HBO Max is currently facing backlash for its latest show or rather, the trailer for an upcoming show. While HBO is well known for its entertaining TV series, the coming show isn’t about dragons and well-intentioned white women who end up unleashing great destruction on the people she sought to protect. That is – it’s not about dragons …
The show features the life and times of one Renee Bach, an American high-school diploma-bearing volunteer turned medical practitioner who took it upon herself to help Africa’s most vulnerable. Only: of the 940 malnourished children that were admitted into her clinic, 105 died. She was sued under Ugandan law by two mothers who had lost their children while they were in her care and a civil rights organisation for unauthorised child services that endangered the lives of children. The case itself sparked righteous outrage in Uganda, an outrage that is seeing a second life in a new HBO documentary on Renee Bach herself, titled ‘Savior Complex’. On the streaming network’s social media, the tag for the film is: ‘are good intentions good enough?’
The answer from the internet at least is clear: ‘No’.
Bach, for her part, escaped conviction by resolving the lawsuit against her in Uganda by agreeing to pay approximately $9,500 to each mother, with no admission of guilt. The resolution is the source of much amazement to anyone who hears of it, and the question of the hour is, why on earth did Uganda allow her to walk away? Fortunately, the internet, as so often is the case, is quick to provide the answers to the questions it raises:
“White supremacy at its peak is a white woman moving to Uganda, posing as a fake doctor, running a fake clinic, having hundreds of Ugandan babies die under her ‘care’, then being platformed in a docu-series because ‘intentions were good’. Sad.”
Others vented their displeasure at the fact that in addition to the fact that she never got jail time for her crime against humanity, she is now also benefiting from the entire incident by being paid to have her crimes serialised.
But is she really guilty?
And that is the million-dollar question on everyone’s lips: is Bach guilty of the consequences of her actions? What does HBO think?
“Savior Complex is a three-part HBO Documentary series examining missionary work in Uganda, where an American is accused of causing the death of vulnerable Ugandan children by dangerously treating them despite having no medical training.”
The narrative of the show at least is clear: Bach is a woman who has fallen victim to her own good intentions. The trailer also frames her as a persecuted woman who had only tried to do well by the community she had tried to serve. Perhaps a proper assessment of her motives would depend on understanding the context within which Bach formed her personal mission, and how she went about trying to achieve it.
A brief history in time: feeding the malnourished
Renee Bach, a Virginian-born American citizen, left her hometown to engage in charity missionary work in Uganda. She went to Jinja, a city with a population of ten thousand on the shores of Lake Victoria. The poverty-stricken area is the focus of many charities seeking to alleviate the suffering of its residents, as well as American volunteers flying in to help out. Bach was one of these. She was just a teen when she first flew in, in 2007. She worked a life-changing nine months at a missionary-run orphanage. She was 19 when she decided that she would move to Jinja completely, and devote her time and efforts to set up her very own charity.
The decision, and the move, were easier than finding what she wanted to do with her efforts once she was there. Where would her help be of the most impact, and whom could she benefit the most? She set up shop in one of the poorer areas in Jinja, called Masese, and started exploring her options. Funded by her church circles back in Virginia, she happened upon one idea that stuck: providing the neighbourhood children with a free hot meal regularly. She estimates that about 1,000 children lined up by her house twice a week for a free meal. Inspired, she named her charity: ‘Serving His Children’. Word quickly spread, and the situation quickly escalated.
A member of the local hospital got in touch with her to see whether she could extend some much-needed help. The hospital frequently tended to severely malnourished children who would be released to the same undernourished households from whence they came after they were past the need for medical attention. They would benefit from an extended period of help until they were nourished back into full recovery. Could Bach help? It was impossible not to agree. She took in these children with the promise of giving them everything they could possibly need: nourishing food, the medicines they had been prescribed, and – religion.
A fully-fledged medical centre
According to other volunteers who shared their experiences with news media, the centre slowly evolved into a medical centre. Bach had hired three Ugandan nurses to help out during the day, and there was a dedicated medical room equipped with oxygen tanks, IV catheters and other monitoring equipment. But one volunteer, a young American named Jackie Kramlich was shocked at the goings-on in the clinic. A newly-certified nurse from the US herself, she quickly saw that the centre was taking on the care of patients they were completely unequipped – both skills-wise and equipment-wise, to care for. The centre wasn’t catering for the needs of those recovering from malnourishment anymore. They suffered from illnesses as serious as stage 4 HIV, intestinal parasites, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and the like.
Bach would frequently perform such medical procedures as she deemed necessary, even invasive ones. In her personal blog, (now deleted) she described how she would carry out blood transfusions or insert IVs into children struggling to live. In Uganda, as in the US, invasive procedures such as these can only be carried out by qualified, authorised medical personnel. The cases Bach dealt with were also more delicate than most – running a blood transfusion into a severely malnourished child is an extremely dangerous procedure. Treating a child in this extremely perilous condition is a violation of the law in one other important way – under both international guidelines and Ugandan law, a severely malnourished child presenting extra complications such as respiratory infections, dehydration, swelling etc. can only be treated at an advanced medical facility. And yet Bach frequently ‘treated’ such ‘patients’, with varying results.
There is a valid medical reason for this regulation – a child in the condition described above is quite literally fighting for their life. At this point, in such a young body, their metabolism, their immune system, begins to shut down, which means that just inserting an IV that is not continuously adjusted to their internal sodium and potassium levels can trigger cardiac arrest. A child in this precarious situation who has no way of being conveyed to a medical centre, is best left alone.
The audacity
Postcolonial theory is a useful tool to understand what goes on in the minds of those in first and second-world countries that take it upon themselves to intervene in the lives of those in the third world ‘to improve their lives for the better’. It helps dissect the unconscious privilege and the power dynamic that this charity masks. In pop culture, this is more colloquially known as the ‘white saviour complex’. Both help describe a situation where an individual of privilege (often white) steps into ‘deprived’ situations to assist in changing the lives of those who are deprived for the better. The power they believe that empowers them to do so is their own privileged identity (often the fact that they are Western, and/or white). i.e., in a situation of unimaginable deprivation, merely being privileged/white is enough to improve the lives of those around you. Many would argue that this is a form of neocolonialism: the Europeans who invaded much of the third world (and in doing so pushed them into the third world) also believed that their mere presence improved the lives of the native ‘barbarians’ for the better.
Such an attitude, or an attitude much like this, is what empowers members of certain communities to believe that their involvement alone is sufficient, even necessary to improve the lives of another community. It is of course not a racial crime for people of privilege to believe that they can play a role in improving the lives of those with less privilege for the better. But communities cannot achieve lasting improvements in their situations with free meals alone, although they are an important part of it. Communities need infrastructural support and partnerships to create the privileges (the rights) they lack for themselves. Jinja needed a medical centre and medical professionals – both of which it already had. During the time in which Bach was directing American funds into medical supplies, she was not qualified to use, the U.S. government itself was working with the Ugandan government to build a specialised care centre for malnourished children across the country. Jinja also already possessed a regional referral hospital with a fully developed malnutrition unit for patients presenting complications. Bach’s charity would probably have been better spent providing transport for those who needed it to get there.
It takes a level of arrogance to believe that you possess the same capabilities as a medical professional to treat an extremely vulnerable patient, even when such professionals are readily available. It takes a level of ignorance to believe that African children are the prime example of a vulnerable community. Many of the issues that plague impoverished Africans plague impoverished communities around the world – including America, and the state of Virginia. America also struggles with poverty, with malnourishment, with child malnourishment, with unequal access to healthcare, with disenfranchised communities and the like. It is problematic that people like Bach believe that the impoverished in their own countries are still better off than the impoverished in others. However, it is unfair to blame the lenses she looks through at the world on Bach alone: Western media has long since monopolised its power over how it gets to portray different cultures around the world, and the paints on the picture of deprived, hapless Africans was long dry before the US ever was a global contender for the world’s balance of power.
‘Justice’
In 2015, worker complaints finally led to police reports being filed on the centre and the health officer for the district shutting it down. The officer noted in his paperwork that the centre had at some point had a health licence, although it had expired in 2014. The sick children found in its care were also thankfully quickly referred to healthcare clinics. Ugandan civil rights attorney Primah Kwagala filed a lawsuit against Bach on behalf of two mothers with the intention of holding Bach accountable for the children who died in her care. Bach herself now lives in Virginia, as Ugandans no longer tolerate her presence: however, her centre does still operate, albeit in direct partnership with the government – and in a different district – and with Bach only involved in administrative work – from Virginia. The money won from the lawsuit represents no comfort for the mothers who lost their children to Bach’s charity. However, Attorney Kwagala despairs that there are no further amendments that are practically achievable. The court process was emotionally draining and logistically difficult for the mourning mothers, and it made little sense to extend their suffering. Speaking to the media, Kwagala said: “She did apologise to them. She did say she was sorry”
Said the mothers to Kwagala, “We just needed her to acknowledge that we are human beings. We have feelings…”
‘Savior Complex’, a three-part documentary on Renee Bach premiered on 26 September on HBO.
(Theruni Liyanage)