Remember Joseph Kony?

We may have forgotten Kony but a new novel by Otoniya J. Okot Bitek urges against forgetting the victims and survivors who bore the brunt of his cruelties in northern Uganda.

Exactly 13 years ago, a 30-minute documentary about Joseph Kony, notorious warlord from Uganda, was released by an American NGO called Invisible Children. Called Kony 2012, it caused a global ruckus because of the sleazy way in which it represented Africa and promoted white, colonial and saviorist sentiments. The documentary hoped to place a target on Kony’s head by urging heavy involvement from the US government and have him arrested; in particular, for abducting children and forcing them to become child soldiers. Without doubt, Kony is as evil as they come and the Lord’s Resistance Army that he created and manned for years has committed unspeakable war crimes and atrocities since the nineties. He’s been a wanted man for several years and was last known to be in hiding in Darfur. But the controversy that raged over Kony 2012 and the hashtag #Kony2012 unearthed an entirely different problem; namely, the place of Africa in the Western imagination. It exposed war-mongering power players like the US, the limited capacities of international legal organizations, and hawkish, political nature of NGOs under the guise of charity and humanitarianism.

The short documentary by Jason Russell was supplemented with an awareness campaign endorsed by list of glamorous celebrities as well US government officials and policy-makers. 2012 was a time when social and digital media had begun to proliferate our daily lives as the uprisings in Egypt and other parts of Northern Africa and Middle East had shown the power of social media for organizing, mobilizing and raising awareness about a gamut of issues. The world had indeed been brought closer, and for better or for worse, we all knew more. We had also started “doing” more to spread information, and caught up in newfound fervor of do-gooder-ism and outrage, we were not quite as alert just yet about the pitfalls of social media. #Kony2012 and the brouhaha about Kony the man and the LRA’s atrocities landed right in the middle of this grand digital moment.

The documentary itself was insidious. Outright racist in its colonial gaze towards Africa and Africans, it also espoused “innocent,” unabashed and unquestioning white saviorism to save those “uncivilized” Africans. Saving the Africans, according the Russell and his organization Invisible Children, was simply a matter of clicking-it-forward until the US government brought about a swift military intervention to catch Kony and slay the LRA.

The documentary, the campaign and Russell himself came under the scrutiny of ferocious debates; the opposite of what any activism should actually do. On one side were the well-intentioned Westerners whose liberal patriotism meant that they had full faith in their government’s abilities to intervene in another country and make military campaigns a form of humanitarianism. These bleeding heart liberals refused to engage with the contemporary history of East and Central Africa that had been ravaged by a set of conflicts and heartbreaking mass displacements for decades, all of which were a direct result of European colonialism followed by Cold War era proxy wars. And if they learned of such histories, it was easy to sweep them under the rug and focus on the endemic nature of Africans as violent, underdeveloped people who were unable to govern themselves. More importantly, the US was already involved and already on the ground, a fact conveniently forgotten in this zealous mobilization. Barack Obama had signed into law a legislation to stop Kony and disarm his army in 2010, and had deployed combat-equipped US troops in 2011.

On the other side were the furious Africans themselves; writers, scholars, and social media personalities who offered incisive analyses and provided an education in colonial history and in the pernicious effects of a system of humanitarianism and aid. Writer Teju Cole coined the term “The White Savior Industrial Complex” which led to more critical thinking about what it really meant to “help” Africa and who actually profits from these campaigns.

I’m proud to say that we too joined the critical side in this debate through an article that was published in my then newly founded magazine Warscapes. Advisory board member and writer Dinaw Mengestu wrote: “What makes Kony 2012 especially frustrating, however, is that the film traffics in a sentimental and infantilizing version of Africa that is so prevalent we don’t even notice it. The idea behind a name such as “Invisible Children” is on par with the sentiments of the first colonists who claimed to have discovered the New World and Africa: We didn’t know about it, therefore it didn’t exist. The children of Uganda were never invisible to their families and communities, who long before the first flood of NGO’s to the region, worked for years to protect them. To claim they were invisible because a group of college students traveling through Uganda happened to stumble upon a war they were too ignorant to have known of before going to the region is, to put it mildly, patronizing.” Mengestu rightly pointed out that the documentary ushered us into an age of awareness for the sake of awareness, and an awareness entirely dependent upon celebrities. He wrote: “Change has never come with a click, or a tweet; lives are not saved by bracelets. We all want solutions, but why should we think or expect an easy one exists for a twenty-year-old conflict in Uganda when we have none for the wars we’re engaged in now.”

These debates were intellectually productive on many levels and brought about a suspicion of clicktivism and hashtag activism that continues to this day. But what about Joseph Kony? As with all trending news, #Kony2012 soon died out in the Western imagination. Kony and the LRA continued their hellish reign until his army shrunk down and he gradually went into hiding from 2018 onwards. They left behind a trail of blood and trauma. The numbers are staggering: over 100,000 dead, over 60,000 children turned into child soldiers, and countless women turned into sex slaves and raped and abused for years on end.

It is surprising that there has been very little literary production on this topic. Perhaps it is all too recent. There are some journalistic accounts and some semi-academic works of research. In fact, Mengestu’s 2014 novel All Our Names does have a Kony-like character but this is up for interpretation, and there are some child soldier memoirs and even a graphic novel that have shown up.

Overall, the materials are scant and this is why Otoniya J. Okot Bitek’s novel We, The Kindling is such a momentous event. I came across Okot Bitek in my capacity as editor for Warscapes when she submitted a nuanced, personal essay about Kony from the perspective of her identity as an Acholi woman that hails from Gulu in Uganda, Kony’s very area of operations. Written some months after the Kony fuss had died down, Okot Bitek’s voice and argument was especially important. She wrote that “the pervasive effect of Invisible Children’s “headlines” has become an oppressive silencing, by insisting that Joseph Kony and the LRA be the most important and only issue, synonymous with northern Uganda.” Her essay deepens and lengthens the story of Kony and of the region, looks afresh at what he and the LRA have been doing, and at the ways in which resistance, negotiations and peace talks have always existed.

Since then, Okot Bitek has been publishing brilliant volumes of poetry and the themes of war, women, trauma and memory are ever present in her work. But since even the most skilled readers remain afraid of poetry, I welcome Okot Bitek’s foray into the world of fiction. We, The Kindling is absolutely unique because it has chosen to unearth the forgotten wounds that Kony inflicted on the people of northern Uganda told through the perspectives of 3 childhood friends who survived the LRA’s onslaught and captivity. Today, Miriam, Helen and Maggie’s lives seem to have normalized but underneath the quotidian calm lies a deep trauma that surges up now and again. Forgetting is denied to these women, and Okot Bitek delivers a moving story of trauma and tragedy. Poetic to a fault, the novel weaves folk songs, myths and local stories in a sparse and minimal style. At its heart however, this is the story of a country and its women who have suffered unbearable pain, and it is told with unwavering love and care.

I hope you will join me and Okot Bitek for a book club conversation about this book on March 29th. There is so much to talk about.

At the start of this newsletter, I asked if you remembered Joseph Kony. Honestly, I hope he is a faint echo in your mind but let us work to collectively remember the victims and survivors who bore the brunt his cruelties.

Love and solidarity,
Bhakti Shringarpure