The continent is treated as a single failed entity, whose people are helpless recipients of aid. This needs to change
Some 10 years ago, the world was momentarily transfixed by a 30-minute film soundtracked by a heady mix of Nine Inch Nails and EDM, featuring shots of Adolf Hitler, crying children, and bodies lying in the road. It was called Kony 2012 – and it was meant to save a country that had not asked to be saved.
The inspiration for the film had come a decade earlier, when an all-white group of US filmmakers had met a teenager called Jacob while travelling in northern Uganda. Jacob was on the run from a rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), headed by a man called Joseph Kony. Jacob told the filmmakers how he had been brutalised by Kony’s rebels, and they were understandably so moved that they set out to do something about it. They created the charity Invisible Children to highlight the plight of kids such as Jacob – whose suffering they considered invisible because Americans knew nothing about it.
Dipo Faloyin is the author of Africa Is Not a Country, published by Harvill Secker
