09/28
2009
2009
I’m heading out to southwest Uganda to find some coffee farmers so no blogging this week. Posting will resume from the other side of the continent next week.
I’m Glenna Gordon, an American photographer and journalist, presently commuting between West Africa and Brooklyn. Previously, I lived in Liberia. And before that, I lived in Uganda. I’ve traveled and worked in over a dozen countries in Africa.
I found the scarlett lion on the roof of a friend’s house in Kampala back in 2006 when I went through a crate of discarded items he and a few other artists had gathered. On that day, I was looking for something and I found the lion: a discarded kid’s toy made in China on the cheap, that somehow found it’s way to East Africa. Something about the hollowed out, paint chipped figurine appealed to my understanding of this place: I’d never seen a real lion, after all.
I’m heading out to southwest Uganda to find some coffee farmers so no blogging this week. Posting will resume from the other side of the continent next week.
Frazer Harrison/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images
Respectfully re-posted from the Getty Images blog
Being a teenager isn’t easy — anywhere. Being a teenager in one place when you’re parents are from another place is even harder. Yoni Brook and Musa Syeed explore the relationship between mother and daughter, and here and there, in a new documentary set to air on September 22 on PBS. Bronx Princess is the story of Rocky, your average American teenager, and her not-so-average Ghanaian family.
I got a sneak peak of the doc a few months back when Yoni gave me a copy. It’s a great story, with an amazing soundtrack, insight that crosses both sides of the Atlantic, and horses on the beach. Yes, horses. Check your PBS affiliate for screening times! And, from September 23 – October 23, you can watch the film on the web.
See previous Context Africa posts:
How did you find the subject for Bronx Princess and how did it go from concept to film?
Our first film, A SON’S SACRIFICE (PBS Independent Lens 2008), explored a father-son relationship at a halal slaughterhouse in Queens, and we had hoped to make a mother-daughter companion film in another borough of New York. However, making a documentary is rarely a straight path, so we weren’t sure how to meet our ideal subjects. During a weekend shoot in a predominantly West African neighborhood in the Bronx, we stumbled into a corner store. The owner, Auntie Yaa, treated us like we were her own children. She welcomed us immediately, cajoling us to try on wigs and sample the lotions she brought from Ghana, her homeland. And we weren’t the only ones — everyone on the block called her “Ma.” Customers trusted her not only tell them which soap would get rid of acne, but also how to patch things up with a boyfriend. But the one person who wasn’t so enamored with the community’s matriarch was Auntie Yaa’s own daughter, Rocky. When the self-assured 17-year-old Rocky walked in, we saw a family conflict brewing: the teenage search for independence butting against her parent’s stern guidance. After hanging out with Rocky and her mother, we knew the stars of Bronx Princess had found us.
Did you find music you like or have someone create a score to match the footage?
Bronx Princess’ music was composed and performed specifically for the film by Blitz the Ambassador, a Ghanaian-American hip-hop artist based in Brooklyn, NY. The score is primarily Ghanaian high life music, featuring strong percussion and horns, with elements of hip-hop. Blitz grew up in Ghana and went to college here in the US, so he understands the the bi-continental experience of Rocky, the film’s protagonist.
Blitz is a talented musician with new album “Stereotype. and we’re releasing a soundtrack to Bronx Princess later this month on iTunes
How did the family in Bronx Princess react when the saw the film?
After we premiered our film in New York at Lincoln Center, a group of 30 high school students surrounded our subjects, Auntie Yaa and her daughter Rocky. They bombarded them with questions, asking for advice about how to deal with their own parents. Rocky and her mother transformed into sages, dispensing witty advice and causing the students erupt in laughter. We didn’t know how Rocky and her mom would react to seeing their lives on the big screen, but the response from the students cemented their commitment to the film. We’re grateful that they entrusted us to tell their story.
You guys stayed with Rocky’s family in Ghana, did you ever feel caught in the middle of the family drama?
Making the film became more of a collaboration with the family than we expected. We became a familiar sight at Auntie Yaa’s beauty supply store — Yoni pointing a camera and Musa balancing a boom pole. Most customers assumed we were making a commercial for the store, but after a few months they realized that even infomercials didn’t require so much shooting.
Our long hours enabled us to gain the trust of both mother and daughter. After one fight in particular at the store, the mood was tense when we followed them back home. After Rocky went to bed early, Auntie Yaa asked us to sit down with her. We thought that she was going to kick us out for invading her family’s privacy. But instead she spoke to us softly, “We’re all family now. Tell me: Am I being to hard on her?” The next day, we found ourselves becoming Rocky’s confidants as well, as she admitted she might have an attitude, but she really just wants to be appreciated. We learned to be good listeners so that we could include both of their perspectives in the film.
When Rocky goes back to Ghana, she’s very much a visitor, and that seems so telling of how different life is for African in the diaspora. How did you and your partner navigate that as film makers?
We were conscious of Rocky’s high hopes of her life in Ghana. As a teenager ready to leave her home in the Bronx, she idealized her parent’s birthplace. She craved a life with more freedoms in Ghana and a more permissive relationship with her father, the chief.
Unfortunately, her father had a different agenda in mind for her three week visit.
As filmmakers, neither of us had been to West Africa before so we were unsure of what to expect. We lived at the family’s palace for three weeks while filming. Everyone else living in the palace understood that there are special rules for interacting with the Chief, such as speaking modestly in front of him. But as filmmakers, we needed to make certain requests of the Chief, like asking him to wear a wireless microphone, which he perceived as a challenge to his authority. After he scolded us, we promised to be more careful. And then there were customs we were simply ignorant of. One day, Yoni casually crossed his legs while sitting in front of the Chief. The Chief called in one of his advisors to explain that crossing one’s legs in front of a chief was a great insult. Eventually, we learned how to work within the Chief’s parameters and before long we were on the dance floor with him, celebrating his chieftaincy at a family party.
Steve Bloomfield wrote a story for Monocle about Alfred Sirleaf, aka the Blackboard Blogger, who is clearly one of the most famous journalists in Monrovia. It’s subscription only to log in, but here are some of the photos I took.
The international part of Monrovia’s central post office. See more images of the post office in the upcoming addition of BBC Focus on Africa magazine.
On Wednesday afternoon, I left Monrovia and flew to Kampala. I’m here for an assignment, and a bit of a vacation, and I have to say, it’s wonderful to be back. I’m seeing this place with different eyes. What before looked shoddy and inefficient now looks like a thriving African city with a robust economy. I can’t believe how fast the internet is, and I’ve eaten amazing Indian food, Italian food, Mexican food, and of course, matooke (that’s for you K.R.!) and reveled at how cheap everything seems after Monrovia’s inflated prices.
Last night at a party a group of old friend bear hugged me when I walked in the door, and then proceeded to argue about the Kabaka and the Mzee. It felt so good to see old friends and hear familiar banter.
Everyone asks me what Liberia is like. I hesitate, and find that the best way to explain it is to compare it to Juba, in south Sudan. They look at me and shudder and ask when I’m moving back to Kampala for good.
We’ll see, we’ll see. I’ve got a lot coming up when I get back to Liberia next month, though sitting at La Fontaine right now, drinking a wonderful cup of coffee, watching images of Monrovia’s amputee soccer team upload at breakneck speed on my FTP client, and enjoying a sunny and temperate afternoon, it’s hard to think about leaving again.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to Ganta, a town on the border of Liberia and Guinea with UNICEF to do some photos of the first six year olds who are starting first grade this year having never seen war in their lifetime. I’ll most more photos from this as soon as they’re up on the UNICEF website, probably tomorrow, but in the meantime let me introduce you to Salomie Kieah. At first when I started taking her picture, she was all fake shy. But, she was beyond cute and I could instantly tell that with even a tiny bit of waiting, she’d drop the shy and embrace the diva. And she did. Here she is, brushing her teeth wearing her shinny pink sunglasses, because you know, most people wear their sunglasses to brush their teeth.
To most people, AIDS is an abstraction: a disease that happens to someone else, somewhere else. And a lot of reporting about AIDS in Africa doesn’t do much to detract from that. But, 28 Stories does. Stephanie Nolen (@snolen) spent years working on a book that’s about real problems, and also real people. She tells the stories of the women, men, children and grandchildren in vivid and sensitive detail. And because of this, the book is so much more important than any 28 people, anywhere.
Stephanie Nolen is the New Delhi-based South Asia correspondent for the Globe and Mail, the national newspaper of Canada. From 2003 to 2009 she was based in Johannesburg as the Globe’s Africa correspondent, with a specific mandate to cover the African AIDS pandemic. In 2007, she published 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa in 14 countries and six languages; it was nominated for Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction Literature.
See previous Context Africa posts:
One of the things that I like the most about “28 Stories” is it manages to give a face, or several of them, to an epidemic. How did you balance individual story telling in the context of a global health crisis?
Setting out to write 28, I was battling the impression of virtually everyone I spoke to in the developed world that Africa’s AIDS pandemic was an overwhelming, numbing problem, that the scale of it, the numbers of people affected, were so big as to be ungraspable. The only way to counter that was through the stories of individual people – to remind people that behind the huge statistics were people, who were, in fact, much like them. Each story in the book tells the reader the personal story of one person (it’s one story for each million of the 28 million then living with HIV in Africa.) But each story also (subtly, I hope) introduces you to one issue or one key piece of information (such as how vaccines work, or how militaries are implicated in the pandemic, or HIV denialism) that you need to understand the African epidemic.
You tell 28 individual people’s stories, but how many did you interview in the course of writing the book and researching HIV?
I couldn’t even begin to guess – zillions. I covered the issue with frequent trips to Africa from the late 1990s, before I moved there, and then full time for six years – so I’ve interviewed people in support groups and hospitals and villages and township clinics and government offices – for years.
Is there any one of the stories that sticks with you specifically today?
Truthfully, they all do. A few of the people in the book have since passed away and I think about them. Most of them became friends, and I hear from them often – about new babies and new jobs and marriages and kids graduating from school … In most cases, the people concerned have taken HIV and made it into a positive force in their lives and it’s inspiring to watch them go from strength to strength. In a few cases, people are sick, and struggling to get access to meds or health care, and them I worry about – it makes me feel very far away.
AIDS is highly politicized. You manage to both engage with that set of politics and avoid letting it become the focus of the book. What do you recommend to people who feel the politics of it all prevents them from understanding individuals?
It’s interesting, to characterize it as “political.” I think often people tried to cloak the pandemic in language of politics, as a way of complicating it and excusing inaction. But it was a pretty straightforward issue of people being denied life-saving access to treatment, denied access to information and basic health care to protect themselves, because they were Africa, because they were poor. And then there were the abstinence campaigns, and the condom prohibitions from the churches, especially the Catholic church, which I suppose could be considered political; and the whole swampy mess of denialism from the Mbeki government in South Africa, which had to do with race and Western ideas of black sexuality – also “political” in some sense. Mostly, though, I felt it was about equity issues – about Africans being entitled to the same drugs and the same access to condoms and information and primary health care – as people in the West – about the responsibilities of those in the developed world, and of African governments. And I don’t think basic justice or equality is particularly political. And when you make the discussion about Mfanbela, in the village, whose wife and children are dying because they can’t afford $5 in transport to get to the clinic in town, or Andualem, who is fired from his job because he has HIV, or Tigist, who is 14 and raising her brother on the streets of Addis Ababa because her parents died – they’re not political.
How did you see the face of the epidemic change as your reported on it, and how would you characterize it now?
When I began reporting on HIV in Africa, no one, absolutely no one, whom I met had access to anti-retrovirals – even though people I knew with HIV at home in North America had had the drugs for six or seven years. A diagnosis as HIV-positive really was a death sentence, and the story I told, at the beginning, was quite simply a story of death and destruction. And then came the amazing fight for access to treatment in Africa, and people – often the most impoverished, most marginalized people in a country – battling their governments and pharmaceutical companies for access. And governments got engaged, and the story became one of fighting back, of survival, of trying new and innovative ways to compensate – obviously, not always successfully – for the impact of AIDS. It became a very dynamic story. Those fights are ongoing in many places, and obviously millions of people continue, inexcusably, to get infected or to die without access to treatment – but I would say that there is a slight easing of the sense of panic at this point.
Images courtesy of John Morstad.
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When I posted three similar photos of soldiers in DRC a few different people responded that journalists shouldn’t travel in packs. While I generally agree, in a situation like when these photos were taken (probably in the Kivus circa Nov 2008) insecurity was a major issue. Traveling in packs is safer. Additionally, as newspapers and magazines cut costs, few journalists can shell out for their own vehicle and fixer and most will often have to pool resources. This is a reality of the industry, unfortunate as it may be.
The Lens even makes mention of this (the safety part, at least, but not the money part):
“For their safety, all of the photographers work together,” Mr. Leroy said. “In the same situation, the same scene, Dominic is better.”
What makes me upset is that the same types of photos receive praise and accolades again and again. The Lens, which is a great, great blog about photojournalism, has featured two stories from Africa, total. One was about Dominic Nahr, whose image I borrowed for this post. The other was about making a movie about the Bang Bang Club, a group of photographers who covered 1990s apartheid violence in the township in South Africa.
Both are about violence, of course.
UPDATE: Thanks MK for a correction via email. The Lens has also featured Tim Hetherington’s Liberia work (silly omission on my part, since I love his work) and a few images among their daily selections.
So really, my issue isn’t with Nahr at all. Clearly, he’s a great photographer. I guess I’d just like to see what would happen if he turned his lens somewhere else.
Always taking, displaying and praising images of violence or about violence limits the possibilities of the visual vocabulary that describes Africa. For example, photos of soldiers trump Finbarr O’Rielly’s amazing photos of Congolese hair styles. I posted one of his photos among the three images of soldiers, but to me, that’s some of his least interesting work. This great series of Congolese hairstyles by O’Rielly is the truly “new” work coming out of DRC, from a photographer who has worked there on and off for years. They tell a similar story in a very, very different way.
