God’s Army

Twelve years later, despite an International Criminal Court warrant and a $5 million bounty, Kony is still sitting safe and sound in Kafia Kingi, a disputed territory in Darfur. The Lord’s Resistance Army is no longer a cohesive formation, but factions remain active in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic (CAR), where the Ugandan army destroyed two camps in August. As for Kony himself, he is hardly the force he once was. Left with a few dozen followers, including several of his sons, he is reputed to be surviving through subsistence farming and by occasionally selling honey in local markets. The US military and Uganda called off their manhunt long ago, but that doesn’t mean Kony is not still a wanted man. Russian Wagner Group mercenaries are, according to Rolling Stone, hot on his heels.

Born into an Acholi peasant family, Kony started his career in public life as an altar boy, later becoming a traditional healer after leaving primary school. In the 1980s, he was drawn to the Holy Spirit Movement led by Alice Lakwena, a fascinating figure in her own right. Lakwena claimed to be fighting for the rights of the Acholi people, who had been excluded from power after a military coup overthrew President Milton Obote in 1971. Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s current president, would eventually replace him in 1986.

The LRA was founded by Kony, who drew on the support of former government soldiers by claiming it continued to support the people of the north and would install a government based on the Ten Commandments. As his cause became more bizarre and the violence against civilians increasingly brutal, his notoriety grew. Unable to recruit willing supporters, Kony pivoted to forcibly enlisting child soldiers, which kept his outfit going for decades.

Over the decades, the LRA committed countless atrocities against civilians, leading to as many 1.7 million people being displaced and housed in refugee camps in northern Uganda. While the LRA’s forces only numbered three thousand at its peak, the United Nations estimates that the conflict killed more than 100,000 people.

Invisible Children

I first encountered Invisible Children at Furman University in South Carolina in fall of 2010. For reasons still unclear to me, I, a South African socialist, had chosen to spend my semester abroad at a conservative school in the heart of the Bible Belt. But the campus was full of young Christians who had either done missionary work in Africa or had an interest in doing so. Several of them were left-leaning, and most had a sincere belief in the social importance of their efforts and wanted to talk about South African politics.

This drove me into their social circles and, eventually, into exposure to Invisible Children. One of the student groups had invited that organization to campus to discuss the evils of Kony and how we had to do something now — urgently. My then girlfriend had convinced me to go, though I knew a group called Invisible Children speaking about Uganda raised innumerable red flags. I had read the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina’s essay “How to Write About Africa” and was suspicious of white saviorism. On the way to the talk, I had his words in my mind: “Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention . . . Africa is doomed.”

My skepticism only increased as I watched as fresh-faced, clean-cut Americans who looked like they could have stepped right out of glee club lecture us about Uganda. The speakers occasionally called on various black Ugandan women clad in traditional garb to act as props and share their suffering for a Western audience. I distinctly remember becoming increasingly agitated by the spectacle and making an intervention about African agency and politics, questioning the point of the call to “do something, now,” much to the annoyance of the audience and the speakers. I left with the impression there was something shady about Invisible Children but also something strangely theatrical about their performance.

My suspicions were proved correct. Invisible Children’s founder, Jason Russell, was born and raised in musical theater, the son of Sheryl and Paul Russell, cofounders of Christian Youth Theater, which Russell was part of as a kid. One of his oft-repeated mantras was that “we can have fun while we end genocide. It’s an adventure.” Invisible Children had even created and filmed Invisible Children the Musical, which sadly seems to have been scrubbed from the internet. Russell claims to have stumbled upon Joseph Kony by accident. He went to Africa years ago to make a documentary about the Darfur crisis and only discovered the story of Kony after being blocked from entering Sudan.

At the core of Invisible Children lay a particular strand of evangelical Christianity. Russell first traveled to Africa as a child missionary and formed the organization as an alternative to traditional missionary groups, whose ostentatiously religious model he found problematic. Invisible Children’s alternative was to project a secular imagination to the general public. As Jason Russell told the New York Times in 2012, “We view ourselves as the Pixar of human rights stories.”

But to religious audiences, Invisible Children gave the impression that it was a deeply Christian organization. Speaking to an audience at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, Russell made clear that he understood that his cause depended on hiding his own beliefs: “A lot of people fear Christians. . . . they fear Invisible Children — because they feel like we have an agenda. They see us and they go, ‘You want me to sign up for something, you want my money. . . . You want me to believe in your god.’ And it freaks them out.” The military strength to stop Kony lay, after all, with the secular state, and Invisible Children’s less religious and more musical-theater-grounded appeal would prove a hit with the Obama administration.

Its calls to apprehend Kony were directly tied to the US State Department. By 2008, the government had dubbed Kony a “specially designated global terrorist,” and the Pentagon was providing intelligence and operational support to Uganda to capture him. When those efforts failed, the US military became directly involved. Operation Observant Compass, Washington’s 2011 military intervention, produced a sprawling network of bases and airfields. The counter-LRA operation was spread across five countries in central Africa, costing an estimated $780 million, some of which would make it into the bank accounts of Invisible Children. Kony 2012, rather than an attempt to draw awareness to evils being committed against children, was primarily a lobbying effort on behalf of this policy, enabled by millions of dollars provided by USAID. Indeed, unlike many other NGOs operating in the region, Invisible Children directly worked with the US military on designing pamphlets dropped by US Air Force jets, and far from trying to keep such activities hidden, Invisible Children boasted about its relationship with the military, regardless of the potential risks to the communities they claimed to be helping.

Then there is the matter of South African mercenaries: Laren Poole, the cofounder of Invisible Children, managed to persuade the Bridgeway Foundation, the charitable arm of a Texas hedge fund, to hire the notorious Eeben Barlow, the founding father of the modern private military contracting industry and the ex-commander of 32 Battalion, the most notorious military unit in apartheid South Africa. Barlow, who was also a member of the Civil Cooperation Bureau, a notorious black-ops death squad, was tasked with training Ugandan troops to hunt down Kony. Poole even went as far as to travel with Barlow to meet a Ugandan general to close the deal.

Operation Observant Compass was shut down in 2017 by Donald Trump. Around the same time, Uganda also ended its efforts to suppress the LRA. Kony and his cronies, the government judged, had left for good and were not coming back anytime soon. After contemplating shutting its doors in 2014, having achieved much of its mission, Invisible Children went on to partner openly with USAID in the Community Resilience in Central Africa (CRCA) project, a $25 million effort “focused on improving the protection of civilians and strengthening community resilience to security threats in central Africa’s Mbomou Uele border region, which spans northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and eastern Central African Republic.”

Rendering the invisible children visible to the Western gaze was rather profitable. On its own website, Invisible Children boasts about securing “more than $40 million of U.S. government humanitarian assistance to LRA-affected communities in DRC and CAR.” The model was simple: create an awareness campaign in tandem with US foreign policy goals in the region, then receive the monetary benefits from USAID as an extension of that policy. As David Herbert, writing for Foreign Policy in 2017, put it, “Once dismissed as a group of amateur click-activists, Invisible Children is now on the front line of a covert war against the LRA.”

While stopping a monster like Kony is something no reasonable person could oppose, digging deeper reveals a misleading campaign intertwined with US military intervention, backed by shady evangelical groups and Texan hedge funds and bankrolled by the US taxpayer.

Clicktivism and Empire

The internet of 2012 was a world apart from what it is today. Facebook wasn’t yet a morass of AI slop to bait boomers into engagement, the X/Twitter algorithm wasn’t yet dominated by far-right Elon sycophants, and smart people still believed social media could be a democratizing force. Cringe wasn’t yet a defining aesthetic response to political earnestness. It’s unimaginable now, but at the height of the Kony frenzy, porn actress Bree Olson released a short video showing herself writhing in various stages of undress, interspersed with images of Joseph Kony and his victims. This was not some kind of shock video designed to gain OnlyFans subscribers but a sincere attempt to raise awareness of injustice.

Yet the reaction to Kony 2012 demonstrates the political limits of social media campaigns. The deliberately simplistic narrative — the lack of context, the images of pure suffering — were a form of manipulation, the calls to act now rather than question a way of promoting an ongoing US military intervention. Of course, the children of Gaza and other locales where US allies have been unleashing horrors remain invisible for those looking to build their campaigns within the malign embrace of US foreign policy.

Kony was not even in Uganda in 2012. Moreover, the campaign was a form of manipulation in tandem with US foreign policy aims. In this respect, some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world were used as human shields to protect a more sinister agenda. This begs the question of how much of the clicktivism of the late aughts and early 2010s was bankrolled by USAID and crafted with the generous help of the State Department and associated three-letter agencies. Invisible Children serves as one of the more extreme cases in which civil society served as the direct agent of US foreign policy, but it is by no means alone. The invisible children of 2025 deserve better.