Canadian film makers to restore Liberia’s photographic heritage.

Posted on May 2nd, 2012

 

http://liberia77.com/ 
http://www.vuesdafrique.org/

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Adding noise to the Kony 2012 soundtrack

Posted on April 30th, 2012

Charles Taylor in the limelight – oh wait, but what about the likes of Mengistu Haile Mariam?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve kept a close eye on this “Kony Kraze” as it unfolded in the media. Facebook abounds with commentaries – in my academic circle, mostly negative ones. I read whatever I could get my hands on.

Many people retorted that Invisible Children’s take on the LRA is seeped in the White Man Burden’s complex, among other issues pointing out to the fact that the 27 minute video is ironically disconnected from the reality it’s portraying and leaves little room for Ugandans themselves to speak, er, well, about their own lives. In fact the video seems to be more about the audience (young Americans) than about the cause.

I saw the storm take off and avoided watching the video for a couple of weeks. Based on the way it attracted attention, as though watching it was THE thing we ALL should do to “save Africa”, I knew I’d be frustrated. My instinct finally succumbed as I sat in bed and watched the video in the wee hours of the morning while nursing my infant.

Don’t they say to always trust your instincts? My first reaction was quite emotional – I wanted to get online and order thousands of Kony 2012 Action Kits. All the right strings were pulled for me to start acting now in order to protect an innocent little girl or a little boy like my baby from abduction, rape and a lifetime of trauma.

I immediately tapped in to Russell’s passion for the cause. Only an extremely devoted activist would feature his own son and put him in the line of fire. Unless he was utterly and naively convinced there would be no line of fire? Which is also worrisome.

Thankfully logic kicked in. Wait … The basic objective of this whole campaign is to support the Ugandan army? AND it’s being marketed as a once-and-for-all solution to the phenomena of child soldiers in Africa/Uganda?

It’s a cliché that this “solution” is coming from well-intentioned but misinformed gung-ho white middle class Americans. Did anyone see the video of Alicia Silverstone feeding her infant by pre-masticating food and spitting morsels into her baby’s mouth? The Kony 2012 does just that. Invisible Children is the mama and the rest of North American youth are young’uns in need of pre-chewed moralistic nourishment that will boost them into action. My skin started to crawl.

While the creators of the Kony 2012 campaign video received a harsh beating (Russell went a little berserk apparently), Russell and his team of advisers represent the mouthpiece for a whole generation of North Americans who made the video a huge success. Their message spread in lightning speed because it spoke to so many people.

I have to admit that I admire people who put themselves out there (no doubt though it could have been done more intelligently …). Many feel that doing something, anything instead of nothing is more productive than the naysayer who thrives on others’ initiative to walk the walk and use it as fodder to generate more of their own talk in insular elite academic circles.

And while I agree with the criticism their interpretation of the conflict drew, the backlash to the film and, worse, the personal attacks on Russell were as disconcerting as the infantilizing approach of the designers of the Kony 2012 Action Kit.

At the end of the day, Russell and his team really hit a raw nerve for me: the sense of helplessness I feel toward tyrants like Kony. It angers me how random the target of the Kony 2012 cause is, knowing that there are hundreds more still lurking around in freedom, power and money stolen from their own people.

As I write this, Charles Taylor is in the media again, being tried for his crimes. As I write this, Mengistu Haile Mariam continues to live a luxurious life in Zimbabwe, having received asylum from Robert Mugabe. But then, should there be no action taken at all? No, acting is important. But how we carry ourselves in the implementation of our intentions determines whether we should have attempted to help in the first place at all.

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South African scholar wants to help deaf children.

Posted on April 20th, 2012

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Canadian grant programme supports research in Africa.

Posted on April 18th, 2012

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Business course helps Quebec immigrant women spend more time with their children.

Posted on April 17th, 2012

The Centre d’encadrement pour jeunes femmes immigrantes (CEJFI) is an organisation whose mission it is to improve the living conditions of young immigrant women.  The Link’s Africa page web editor Awa Dlodlo tells us about a special CEJFI course that helps women start a day care business.  http://www.cejfi.org/

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Gurls, Go To Africa

Posted on April 17th, 2012

On the day after the now infamous Kony 2012 video hit the Internet, one of my students told me about a friend of hers who had posted the following message on her Facebook profile: “This is the cause I have been waiting for my entire life.”

Over the subsequent few days, as criticism about the video exploded, I often thought about that comment. How did this girl feel when what she had assumed to be a good cause became widely reviled as an exercise in Western paternalism? Read more…

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Mobile clinics offer health care to truckers and sex workers.

Posted on April 4th, 2012

 

Truckers and sex workers in Africa are vulnerable to various diseases, but thanks to mobile clinics they now have access to much needed medical care given by a non-governmental organisation called North Star Alliance.   The Link’s Africa page editor Awa Dlodlo has the story http://www.northstar-alliance.org

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Dancers incorporate South African gumboot dance with traditional Quebec gigue.

Posted on March 23rd, 2012

Sixteen years ago, Sylvie Mercier fell in love with gumboot dance, a compelling art form conceived by black miners in South Africa during the repressive apartheid era. Today, she fuses gumboot dance and the traditional Quebec gigue in her choreography. The Link’s Africa’s editor, Awa Dlodlo spoke to Mercier about what drew her to this compelling art form.
http://www.bourask.com/compagnie.html

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Mozambique-born musician plays with Chiac-Canadian hip-hop band.

Posted on March 16th, 2012

Samito Matsinhe came to Canada from his native Mozambique, to continue his studies in music. But he was soon busy playing keyboards with some great musicians on tours around the world. Recently, he joined the Canadian hip-hop band, known as Radio Radio.

He spoke to The Link’s Africa editor, Awa Dlodlo about his experience and how he has made it as a musician on the Canadian music scene.

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#Kony2012: Critiquing the critics, embracing discomfort

Posted on March 12th, 2012

Jason Russell is an easy guy to hate.

The co-founder of Invisible Children is blue-eyed, (sometimes) blonde haired, and appears dressed in “trendy,” expensive-looking clothes and eyeglasses. In the past week he has been described in various blog posts and website comments as a “hipster,” a “pretty boy,” and an “egomaniac.”

And, I admit it, as I re-watched the now ubiquitous #Kony2012 video today, every time Jason Russell appeared on screen, I felt myself cringe. Russell seems to be the embodiment of everything that is offensive about Western engagements with Africa: paternalistic, moralizing, overly-earnest, and—most of all—far more visible in the videos produced by Invisible Children than the Africans that his organization is supposedly empowering.

If you somehow managed to avoid the #Kony2012 hoopla that engulfed the Internet over the past week, a brief summary: Joseph Kony is the leader of Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a militia-type group inspired by a radical interpretation of Christianity. Formerly active in Northern Uganda, the LRA has now dispersed to the DRC, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic. Kony and the LRA have been implicated in a horrific series of crimes against humanity, most notably kidnapping young children and forcing them to serve as child soldiers and sex slaves.

On Monday, the U.S.-based organization Invisible Children launched a social media campaign aimed at building popular support to capture Kony by the end of 2012. They posted a promotional video on YouTube, which as of this writing had been viewed over 70 million times. The campaign spread quickly via Facebook and Twitter (#StopKony became one of the top trending Twitter topics worldwide.) It also engendered a good deal of backlash among bloggers and other commentators who argued that the campaign was simplistic, patronizing, and misleading. (For a roundup of critiques see the Visible Children tumblr.)

In explaining the success of #Kony2012, Duncan Green writes, “All you need for a good campaign is a problem, a solution, and villain.”

Certainly this seems to be Invisible Children’s strategy. They themselves have admitted to oversimplifying a complex issue in order to garner public support. 

Thus, according to the Kony 2012 video, the problem is that children are being kidnapped by the LRA. The solution is to capture Joseph Kony.  The villain, of course, is Kony himself. (Just to make sure that we understand this, the video makers throw in an Adolf Hitler comparison for good measure.)

Now, none of the critics of the Kony 2012 video have engaged in such extreme forms of hyperbole in their take downs of Jason Russell and Invisible Children. Nevertheless, there seems to be a similar strategy at work in many anti-Kony2012 articles.

A post on the blog ‘Africa is a Country’ is a particularly notable example. The problem, according to such critiques, is that of wealthy uninformed Westerners offering simplistic solutions to African problems. The solution is, well, for them to stop doing this. The villain is Jason Russell and, by extension Invisible Children.

Joseph Kony personifies African suffering; Jason Russell personifies Western paternalism and naiveté. Two complex issues have been nicely encapsulated within two individuals. How much easier these problems seem to solve now!

I should say that I am incredibly sympathetic to many of the critiques of #Kony2012. Indeed, this blog post started out as such a critique. Criticism about the campaign has centred on factual inaccuracies, shady finances, uncomfortable resonances with the colonial-era “White Man’s Burden,” and a lack of Ugandan voices in and surrounding the Kony2012 film (and in IC’s work more generally).

Others have done a fantastic job of making these arguments, and there is no need to repeat them here. One might also object to the Kony 2012 video’s militant tone (at one point a large crowd of young students is shown chanting “fight war!”—the potential double meaning of this slogan seems to have been lost on the IC filmmakers). Or to the use of Russell’s young son Gavin as a white identification figure in order to tug on the heartstrings of viewers who, IC presumably thought, would not have been as moved were they presented with an Africa child. (“Every day, young boys just like Gavin are kidnapped by the LRA…”)

And yet, as I wrote the first draft of this post, I couldn’t shake a sense of discomfort. You see, much of the criticism surrounding the Kony2012 campaign argues that it is “slacktivism.” It provides an easy way for well-meaning people in the West to “help” Africa, without expending any significant effort. By forwarding the Kony 2012 video, or putting up a Kony 2012 poster, or donating a small sum of money to Invisible Children (the organization raised 5 million dollars in the 48 hours after the video was posted), you are doing good.

You don’t need to engage in any hard questioning of the structural forces that allow people like Joseph Kony to rise to power in the first place, nor about your own role and investment, as a privileged Westerner, in perpetuating those forces.  Just forward the link, write a comment, maybe send away for the Joseph Kony Action Kit, and be done with it.

But are many of the critics of #Kony2012, myself included, not engaged in slacktivism as well?

We say that we are raising awareness: Simplistic narratives such as the one currently being promulgated by Invisible Children do more harm than good and must be “taken down”. Fair enough.

And maybe yet another blog pointing this out will have some positive effects.  

 But isn’t this the exact same argument that Invisible Children is making to justify the Kony 2012 campaign?

That “raising awareness” is an inherent good; that there is no need to engage in a substantive exploration of the issues? It’s not as though, after writing this, I am going to devote the years of study and personal commitment necessary to understanding the conflict in Northern Uganda, or to fostering positive change in the region. This is true of many of the bloggers who have weighed in this week. Instead of informing ourselves, or taking a good hard look in the mirror, we will sit back in smug satisfaction at our superior understanding of how Western engagement in Africa should be “properly” conducted. And in this sense, we are little better than Jason Russell.

I should say that I’m all for clarity and factual accuracy, and I’m not speaking here of the many bloggers who have sought to provide a more complicated, nuanced picture of the situation in Northern Uganda. (My friend Letha Victor, who did her Master’s fieldwork in the region, wrote a post that is an excellent example of this type of intervention.)

Certainly, I am also not impugning the many Ugandans and other Africans who have added a much needed diversity of voices to the conversation. Rather, I am speaking here of the simplistic, outraged criticisms or Russell and Invisible Children that seem to be spreading like wildfire across the Internet. I include myself here: There was a real risk that this post would indulge in exactly this type of narrative.

So what is a “well-meaning Westerner” to do?

Should we simply avoid comment or engagement altogether, other than in the few regions and on the few topics where we possess detailed and comprehensive knowledge? (I don’t think so.)

Should we stop criticizing Invisible Children and get on board the ‘Kony 2012’ train, understanding that in spite of its flaws it is raising awareness of an important issue? (Not likely.)

Should we use whatever structural privilege we may have to advocate for more local voices in decision-making and advocacy? (Definitely, but it can’t stop there.)

It seems there is no easy solution. Try as I might, I can’t shake my discomfort and arrive at a place where I feel that I am fostering “positive change” in an unproblematic way.

I am a white man teaching a seminar in African Studies at a major Canadian university. My position is inherently problematic, and I make peace with it by focusing the class on the exact types of criticisms of Western representations of Africa that we have seen flying around the blogosphere in response to Kony 2012.

My students sometimes complain about the critical tone of the class: “Nick, we understand that it’s important to be reflexive about engaging in Africa, but it seems from the articles we read that there is no way to engage that is not problematic. That no matter how respectful, understanding, etc. we try to be, no matter how conscious we are of structural inequalities, someone will always turn around and criticize us.”

My answer is this: We privileged Westerners need to stop striving to get to a point where we are comfortable in our positions. Discomfort is good. We should be uncomfortable. The world is unequal and unfair, and people like us are the beneficiaries of that inequality. So we must embrace our discomfort, and do our best to push things in a positive direction, understanding that, yes, we are opening ourselves to criticism. We must be receptive to criticism, learn from it, use it to do better. 

At the end of the day I have the same problem with the Kony 2012 video as I do with much of the criticism surrounding it: Everyone just seems way too self-satisfied.  Both the video and the critiques play on people’s guilt and then provide them with an easy means to alleviate it. Join the anti-Kony bandwagon or the anti-anti-Kony bandwagon, either way you can be morally reassured.

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