Kony’s dubious first for Africa

A commentary on the video Kony 2012 in The NewTimes, March 14, titled “KONY 2012 – The need for a better campaign” captured well the sympathies many felt for the victims of Joseph Kony’s atrocities upon watching the video. It also elaborated on the disappointments, one of them being that the video was outdated despite a touching account of the atrocities.Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, is wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder, sexual slavery and using children as combatants.For his atrocities, the Ugandan rebel has given Africa a dubious first through the 30-minute documentary posted on YouTube that is being touted as the most viral video in history, courtesy of its phenomenal spread on the Web and the social media. Launched by the group Invisible Children on March 5, on YouTube, the video would gain over 70 million hits in just five days. That was more hits than any other video on YouTube given the same number of days to date. According to YouTube, over 60 hours of video material are uploaded to its site every minute. That makes it quite a feat for a video to be noticed, let alone garner such a magnitude of hits. It was also the first time that an African issue made it to number one position riding on the viral video phenomenon.By Tuesday, this week, however, the video had somewhat slowed down registering just over 7.6 million hits amid a raging storm of criticism that it was naïve, inaccurate, outdated and had oversimplified the situation in northern Uganda. The LRA left Uganda some six years ago and now operates in central Africa, mainly in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, where they continue their violent rampage. One criticism was that the video seemed to give the impression that the LRA might still be in Uganda.According to the producers of the video, the goal was to raise awareness of the activities of Joseph Kony in the hope of bringing him to justice, and engage in some development projects in northern Uganda. This drew another of the criticisms; that the group pandered to a Western audience for their sympathy and donations to the continent, while seeming to patronize and ignore Africa’s ability to bring about the desired change.In a cutting comment, an article in The Atlantic observed that viral video campaign reinforced “a dangerous, centuries-old idea [that] 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.”Criticisms such as these put paid to the campaigners’ apparent good intentions, while serving to fuel worldwide attention to the video and the issues raised. The “white man’s burden” comment especially expressed the sentiment of many who variously used it to articulate the indignation the video provoked. There is a silver lining to all this, however. The producers of the Kony video may have had the best of intentions, and have since recognized the shortcomings of their video. As the issues raised continue to play out, it demonstrates the power of the social media, including our connectedness and interdependence within a global community to raise awareness on our concerns as well as scrutinize our motives.