Day: March 13, 2012

I’ve been waiting for Mahmood Mamdani to weigh in on Kony 2012. His piece was finally published today in the Daily Monitor. The discussion of Invisible Children comes only at the end of the piece. Mamdani calls on the tens of millions of viewers of Kony 2012 to remember that the LRA is not just a one-man show, but comprised of many people, children and adults, who will need to be reintegrated back into their communities when the LRA is finally no more. There are no simple solutions.

“The 70 million plus who have watched the Invisible Children video need to realise that the LRA – both the leaders and the children pressed into their service – are not an alien force but sons and daughters of the soil. The solution is not to eliminate them physically, but to find ways of integrating them into (Ugandan) society.

Those in the Ugandan and the US governments – and now apparently the owners of Invisible Children – must bear responsibility for regionalizing the problem as the LRA and, in its toe, the Ugandan army and US advisers crisscross the region, from Uganda to DRC to CAR. Yet, at its core the LRA remains a Ugandan problem calling for a Ugandan political solution.”