Savior Complex Doubles Down

Savior Complex is a slyly simplistic title. For most of the three-episode HBO docuseries’ runtime, the term applies in the singular, a descriptor for primary figure Renee Bach. At 19 years old, the American woman — home-schooled, possessing no medical training, armed only with what she describes as the voice of God in her head — moved to Uganda to do missionary work and eventually opened a malnutrition-treatment clinic that was better funded than actual Ugandan hospitals. After a suspicious number of children died and fellow missionaries and local doctors complained to the U.S. Embassy and local health officers, the Ugandan government investigated Bach’s nonprofit, Serving His Children, for operating as a medical clinic without proper documentation and licensing. When social-media criticism against Bach went viral, she fled home to Virginia and to date has never faced criminal charges for her actions.

Although Savior Complex opens with Bach, who displays a mixture of righteous self-aggrandizement and evasive self-pity in her interviews (the moment she trips over the pronunciation of “neocolonialism” and says she doesn’t know what it means? Excellent TV), it quickly gives ground to her critics. Activist organization No White Saviors, created in 2018 by Ugandan Olivia Alaso and “white savior in recovery” Kelsey Nielsen, a former missionary, used social media to criticize celebrities accused of using African children as props. After discovering Serving His Children and Bach’s blog, No White Saviors focused its callouts on her, too. Nielsen is presented as the marketing mind behind much of this online messaging, from pithy memes to accusations that Bach experimented on unconsenting children. Whenever Alaso critiques white missionaries with lines like “Africa is not your playground,” Nielsen seems like the exception, the woman who realized she came to Uganda for the wrong reasons and has been trying to make amends since. When No White Saviors starts working with Ugandan lawyer Primah Kwagala to investigate the deaths of children at SHC, Nielsen is forthright in demanding criminal charges against Bach. It’s easy to see Nielsen and Bach as foils, the former deprogrammed from the Americans-as-exceptional training to become an example for allyship; the latter stuck in her conviction that God called her to Uganda and that her actions were justified.

As Savior Complex progresses, though, it complicates that initial framing of Nielsen-good, Bach-bad. Bach and her allies dislike the group, of course, and blame their posts for the collapse of donations to the clinic. Yet other Ugandans have their doubts, too. Kwagala emphasizes that she works for parents of children insufficiently treated by Serving His Children — not No White Saviors. When the lawyer searches for the families of children mentioned on SHC’s social channels to join her civil case against Bach, she connects with the mother of Patricia, a girl who previously suffered from malnutrition and a flesh-eating bacteria on her face. A Ugandan doctor had recognized the latter, Bach ignored the diagnosis (describing it as a “mysterious and ever-growing wound” on her blog), and the bacteria spread and scarred Patricia until she eventually found treatment. Kwagala is shocked to learn that Patricia’s mother only has praise for Bach (“That woman saved me and my child … Renee was so caring”), and even more shocked when Nielsen again posts Patricia’s photo to No White Saviors’ social media as another attack on Bach. “She was working on them. She was not qualified to do this,” Alaso says in defense of amplifying — arguably inaccurately — Patricia’s story. Kwagala is unmoved by that justification: “No White Saviors, I believe that they had a different objective than we did.” Through Kwagala, Savior Complex suggests that No White Saviors was perhaps more driven by antipathy toward Bach than sympathy for her alleged victims. But as Savior Complex nears its conclusion, Nielsen is accused of financial malfeasance by her partners in No White Saviors — and maybe doesn’t seem that different from Bach after all.

In the last ten minutes of the finale “Reap What You Sow,” we watch grainy footage of Nielsen and Alaso arguing about whether Nielsen mishandled donations to No White Saviors. The clip isn’t very long, but the vehemence within it is unmistakable; the women raise their voices and throw insults, and the video is shaky and handheld, as if shot surreptitiously. “Kelsey, you’re evil!” Alaso says. Nielsen responds in an exasperatingly cool tone, “I thought you cared about Black people” — a phenomenally inappropriate thing for a white woman to utter to a Black woman. There are pieces missing here that Savior Complex doesn’t fully explain since neither Nielsen nor Alaso discuss their confrontation in the documentary: How much money Nielsen might have mismanaged, and how long Alaso and Lubega were in the dark. Nielsen is ejected from the group after this confrontation, and Alaso implies she was seduced by online fame into forgetting “the real goal of the work.”

The possibility that Nielsen took advantage of the Ugandans she claimed to treat as partners is a real-life example of that “me sowing / me reaping” viral tweet; her, “I thought you cared about Black people,” statement — like Bach’s “neocolonialism” gaffe — gives us a glimpse into the haze of congratulatory delusion encircling both Americans. Nielsen’s potential guilt doesn’t make Bach innocent, but by sliding focus from Bach to Nielsen, Savior Complex exposes how the American evangelist idea of “service” encourages, and even ingrains, a sense of righteousness that is difficult to reverse. Their white, female, American missionary backgrounds, Savior Complex implies, led Bach and Nielsen to center themselves in places where they had no business leading the conversation — to believe their God-given rights gave them superior value. Their religious training was “an indoctrination … a taught and learned thing,” Nielsen had said, and it seeped into their egos despite their conflicting viewpoints.

Savior Complex doesn’t overly rely on the rivalry between Bach and Nielsen; it incorporates enough testimony from Ugandan doctors, activists, social workers, and other citizens to avoid becoming a story of two white women sniping at each other against an African backdrop. The docuseries ultimately offers an unsparing investigation into Bach, with a strong sense of when to point out her contradictions, let viewers linger in her defensiveness, and cede ground to Ugandan citizens and their perspectives. But by ending in a way that emphasizes Nielsen’s similarities, Savior Complex gestures at how missionary thinking can’t be so easily undone, to the detriment of those who are ostensibly being aided: How both Bach and Nielsen betrayed their intended goals and the people they promised to help because they couldn’t see past themselves, how their megalomania might be inseparable from the cultural environment in which they grew up, how their very need to be the faces and centerpieces of their organizations reflects the savior complex that they, as Nielsen herself said, were taught and learned. In the series’s final minutes, Jesko visits a missionary convention and allows organizations to speak directly to the camera. Their smiling-faced pitches about serving God and helping those in need blur into each other much the way Bach and Nielsen blur together, too, bringing into focus Savior Complex’s most thought-provoking teaching.