Kony 2012: Hype over substance

*The following blog post first appeared on sbs.com.au on the 9th of March 2012.  


I just got back from almost three months in Uganda. The trip was a mix of work and pleasure. After two and a half months travelling the country, I can safely say I still know next to nothing about Uganda. I don’t understand its complicated politics, I don’t know much about its economy or its tumultuous history, I am almost clueless about the intricacies of its tribes and languages, and regional etiquette escapes me.  

I filmed several news stories while I was there; one on women rebuilding their lives after the brutal conflict that had devastated the country’s north for two decades. Northern Uganda is now a relatively peaceful place. During the dry season the temperature hits 35 degrees every day. Between towns the region’s bumpy, red roads snake through arid grasslands, littered with women carrying babies whose tiny, fuzzy heads poke out from underneath the shawls and blankets their mothers use to strap them to their backs.  At night, the only way you can tell the land is inhabited is by the small fires flickering in the distance, illuminating the round mud brick huts so many families call home.      

I spent time in various parts of northern Uganda and never felt as though there was any threat to my personal safety. Why should there have been, the area is safe and aside from a stray comment here or a new NGO there, you would never know that only years ago it was the heartland of a very violent conflict. 

So imagine my surprise when I woke up yesterday morning to what seemed like everyone I have ever friended on Facebook posting about Joseph Kony– the self-styled leader of the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), the rebel group that had wreaked havoc on its own people for two decades. Not only had everybody suddenly realised that there had been a long and brutal conflict in northern Uganda but suddenly everyone seemed to care.

‘Make a difference’, ‘it’s time to matter. Make Kony famous’, proclaimed status updates and tweets from all over the world. People and rent-a-celebrities became technological activists taking part in a mass campaign to save the lives of children in a country they had probably never even heard of. Joseph Kony and the LRA had suddenly become all that rage. Strange, given that their atrocities in Uganda started more than twenty years ago and ceased in 2006.

We have certain ways of understanding countries and people who aren’t us. We like to package them into neat little boxes so we can better relate to them. There are those in Northern Uganda who know more about Joseph Kony than you or I or even Invisible Children, or the United Nations or the International Criminal Court or any NGO. They are the people of northern Uganda, people who apparently desperately need our help and our intervention – military or otherwise – to bring about justice.   

In Gulu - Kony heartland - I met a young girl named Coincy. She’s 20 years old. At 13, she was returning home from a neighbouring village with her cousin when she was abducted by LRA rebels. After a week in captivity carrying heavy loads of weapons and goods for the rebels around the Ugandan bushland, she was forced to strip naked. The rebels discovered she was already three months pregnant so to punish her they cut of parts of her lips, nose and ears and dumped her by the roadside.

I’m only telling you this story because when I spoke to this girl or rather when she spoke to a translator who spoke to me, I could only think of my sister, who is also 20. My sister has boy problems and fake nails. She’s just started a new university degree, she fights with my father over curfew, she works in a café, she’s saving up for a trip to Europe and the Middle East later this year. That’s what we know being 20 to be all about. It’s not about being abducted by LRA rebels. It’s not about having part of your face sliced off because you were already pregnant by 13.

I know – or at least I thought I knew – about the alternate lives that some people in this world lead. Surely, it doesn’t take much know about and understand the situations of those less fortunate than ourselves, to understand their reality especially given that we’re so saturated with information in this digital age. But it does! It takes a lot. It takes more than three weeks in an area or two months in a country and it sure as hell takes more than a click on a website.   

I didn’t understand Coincy or her reality, I still don’t. The most I understood was part of the story she chose to tell me and the most I could relay on television was 30 seconds of that. It’s the nature of the beast that is TV news. Now there’s another beast that’s already made its way from the horizon to the foreshore of news consumption. It’s 140 characters long and can spread like a disease around the world in a matter of seconds, infecting the unsuspecting with a potentially false message. 

Of the millions who have seen and liked and shared the Kony 2012 campaign video, I’m going to wager a guess that a significant proportion know almost nothing about Africa, about Uganda, about Gulu, about the Acholi, and my feeling is that after watching it they still don’t know because apart from Jacob there were no other Acholi voices in the story. There was nothing from the people at the heart of this conflict. 

One of my friends who posted the video as a Facebook status update told me it was good thing because it drew our attention to what was going on in Uganda. But that’s the whole point: it did anything but! It drew attention precisely to what was going on outside of Uganda, namely in the offices of high ranking officials in the United States.

It’s based on the assumption that Kony was is not ‘famous’ enough, which is absurd because he’s one of the most sought after criminals in the world and has been for years. Just because you may not have heard of him it doesn’t make him any less notorious, it doesn’t lessen his crimes. Ask anyone in East Africa who Joseph Kony is and they’ll tell you, but this campaign is clearly not about the people of East Africa, it’s about us in the west and its about Invisible Children, whose team managed to achieve unprecedented success with their campaign going viral in days. It’s about their efforts, about the creator explaining it to his young son, about the team’s advocacy and the response they got or hoped to get. It’s about the university students, the mothers, the teenagers, the business people, the store owners, the public servants, the journalists, the pensioners around the world who get to take one minute out of their day to get outraged, share a link and sleep better at night for it. So we can feel like we mattered.  

This certainly doesn’t mean people shouldn’t watch the video, like it and share it and it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t feel passionate about making a difference. But before you like and share you need to question. Question the organisation and its motives and funding, question the timing and more importantly question what you now know about northern Uganda that you didn’t before watching the video.

Kony 2012 peddles a simplistic narrative, devoid of nuance. It offers no concrete plan other than to ‘stop Kony.’ It doesn’t explain what will happen if he is caught (nor the means why which he will be caught), whether the child-soldiers he recruited should be punished along with him or whether government troops, who were also responsible for countless atrocities, should too be brought to justice.

Its disempowering narrative takes agency away from so many of the people who are working on the ground to help rebuild northern Uganda and its communities; people who understand the complexities and politics behind this conflict because they lived it. This campaign fashions itself the lone wolf stopping at nothing to seek justice for the hapless people of northern Uganda yet it avoids complex questions such as, ‘what if they don’t want justice?’ This may sound absurd but many northern Ugandan families have children who were abducted by the LRA and subsequently became the LRA. They want to see them return home and if that happens who is responsible for their reintegration? Not Invisible Children I suppose.    

The truth is Kony 2012 is not about the conflict in northern Uganda. Its a story of victims, villains and more importantly heroes - foreign, white people like us with power and money and influence, sitting before our keyboards, on our proverbial white horses striding into the country to save those whose voices and faces tell us they need saving, voices and faces that almost can’t say anything else because – like me with Coincy – we fail to understand them when they do. They no longer fall perfectly into that neat little ‘victim’ box we’ve spent so long fashioning for them.

Coincy, like any human being anywhere in the world is many things. She may be a victim but she’s also a fighter, a mother, a farmer, a woman, an Acholi and like much of the district she lives in she’s rebuilding and moving on from her shattered past. Gulu has grown considerably in the past five years and its residents live in a peace they haven’t seen since the mid 1980s, thanks in part to their efforts and resilience. 

Uganda is proud country and believe it or not, its people are not waiting for a saviour from abroad to rescue them from themselves and even if they were, that saviour is not you, with your Kony 2012 wristband, your win-a-prize T-shirt, your shiny Mac Book pro and your Twitter account.      

Penny Wong is responsible for the London riots!

Gay people and their children and their children's children riot in London

This post relates to an article that appeared on the Daily Telegraph website on the 14^th of August 2011. It was called the Problem with a Fatherless Society and was written by Miranda Devine.


Basically it linked homosexual marriages (and families) to the widespread violent riots that look place in London in 2011. The article was highly misleading, grossly ill informed and very, very offensive. It ruined what would have been an otherwise pleasant morning.

I should point out that I rarely buy fish but if I did I would use the Telegraph to wrap it with and I wouldn’t even buy said paper, I would find a discarded copy on a train somewhere, head to the fish market, buy fish and then wrap it with the discarded copy (probably the opinion section). Then I would throw the fish on the ground and stomp on it several times, pick it up and hit passers-by and fellow consumers of fish who look like they might enjoy reading the Telegraph on the back of the head. Then I would start a fire in a park and burn the fish whilst laughing hysterically!

Fortunately the internet prevents me from directly descending into lunacy so when someone posted this on Facebook I read it. Now, normally after reading a piece like this I would have hopped onto my balcony and yelled, “Miranda Devine is a [meow meow meow] who deliberately fails to engage in public debate on any meaningful level,” at the top of my lungs and then called it a day. But not today, no, today I chose to dedicate my morning to writing a long and complicated piece examining the false premises and callous misconceptions proliferated by the article. It took me all morning but by the early afternoon I had finished my masterpeice. 

Unfortunately it was a bit shit. But then the internet solved everything by thinking the exact same thing i was thinking. 


I'll let this guy tell you. 

And to think I used to trust you once SMH!

Last night I went to bed with the news that a bomb had ripped through a ministerial building in Oslo. This morning, in a bid to find out more, I did what most people would do; I Google-newsed!

The top seven searches (those first seen without scrolling down) were from WDAY, The Sydney Morning Herald, The National Post, USA Today, CNN, BBC and CBS. Being Australian, my instinct was to go for the SMH, but like any media consumer who would rather read a factual article without having poo smeared on their computer screen, I opted for BBC followed by CNN.

Now, I should note that 6 weeks ago I promised myself I would no longer look up two websites – dailymail.co.uk and smh.com.au - for reasons, which I believe to be obvious: Basically, they’re both rubbish. Unfortunately, last night at 1.30 am, in a bid to know more about Leann Rimes’s drastic weight loss I ended up surfing that beacon of celebrity gossip, The Daily Mail. Yes folks, I failed. Given this shameful relapse I thought it might be okay if – just this once – I read the article on SMH, you know, just for an Australian angle, something I’ve been lacking since living out of the country.

The article starts out (without being attributed to ANY author/source by the way) by talking about the Oslo blast, followed by the shooting of children at a camp, goes back to Oslo, back to the camp, then to Twitter, then to a comment from the Norwegian Prime Minister then to eyewitnesses, then this:

It was unclear who was behind the attacks, but there has been growing unease in Norway that the country had little protection against such assaults, while exposing itself to terrorism through its military operations abroad. There was speculation that yesterday's attacks could be linked to Norway's military involvement in Nato operations in Afghanistan, where it has 500 soldiers, or Libya, where Norwegian jet fighters are flying sorties.

Norwegian television reported that a previously unknown group called ''Helpers of the Global Jihad'' had posted a message online claiming the attacks were ''only the beginning'' of a response to the decision by Norwegian periodicals, like other Scandinavian media, to publish cartoons portraying the prophet Muhammad.

Last week a Norwegian prosecutor charged an Iraqi Kurdish cleric, Mullah Krekar, the founder of the Ansar al-Islam militant group, with making death threats against Norwegian politicians.

In July last year police arrested three Muslim immigrants from Iraq, Uzbekistan and China for allegedly plotting bomb attacks using peroxide explosives. The authorities said the suspects had links with al-Qaida and one of them visited the Pakistani tribal area of Waziristan, an al-Qaida stronghold.

Norway presented a softer target than other western capitals with experience of terrorism. Government buildings were not protected by bollards or anti-blast curtains. Observers predicted Norway's relaxed attitude to security would change, as in neighbouring Sweden, which was hit by a suicide blast against Christmas shoppers in Stockholm.

The bomber, Taimur Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, was an Iraqi-born Swede who studied in Britain.

I see, WELL WHAT THE F**K DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHING SMH? A few queries if I may….

1. Let me draw your attention to the first line of these heinous paragraphs “It was unclear who was behind the attacks.” Since this sentence is pretty cryptic, let me break it down for you. It means police have no clear suspects. This means that anyone could have done it. This is not an invitation for you to speculate as to who may have been responsible.

2. “Growing unease”? From who?

3. “Speculation”? From who?

4. “Could have been linked” See, when there are no clear suspects, the attack “could have been linked" to anyone and any organisation. Alas nay, there is only speculation about them crazy Muslims.

5. “Norwegian television reported” Which “television”, all of them? One of them? For how long? Was it an on-going story? Was it a feature or just a VO? These things all make a difference!!!!!!

6. “Last week a Norwegian prosecutor charged an Iraqi Kurdish cleric, Mullah Krekar, the founder of the Ansar al-Islam militant group, with making death threats against Norwegian politicians.” Uh-huh, well did you check to see if anyone else in the country was charged with making death threats against politicians? People do it all the time unfortunately or does it not matter since they’re probably not a big old crazy Muslim cleric? Where did he make the death threats? In front of whom? What did he say? Why did he make the threats? Against whom? Care to elaborate?

7. I’m sorry but I’m really confused about the relevance of the arrest of three Muslim immigrants ONE YEAR AGO in connection to NOTHING OF RELEVANCE. Why is this in the article? This is not okay!

8. I don’t know if you know this, but Sweden is not Norway, Christmas is not now. Why is this even mentioned?

Let’s cut the shit SMH, this is what your article is saying: Muslims are a bunch of crazies and they may just be at it again, but if they’re not, you might just want to remember all the other times that they were.

There is no clearer example of how Muslims are unfairly targeted by the media. In the coming days we may just discover who was behind the blast and the shooting and it may turn out to be an extremist Islamic group, but that does not give you the right to speculate widely when the facts speak otherwise. That’s lousy, fear mongering, bulls**t journalism.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to wipe the poo off my screen!

When Bangladesh gets it right, it gets it VERY right!

Sometimes, when my air conditioner stops working, I get very upset. Other times, if my cleaner hasn’t used the nice smelling soap that I like, I get very upset. If I come home feeling like carrots only to find that there are no carrots, I get very upset. If I sweat profusely in the Dhaka heat, it really upsets me. If I don’t have the right sized photo for my work pass, it can be very distressing. If I plan a surprise party and it drizzles, my blood pressure rises. These events have combined their powers to make me miserable in Dhaka for the last two months.

But today, something remarkable happened! Whilst reading about the trafficking of underage sex workers, I suddenly became very happy. As I flipped through my article, each page plunging further into the darkest crevices of human existence, it occurred to me what a right &*%** twat I’ve been. It occurred to me that during those many hours I spent complaining about nothing of significance, there may or may not have been a 12-year-old girl somewhere in Bangladesh forced to have sex with a man three times her age; a girl sold into slavery, living in the most horrendous conditions with no concept of her rights or her worth.

It’s always a profound and welcome moment when you realise, if only for a minute, just how lucky you really are. Make no mistake, Bangladesh is not an easy country to live in, but for all its harsh realities there is a hidden charm to every day life here. Here are some of the things Dhaka does right, very right.


1. Singaras (Pronounced shingaras)
Not to be confused with chingaras, especially in Mexico, these balls of soft thick dough are available at your nearest street-food vendor and are filled with a bunch of tasty vegetables. Status = delicious. One singara will set you back 6 taka, which is roughly AUD0.076 (DID YOU GET THAT? THAT’S NOT EVEN TEN CENTS) but if you eat too much, you’ll probably burn your face off. This means you can buy ten singaras for 60 taka, which is not even AUD$1. Ten shingars feed five people; make a salad and you’ve got yourself a 5-person meal for about six bucks.


2. Beauty parlours:
Yes, to the untrained eye, upon exiting the beauty parlour some Bangladeshi women might look like the drag queens we all know and love, but please, show some respect for the artists that are this country’s beauticians. They are amazing and they deserve an award for the nimble hands that continually transform me from a Saddam-Hussein-when-he-was-found-in-that-hole lookalike to a lady...ish. Sorry, did someone say eyebrow and upper lip waxing for AUD1? That’s madness, even Sue, my beloved beautician back home charges $15. And yes, some of us wax our upper lip. Don’t draw attention to it, it’ll be primary school all over again. Point is, these beauty parlours are everywhere and you NEVER have to wait because there are always 10 ladies standing about just waiting to tweeze, rub, blowdry, cut, file, massage, dress and paint you into beauty heaven.


3. Fairy lights:
I remember for my 21st birthday, I insisted on having fairy lights draped across our backyard, which seemed like a really good idea at the time except for the fact that I near strangled the cat trying to put them up and then half of them failed to work anyway.

See, this would not happen in Bangladesh, because all you have to do is make one phone call and some guy comes round and puts them up for you. So, you ask, that happens everywhere. Not like this it doesn’t; dead cheap, quick, easy, available on short notice and so, so pretty. You don’t even have to peel yourself off the couch; they just know what you want. I don’t know how they know, they just do. You don’t even have to show them where the power points are. THEY JUST KNOW! FYI, if you see a building draped in fairly lights, it means someone in there is getting or has gotten married. It probably means they’re doing it in there too. They’re probably doing it right now.


4. Tailoring: My dad called me last week and reminded me not to come home without some tailored pants for him. So I say, “but dad, I don’t even know your measurements,” so he says, “whateves” (he didn’t actually say that, he’s not familiar with anything Gen-Xey, not even his own daughter. Not that he’s a bad father. He’s a GREAT father. Probably the best father ever. Okay, quiet now.) So I think, you know what, what better place to have some tailoring experiments done than Bangladesh? There are tailors everywhere and the material is whatever you want it to be. Give a tailor a shirt you want copied and odds are you’ll get two of the exact same shirt back...for a 1/17th of the price you paid for it in Australia.


5. Hospitality:
One thing to keep in mind; if a Bangladeshi family invite you to dinner; go! You will find a sumptuous feast prepared in your honour. Yes, most of the food will probably burn your nose hairs but by God you will lick your plate clean because Grandma has probably been kicked off the table just so you and your guests have enough room to enjoy a home cooked Bengali banquet.


6. Kids:
Unfortunately children in Bangladesh are super cute, especially babies. This means they will trick you into doing things like holding them when you’re supposed to be taking part in a Habitat for Humanity build. They may also entice you to play cricket with them, take photos of them, engage in conversation with them and give them money (apparently they don’t accept bananas as a substitute for cash.) If you’ve just stepped in poo, an event highly likely to happen, the remedy might be to look up and find a group of street children holding rubbish bags and laughing at your misfortune.

Why does Chad always have to ruin everything?

Don’t get me wrong folks. I like International Women’s Day. Yes, it makes me feel like I belong to disadvantaged, partially-stunted section of society that needs a “special” day of recognition but that’s because I DO belong to a disadvantaged, partially-stunted section of society that needs a “special” day of recognition. (On a side note, I look forward to International Ethnic’s Day)

Yesterday, I posted something about pack-rape in the Congo as a Facebook status. This led some people to believe that I might be a hater, which is entirely true. I hate many things you guys. Pack rape in the Congo being just one of them.

In the last few weeks I’ve been reading parts of UNICEF’s State of the Word’s Children 2011 report. Basically, the children are in a not-very-good state (I use the term diplomatically). This leads me to believe that women are also in a not-very-good state. So when I read that 45 in every 1000 children will die within the first 28 days of life in Chad, I felt like I wanted to hate. Fortunately that feeling only lasted for a maximum of 3 minutes before it whittled away into apathy.

It was in those three minutes however, that I became privy to the fact that it was International Women’s Day and I wondered that while women in Australia and the United States and Western Europe and probably Canada were toasting their (relatively newfound) ability to run companies and/or initiate wanton sex in toilet cubicles; I wondered what the women in Chad were toasting.

Then it occurred to me that maybe the women in Chad – or at least the ones giving birth to stillborn babies on the dirt floors of their village huts – maybe they weren’t really included in the Women’s Day revelry. Because it would be weird, you know, to talk about female empowerment when you’re cradling your dead baby in your arms – who by the way – has died as a result of nothing more than a lack of BASIC nutrients and heathcare.

This leads me to ask what International Women’s Day is all about – nay – what being a woman is all about. And while, I’ve always thought it was about glass ceilings and the vote and equal pay and whether we’re slaves to the beauty industry (how 90’s of me) and maternity leave and whether we can have a successful career-slash-family, NOW I’m thinking that maybe it’s about getting access to some clean water so that, you know, our children don’t die from something that IS SO F**KING PREVENTABLE.

I know we love to talk about the vote and the career but that all seems so arbitrary if you’re going to end up bleeding to death on a dirt floor with a dead baby stuck inside you.

If you grow too much Bangladesh will judge you

This is Richard. He's a tall. His kind ain't welcome here.

If Village of the Damned taught us anything, it's that you can't trust children. Fact.

Hi kids. Pope here.

It’s come to my attention that some people are saying some pretty nasty things about the Catholic Church and I think I need to set the record straight.

For one, these vicious rumours about Catholic priests abusing children are just that; vicious rumours and to all rumours I say, I’ll believe that when I see it thanks.

Everyone always goes on and on about this “abuse” business but has anyone actually ever SEEN anything? No.

Sure, some people produce “videos” and “photographs” and “physical scars” but in the age of modern technology it’s so easy to tamper with all these things. I mean look. See that? I got that scar from my days in a Nazi youth group. Now, if I was a terrible person I would say that I got the scar from being jacked at age 5 by a violent priest after choir practice. But since I’m the Pope - aka a good dude - I would never say anything like that.

Basically kids, if you want to be a good dude too, you should never say anything like that either. Ever! No matter what happens. It’s like Fight Club. What’s the first rule of Fight Club again? Say it with me now....we don’t talk about Fight Club. Excellent kids, excellent.

Well, stay safe now. Except during sex. We don’t want to have to think about what would have happened if God had used a condom now would we? Exactly.

Love love,

Mr Pope.