Ironically these saviors had declared war on a man who is the end product of previous generations of white saviors’ interventions in Africa. It was the white missionaries who brought the Christianity to Africa that Joseph Kony credited with inspiring him. He even named one of his children George Bush.
While Invisible Children never led to the capture of Kony, it added support to further U.S. military engagement in Africa—the kind of collateral damage saviors often bring. They organized thousands of young people to lobby Congress for more U.S. military engagement—seventeen hundred visited congressional offices in one day, and the next day a bill calling for more U.S. “involvement” in the region had over one hundred sponsors.13
Obama appointee Samantha Power’s first public address after she became U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was to the Fourth Estate Leadership Summit, an event organized by Invisible Children. Writer Vijay Prashad described Power’s military interventionist foreign policy as “KONY-ism,” adding that “Power praised the group for its ‘new kind of activism’ whose ‘army of civilian activists’ had pushed the Obama administration to tougher action against Joseph Kony, the head of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), and whose example had helped Kenyans and Russians and most of all Arabs, who ‘barely knew democracy as recently as three years ago,’ to use the Internet to hold governments accountable.”14
Under the strain of international attention, Invisible Children burned out in spectacular fashion. Ten days after KONY 2012 launched, cofounder Jason Russell had a public mental breakdown, ranting naked on the street corner outside his San Diego home, yelling at cars. “My mind couldn’t stop thinking about the future,” he said later. “I literally thought I was responsible for the future of humanity.”15
In 2014 the organization began the process of shutting down. “Even though we’re announcing this before the capture of Joseph Kony,” said CEO Ben Keesey, “the Invisible Children story is one of gigantic progress and huge impact in people’s lives.”16
Their defenders say that Invisible Children and Save Darfur led to more engagement with the problems of the world. But these campaigns do not lend themselves to long-term engagement precisely because, by their nature, they are all about the quick fix. The campaigns encourage emotional reactions instead of critical thinking, and band-aids instead of lasting solutions to systemic problems. They also reinforce old stereotypes about western superiority and about Africa’s need for external salvation, by calling for white rescuers.
Western colonial engagement with Africa, even with the best of intentions, rarely ends well. Western Christians in Uganda, perhaps inspired by Invisible Children, have also successfully lobbied for some of the world’s most homophobic laws, such as the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2014, which called for the death penalty for gays and lesbians.
This is not an issue unique to Invisible Children—you can see it in the fund-raising and membership campaigns of most nonprofits. You are asked to donate and perhaps to sign something but nothing more. However noble and uncomplicated it may seem to offer help to those in need, the kind of help, and how it is delivered, matters. As Harvard law professor David Kennedy has said, “Humanitarianism tempts us to hubris, to an idolatry about our intentions and routines, to the conviction that we know more than we do about what justice can be.”17
How many people who joined Save Darfur or Invisible Children were left with the idea that all they needed to do was sign a petition or forward a video? How many were later left with the idea that change is impossible, noting that despite the mass involvement, atrocities are still committed in Darfur, and Joseph Kony is still free?
The “white people know best” activism of KONY 2012 can also be seen in the voluntourism industry, a range of businesses that have sprung up to help make the privileged feel useful by rebranding vacations as generosity. “On the Indonesian island of Bali, for example, a burgeoning orphanage industry exists to cater to voluntourists who want to help children,” writes Rafia Zakaria.
Children leave home and move to an orphanage because tourists, who visit the island a couple of times a year, are willing to pay for their education.
These children essentially work as orphans because their parents cannot afford to send them to school. Instead of helping parents cater to the needs of their children, the tourist demand for orphans to sponsor creates an industry that works to make children available for foreigners who wish to help. When the external help dries up, these pretend orphans are forced to beg on the streets for food and money in order to attract orphan tourism.18
The staff of voluntourism companies are either cynically aware of these issues from the beginning, or they soon become aware. “To be honest, I have never really felt like I truly helped anyone,” writes Alexia Nestora, a former employee of the voluntourism company I-to-I, who blogs as Voluntourism Gal.19 In almost every case, it would be better to stay at home and send money instead.
The individualist responses of voluntourists or Invisible Children make for easy targets. However, the same issues come up in the larger, more professional organizations like the Red Cross. The relief industry is filled with people, however well meaning, who are seeking easy solutions to systemic problems.
As Tracy Kidder wrote after the 2010 earthquake devastated Haiti, “At least 10,000 private organizations perform supposedly humanitarian missions in Haiti, yet it remains one of the world’s poorest countries.”20 And in the midst of this poverty, the aid workers always seem to live in the most comfort. One could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that the more aid groups are active in a country, the worse things become. At the very least, they do not seem to work with the aim of realizing a world in which they are no longer necessary.
Haiti today is the perfect illustration of the twin legacies of colonialism and neoliberalism. The Nation magazine described it as “the NGO Republic of Haiti,” a country where nongovernmental organizations have far more wealth and power than the government.
Ever since the Haitian people freed themselves from slavery and French rule in 1791–1804, they have faced economic exploitation from colonial powers. In 1825 French King Charles X demanded that Haiti pay an “independence debt” equal to ten times the country’s GDP, a debt they spent over one hundred years repaying. This was followed by U.S. support for brutal dictatorships in the twentieth century, International Monetary Fund and World Bank loans that demanded neoliberal restructuring of the economy, and “gifts” from funds like the Clinton Foundation, which encouraged more sweatshops.
Hillary Clinton’s State Department worked hard to overturn a 2009 law passed by the Haitian Parliament that raised the minimum wage to sixty-two cents per hour. According to State Department documents released by Wikileaks, Clinton’s State Department worked with USAID and private corporations like Levis and Hanes to cut that wage in half for garment workers.21 Both Bill Clinton (representing the Clinton Foundation) and Hillary Clinton (still at the State Department) later pushed for an industrial park in which most workers took home less than two dollars a day.22
The 2010 Haiti earthquake could have been an opportunity for wealthy nations to right historical wrongs. Instead it was a chance for further profit and exploitation by business and aid groups. “Between 2005 and 2009, aid in Haiti ranged from approximately 113 to 130 percent of the total revenue available to the government,” wrote Kathie Klarreich and Linda Polman. “After the earthquake, the flow of relief and recovery aid significantly exceeded—by more than a factor of four—the government’s internal revenue.”
“Our priorities are not the same as theirs, but theirs are executed. In theory, NGOs come with something, but not with what the population needs,” Joseph Philippe, a Haitian government worker told the Nation. “We have no choice but to accept what they bring us. But then, when it doesn’t work and it’s not what we need, the state is blamed, not the NGOs.”23
The representative of one of the largest UN organizations in Haiti was asked by Nation reporters whether the local government of Haiti has ever told them what to spend donor money on. He replied anonymously, “Never. They are not in the position, because they are financially dependent. Recently, there was a government