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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#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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Re-mapping Africa

Posted on February 16th, 2012

Would it surprise you to learn that Africa contains over 20 percent of the world’s land mass? Or that you could fit the United States, China, India, Japan, and most of Europe within Africa’s footprint with room to spare? Or that the (supposedly) tiny island of Madagascar, off Africa’s east coast, is roughly the same size as the United Kingdom?

These surprising facts are illustrated by Kai Krause’s 2010 map “The True Size of Africa,” a link to which recently came across my Twitter feed.

Cartography is one of the most fundamental ways in which our knowledge of the world is structured. Tell someone to picture “Africa” and nine times out of ten, the first image that leaps to mind will be the outline of the continent on a standard world map.

Yet despite the underlying role of maps in our understandings of global geography, we don’t often think critically about how they distort and simplify the world as it actually exists, or about the political ramifications of these distortions.

The size, shape and content of the standard map of Africa have certainly evolved over the years. Of sixteenth century European maps of Africa, the Irish poet Jonathan Swift wrote: “Geographers in Afric-‘Maps / With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps, / And o’er inhabitable Downs / Place Elephants for want of Towns.”

As European explorers circumnavigated the continent and began to set up outposts, the map of the African coastline became clearer, though, even into the colonial era, much of the interior of the continent was often represented as empty space.

Currently, world maps using the Mercator projection are most commonly used in classrooms, textbooks, etc. This projection, however (as was pointed out in an episode of one of my all-time favorite television shows, The West Wing) greatly alters the relative size of countries and continents, making those closest to the poles (including Canada) appear disproportionately large, while shrinking the areas nearest the equator.

This has important political ramifications: the perceived power and importance of Africa, and individual African countries, is diminished by maps that understate the extent of their territories. For instance, would you be less likely to think of the Democratic Republic of Congo as a marginal player on the world stage if you were to learn that it is the 11^th largest country in the world?

There have been a number of attempts over the years to propose different world maps, which rectify some of the distortions inherent in the Mercator projection. The Peters projection map is the most commonly-used of these alternative models. Indeed, The Economist recently proposed a modified version of Krause’s “True Size of Africa” map, using the Peters model.

My favorite alternative world map, however, is Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion map. Fuller projected an image of the globe onto a polyhedron, which could then be cut apart, flattened, and re-folded in a host of different ways. Fuller viewed this as a fundamentally democratizing project, challenging pre-conceived notions of size, as well as north/south and up/down, thus disorienting the user and causing her to think about the world in a fundamentally new way.

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Faces of Africa: come see the lionman… er, lions and men

Posted on January 18th, 2012

Sometimes I have to do a bit of thinking to decide on a topic for this blog. And then there are times like last Thursday.

I had stopped at the McGill campus Travel Cuts to see about a package deal on train tickets. (Ironically, I was on the way back to my office after teaching a seminar on popular images of Africa in the West.) As the woman behind the counter tried to find information about the promotion, I scanned a rack of travel guides.

I found a section of brochures devoted to Africa. The covers of the first two depicted typical scenes of Western tourism in Africa—a young girl in “traditional”, “tribal” dress (it is impossible, without previous local knowledge, to tell which community she belongs to as the picture is uncaptioned) looking off into the distance; a white man holding an expensive camera peering out at the savannah from an SUV. These images are problematic enough, but it was the third brochure on the rack that really caught my attention.

The cover of this brochure, produced by Acacia Adventure Holidays (and shown in the image above), features the face of a lion and the face of an anonymous African man merging into one another. Half lion, half human. The title below the picture reads, “FACES OF AFRICA: Strong & Proud.”

It should (hopefully) be apparent that this image is incredibly problematic. The image recalls one of the most offensive tropes of colonial- and pre-colonial-era representations of non-Europeans: The Other as a beast or animal. The fact that this African man is implicitly equated with a “strong, proud” animal such as the lion (and not, say, with a monkey) does not mitigate the fact that this purported equivalency is profoundly dehumanizing.

Unfortunately, this brochure is only an extreme example of a prevalent tendency in Western promotions of tourism to Africa: Africans—specifically rural, “traditional” Africans (urban, “modern” Africans are almost never depicted in such writing)—are just another aspect of Africa to be “seen.” Get in your SUV, drive to the watering hole, see some elephants, drive to a village, see some Africans, drive through the savannah, see some baobab trees.

It is unfortunate that such images of Africans are still being used in 2012. (Indeed, when I first picked up the brochure, I triple checked the date. I was sure that it must be a dusty relic from some previous, less political aware decade.) It is all the more unfortunate that there are, presumably, people out there who find this kind of thing intriguing, rather than horrifying; otherwise why would Acacia use it in their promotional materials?

I’m not against tourism to Africa. Indeed, I believe that meeting people from different places and cultures is one of the key ways to break down stereotypes and misunderstandings. (Furthermore, revenue from tourism is incredibly important to many African economies.) But this can only occur if travel is undertaken with an open mind and a spirit of generosity. When Africans become just another thing to check off your list of photographs, along with the “Big 5” safari animals and the Nelson Mandela museum, tourism become destructive; it builds walls rather than creating connections.

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Festival Nomade in Montreal

Posted on December 15th, 2011

I recently had the opportunity to attend several events as part of the 2011 Festival Nomade, a celebration of nomadic lifestyles and cultures held annually in Montreal.

The Festival is the brainchild of Mohamed Ould Atigh, a Montreal restaurant owner and entrepreneur who hails originally from Mauritania. (Atigh also puts together a yearly Festival Nomade in Ividjaren, in his native country.) This year’s event, which ran from December 6 – 11, featured art, performances, and food from nomadic communities around the world, including several from Africa.

As part of the Festival, Atigh and the other organizers also collaborated with students from the McGill Anthropology department to put on a public screening of the documentary film Milking the Rhino — which explores land rights and conservation in a Maasai community in Kenya and a Himba community in Namibia — as well as a panel discussion concerning challenges facing African pastoral communities. (These students included me, though others did far more work organizing the events than I did.)

The highlight of my experience at the Festival Nomade was the Saturday night “Nomad Music Night,” which featured a communal dinner at the “Nomad Nation” artists’ space in Mile End, followed by an impressive series of performances, including by the Senegalese drummer Ahmadou Ngom.

Not all of the participants in the Music Night were members of nomadic cultures. Some played music inspired by these cultures. Others simply identified as people who, as the Festival Nomade website states, “believe that home is not always found in a physical place.” Indeed, a major goal of the festival is to share a nomadic ethos with the broader community; to preach a spirit of minimalism and community. Not only does the festival raise awareness of endangered nomadic cultures, it also aims to inspire change in the West so that these cultures might survive long into the future.

(Click here to watch a short documentary about the Festival.)

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The Book of Mormon: A Sensitive and Complex Portrayal of African Realities

Posted on November 23rd, 2011

 

 

 

AP Photo/Boneau/Bryan-Brown, Joan Marcus

 

 

 

The Book of Mormon, the hit musical about missionaries in Uganda, features jokes about warlords, rape, HIV, and female circumcision. It may also be one of the most humanistic, complex, and respectful portrayals of Africa and Africans in Western popular culture in years.

I recently had the opportunity to see The Book of Mormon on Broadway. While, going in, I was vaguely aware that part of the story was set in Africa, I was unprepared for the central role that Africans would play. Read more…

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African indigenous values-based management

Posted on November 8th, 2011

For decades, African indigenous peoples have created community-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for the purposes of preserving traditional culture, safeguarding the natural environment, and promoting development.

These organizations often must adopt “Western” management structures and financial accountability measures as a pre-condition for outside funding and support. Western conventions, however, are often foreign to indigenous community members. Indigenous NGOs are thus placed in an awkward position: In order to garner outside support they must adopt outside values and practices, but in order to maintain support within the communities where they work, they must at the same time practice traditional management styles and techniques. Read more…

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Conversations with the Earth: African Indigenous Voices on Climate Change

Posted on October 13th, 2011

Conversations with the Earth  is an exciting and groundbreaking video project, featuring works about climate change authored by indigenous communities from around the world.

I recently had the opportunity to attend a screening of videos from Conversations with the Earth at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. This exhibition included short films from Gamo communities in Ethiopia, Maasai communities in Kenya, and Baka communities in Cameroon. Gamo and Maasai filmmakers also attended the exhibition and addressed the audience (regrettably, the Baka filmmakers were unable to obtain visas to travel to the United States.) Read more…

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Burning Man in Africa: A Response

Posted on September 26th, 2011

I received the following response to my recent post regarding AfrikaBurn from Adriaan Wessels, a member of the AfrikaBurn community. While I don’t agree with all of his points, Adriaan’s response is both thoughtful and thought-provoking, and so I am sharing it here with his permission.

Hi Nicholas,

Thanks for an interesting article. The issues that you have raised are being actively debated in the AfrikaBurn community. Part of the implicit purpose of the event is to do exactly what you suggest – to help people reflect on their communities and to share with others.

Giving people a safe environment in which to do all of this assists with the process. Fun is being used as the vector for the philosophy. Read more…

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Burning Man in Africa

Posted on September 13th, 2011

 While listening to a radio interview about the recently concluded Burning Man festival, I was surprised to learn that there is now an annual Burning Man event in Africa. For the uninitiated, Burning Man is a weeklong gathering held in the Nevada desert featuring musical acts and art installations. It bills itself as an experiment in temporary community. No commerce is permitted on site; participants are expected to bring everything needed to survive a week in the desert. (See the 10 foundational principles of Burning Man here.) The event is also known for a freewheeling, permissive attitude towards alcohol, sex, and drugs. AfrikaBurn, which has been held each year since 2007, brings the Burning Man ethos to the South African desert near Tankwa Karoo National Park.

 

I’ve always been intrigued by Burning Man. While its hippie-inspired mission statement can read as a bit self-indulgent and self-righteous, the idea of a community centered on reciprocity, art, and hedonistic pleasure has its appeal. But I immediately found the idea of an African Burning Man objectionable. And I began to wonder why.

Well, for starters there is something disconcerting about a group of people voluntarily living in tents in the middle of a desert with limited food and water on a continent where so many do so out of necessity. This contrast is only exacerbated by the fact that those who attend AfrikaBurn are relatively privileged. While there may be no commerce on site, one does need to purchase supplies, have access to a 4×4, and be able to take a week off work. Not to mention the price of admission itself, which can run up to 650 Rand ($88 CDN). Then there is the fact that, if one is to judge from photos and videos of the event, AfrikaBurn participants are predominantly white in a country where Caucasians comprise only 10% of the population. There are other unsettling factors too: The giant wooden sculpture that is burned at the conclusion of the festival is named the “San Clan” and is designed to look like the traditional rock art of the San peoples, original residents of the Northern Cape who have experienced forced displacement and human rights abuses at the hands of the South African government. Read more…

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