Ten years on from Kony 2012, the west still sees Africa as a problem to be fixed

theguardian.com:

Some 10 years ago, the world was momentarily transfixed by a 30-minute film soundtracked by a heady mix of Nine Inch Nails and EDM, featuring shots of Adolf Hitler, crying children, and bodies lying in the road. It was called Kony 2012 – and it was meant to save a country that had not asked to be saved.

The inspiration for the film had come a decade earlier, when an all-white group of US filmmakers had met a teenager called Jacob while travelling in northern Uganda. Jacob was on the run from a rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), headed by a man called Joseph Kony. Jacob told the filmmakers how he had been brutalised by Kony’s rebels, and they were understandably so moved that they set out to do something about it. They created the charity Invisible Children to highlight the plight of kids such as Jacob – whose suffering they considered invisible because Americans knew nothing about it.

You can almost forgive the filmmakers’ naivety about the African continent. A decade earlier, Tony Blair had declared the state of Africa to be a “scar on the conscience of the world”. Before that, in the 1980s, a whole genre of celebrity-fronted campaigns had emerged that saw famous faces sent to Africa to fix something. The most infamous was Bob Geldof’s Live Aid and the earlier Band Aid song Do They Know It’s Christmas?, which can still be heard in Britain every December. The song claimed that across the totality of Africa “the only water flowing / is the bitter sting of tears’’ and that “the greatest gift they’ll get this year is life”.

The Kony 2012 filmmakers had spent years trying to get the west to intervene in Uganda to capture Kony. They were failing in the task and urgently needed a new tactic. Kony 2012 was their