes: attempting to instill Western values and Western solutions to African problems Before I go further, and lest I lose you, dear reader, let me point out that many charities across the world do wonderful things. I have no problem with charity groups and aid organizations, so long as they are well-tuned to local concerns and local societal norms and local politics. The problem with organizations such as the Peace Corps and this Invisible Children catastrophe is that they refuse to include Africans in the solutions. Fisher says it much better than I can:
"Worst of all, the much-circulated campaign subtly reinforces an idea that has been one of Africa's biggest disasters: that well-meaning Westerners need to come in and fix it. Africans, in this telling, are helpless victims, and Westerners are the heroes. It's part of a long tradition of Western advocacy that has, for centuries, adopted some form of white man's burden, treating African people as cared for only to the extent that Westerners care, their problems solvable only to the extent that Westerners solve them, and surely damned unless we can save them. First it was with missionaries, then "civilizing" missions, and finally the ultimate end of white paternalism, which was placing Africans under the direct Western control of imperialism. And while imperialism may have collapsed 50 years ago, that mentality persists, because it is rewarding and ennobling to feel needed and to believe you are doing something good." (Fisher, "The Soft Bigotry of Kony 2012,")
In my personal experience, I have met Peace Corps men and women who were wonderful, idealistic, and energetic individuals who were nothing but a positive for their organization. I have also met PC individuals who were the worst embodiment of what Fisher describes: the post-modern 'missionary' (both literal and figurative), spreading the love of America or of Jesus Christ or new technology while denigrating African methods as 'primitive' or 'backwards.' I once met an American Peace Corps volunteer in Johannesburg who was, and I do not exaggerate, one of the most reprehensible human beings I have ever encountered. He knew absolutely nothing about the people where he was going, and his impressions of Africa were troubling, to say the least. Yet again, this one individual is not my overall impression of the Peace Corps, nor do I mean to single out the Peace Corps for my literary venom. My larger point is that we, as Westerners, have never lost the guilty feeling that we are responsible for uplifting the poor 'savages.' These organizations, in an intellectual sense, are simply the newest 'sterile' version of colonialism - imposing our values on a political environment, on a culture, on a society that we do not fundamentally understand. My plea is that we take the time to learn about the new cause celebre before we jump in - and come to the understanding that a bracelet or a video 'repost' on social media is only a method of assuaging guilt, or of saving face in one's social community. We should be very concerned about the situation with Kony - but we surely cannot be so arrogant that we believe that Africans are not able or willing to solve their own problems with African solutions. That has been the Western mindset for centuries, and it has only brought misery. Let us remember to keep faith in our fellows, and remember that local solutions are almost always the best option.
Something immediately bothered me about the sudden interest in central Africa. I couldn't put my finger on it - perhaps it was arrogant intellectual indignity on my part ("Jesus, I can't believe these people are JUST NOW paying attention to this - what dunces") or guilt because I hadn't been paying the attention I should to these conflicts in my post-university life - but there was something inherently wrong about people who couldn't find Uganda on a map, knowing nothing of the history or the legacy of imperial rule, the political situation in central Africa suddenly pontificating about events that they, in all probability, fundamentally misunderstood (again, my intellectual arrogance shining through: apologies to the reader for my faults in this regard). An old professor of mine - a wonderful woman whom everyone should have the joy to meet - linked to an article by Max Fisher at The Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-soft-bigotry-of-kony-2012/254194/) which perfectly described the situation for me. To Fisher, these philanthropic movements are nothing more than colonialism in new clothes: attempting to instill Western values and Western solutions to African problems Before I go further, and lest I lose you, dear reader, let me point out that many charities across the world do wonderful things. I have no problem with charity groups and aid organizations, so long as they are well-tuned to local concerns and local societal norms and local politics. The problem with organizations such as the Peace Corps and this Invisible Children catastrophe is that they refuse to include Africans in the solutions. Fisher says it much better than I can:
"Worst of all, the much-circulated campaign subtly reinforces an idea that has been one of Africa's biggest disasters: that well-meaning Westerners need to come in and fix it. Africans, in this telling, are helpless victims, and Westerners are the heroes. It's part of a long tradition of Western advocacy that has, for centuries, adopted some form of white man's burden, treating African people as cared for only to the extent that Westerners care, their problems solvable only to the extent that Westerners solve them, and surely damned unless we can save them. First it was with missionaries, then "civilizing" missions, and finally the ultimate end of white paternalism, which was placing Africans under the direct Western control of imperialism. And while imperialism may have collapsed 50 years ago, that mentality persists, because it is rewarding and ennobling to feel needed and to believe you are doing something good." (Fisher, "The Soft Bigotry of Kony 2012,")
In my personal experience, I have met Peace Corps men and women who were wonderful, idealistic, and energetic individuals who were nothing but a positive for their organization. I have also met PC individuals who were the worst embodiment of what Fisher describes: the post-modern 'missionary' (both literal and figurative), spreading the love of America or of Jesus Christ or new technology while denigrating African methods as 'primitive' or 'backwards.' I once met an American Peace Corps volunteer in Johannesburg who was, and I do not exaggerate, one of the most reprehensible human beings I have ever encountered. He knew absolutely nothing about the people where he was going, and his impressions of Africa were troubling, to say the least. Yet again, this one individual is not my overall impression of the Peace Corps, nor do I mean to single out the Peace Corps for my literary venom. My larger point is that we, as Westerners, have never lost the guilty feeling that we are responsible for uplifting the poor 'savages.' These organizations, in an intellectual sense, are simply the newest 'sterile' version of colonialism - imposing our values on a political environment, on a culture, on a society that we do not fundamentally understand. My plea is that we take the time to learn about the new cause celebre before we jump in - and come to the understanding that a bracelet or a video 'repost' on social media is only a method of assuaging guilt, or of saving face in one's social community. We should be very concerned about the situation with Kony - but we surely cannot be so arrogant that we believe that Africans are not able or willing to solve their own problems with African solutions. That has been the Western mindset for centuries, and it has only brought misery. Let us remember to keep faith in our fellows, and remember that local solutions are almost always the best option.
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