As soon as the ticking clock that signals the end of Invisible Children’s newest 30-minute documentary hit the zero mark, I realized a few minor things in my life inevitably would change between March 6 and April 20.
Primarily, I realized my social media feeds would be cluttered with good-intentioned American friends who want to see the “Kony 2012” campaign succeed. Since I live in Madison, it also became clear that radical leftists and disgruntled right-wing skeptics would react with equal disgust at the campaign to arrest Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, but for different reasons on each end.
University campuses quickly will become the front lines of the battle between Kony 2012 loyalists and its critics. They should be.
On Wednesday alone, I saw angry reactions from far-left students that Invisible Children’s crusade against Kony was just another disturbing example of cultural and political imperialism. The overwhelming Western-ness of the group’s leaders only added to their disappointment. On the both the left and the right, I also noted the usual worry of slacktivism, a pejorative term for the phenomenon of only sharing a cause’s content but not actively participating in it.
The answer to this skepticism lies, like most complex issues, somewhere in the middle. I cannot pretend to be an expert on African issues, but in the aftermath of this week’s video, I’ve come to a few conclusions about the current status of our conversations about the global south.
Despite the incessant conversation about heightened global sensibility western Europe and the United States continue to have, we still talk about Africa in general terms. In the “Kony 2012” video, this was especially evident when Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said “[Invisible Children] realized that these African children and families were invisible to Washington policy makers, so they decided to make them visible.”
These kind of statements are the reason so many Americans ask themselves if Africa is a continent or country. When we discuss Cambodian genocide or Rio de Janeiro’s most notorious favelas, we never say “Southeast Asian killing fields” or “Latin American shantytowns.” Those regions have reached a level of popular understanding, mostly because of films like “Slumdog Millionare,” “The Killing Fields” and “City of God.” We understand more about Asia, Latin America and the Middle East because of our heightened economic ties with those regions. But we still fail to grasp the complexity of African countries.
It’s not unfortunate that globalized mass media can educate western audiences, albeit imperfectly, about the problems facing many nations. But it is unfortunate that our understanding of Africa still is limited to charity videos that make the entire continent appear to be a monumental mass of inferior governmental, economic and social systems that have plunged every sub-Saharan state into war and squalor.
Invisible Children sends the right message of human empathy and compassion with their demand for Kony’s arrest, but many of these positive effects are offset by a perpetuation of generalizations and misunderstandings about the African continent that lead to a belief in the superiority of Western social and political norms.
When I finished watching “Kony 2012,” I wanted to fly to Uganda and go to war with Joseph Kony. I wanted him to die the same way I wanted Osama bin Laden to die after Sept. 11. And I even posted, regrettably, that “good versus evil is a real thing.”
After sleeping on the video, though, I realized I had fallen into the same rhetorical team as George W. Bush. His earnest compassion for many African nations unfortunately led to the same promotion of intervention that ignores non-western concepts of political sustainability that could be effective in African countries.
My experience is only one out of what must be thousands of cases of ambivalence and moral confusion over the issue. The new blog Visible Children, which offers a particularly scathing critique of the Kony campaign, understands this ambivalence.
And that’s why universities are such special tools for understanding some of the most difficult issues facing the world.
So much about the anti-Kony campaign is good and humane, but much of it also is troubling. University of Wisconsin students should participate in the campaign and continue to apply pressure to remove his evil from the region he contaminates. Buy an action kit. Call your congressperson. Post ____ to _____ to tell people about how awful _____ is.
But after we wake up on April 21, students also should take the initiative to focus on more innovative measures to end and prevent the worst of human crimes.
Ryan Rainey (rrainey@badgerherald) is a junior majoring in journalism and Latin American studies.
