REMEMBER WHEN the Kony 2012 video went viral? The short documentary, produced by the controversial Invisible Children organization about brutal Ugandan rebel Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army, purportedly reached more than half of young adults in the U.S. when it was released. Young Christians across the country swarmed their elected representatives, urging action against Kony, which quickly legitimized Obama’s deployment of U.S. military forces to hunt a relatively idle madman with depleted resources.
Since then, U.S. militarization in Africa has shown no sign of slowing. In 2006, according to The Intercept, “just 1 percent of [U.S.] commandos sent overseas were deployed in the U.S. Africa Command [AFRICOM] area of operations. In 2016, 17.26 percent of all U.S. Special Operations forces ... deployed abroad were sent to Africa.” The U.S. admits to the existence of one permanent base in Africa, in Djibouti on the Gulf of Aden, while U.S. special forces are deployed in “more than 60 percent of the 54 countries on the continent.”
Special operations and collaborations with proxy militias enable U.S. militarism in Africa to persist with very little public awareness or oversight—and wreak havoc on local populations.
“By keeping us in a state of perpetual war, the arms trade grows,” said Norman Tumuhimbise, a Ugandan youth activist kidnapped and tortured in 2015 by a branch of Uganda’s military that trains under U.S. anti-terror programs.
There is hope, however. While U.S. evangelicals in 2012 were lobbying Congress to deploy more troops, Africans were resisting theft by proxy militias of their land and natural resources. In 2013, I visited a community in the Amuru District in Uganda, along the Nile River. The previous year 60 women from that community had resisted President Museveni’s directive to relinquish their land to foreign investors by stripping naked in front of the president, government officials, and business leaders. Following this powerful cultural indictment, Solidarity Uganda, a civil society nonprofit that teaches nonviolent strategy, offered training in this community on nonviolent action. Five villages of Amuru District united to form a land-protection movement.
Death threats, arson, and forced evictions against the movement has not slowed it down. In April 2015, Uganda’s minister of lands and internal affairs arrived in Amuru to set new district boundaries, part of an effort to push people off their ancestral lands. Residents erected roadblocks. Hundreds of schoolchildren marched with leaves, as symbols of their nonviolent protest. Again a handful of grandmothers undressed before government officials, this time causing one of the representatives to cry. The government delegation returned to the capital without having convinced the community to give up land. A few days later, according to my contacts, the military occupation of one Amuru village was called off.
In September 2015, just months after the victory in Amuru, heavily armed police and military stormed a village in the region and shot indiscriminately. At least two people were killed and more than 20 injured. Religious leaders visited victims and condemned the act. “Government has a constitutional responsibility to respect human rights rather than violating them because when they do it, it takes away peace from the people,” said retired Anglican Bishop Macleod Baker Ochola, a member of the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative.
Since this incident, no large-scale violence by state forces has occurred in Amuru.
Africa is out of sight and out of mind for many U.S. taxpayers who fund military action throughout the continent. In the past U.S. Christians were often part of the problem, as with the Kony 2012 video. But now Americans can be part of the solution by acting in solidarity with African resistance movements, investing in projects that promote nonviolent dissent to militarism, supporting exiled Africans in the U.S., and pressing churches and anti-war organizations to address the rapidly escalating U.S. military presence in Africa.
Phil Wilmot directs Solidarity Uganda, an organization that links nonviolence training with movement for social change in Africa. He writes on African activists and lives in Uganda.
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