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The Tragedy and Delusion of KONY 2012’s Jason Russell

Jason Russell’s KONY 2012 film is indeed very powerful, playing perfectly to an idealistic youth with its simplistic, gung-ho Hollywood sentiment: that human evil can be eradicated and the world finally made good if only Joseph Kony, the Ugandan warlord, is at last captured and punished. And this youth, by virtue of their youth – believing that humanity can be transformed – have responded in their millions, the film mobilising them to rise up and demand global action.

The intention to stop Kony from abducting children and using them as either cannon fodder or sex slaves is a noble and important one. However, KONY 2012, and the movement around it, possesses the same tragic delusion as Obama’s first presidential campaign – that America and the spirit of all her citizens, the whole world in fact, would suddenly be transformed once he was in office. This has not happened, and never will happen, even with a second term, which I hope he gets. And likewise, the capture of Kony will not bring about such miraculous transformation either, for his victims, the Ugandan people and the world at large.

It is only with age and wisdom that one realises humanity cannot be “transformed”, and though an individual can change, can better his spirit, can choose good over evil, evil shall always occupy his heart, shall always be lurking in his soul. It was Solzhenitsyn who concluded the following in The Gulag Archipelago, after years of immense personal suffering at the hands of Soviet Communism: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various stages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.” Kony’s victims, some of whom I know well, have reached the same conclusion.

Thus, though the arrest, trial and punishment of Kony is vital and necessary, it will not transform the lives of his victims and the lives of future children in Uganda, Africa and beyond. Destroying him, and other warlords and tyrants like him, will not mean the end of human evil. Russell, in KONY 2012, casts himself as a superhero, telling his young son that he will go and get the evil Kony once and for all, and in doing so, restore goodness to the world. And his child believes this brave, philanthropic, compelling statement. And yet days after the film’s global release, this same superhero is detained by San Diego police for masturbating in public, vandalizing cars and screaming obscenities. It would seem that Russell is not only close “to sainthood” but also “to being a devil”, in the words of Solzhenitsyn.

Russell’s family, and the charity of which he is a co-founder, Invisible Children, now push the line given to them by his psychiatrist, that he has suffered from “reactive psychosis”. He likely has, psychosis defined as “a loss of contact with reality”. And yet, according to this definition, he was arguably psychotic even while making the film, such is the extent of his delusion in it. Thus, his naked breakdown, it seems, was less the consequence of extreme exhaustion, stress and dehydration as a result of enormous public attention which contained equal measures of praise and scrutiny, and more his realisation of his own tragic naivety and delusion, that the world and humanity are in fact far more complex than he wants them to be and cannot simply be saved from evil. I wish Jason well with his recuperation: it’s clear he’s suffered enough from the events of the last week and now needs the time to heal.

Just as crucial as Kony’s capture is that his victims are helped to get on with their lives. Invisible Children would do well to use Russell’s film, and the money they’ve raised through it, not only to bring Kony to justice but also to continue to help his victims, to allow “good to flourish” in them rather than “exuberant evil”. The charity does this anyway, its work to be commended, though it would do better to spend less of the money on campaigning now and more on giving to those in need in Uganda.

Mtaala Foundation does not believe it can transform the world, but does believe, and has shown that, it can help victims of Kony and other vulnerable Ugandan children make changes to, and better, their lives, and in turn the lives of others.

Please donate to Mtaala Foundation.

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Roof – Child Soldier

Roof, Shelter’s Magazine, October 2008

Imagine this. You are forced from your bed at gunpoint in the middle of the night, tied up and dragged off, half-naked and barefoot, into the wilderness. You are made to walk for twelve hours, then permitted to rest, but for no more than two hours, on hard ground, on a bed of leaves, in the dirt, damp and rain. You are not fed, just given water. And then you are ordered to walk again, for another twelve hours.

This goes on for three days, and by the end of it you are starving and exhausted, and your feet, swollen and blistered. Then you are stripped naked and paraded in front of a number of men in uniform. You are told that from hereon you must obey these men at all times, and that if you don’t you will be killed. And then finally, you are fed.

You spend your first week of captivity as a porter, carrying munitions for the men in uniform. Next, you are trained to fight: to use a machete in hand-to-hand combat, to load and shoot a machine gun, to fire a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, and to lay landmines. Your training lasts for just one week, after which you are ordered to loot and fight.

‘Now we have given you the power to kill someone, you must do it,’ the men in uniform insist, ‘and if you do not, then we will kill you.’

Kill or be killed.

Hours later you are with the men in uniform as they raid a small village in search of food and other supplies. It is full of women and children, and your orders are to kill them, kill all of them.

I wish this were fiction, but it is not. This is what happened to Ojok Charles. He was abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Kitgum, Northern Uganda, in 2002. He was just ten years old.

They took him precisely because he was so young: they could break him down quickly and have him killing in no time, without compunction.

He slept on the forest floor, living and fighting rough, and soon the only thing which distinguished him from the other animals he shared the forest with – the gorilla, the bushbuck, the golden cat, the duiker, the giant hog – was that he was crueller than them. Homo sapiens, as a species, has an extraordinary propensity for cruelty, which far exceeds that of other animals.

Ojok fought for three years, and during this time killing became routine. After the first year he was orphaned, his mother and father murdered by fellow rebels. And in his second year, he was seriously wounded, shot in the head and lower leg. Though his head healed his leg did not, and not given adequate medical attention he risked losing it. His escape came just in time. He and a few others were returning to camp having looted a nearby village. Ugandan government forces lay in ambush. They attacked the parade and, in the resulting chase, Ojok managed to escape. On his own, he lived off the land for a number of days before finally being captured.

He was taken, first, to government barracks, where he was questioned about his time in the bush and who his leaders were; then, to a rehabilitation centre in Lira which cared for child returnees – those recently escaped or freed. His leg was, at long last, treated, and he was fed well and encouraged to rest.

At first Ojok ate more food than he could eat, and slept day and night. It was wonderful to sleep in shelter, on a bed and mattress, with clean sheets. After three years sleeping curled up on the forest floor he had imagined that he would never sleep in a bed again with a roof over his head.

For the first few weeks he barely spoke, other than to utter his name, and he never smiled. He was numb inside, and had been for a long time. However, as the weeks became months he started to feel more, receiving counselling and emotional support from those who worked at the centre, and it was not long before his smile finally returned and he was able to talk about, and come to terms with, what had happened to him and what he had done.

While at the centre he met someone from Outside the Dream, a foundation which brings education and hope to those whose lives have been shattered by war and poverty. Ojok was determined to return to school despite his years of absence. He would have to sit in a class with children four years his junior. He would have to re-sit one academic year. He would have to forego the life typical of a teenager his age. But he would do all these things as he now had a dream in mind – to finish school and attend university.

He is now back at school and doing very well. In fact, he is very near the top of his class.

My first novel, Love and Mayhem, had been a study of homelessness and destitution resulting from personal tragedy, and I quickly realised while researching my third novel, Gorilla Guerrilla, based on the experiences of Ojok Charles, that this would also be a study of homelessness and destitution, though born of political, not personal, tragedy. Just as Leonard Gold, the protagonist of Love and Mayhem, overcome with grief after the death of his wife, is forced to live on the streets, so Kibwe, the child protagonist of Gorilla Guerrilla, is forced to live rough in the bush after he has been abducted. Both characters are stripped of their humanity and forced to live as animals. However, whereas the cause of Leonard’s tragedy was unavoidable, the cause of Kibwe’s was not. His was driven by the pursuit of power, political power.

Millions in Uganda have been affected by this pursuit. Now twenty-two years long, the conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Ugandan government is Africa’s longest-running civil war. More than twenty-five thousand children have been abducted and forced to fight as child soldiers, and over two million people have been driven from their homes and forced to live in temporary shelter in internal displacement camps. Uganda has been described as ‘a nation of orphans’. Currently 2.2 of its 27 million population are orphans, but by 2010 the UN predicts that this number will have risen to 3.5 million. When will it end?!

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Gorilla Guerrilla, from Chapter 24

The rain tumbles down; it does not relent. The forest is hazy, saturated, obscured by the downpour, and during those brief periods when the rain abates, steam rises from the canopy, the thick dense jungle within giving off a great heat.

We hear an unfamiliar sound and my father rises. He arches his great back, its silver fur catching the light, which almost seems to make it glow brightly like a giant leaf wet with dew at sunrise, then digs his knuckles into the ground, his arms erect, shoulders tense, head held high and alert. I look at his lips, which are compressed, then watch him as he stands up and beats his chest, this great rondo of pok-poks resounding throughout the forest. I hoot and chest-beat also, as do two other young males in the group, but we fail, even collectively, to make an equivalent impression. My mother pulls Lisala close to her chest. My father looks to his left, next his right, then lowers himself onto all fours once more. Other females and children in the group scurry behind him, to where my mother and sister are.

I stand beside my father, a few feet back from him, as does Kibu.

And then there is a sudden explosion of noise, and I see my father rise up again, beat his chest, roar, then charge, his knuckles thumping the ground, bulldozing through foliage, and his screams high-pitched, possessing a deafening intensity, as he opens his mouth wide and bares his enormous canine teeth, the hair on his head crest erect.

The last time I had seen my father so angry, it had terrified me, and I realise, at this moment, that the threat posed to us must be from humans: for it is only them that can make him this angry…

View the book Gorilla Guerrilla

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Gorilla Guerrilla, from Chapter 1

The sound of a voice wakes me.

I am still tired, it is black outside, it must be the middle of the night.

I am not with my mother and father, no, but with my friend, Oleé. His mother has gone to the town for a few days, she is sick, has the disease, the one that you get from being bad even though she is good. She needs to get medicine to make her better, and I said I would stay with him while she is away. He is a year younger than me, he is nine, and does not like to be on his own, not because of his age but because he is scared, like all of us are, scared of them.

Oleé kneels over me, shaking me and speaking. He says, “Come on, we must go, they are here.”

“How do you know?” I mumble.

“I can hear them. Listen.”

Sitting up, I concentrate on my ears, hear nothing, then see him lift the curtain to the banda and step outside. “Come on,” he says again.

I follow him, but as I reach the curtain and make to leave as well I am pushed back in by two pairs of hands, which seem to come from nowhere, out of the darkness. I fall hard on my bottom, then on my back, the straw mats not cushioning my fall, and the back of my head goes thud as it thumps against the hard ground…

View the book Gorilla Guerrilla


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Gorilla Guerrilla, a review by M. Hewitt

“I read, and liked, Nick Taussig’s first novel, Love and Mayhem, but somehow missed Don Don, so I’m glad I came across his third book, Gorilla Guerilla, a book I really enjoyed from cover to cover.
Told from the twin perspectives of a 12 year old African boy mercenary (Kibwe) and a 12 year old silverback gorilla (Zuberi), Gorilla Guerilla is a fascinating and captivating insight into two opposing, yet so similar, lifestyles within an (unnamed) African country.
Both characters provide an innocent, yet philosophical view of their situations and surroundings as they face hazards that raise questions about our own human desires of power and struggle and how these affect our environment and other creatures that co-inhabit our world. Yet somehow the book manages to keep these weighty issues fairly light, and although brushes on very dark elements and probing questions of humanity, it has an air of optimism, an air of hope.
Gorilla Guerilla is the sort of book that should be required reading for all twelve year olds and above, whether from the UK or Africa, or indeed anywhere else in the world. Right, I’m now off to find Don Don.” M. Hewitt

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Gorilla Guerrilla, a review by N. Phillips

“I thoroughly enjoyed this beautifully written novel. Based on the true story of a child soldier, Kibwe, Taussig powerfully sets the nightmare brutality of civil war against the lush, calm, jungle setting of the silverback’s domain – just as the story of Kibwe and Zuberi is both brutal and beautiful.
Taussig’s description of Kibwe’s journey is a stronger, more poignant account of how a young child can be affected by civil war than any piece of journalism I have read. Fast paced and compelling to the end.” N. Phillips

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Gorilla Guerrilla, a review by Nicholas J. Green

“In this book Nick Taussig evidences his intelligence, humility and humanity by juxtaposing the lives of two higher primates – one of which writes books. The author also thus renders the barriers we erect between our species and others to protect our sense of uniqueness otiose – or at least calls them (quite rightly) into question. Good research lends insight and texture. Avoidance of grandiose prose renders the text unpretentious and distinctly moorish! Perhaps the world would do well to read and ponder? Congratulations, Nick.” Nicholas J. Green

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Gorilla Guerrilla, a review by E. Panizzo

“One of the best books I have ever read and Nick Taussig’s best novel so far. Like the ‘brown brown’ forced upon the African child soldiers the story takes you on a savage trip, smashing you in the face with its emotional power and honesty. Never before have I been transported into a world so different from my own, either as the child soldier Kibwe or the silverback gorilla Zuberi. We can learn about our own humanity from both of them.” E. Panizzo