Savior Complex: HBO’s Renee Bach documentary looks at white saviors – with a twist. – Slate

A woman stands in a doorway, light floods the air around her. The walls are full of photographs arranged in uneven rows, but you can’t make out more than the shape and color of the people in them because the focus is solely on her – head bowed and arms outstretched, as if it were her body an antenna carefully aimed at the sky. Everything else is a blur.

The woman is Renée Bach, an evangelical Christian missionary who is the focus of the three-part HBO documentary “Savior Complex.” In 2009, the then 19-year-old Bach founded a nonprofit organization called Serving His Children in Jinja, Uganda, focused on feeding the area’s malnourished children. (According to a 2019 UNICEF report, a third of Ugandan children suffer from the long-term effects of malnutrition, and it is responsible for four out of 10 deaths among children under 5.) Because the children who came to Serving His Children Essen was prone to getting sick in other ways, the facility unofficially took on the functions of a medical center – and because Bach saw herself as someone called by God to this task, she felt empowered to carry out some of these functions herself take on without giving up on them have a license or formal training. As the title of the first episode of Savior Complex reads: “God does not call the qualified. He qualifies the called.”

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This image of Bach standing among his children’s wooden beds, surrounded by photos of Ugandan children, was used in the organization’s fundraising materials and is a perfect representation of how Bach saw himself, or at least wanted to be seen: as a vessel for God’s will , saving both lives and souls. “Every image,” she tells the cameras, “represents a life changed.” But the photo becomes a weapon used against her, particularly by the activist group No White Saviors, which accused Bach of fraud, negligence and responsibility responsible for the deaths of more than 100 children while caring for his children. The young white woman takes center stage, clearly, the African children whose lives she supposedly changed are reduced to blurred background details. When the image appears on No White Saviors’ Instagram feed at the end of the second episode of Savior Complex, the caption “Angel of Death” appears.

For most of its first two episodes, “Savior Complex” oscillates between these two perspectives and leans heavily toward the second. The opening shots seem like the set-up for a true crime expose, with Bach cooking dinner for her adopted Ugandan daughter and referencing newspaper headlines calling her a “serial killer,” which the documentary leaves out of context in order to to achieve the greatest possible shock effect. Jackie Kramlich, an American nurse who volunteered at Serving His Children, describes her increasing horror as she worked alongside Bach and watched her provide medical care for which she was not trained – a combination of ignorance and Arrogance that put children’s lives in danger. And No White Saviors, a group led by Olivia Alaso, a black Ugandan, and Kelsey Nielsen, an American who describes herself as a “recovering white savior,” takes the charge even further, accusing Bach of encouraging medical experimentation to have carried out the children. To them, she’s a murderer who belongs in prison, and they won’t stop until she’s behind bars.

HBO is splitting the broadcast of Savior Complex over two nights instead of three weeks and has released all episodes for streaming at the same time. (The final two episodes air tonight, but they’re all already available to stream on Max.) This turns out to be a smart move, because by the end of the second episode I was so frustrated by the seemingly tendentious point of my view that I was hesitant, press play the third time. Bach’s behavior is questionable at best, but No White Saviors’ approach seems equally reckless and self-aggrandizing, making indiscriminate accusations about his social media influence without regard to how much collateral damage might be. Bach is an easy target – when she reads an accusatory comment from Nielsen on the Serving His Children Facebook page, she stumbles over the word “neocolonialism” and tries it several times before giving up entirely. But I kept thinking back to Bach’s statement at the start of the series that she “took the hit for every white person who ever set foot in Uganda,” which, while it betrayed a characteristic lack of self-reflection and a touch of martyrdom – at She once says that a photo of her injecting fluid into a child’s head through an intravenous catheter was used to “crucify me” – that doesn’t seem entirely untrue. Abner Tagoola, the head of pediatrics at Jinja Hospital, takes a cool stance against the filmmakers as he points out: “They came all the way from America for one person.”

The shoe finally drops in the middle of the series’ final episode, “Reap What You Sow.” No White Saviors is divided over allegations that Nielsen embezzled funds, which Nielsen denied – according to a 2022 Guardian report, the debate over whether it was appropriate for a white man to play a prominent role in the organization also contributed – and the prosecution against Bach fails for lack of evidence, although she agrees to pay small compensation to the mothers of two children who died after treatment at Serving His Children. But more importantly, the episode is the first to give Ugandan voices real meaning. The key figure in the story’s final chapter is not Bach or Nielsen, but Primah Kwagala, the civil rights attorney who enforces the mothers’ civil lawsuit against Bach. As the rhetorical war between Bach and No White Saviors escalates – Bach flees back to her home in rural Virginia after the “Angel of Death” post sparks death threats – Kwagala remains calm and focused on ministering to the grieving mothers, rather than building a family image of herself. Like Tagoola, she is aware of the bigger picture. Online activist groups like No White Saviors are great at bringing attention to injustice, but the outrage burns too strongly to sustain long-term solutions, while people like Bach have access to faith-based fundraising networks that also absolve them of responsibility. “No White Saviors” succeeds in poisoning the “Serving His Children” brand, but it’s not clear what, if anything, will replace the work done. “Who is serving these people now?” Bach asks. “Is it Kelsey?” She hasn’t posted about it once, so I’m pretty sure it’s not happening.”

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The idea that Nielsen couldn’t possibly have done something good without documenting it on social media is breathtaking in both its presumption and its seeming accuracy. And Bach, who has detailed her work in a series of blog posts, appears to be no different. When the filmmakers confront her with Jackie Kramlich’s accusation that she gave a blood transfusion to a sick child without proper medical supervision, Bach admits that her blog post omitted the presence of a nurse in the room because: “I wrote in the blog at the time in a truly first-person manner.” Jesus advised his followers to do good deeds in secret, but Bach claims that it is good to put themselves in the foreground to appeal to donors, which in turn is good for their cause. Her supporters subscribed to the idea that she was doing the Lord’s work more than the work itself; Even after Bach returned to the United States and Serving His Children was taken over by Ugandans, donations never recovered. Growing up in Uganda, No White Saviors’ Alaso says she got the idea that white missionaries were “more blessed than us because they looked like the Jesus on the wall.” Charity focuses on recognizable shapes and familiar stories, the image of a woman with her hands outstretched and her eyes closed, channeling God’s will through the kind of vessel he always seems to choose.