As a white woman from Africa the KONY2012 social media campaign that hit the Internet on March 5th—besides creating a worldwide furor—awoke in me a sense of things having gone more awry than usual.
I wasn’t born in Africa; I was moved there with my parents in 1956—the year Que Sera Sera sung by Doris Day became the number two hit in the U.S. and number one in the UK. It was played on the ship from morning to night during our voyage from the U.S. to Amsterdam, and “Whatever Will Be Will Be” soaked its never-to-be-forgotten message into an extremely young marrow to weld with the DNA.
Except for a few small forays out of Africa, until 2006 Africa was my home—the only continent I can say I know intimately and love to this day with a passion that comes from spending years under a skewed white minority ruled regime, travelling and doing business in 24 countries on it, and understanding the culture and learning the lore of its many different peoples.
After reading the pros and cons of Invisible Children and studying their audited financial statements to form a picture of who and what they are, I started following the threads through various media. Reader forums were running amok with discussion of the issue at hand as well as various human rights atrocities in other countries—Libya, Syria, North Korea, Tibet, U.S., Belgium (genocide in Rwanda).
There’s a lot that can be said both for:
- creating awareness of how child soldiers are “recruited”
- spotlighting man’s inhumanity to man
- showing that there is another world outside our own living space
- moving others from their armchair indifference into a position to take action should they care to
- raising funds to both create awareness and channel to those in need
And there’s a lot that can be said against the method used by Invisible Children and the faulty perception they brought to the eye of the online world—all 76 million hits of them—that, among other things, Kony was still active in Uganda. He hasn’t been there since around 2006 and is either operating from southern Sudan or the DRC. Inhabitants of peaceful Gulu, Uganda, where this video was shot were themselves amazed—blissfully unaware they went to work in the morning and by the time they got home in the evening, they had become a “hit” on social media.
There was also a lot being said in the discussion forums about the harm that can be done when taking mindless action without knowing all the facts—something discussed in the article Rethinking Child Labour in this magazine—and about creating awareness simply for the sake of awareness—“then what?”
Creating awareness is a goal in itself—a preventative measure. We tell people that sticking their fingers in a wall socket could possibly kill them and may result in the house burning down and the whole neighbourhood could go up in flames. But does this stop them? For some it will; others will still do it just “to see.” That is their informed course of action, their informed choice and the resultant fall-out they will have to deal with.
We cannot constantly attempt to prevent them from doing whatever it is they choose to do. They’re aware of the dangers and also aware that sticking fingers in wall sockets is not “approved” behaviour. We then get out of their way and let them use the information as they see fit, empowering them.
In a political sense, this was done to South Africa during the apartheid years. The world voiced its disapproval of the minority-ruled government and imposed total sanctions against South Africa. Then it sat back and allowed the people to sort out their own problems. And it empowered them. South Africa had to become self-sufficient, build its own oil refineries, manufacture its own cars, aircraft, weapons, etc. Find ways to get around things and sort out its own problems without outside intervention. It wasn’t a pleasant process and it wasn’t easy, but it happened and, in the end, we had peace. But then, we were lucky, we had Nelson Mandela.
If anyone were to delve into the history of Africa in an attempt to discover what, where and why things went south (or north, east or west for that matter), only one perpetrator stands out like a sore thumb—white man. White man’s greed turned a continent of bounty and reasonable peace between neighbours into convoluted lines on a map that separated not only tribes, but also families and played havoc with an already perfect culture and environment.
Wikipedia’s page Scramble for Africa is a quick online scratch of the surface, and for those wishing to dig a bit deeper, The Scramble for Africa: The White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912 by Thomas Pakenham, published in 1990, is a comprehensive popular history of white man’s African “safari,” an excellent read and a good place to start the search for understanding.
One of the glaring misconceptions is that Africa cannot look after and protect itself and requires foreign intervention to solve its internal problems. Foreign intervention is what created the initial problem. Foreigners tore up a continent, ripped out its perfectly beating heart and surgically replaced it with a heart that’s out of rhythm with its beautiful body.
We took Africans to use as slaves, its lands for shipping supply posts, its gold, cobalt, uranium, oil, cotton, coffee, cocoa—all the things we didn’t have, probably because we didn’t deserve them in the first place. We took them, sometimes after only perfunctorily asking. And what did we give them in return?
Guns, dictators, land demarcations, rampant disease, skewed values, a destroyed environment, and displaced people and animals. We have the gall to talk about Africa as a dark continent, the people as being uneducated, helpless savages who need uplifting “to our level.” How can we even consider “our level” as “up” when looking across the globe and seeing what “up” has done to the world?
We took away reasonable peace and gave turmoil—and in a court of law, “reasonable doubt” is an instruction to leave things be—let things go.
Hopefully, the awareness created by the Kony2012 campaign has caused the world to pause and think. The first thought is always, “Something should be done.” However, the correct thought would be “Something should be done, but who should do it and, if it is us,what should we do?” And, before taking any action, how about gathering all the available information and then asking the people themselves—in this case the people of Uganda—do you need help? Do you want help and how best do you think we can help you? And, if the response is, “Leave us alone to solve our own problems,” then do so.
The words of the 1956 hit—“Que sera sera, whatever will be will be” resound. From the time white man first put his feet in Africa, we began messing around where we didn’t belong and were not invited with unpalatable results. Before we do so again, although there really isn’t anywhere left on this planet on which to practice restraint, think of “what will be”—it will.
