LONDON ELECTRIC

by GEOFFREY YORK

It was planned as a tour of Uganda’s poorest towns and villages: the first chance for Joseph Kony’s victims to see the viral video sensation that has excited so many millions of people in North America.

But after a furious reaction, the tour has been cancelled. Too many Ugandans were outraged by the “Stop Kony” video when they saw it. Some even threw stones and shouted abuse, forcing the organizers to flee.

The video by a California-based activist group had already been strongly criticized by many African writers and Western aid experts, who called it simplistic, patronizing and inaccurate. They are worried that the publicity will distract attention from more deserving African needs.

But the video, calling for the arrest of the indicted war criminal who leads the Lord’s Resistance Army militia, has been viewed by more than 100 million people worldwide since its release last week. And it has stirred up a huge amount of curiosity in northern Uganda, where the LRA was born in the late 1980s – even though the vast majority of people could not see the video because they lack electricity, television, and Internet access.

So a Ugandan group, the African Youth Initiative Network, decided to organize a community tour for the video, bringing it to towns across northern Uganda for the rest of this month, so that impoverished people could see the 30-minute video for the first time.

The first screening was held this week in the northern Uganda town of Lira, once an epicentre of the battles between the LRA and the Ugandan military. The video was projected onto a white sheet, held up by crude metal rods, in a dusty town park. An estimated 5,000 people flocked to the show.

Curiosity soon turned to bafflement, and then to anger. The screening was hastily abandoned when people jeered and threw stones, forcing the crowd to scatter.

Many Ugandans at the screening were upset that the video focused on the U.S. filmmaker, Jason Russell, and his young blond son. Some were offended by its call to “make Kony famous” by putting his image on T-shirts and posters, since they saw this as giving celebrity status to a killer. Some said the video was reviving their painful memories of a war that had ended in Uganda in 2006 when the LRA was chased out of the country.

“There was chaos, we had to run away,” tweeted Rosebell Kagumire, a Ugandan blogger who attended the screening this week.

Most people were peaceful, but many were disappointed and angry, she said. “They have had enough of money makers!”

After the screening, Ugandans called local radio stations in Lira to demand that no T-shirts of Joseph Kony should be allowed into the region.

Victor Ochen, director of the youth network that organized the screening of the Kony video this week, says he is worried that the video will waste money that could be better spent on helping the victims of the LRA.

“Why spent millions on Kony alone while thousands of survivors are dying of repairable physical and psychosocial pain?” he asked in a message on his website.

Mr. Ochen is worried that the video will promote a military assault on the LRA, perhaps leading to the death of innocent children who were kidnapped by the LRA – including his own brother and cousin.

“Raising potentially false expectations such as arresting Kony in 2012 will not rebuild the lives of the people in northern Uganda,” he said. “Restoration of communities devastated by Kony is a greater priority than catching or killing him.”

The Kony 2012 campaign treated its audience like children with short attention spans, and now that’s how many of them are behaving.

Almost exactly one week after viral video campaign Kony 2012 alerted millions of viewers to the horror of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, the start of what was supposed to be an international activism campaign to spur the U.S. military to arrest him, the world appears to have lost interest. According to Google data posted above, searches for Kony have dropped precipitously, as have his mentions in the news. Search volume looks to be dropping pretty rapidly back down toward zero, where it was throughout the now-over years of Kony’s worst atrocities. The chart looks almost identical for U.S.-only searches.

For the sake of comparison, here’s a chart that compares U.S. searches for (and, below that, news on) Kony, Oscars, NCAA, Obama, and Syria. The latter two barely register. The Oscars had a tellingly similar trajectory as Kony: an entertainment event that inspired frenzied but short-lived interest. The NCAA has just surpassed Kony in terms of the American Internet user’s interest.

Kony has also been dominating Twitter, frustrating human rights workers who wish the world could care this much about Syria, where approximately 100 civilians are being killed every day. Syria has been referenced 6.6 million times over the last three months, while Kony has been mentioned 11.5 million times in just one week. Foreign Policy’s David Kenner noted that Syria is very complicated whereas the Kony 2012 video made Central Africa sound very simple, but says he suspects the attention probably won’t make any real difference for Kony’s actual victims:

The bigger question is whether any of this Internet-based sturm und drang can be translated into real-world action. Minty found that, during the peak of global interest in the Kony video, only about 140 tweets came out of Uganda regarding the story, and that Ugandans wrote only about 2,000 comments on Facebook out of a pool of 5 million — a drop in the bucket compared to the deluge of comments coming from the United States and Europe.

Invisible Children, the NGO behind the campaign (and, always, the white faces in front of its many cameras), was probably never going to make much of a difference in the world with Kony 2012. The campaign was doomed for the exact same reasons for its success at generating viewers and media buzz. It reduced Central African violence to such simplicity that viewers didn’t have to bother themselves with learning more, and it told people that all they had to do to fix the problem was share the video on Facebook and maybe buy a wristband. 

“Americans’ heartlessness or apathy was never the biggest problem,” Kate Cronin-Furman and Amanda Taub wrote last week of the misguided campaign. Invisible Children managed to generate lots of short-term interest, which is nice in that it’s good for people to care about others, but has proven useless at actually improving anyone’s life in Central Africa. Maybe that’s because the video painted such a simplistic picture that legitimately engaged people don’t know enough, or they now have too much bad information, to do something on their own. Maybe it’s because Invisible Children treated the campaign more like a viral puppy video than an international human rights campaign, so that’s how everyone else is treating it. Human rights issues like Darfur might generate months of years of engagement, but Kony 2012 had one really good week, and now it’s over. That’s too bad, because Central African violence is the kind of issue that could benefit from a small but passionate and knowledgeable group of people, not from a 50 million-person mob with a 30-minute attention span.

In the end, Invisible Children got exactly what they asked for: retail revenue for themselves (the$30 “action kit” of stickers and bracelets sold out in hours, went on a months-long back-order, and are no longer available) and nothing for actual Africans. The group treated its audience like short-sighted, emotionally selfish children — the video’s narrative message is literally delivered to a small child who can barely bring himself to pay attention — and that’s how they behaved. 

Update, March 15: The Western world may have already burned through its enthusiasm for Invisible Children’s campaign, but many actual Africans are just now seeing it, and they don’t care for it. A planned screening tour of Uganda, Kony’s home country and the site of his worst atrocities, has been cancelled after Ugandans reacted with outrage to the film’s patronizing treatment of Africans and its glorification of white NGO workers.

The first screening was held this week in the northern Uganda town of Lira, once an epicentre of the battles between the LRA and the Ugandan military. The video was projected onto a white sheet, held up by crude metal rods, in a dusty town park. An estimated 5,000 people flocked to the show. 

Curiosity soon turned to bafflement, and then to anger. The screening was hastily abandoned when people jeered and threw stones, forcing the crowd to scatter. 

Many Ugandans at the screening were upset that the video focused on the U.S. filmmaker, Jason Russell, and his young blond son. Some were offended by its call to “make Kony famous” by putting his image on T-shirts and posters, since they saw this as giving celebrity status to a killer.

In the Koch Guma IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) Camp, children who are not orphaned are left alone in the camps for long stretches of time while their parents strike out looking for work. – Photo: Joshua Dysart

In October 2011, President Obama sent 100 U.S. Special Operations Forces into Uganda’s northern region to, he said, help the Ugandan Army protect the people by hunting down Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, commonly known by its acronym, the LRA. Now, however, many Acholi and other indigenous people of Northern Uganda say that Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s attempt to evict them from their land is what really threatens their survival.

On Feb. 12, Ugandan American Black Star News Editor Milton Allimadi published “Uganda: Museveni’s and Madhvani Group’s Acholi Land Grab Would Amount to Second Genocide.” “A vicious land grab,”Allimadi wrote, “is being carried out in Uganda, pairing the country’s dictator with an ‘investor,’ and the targets are the Acholi, genocide survivors who live in the northern part of the East African country, on abundant, fertile and mineral-rich land.”

During Museveni’s 26-year rule, since 1986, his army drove 90 percent of the Acholi people into refugee camps, where many died of starvation or disease or committed suicide, though Museveni justified the refugee camps by claiming that he was protecting the Acholi people from the LRA.

Allimadi cited documents attributed to President Museveni by American scholar Todd David Whitmore which show that Museveni was all the while eyeing Acholi land for mechanized agriculture. In recent years, he wrote, the land contest has intensified, as rich oil fields have been discovered in the region.

One member of a Northern Ugandan community which sustains itself by traditional, clan based agriculture, said in the video, “Shoot Us All Down,” made by the Kampala, Uganda-based Refugee Law Project, that many Northern Ugandans are ready to die to stop the land evictions: “Everywhere you go, you ask, talk about land. Aiyiyiyiyi [people say]. Don’t take the only resource we have left. For land, I’m ready to die. I’m ready to shed blood.”

Milton Allimadi and others have said for several years that Museveni and the U.S. government are using the infamous LRA militia as an excuse to send in troops to secure oil and other resources in Uganda, Congo and South Sudan.

Ugandan American Black Star News Editor Milton Allimadi hails from the Acholi region of Northern Uganda, where he says the Acholi people are now facing a second genocide consequent to land eviction.

In early January, Obama approved weapons sales to the new nation of South Sudan and the next week said that he would also send U.S. troops with expertise gained in the United States Marines, Air Force, Navy and Army, meaning again, Special Forces. In early February, they arrived in South Sudan, which borders Northern Uganda and is also a homeland to the Acholi people.

During the third week of February, wire services and mainstream dailies reported that U.S. troops are now in Uganda, Congo, the Central African Republic and South Sudan. None reported the indigenous land evictions or what Milton Allimadi calls the Second Acholi Genocide.

http://www.reunionblackfamily.com/apps/blog/show/12782921-uganda-acholi-people-face-second-genocide-with-u-s-troops-in-country

The industries of fashion, music and cars had a full-on collision recently, courtesy of smart, as fashion brand Boxfresh launched their collaboration with smart’s Brabus tailor-made car. Let me tell you, if I had more money in my exhausted bank account, I’d ditch the designer bag fund for one of these sophisticated little numbers! Not only is it a convertible, but it has a matt-finish and one lovely sleek tan leather interior. What a relief that Boxfresh abstained from plastering their logo all over it too. They did a fantastic job of designing a car I think most would like to take home with them.


Upcoming band Man Like Me then took the car for a spin before playing a fantastic live pop-up gig near the Southbank Centre, hosted by smart and Boxfresh. And wow, how could we almost forget to mention the smart car with a DJ decks and a state of the art soundsystem in it?! Have a look at the Pioneer collab here.



If you didn’t get a chance to test drive the smart fortwo electric drive, let me tell you about it: we tried it out yesterday at the smart urban stage and it’s fantastic. It makes next to no noise and it’s extremely stylish. And as we are all getting more eco-friendly by the day, it’s the perfect drive - you can even plug it into a household socket if you move the kettle out the way!