How the World Sees Uganda

Abstract

In the late 19th century explorers and missionaries brought home accounts of the interior regions of East Africa that fed the curiosity—and exploited the credulity—of audiences in Europe. Some saw a continent of cruel tyrants exploiting their people and enslaving, if not cooking and eating, their adversaries. Others found an Eden of harmonious living in happy isolation from the corruptions of the outside world. In 2012 another similarly distorted image of Uganda was viewed a hundred million times around the world when it was posted online by an activist group seeking the military defeat of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army. As a foil to such exaggerated pictures, the author recounts the testimony of an LRA survivor concerning her years in captivity and her life after escaping.