Tag: Uganda

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Kony 2012: A View from Northern Uganda

Evelyn Amony was kidnapped by the Lord's Resistance Army at age12 and was first raped by its leader, Joseph Kony, at 15. One of dozens of girls selected to be Kony's concubines, she had three children including Mercy, 14 months, before escaping to freedom in January 2005. Photographed March 31, 2006, in Gulu, Uganda, by Dan Morrison.

The release this week of the video Kony 2012 and a viral social media campaign by the American NGO Invisible Children has jacked awareness of the vicious Ugandan rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army into the stratosphere. It’s also provoked a significant backlash from experts who say the film is simplistic, manipulative, and that it narcissistically focuses on the filmmakers themselves over their African subjects. Invisible Children has responded to some of that criticism, and debate over the film and its prescriptions continues across the web, much of it under the Twitter hashtags #Kony2012 and #StopKony.

In this post, which first appeared at National Geographic, my friend Anywar Ricky Richard, a former child soldier of the Lord’s Resistance Army, and director of the northern Ugandan organization Friends of Orphans, responds to the clamor: Continue reading “Kony 2012: A View from Northern Uganda”

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The Nile: Five Forgotten Cinematic Jewels

Forget Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot unraveling the deadly mendacities of a steamer full of wealthy foreign tourists. Divorce your gaze from the spray-tanned Elizabeth Taylor and her cast of genuflecting thousands. For a cinematic glimpse of what life was like along the Nile in the glorious old and not-so-old days, check out these overlooked classics of exploration, identity, betrayal, and fear on the world’s longest river. (A video slideshow at the Huffington Post.)

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Lonely Planet Gives ‘The Black Nile’ 4.5 Stars

Travel guide author Steve Waters, writing at the Lonely Planet website, has this to say:

The Black Nile offers a fascinating and harrowing look at a country that continually makes headlines for all the wrong reasons. Morrison does his best to explain the historical events, tribal intricacies, external pressures and internal tensions that haunt Sudan today. Ok, not every traveller can flash their press card and jump a UN chopper, but then they normally wouldn’t end up under the bed sheltering from a firefight between local militias either. Morrison’s trip through Sudan becomes a quest for understanding; an attempt to unearth the truth behind his experiences as he interviews rebel leaders and local headmen, academics and taxi drivers, archaeologists and tour guides, all the time cadging his way a little further downstream.

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The Black Nile reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

Please check out this great review by Hugh Pope in the weekend Wall Street Journal. Here’s the kicker:

Above all, Mr. Morrison’s peppery anecdotes, his refreshing honesty and his ability to show how Africans view their difficulties save “The Black Nile” from being simply a memoir of an author’s self-prescribed endurance test. Instead, the book gives us a compelling portrait of life along the Nile—from lonely fishing communities on Lake Victoria to the cacophonous collisions of Cairo. Mr. Morrison’s more discouraging encounters also quietly pay tribute to triumphs of the human spirit. Mr. Bryan, the author’s companion and verbal sparring partner for the first third of the account, later writes to him: “It’s good to be desperate once in a while. Gives you an appreciation of the looks on people’s faces when they’re desperate and you’re not.”

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Egypt’s Battle to Control the Nile Waters

My newest piece, on the struggle for control of the Nile. Here’s the lead:

I was standing inside a colonial-era circuit house in a sprawling, malarial city called Malakal in southern Sudan. I had come to see a man about a river, but the man, an Egyptian hydrologist, wasn’t talking.

“It is forbidden,” he said solemnly, “to speak of the Nile.”

I pointed towards the window. “But it’s right there,” I said. This was, after all, a measuring station of the Egyptian water ministry, one of several it maintained in Sudan and Uganda to track the volume of the world’s longest river.

The hydrologist didn’t need to look out the window. He knew where the Nile was–he’d devoted his life to its study. But there was nothing he could say to a stranger about something so important to his nation’s survival. I might have had better luck inquiring about Tehran’s nuclear program.

You can read the whole article here, and check out other great writing on the environment at the NatGeo News Watch blog.

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The Black Nile “highly recommended” by Library Journal

“Morrison’s narrative combines reporting and travelog in a way that brings readers to this most unlikely destination, a place of complexity, tension, struggle, and pain, where shreds of tradition and community are still visible.

“Verdict: Morrison’s account transcends the travel genre to provide authentic and timely information on a complicated part of the world. Highly recommended.”—Melissa Stearns, Library Journal

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Atrocity in Kampala

There’s a reason so many Westerners – tourists and humanitarians alike  – visit Uganda in such numbers, and it goes beyond the stunning variety of natural wonders and the equally stunning toll of HIV and the Lord’s Resistance Army. It’s a wonderful place, full of wonderful people trying to eke their way out of often difficult circumstances.

Despite a modern history of war and trauma that would seem more appropriate to the capital of a much bigger country, Kampala is light of heart. It breathes. And while a sense of innocence lost may be inevitable after Sunday’s terrorist attacks, I hope the people and the government will resist a slide into fear and anger. (It may be too much to wish that this tragedy will not be used as a political cudgel. It was certainly too much to ask in the United States after September 11.) But I hope Ugandans will keep those urges and at bay.  Here’s a piece I wrote analyzing the bombings for Slate.