The Save Darfur Coalition was founded in 2004 to raise awareness of human rights abuses in the Darfur region of western Sudan and recruited heavily on college campuses. The actions or crimes of the Sudanese government are almost beside the point. As Columbia University professor and author Mahmood Mamdani points out, the focus on Darfur was used to obscure crimes committed by the United States, Israel, and U.S.-supported dictators in the region, even though these were the crimes citizens were paying for from their tax dollars. Unlike Bush administration atrocities, liberals could condemn Sudan without endangering the overall project of empire. In a debate at Columbia University, Mamdani was harshly critical of this project. “The facts that this movement gives out are completely decontextualized,” he says. “Go to a Save Darfur website. What you will find on this website is a documentation of atrocities. No history, no politics, nothing [that] tells you why there is violence. All you see is evidence of killing, raping, ethnic cleansing. I call it a pornography of violence.”
“It is meant for the good of the one who views it, not for the good of the one who is being viewed,” said Mamdani. “The focus is on naming and shaming. On punishment, on criminal justice. The demand is not reform, the demand is punishment, as if they are lusting for blood. It is, I believe, seamlessly a part of the War on Terror.”6
These campaigns disseminate a simplistic worldview that disassociates the causes from realities on the ground. Save Darfur tells us to look at this video, sign this petition, and your duty to the world is done. To Mamdani it is the opposite of intellectual engagement. “The peace movement of the 60s turned the world into a classroom; its signature activity was the teach-in,” says Mamdani. “Save Darfur has turned the world into an advertising medium.”
It relates to its constituency not as an educator, but as an advertiser. It has not created or even tried to create an informed movement but a feel good constituency. Its focus, you can see, is increasingly shifting from college students to high school kids. These are Save Darfur’s version of child soldiers. Its leaders are less educators, they are more celebrities from high-profile activities: showbiz and sports. They openly disdain education and debate.7
Mamdani says that Save Darfur represents the difference between feel-good charity and true civic engagement. It is a way to “help” others, without addressing your own problems. “Why were my students and my son’s classmates . . . being mobilized around Darfur and not around Iraq?” asks Mamdani.
And I realized that Iraq calls on Americans to respond as citizens. A student who thinks of Iraq realizes either he feels or she feels guilty, or he or she feel impotent, that there are limits to American power. When it comes to Darfur, these same students . . . do not relate to Darfuris as citizens but as victims. . . . I realized that Darfur is a charity, Iraq is a tax. In Darfur these same students can feel what they know they are not in Iraq: powerful saviors. In Darfur, the assumption is as throughout the world . . . that if they don’t make it right we must go and make it right. The assumption is that the problem is internal, the solution is external. The U.S. has to learn to live in the world, not to occupy it.8
At the time, Darfur was often used as a rhetorical weapon against the growing pro-Palestine student movement. “Why are you focusing on Israel?” went the refrain. “Why not focus on the Muslims committing genocide against Africans?” And while real solutions to war and displacement are complicated and involve challenging systemic issues like the legacy of colonialism, Save Darfur offered a comforting, simplistic solution that did not involve challenging the privilege of U.S. citizens. Not coincidentally, the coalition was sponsored by pro-Israeli organizations (the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and American Jewish World Service) at a time of increasing criticism of the Bush administration’s role in the Middle East and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The campaign provided a Muslim villain for easy condemnation—perfect for an audience that might be uncomfortable with the style of the Bush administration’s demonization of Islam but still accepting a basic distrust of Muslims.
In 2009 the Christian Science Monitor reported that “activist campaigns mischaracterized and sensationalized” casualty rates in Darfur. “What they tended to leave out was that the majority of the casualties occurred as a result of disease and malnutrition” rather than more directly from war. As a result of activist efforts like Save Darfur, hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. funding shifted from humanitarian aid (which would have been more useful for combating disease and malnutrition) to military “peacekeeping.” The newspaper concluded, “Had the Darfur activists not advocated for a reallocation of funds, more lives would probably have been saved.”9
Many from inside humanitarian institutions argue that even in the best cases their intervention is flawed. “The scenes of suffering that we tend to call humanitarian crises are almost always symptoms of political circumstances, and there’s no apolitical way of responding to them—no way to act without having a political effect,” writes journalist and author Philip Gourevitch. “Humanitarianism relieves the warring parties of many of the burdens (administrative and financial) of waging war, diminishing the demands of governing while fighting, cutting the cost of sustaining casualties, and supplying the food, medicine, and logistical support that keep armies going. At its worst—as the Red Cross demonstrated during the Second World War, when the organization offered its services at Nazi death camps, while maintaining absolute confidentiality about the atrocities it was privy to—impartiality in the face of atrocity can be indistinguishable from complicity.10
In 2003, the year before Save Darfur was founded, three young white Christian missionaries in their early twenties traveled from San Diego to Uganda in search of a documentary project. They were part of a Christian movement called the Emerging Church. Jason Russell, one of the founders, had first traveled to Africa in 2001, as a missionary in Kenya. After this trip his mission became to embody the gospel by “ending genocide.”
What the missionaries found inspired them to not only make a film but also start a charity that would distribute it, mostly to church groups. In 2006 they founded Invisible Children, a nonprofit aimed at raising awareness of war crimes in Uganda, through distributing their film of the same name.
After years of distributing Invisible Children, on March 5, 2012, they released a new video, KONY 2012. Across the United States thousands of people, many of them youth affiliated with church groups, tweeted the link to the video. Within five days the video had over one hundred million views. That hundred million would be a decent number for a new music video by Beyoncé or the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards, but for a half-hour slickly produced but ponderously paced and simplistic infomercial, it was a phenomenon, the most viral video ever at the time.
The goal was vague but simple: make Ugandan militia leader Joseph Kony famous, and then some nation’s military (that of the United States or perhaps an African nation) would respond to the publicity and make his capture a priority, and his reign of terror would come to an end.
In terms of digital outreach, it was a phenomenal success. But as Joshua Keating wrote at the time in Foreign Policy, in words that apply to most activist projects launched by saviors, “What are the consequences of unleashing so many exuberant activists armed with so few facts?”11
Criticism of the video came hard and fast, much of it from Ugandans and other Africans. “This is another video where I see an outsider trying to be a hero rescuing African children,” wrote Ugandan blogger Rosebell Kagumire. “We have seen these stories a lot in Ethiopia, celebrities coming in Somalia, you know, it does not end the problem.” She went on:
How do you tell the story of Africans? It’s much more important what the story is, actually, because if you are showing me as voiceless, as hopeless . . . you shouldn’t be telling my story if you don’t believe that I also have the power to change what is going on. And this video seems to say that the power lies in America, and it does not lie with my government, it