Reflections on Kony 2012

Lots of buzz these past few days over the Kony 2012 video.

Given the amount of attention I’ve given to the use of social media and online communication in the Arab spring (and the fact that a good part of my day job is spent trying to measure advocacy impact) I was struck by the speed with which the video exploded on the Internet.

Obviously, the campaign has been in the works for some time, and a lot of work has gone into its preparation and delivery, but a good social media/PR team doesn’t guarantee success.

The video can be found here and the situation it describes is no longer a fully accurate picture of the situation. Kony is no longer in Uganda, the Lord's resistance Army is not the same sort of threat that it was five years ago, the “Night Commuters” are no longer trapped in their horrible circular migration. Nonetheless, the video has been a huge success.

Predictably, there has been a major pushback in response, and a whole host of criticisms have been leveled against the Kony 2012 video and Invisible Children, the organization that created it and the surrounding social media campaign.

The video has been attacked on a variety of fronts (here's a good place to start or here), but most of the criticism addresses some key points:

1. The video oversimplifies a complex situation
2. The video does not reflect the current state of affairs
3. The video advocates the use of force to resolve a situation that would be better resolved without violence
4. The video perpetuate the stereotypes of Africa as nothing more than a place of violence and death
5. The video embodies the worst examples of white European paternalistic urge to "save Africans"
6. The organization does not make good use of the money they raise

These are, of course, all good criticisms. The organization has done a reasonable job of responding to some of them (see here) but I think they're all missing the point.

Teju Cole @tejucole, a gifted Nigerian American writer, posted some particularly biting responses on his twitter feed  two days ago:

• From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex.
• The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.
• The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.
• This world exists simply to satisfy the needs—including, importantly, the sentimental needs—of white people and Oprah.
• The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.
• Feverish worry over that awful African warlord. But close to 1.5 million Iraqis died from an American war of choice. Worry about that.
• 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.

Here’s the thing. I think Cole is way off base here. Now, don't get me wrong, as someone who occupies a world that is both American and African, I think Cole has worthwhile insights, but I also know several people who've given many years of their life in service to communities across the African continent. To paint these people and their work with the brush of the "white savior industrial complex" does them a gross disservice. Commitment to a life in the relief and development sector is commitment to a career full of small victories in the face of enormous setbacks. It's a field where you start out naive and idealistic and then you grow beyond that or you leave the field. I certainly think the Kony2012 campaign is a deeply flawed one, but it's also a pretty remarkable one that shows great potential for other endeavors.

The world is full of young people who want to help each other, and to dismiss that as desiring a "big emotional experience that validates privilege" is like telling a child that his crayon drawing is poorly executed and unrealistic. The people whose eyes are being opened by this are not adults. They are children and teenagers who were still in diapers when the “American war of choice” began in Iraq.

To speak with so much contempt and condescension is to plant seeds of cynicism in the hearts of the young.

(As I write this, I'm reminded of the Rumi story about Moses and the shepherd)

But here's the thing...Mark Toner, deputy spokesman for the US state dept. was made aware of the video by his 13 year old daughter (link).

Imagine that conversation.

And then imagine if Christine Shelley, State Department spokeswoman during the Rwandan genocide, had been asked by her daughter each evening, “What are we doing to help the children of Rwanda?”

Two days ago a friend of mine made a passing comment on Facebook in defense of the Coney 2012 video and an older family member responded by saying, "Atrocities happen all the time, I've never heard of this guy until you mentioned him just now, what makes the situation any different than any of the others?"

So.

There you have it.

For a quarter of a century people have successfully ignored this horrific unfolding atrocity that is STILL GOING ON.

But…

We are reaching the point now where, thanks to YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and Flickr and Skype, the wider world can only be ignored through an act of willful self-imposed blindness. And it is becoming harder to maintain that blindness.

Ultimately, the most incisive and relevantcritiques of Invisible Children as an organization are the same critiques that have been directed at just about every other major organization in International Aid and International Development, and they largely boil down to this:

The programs that generate the most donor funding are rarely the programs that do the most good for their target populations.

If you want to motivate people to dip into their wallets, the best thing in the world is a photograph of a starving little African baby with a swollen belly and flies crawling on his face. It just works.

But they want you to spend that money on food for the starving baby, not on projects that address the structural causes of food insecurity in the undeveloped world. Alex De Waal’s Famine Crimes: Politics & the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa addresses this issue far better and far more extensively than I could really hope to.

For me, however, I don't see this campaign as part of a long string of bloated miserable Band-Aids that some guilty first world culture has perpetuated to assuage some innate guilt of being privileged. Instead, I see it as reflecting a new scale of human interaction. If you really wanted to, you could find and become Facebook friends with a former "night commuter" from Uganda within 5 minutes (you could probably find a twitter feed from one in even less time).

The Indonesian tsunami of 2004 (which, by the way, was the first time where individual giving to a major disaster outstripped government aid) and the Iranian post-election fallout in 2009 were harbingers of this.

It is so important to remember that the real uptake on this video is taking place among people who have not even finished high school yet, and ultimately, the true impact of this video will not be seen in the money that it generates for Invisible Children and their work.

The important thing about the video is not the video itself, but rather its success – we're only discussing it because the video is an internet sensation. So is this a fluke, a random moment of emotion that (as Cole puts it) "validates privilege" or is this in fact something new?

I think this is something new. Don’t try to kill it before it can grow.