three hundred thousand followers. “It’s
a lot of human beings. And it’s fast.”
Nielsen lives most of the year in Kam-
pala, where she shares an office with Ol-
ivia Patience Alaso, a Ugandan social
worker with whom she founded No
White Saviors, and Wendy Namatovu,
a more recent addition to the team. (They
met when Namatovu, who worked at the
coffee shop that Nielsen and Alaso fre-
quented, recognized them
from their Instagram ac-
count and introduced her-
self.) Their goal is to “de-
colonize development,” by
holding missionaries and
humanitarians account-
able for the assumption of
white supremacy underly-
ing their charity. In Uganda,
No White Saviors hosts
consciousness-raising work-
shops. On social media, it chides celeb-
rities for enhancing their reputations by
adopting African children, solicits funds
for favored causes, and offers inspirational
messages. (For Valentine’s Day: “Roses
are red, personal boundaries are healthy,
‘justice’ systems protect the white and the
wealthy.”) But the Bach story is what
has propelled the group to prominence.
As the story broke in the international
press, Alaso gave an impassioned inter-
view to Al Jazeera. “People have taken
Africa to be an experimental ground
where you can come and do anything
and walk away,” she said. “If it was a
black woman who went to the U.S. or
any part of Europe and did this, they
will be in jail right now—but, because
of the white privilege, this woman is
now free.” No White Saviors was sub-
sequently cited by NBC News, “Good
Morning America,” and ABC News.
The BBC released a video introducing
the “founders of the movement,” showing
Nielsen, a white woman with reddish
hair in a blue Hawaiian shirt, bumping
fists with Alaso, a thirty-two-year-old
with short hair and an intense stare.
Nielsen first volunteered in Uganda
in 2010, at an orphanage called Amani
Baby Cottage—the place where Bach
had worked two years earlier. Unlike
Bach, Nielsen felt alienated by her
fellow-missionaries in Jinja. “I had a bit
of a different upbringing than a lot of
the other white women that end up
there,” she said. “I grew up poor—
single-parent household, abusive father.”
For years, Nielsen blogged about the
mental illness that she inherited from her
father, and the ways in which he tore her
down. “I did what all good daughters of
abusive/absent Fathers do,” she wrote in- “I became a chameleon who could
mold into whatever my audience wanted.”
When Nielsen was fourteen, her father
died. “I went from being a straight-A
student to then running away
from home for a week at a
time,” she told me. “That was
like the marker, if you look
back, on my bipolar disorder
manifesting.”
Ultimately, Nielsen was
able to get into Temple Uni-
versity, but needed five years
to graduate, because she kept
going back to Uganda to vol-
unteer. In the college news-
paper, Nielsen described her life in Jinja
much as Bach had: “Making trips to the
local hospital to pay for a 4-year-old
with sickle cell to have a blood transfu-
sion, making home visits to the village.”
She’d had malaria three times, but, she
told another paper, “I just love loving
the Ugandan people. I could get malaria
a thousand times and still feel this is
where I need to be.”
Though Nielsen didn’t overlap with
Bach at Amani, she was well aware of
her. To Nielsen, Bach and her friend
Katie Davis “were, like, the cool girls of
Jinja.” Davis, another missionary, came
to Uganda at eighteen, and within five
years had become the legal guardian of
thirteen Ugandan girls, whom she wrote
about in her best-selling memoir “Kisses
from Katie.” Nielsen said, “Honestly, I
remember wanting to be friends with
Katie and Renée. They’re the cool, young
missionaries, starting their own N.G.O.s,
adopting children.” She recalled a New
Year’s Eve party at Bach’s house in 2011:
“All white people and their adopted
black children.”
Nielsen described her feelings to-
ward Bach and Davis as simultaneously
envious and disdainful. “I always thought
that I was a little bit better than them,
because I actually went to school for
what I was doing,” she said. Nielsen
started her own N.G.O. in 2013, with a
fellow-missionary she’d met at Amani.
They called it Abide, and they sought
to encourage impoverished families not
to relinquish their children to orphan-
ages, by giving parenting classes and
helping them pay living expenses. (Niel-
sen thinks of herself now as a “white
savior in recovery.”)
Toward the end of 2013, a sick child
named Sharifu stayed for several months
in Abide’s emergency housing. Nielsen
posted pictures of him on Facebook, and
Bach, noticing them, remembered that
he had been treated at S.H.C. that spring.
“We have a huge medical and history
file on him,” Bach wrote to Nielsen. “I
can have someone get that to you.” She
added, with a frowny-face emoji, “It’s
super sad we live in the same town but
never get to see each other.” Nielsen sent
a friendly reply: “We really need to fix
the lack of hanging—coffee or break-
fast?” She went on to say that Abide was
also hosting Sharifu’s grandmother, and
training her in “parenting/attachment
development.” If that didn’t work, they
would have to consider having Sharifu
adopted—his father, she said, posed a
risk to his safety.
Nielsen told Bach that one of her so-
cial workers would follow up with Bach’s
employees, but no one did. Sharifu got
sicker, and Nielsen and her colleagues
took him to a hospital in Kampala, where
he was given a diagnosis of heart prob-
lems. “They started raising money on-
line, because they couldn’t get him dis-
charged without paying the bill,” Bach
recalled. She told Nielsen that S.H.C.
would cover the shortfall. “I literally met
her on the side of the road one day and
handed over the money, and Kelsey was,
like, ‘Thanks, see ya,’ ” she said. “Then
they made this social-media post that
they had gone to see his cardiologist
and that it was like this miracle: he’s
healed! And that night the kid just died.
Then I started seeing her around town,
and she would just look like she was
going to kill me.”
To this day, Nielsen blames Bach for
Sharifu’s death. When I asked her why,
her response was convoluted. “He died
of a heart attack because of the number.. .he was only like three and a half, four,
and he had had too many ... the stress
on his internal organs ... because severe
malnutrition really puts a lot of stress on
kids’ organs,” Nielsen said. “I remember
sitting down and just telling Renée to
her face, ‘If you had followed up, you
would’ve caught that the abuse and ne-
56 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020