2. The film made by an American charity called Invisible Children – about the plight of children
in Uganda at the hands of the warlord Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lords Resistance Army
(LRA) guerilla group. His group is said to have abducted 60,000 children.
With its slick Hollywood production values, the film has been an almost instant viral success,
dominating Twitter worldwide and having one of the fastest ever take-offs on You Tube.
The hashtag #stopkony has had hundreds of thousands of tweets, and millions of people now
know something about Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army
3. The Kony 2012 video is an example of what Richard Dawkins calls a meme
A meme is an idea, behaviour, or style that spreads from person to person within a
culture
The Kony 2012 video is the most dramatic demonstration so far of how an idea can
spread over the globe via a channel that is beyond the reach and control of
established media outlets. YouTube operates outside the control of conventional
gatekeepers and editorial sieves
However it also highlights the problems of distilling a complex regional problem such as
the Lord’s Resistance Army into social-media-friendly hashtags and Facebook updates.
4. Kony 2012
• Kony 2012 has attracted criticism: There are questions
about:
• 1. The charity's funding,
• 2. Its targeting of US leaders instead of African leaders
to instigate change, (the implicit assumption being that
Africans are hopeless and that the only solutions to
their problems come from white foreigners).
• 3. And accusations that it is failing to criticise the
Ugandan government, with its poor human rights
record
• Charlie Brooker
5. Writing in the Guardian Michael Wilkinson argues:
It also makes the point that there is currently no threat to remove the US advisers who
are working with the Uganda government to track down the army – Invisible Children's
key aim is to force the US government to keep them there.
6. People watching a screening of Kony 2012 in Lira, northern Uganda, an area which was
ravaged by the LRA. Photograph: James Akena/Reuters
7. The reaction?
• Puzzlement, then anger, which boiled over into scuffles
and stone-throwing that sent organisers fleeing for
cover.
• "They were all saying, 'This is not about us, it does not
reflect our lives'."
• There was particular criticism of the Stop Kony
campaign's use of merchandise, such as bracelets and
T-shirts, which victims said they find offensive.
• One young man who lost four brothers and one of his
arms said afterwards: 'How can anybody expect me to
wear a T-shirt with Kony's name on it?'"
8. Jason Russell,
Founder of
Invisible Children
Emmy Okello, a radio journalist in Lira, said: "I cannot understand the intention of this video.
It is difficult to account to us if you are not including local people. What has angered people
is that the video is about a white person, not about the victims. All of them came here
hoping to see video that tells their story."
9.
10. Under colonialism kingdoms
that had been historically
antagonistic to one another
were merged into larger
colonial units
For example in Uganda the rival
kingdoms of Buganda & Bunyoro
in Uganda
11. In contemporary
Uganda the broad
division is between
the Bantu groups to
the south, such as the
Banganda and the
Nilotic groups of the
northsuch as the
Acholi and Langi
14. During the conflict government put more than one and a half million civilians into
internal displacement camps without access to even the most basic necessities
