We want to step off #Kony2012 (we promise to lay off them by this weekend), but we could not let this one pass. We know that Jason wants a career in musical theater. The writers of British broadcaster and satirist Charlie Brooker’s nightlyweekly commentary on Channel 4’s weekly satire show ’10 O’Clock Live’ spent some time looking at Invisible Children’s videos on Vimeo and Youtube and found plenty musical theater among the 274 videos (at last count) the group has posted online.

The first video, 2006’s “Global Night Commute: A Musical to Believe” shows Jason (described by Brooker as “a clean-cut Abercrombie and Finch version of Jesus Christ”) and company “dancing around Glee-like in a high school like a boy band.” Brooker adds that the video “must have cost what even the Bible would describe as a bumload of cash.” Watch from the 1:40 mark:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWACLKaOC08

Then there’s the 2007 “World Tour Blazing Trials Again” showing actors riding around on a minivan miming to pop lyrics “without a single mention of Africa the entire four minutes.”

Next up is “Jump First, Fear Later” from 2009, “a cult like video” with their followers leaping “like a lemming pack” off a cliff, which, “once again cleverly raises awareness of Uganda, by never once mentioning Uganda.”

And finally, “at least Invisible Children doesn’t also organise vaguely ominous youth camp events for its followers which hint at them all — I don’t know — rising up to usher in some kind of New World Order, all topped off with a sinister logo.” Uh-oh. This is Invisible Children’s “Fourth Estate”, complete with some kind of bizarre Australian-cum-English-cum-Californian accent doing the voiceover. (Is it Russell Crowe?) Help!

Watch Charlie Brooker’s full #Kony2012 commentary here.

H/T: Mikko Kapanen; Neelika Jayawardane and Elliot Ross contributed to this post.

Further Reading

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Wizkid’s dispute with Seun Kuti and the release of his latest EP with Asake highlight the widening gap between Afrobeats’ commercial triumph and Fela Kuti’s political inheritance

Progress is exhausting

Pedro Pinho’s latest film follows a Portuguese engineer in Guinea-Bissau, exposing how empire survives through bureaucracy, intimacy, and the language of “development.”

The rubble of empire

Built by Italian Fascists in 1928, Mogadishu Cathedral was meant to symbolize “peaceful conquest.” Today its ruins force Somalis to confront the uneasy afterlife of colonial power and religious authority.

Atayese

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Bread or Messi?

Angola’s golden jubilee culminated in a multimillion-dollar match against Argentina. The price tag—and the secrecy around it—divided a nation already grappling with inequality.

Visiting Ngara

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Gen Z’s electoral dilemma

Long dismissed as apathetic, Kenya’s youth forced a rupture in 2024. As the 2027 election approaches, their challenge is turning digital rebellion and street protest into political power.

A world reimagined in Black

By placing Kwame Nkrumah at the center of a global Black political network, Howard W. French reveals how the promise of pan-African emancipation was narrowed—and what its failure still costs Africa and the diaspora.