Renee Bach Played God in Uganda. And 105 Children Died
Great documentaries tend to tell messy stories in a way that somehow makes them clear, honoring the messiness all the while. Such is the case with Savior Complex, HBO’s new three-part doc that digs into some contentious issues – including colonialism, medical ethics, religious fervor, and the limits of activism – with a flawlessly steady hand. There’s not a trace of gotcha in this tale of a white missionary, Renee Bach, who set up a malnutrition rehabilitation center in Uganda and seems to have taken on much of the treatment regimen herself – despite having no formal education beyond high school. She remained defiant in the face of criticism, and even legal action, as a Uganda-based activist group, No White Saviors (which included a former white missionary who ended up facing her own savior-complex moment), made her the face of every evil committed by a white person in Africa. If you’re keeping score, that’s a lot of evil.
Director/producer Jackie Jesko is very good at this sort of thing, and she’s having a banner year. She was an executive producer on the docuseries Demons and Saviors, another nonfiction story with the potential for maximum sensationalism (possibly telekinetic woman imprisoned for killing her child!) that instead became a responsible study of exploitation, crime and punishment. In Savior Complex, working with a team that includes executive producer Roger Ross Williams (The 1619 Project), she eschews the flashy reenactments that now pervade streaming documentaries, relying instead on archive footage (Bach was an obsessive self-chronicler), original interviews, and her own keen reporting and narrative instincts. The result is a deeply troubling story that you paradoxically don’t want to see end, never boring but never descending to the hyperbole employed by more than one of its subjects.
Bach was a recently home-schooled teen when she first visited Uganda in 2007, eager to help and spread the word of Jesus. “I started to see malnutrition everywhere,” she says in the documentary, and she soon set up Serving His Children, a Christian nonprofit that quickly moved from serving hot meals to providing medical care in a ramshackle facility. Bach brought on a volunteer registered nurse from the U.S., Jackie Kramlich, who was horrified by what she saw: an unqualified missionary performing medical procedures on child patients, including a blood transfusion, often with little or no professional supervision. Kramlich blew the whistle, while No White Saviors, which cast Bach as a sort of latter-day Josef Mengele, incited a firestorm of social media attacks (including multiple death threats). Authorities, both American (which claimed lack of jurisdiction) and Ugandan (wary of scaring away other Western missionaries), dragged their feet. The official tally of severely malnourished children who died under Serving His Children’s care is 105. Bach (who fully participated in the documentary) argues that they saved far more than that, but doesn’t provide much in the way of receipts.
It’s a thorny affair, and Jesko and her team know how to let the wounds breathe. Savior Complex never hits you over the head, though it certainly knows what to do when telling moments present themselves. At one point, reading through an angry online missive, Bach shows that she doesn’t know how to pronounce “neocolonialism,” and isn’t even sure what the word means. Jesko, surely aware that such nuggets of irony don’t often present themselves so readily, wisely leaves the moment in and lets it sit for a few seconds. Savior Complex doesn’t need to provide a lecture, or a fifteen-minute historical sequence, on the West’s exploitation of Africa through the centuries. Everything the documentary needs is packed within its three parts, including an inherent trust in the viewer to sift through and sort out conflicting viewpoints.
There are no strawmen (or women) here. There is, however, an age-old question. What exactly does God justify, or even encourage, in the eyes of believers? Bach, toeing the standard missionary line, insists her Savior compelled her to become a savior. She was obviously not without compassion. Meanwhile, in the concrete world of laws and ethics, sickness and health, life and death, she played doctor in a land she knew only as a well-intentioned if reckless visitor. She was a “mzungu,” the Swahili word for a white person in Africa which is used frequently in Savior Complex. She walked around with a stethoscope around her neck, and many trusted her as they would a physician. And she violated that trust. And many, many children died.