Tim Hetherington, Sleeping Soldiers

A lot has been written about Tim Hetherington as a war photographer. Here’s David Carr in the New York Times:

Tim Hetherington was a war photographer in every regard. Tall, brutally handsome and modest, he had a British accent plucked from a Graham Greene novel and the body fat of a Diet Coke.

I actually disagree. From my limited personal knowledge of Tim, and from extensive time thinking about and looking at his work, I don’t think he was a “war photographer in every regard.” While his photos of conflict in Liberia and Afghanistan are truly excellent examples of war photography, so many of his photographs are examples of something else. His series Sleeping Soldiers certainly isn’t straight war photography. It’s a look at the people fighting wars – vulnerable, young, human.

When I interviewed him, I specifically asked him about war photography. Here’s what he said:

I’ve never seen myself as a war photographer. This is about narrative. I’m very open to any visual conceits and any possibilities at my disposal to better explain to people the ideas I’m exploring. I like art photography, I like still life, I like war photography. I like to include everything to weave a tapestry to explain to someone, “What happened?”

A lot of the pictures are metaphorical, and the combination of pictures is metaphorical. This piece of work is almost like a novel. I use narrative book techniques, and I think they’re a more powerful approach than having a lot of war photography.

He said this type of thing other places too — he told @Zoe_Flood:

“I’m not a war junkie – I don’t go to places like Liberia because I get off on it. Whilst war photography is the most extreme in terms of it being pure photojournalism, taking place right on the edge, what I am interested is how people are touched by the story, and if they are, that they become aware of something they hadn’t previously known about.”

This is important to remember, especially now as Duckrabbit insightfully, and fearfully, points out, that the romantic myth of the war photographer is stronger than ever.

Here’s Sebastian Junger, remembering Tim, and deeply invested in the romance of war:

You and I were always talking about risk because she was the beautiful woman we were both in love with, right? The one who made us feel the most special, the most alive? We were always trying to have one more dance with her without paying the price. All those quiet, huddled conversations we had in Afghanistan: where to walk on the patrols, what to do if the outpost gets overrun, what kind of body armor to wear. You were so smart about it, too—so smart about it that I would actually tease you about being scared. Of course you were scared—you were terrified. We both were. We were terrified and we were in love, and in the end, you were the one she chose.

Debating his legacy is an important part of remembering him and how he contributed to the way we all understand the world.

I hope Tim isn’t only remembered as a war photographer.

***

“Could Have,” by by Wislawa Szymborska, and translated below from the Polish, via CJ Chivers.

It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later.
Nearer. Farther off.
It happened, but not to you.

You were saved because you were the first.
You were saved because you were the last.
Alone. With others.
On the right. The left.
Because it was raining. Because of the shade.
Because the day was sunny.

You were in luck — there was a forest.
You were in luck — there were no trees.
You were in luck — a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake,
A jamb, a turn, a quarter-inch, an instant …

So you’re here? Still dizzy from
another dodge, close shave, reprieve?
One hole in the net and you slipped through?
I couldn’t be more shocked or
speechless.
Listen,
how your heart pounds inside me.

Two weeks ago, I boarded a plane in Monrovia and flew back to New York via Atlanta. I arrived in Atlanta in an exhausted daze. The work I’d be doing for the past couple of weeks was physically and emotionally exhausting, and while transitioning between the USA and Africa is never, ever easy, this time it felt especially hard. As I walked around the Atlanta airport, I saw people from my photos, Ivorian refugees superimposed on the friendly Americans buying a coffee at Seattle’s Best, standing among piles of identical and immaculate brightly colored Lacoste shirts.

I thought of Tim Hetherington’s personal video diary.

Diary (2010) from Tim Hetherington on Vimeo.

He chronicles the difficult transition with disquieting grace and salience.

I often thought about his work while I was working. There are few people who I admired as much, whose way of doing journalism made so much sense to me, whose focus on individuals and on ideas translated visually with such poignancy and meaning. I was lucky enough to meet him in Liberia in early 2009 and interview him for a blog post. He recommended me for a couple of great assignments. While I was happy to have the work, I was even more pleased that someone whose work I admired so much had remembered me and recommended me.

I had a copy of Long Story Bit by Bit at my apartment in Monrovia. I showed it to friends and acquaintances often. When I left Liberia last October, I left it, along with a couple of other photo books, at a new art school.

When I visited in February, I flipped through the book while I was at the art school. The spine was creased and the pages  showed signs of being handled. I was glad to see that – to see the students had been looking at this amazing book, and looking often.

The students loved some of the gorier photos, but not just those. We spent awhile talking about his still life of an orange, how that could tell part of the story too. And I remembered, again, what a masterful storyteller and journalist he was.

There was a drawing posted on the wall by one of the students,  based on one of Hetherington’s photos. I intended to email this image to Tim, but hadn’t yet gotten around to it.

Tim Hetherington died today in Libya. To say that he will be missed is an understatement. He was a visual pioneer, a dedicated story teller, and someone I deeply, deeply respected.

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:

• Stephanie Nolen explains an epidemic in 28 stories
• Alex Halperin looks at the Mzungu Thing
• Katine project brings village life to the mainstream media
• Candace Feit captures Senegalese wrestlers in monochrome
• Mary Wiltenburg documents a year in the life of a refugee
• Sam Reinders pictures the complications of “poverty tourism”
• Paul Sika’s technicolor dreamscape
• Andrew Rice on memory, murder and Idi Amin
• Tim Hetherington on the culmination of ten years of taking pictures in Liberia
• Rob Crilly on how to write about a place as contentious as Darfur
• Nicholai Lidow on post-conflict surfing
• Jina Moore’s Q and A about forgiveness in Rwanda

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.

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:

• Alex Halperin looks at the Mzungu Thing
• Katine project brings village life to the mainstream media
• Candace Feit captures Senegalese wrestlers in monochrome
• Mary Wiltenburg documents a year in the life of a refugee
• Sam Reinders pictures the complications of “poverty tourism”
• Paul Sika’s technicolor dreamscape
• Andrew Rice on memory, murder and Idi Amin
• Tim Hetherington on the culmination of ten years of taking pictures in Liberia
• Rob Crilly on how to write about a place as contentious as Darfur
• Nicholai Lidow on post-conflict surfing
• Jina Moore’s Q and A about forgiveness in Rwanda

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.

I met Alex Halperin in Kampala in 2008. He already was talking about writing a piece like The Mzungu Thing even back then, and I’m so glad to see it published. The essay takes a long hard look at expats in Africa – the good they do, and the not so good. Alex says a lot of things that need to be said, but that most people don’t want to hear, and certainly no one wants to write.

With amazing dry humor and a nod to How to Write About Africa, Alex recons with everything from the devaluation of African lives to “good news” to drug trafficking. Here’s a brief excerpt, though I highly, highly recommend that you read the whole essay:

The safer parts of Africa have become a workshop for high-concept philanthropy, wrapping adventurism in a veneer of charity. Young Americans bring yarn to a small Ugandan town, where they teach women to crochet hats to sell back in the States. Two British girls on a gap-year teach kids photography in Nairobi slums. They plan on selling the kids’ work from a London gallery and, if the plan works out, somehow reinvesting the profit in the kids. A fitness-oriented charity attempted to organize “an endurance running challenge: 7 marathons on 7 continents in 7 weeks in 2010. This Guinness World Record-breaking endeavor will push our team members to their personal limits with the goal of bringing fundraising and awareness to the AIDS orphans of East Africa.” Running the Antarctica Marathon for the sheer idiocy of it no longer registers on the self-satisfaction meter.

I can sympathize. It wasn’t enough to go to Africa; I had to feel important doing it. So I found a generous organization that would sponsor me to go find Africa’s untold good news, although I’d never been there. I wanted to write about social entrepreneurship, fair trade, and microfinance—this last the biggest thing in poverty reduction since Live Aid. Since I wanted to sell my stories to the mainstream American media, it would help if my central characters were white.

The point of this series is to highlight projects that go above and beyond daily news to tell a story of a place in its context. I also hope create an ongoing dialogue about what it means to tell contextual stories in Africa. There’s a lot of daily news out there that is factually incorrect, slanted, or stereotyped. But, there are also a lot of projects committed to telling a different kind of story.

See previous Context Africa posts:

• Katine project brings village life to the mainstream media
• Candace Feit captures Senegalese wrestlers in monochrome
• Mary Wiltenburg documents a year in the life of a refugee
• Sam Reinders pictures the complications of “poverty tourism”
• Paul Sika’s technicolor dreamscape
• Andrew Rice on memory, murder and Idi Amin
• Tim Hetherington on the culmination of ten years of taking pictures in Liberia
• Rob Crilly on how to write about a place as contentious as Darfur
• Nicholai Lidow on post-conflict surfing
• Jina Moore’s Q and A about forgiveness in Rwanda

How did you decide you wanted to write about this and how did the essay come about in this form?

I began writing what eventually became The Mzungu Thing during Kenya’s electoral crisis. The country was falling apart: thousands of Kenyans had been killed or injured during the violence, many times more had lost their homes and I was going home every night to a comfortable furnished apartment in Nairobi. For me it underscored the reality of Americans visiting Africa which is that they are, in almost all cases, infinitely more privileged than almost everyone they encounter. That’s not always said but still pretty obvious, so in the essay I focused on why people like me want to go to Africa and what we do once we’re there.

There are many foreigners who are doing important work in Africa. I focused on those who aren’t because their foibles are more entertaining. But I also hope the piece conveys that do-gooding isn’t something just anyone can do. Many Americans, I think, go to Africa under the illusion that somehow their mere presence will make a difference. And that isn’t any more true than it would be for someone who barged into an operating room and demanded the scalpel.

What are your concerns in publishing something like this? Do you think it might be misinterpreted?

Anything can be misinterpreted, and I do worry about that kind of thing. In a lot of reporting from Africa, undoubtedly including my own, most Africans appear as martyrs and victims in atmospheric detail and then the journalist goes off and interviews an official—often a foreigner—whom they rely on to find out what’s going on. In this piece I tried to describe encounters with a few people who probably wouldn’t appear in the media, and because these portrayals aren’t entirely sympathetic I am a bit nervous about how readers will react.

Ultimately, this essay is very much about the value of African lives to the outside world. What kind of thoughts did you have about this before you went to Africa and at the end of your stay? And after writing this piece?

Before I left for Africa I didn’t think there was any earthly calculus in which Africans have an influence proportional to their numbers. Traveling around didn’t change my mind. How could it?

To me, this essay is kind of like a version of “Stuff White People Like” that’s about Africa. What do you think of that?

I like that blog and can cringingly identify with it as much as the next white person. Sure, elements of my essay might read like what happens when ‘White People’ go to Africa. I didn’t mention it in the essay, because I couldn’t figure out a way to say it without sounding even more tendentious, but elements of white culture—which of course the blog highlights—are highly sought after by Americans in Africa. Good coffee, The New Yorker, and certain foods are all the more fetishized for being hard to come by. Pirated DVDs, iPods and 21st century pharmacology make life in Africa much more comfortable than it used to be. On the other hand the contrast between American middle-class luxuries and the reality of life in, say, northern Uganda, can be unsettling. Like any White Person, I squirmed a bit at the juxtaposition.

Do you feel guilty about being one of those mzungus?  why or why not and what do you do with that feeling?

Not really. I’m a journalist and so it’s pretty easy to say I was in Africa to write about things, not to help anyone. And like most people I’m not particularly inclined to apologize for my circumstances and good luck.

Why do you think Africa in particular is subject to this sort of thing: “The typical American in Africa is less likely to know five people willing to donate $100 than a quintet eager to fly over and give an awareness-raising rockapella concert.”?  Why don’t other poor regions see the same phenomenon?

It’s not exclusive to Africa. In Calcutta, for example, there’s a huge community of wazungu—for lack of a better term—who are anointing lepers and such because they feel guilty about some aspect of their lives. Part of this owes to Mother Teresa’s legacy but the broader point is that many people try to absolve themselves, for whatever reason, by working with the poor and it’s much more stylish these days to work with the far away poor than the nearby poor. But yes certain parts of Africa do attract more than their share of people looking to do charity on their vacation. This is probably because Africa is the poorest continent and Westerners who haven’t been there often see it as one miserable monolith, the place where they’re most needed.

Alex Halperin is a freelance reporter who lives in Brooklyn. You can reach him at alexhalperin at gmail dot com.

It’s not often that you see much about a remote rural, area in Sub-Saharan Africa in the mainstream media.  But an innovative web project hosted by the Guardian about an area in eastern Uganda called Katine is the exception that proves the rule. Editor Elizabeth Ford agreed to answer some questions for Context Africa. Katine is the online chronicle of the ups and downs of village life, from specials about secondary school to irrigation schemes, Katine is your one-stop-shop for understanding one particular kind of rural life.

The point of this series is to highlight projects that go above and beyond daily news to tell a story of a place in its context. I also hope create an ongoing dialogue about what it means to tell contextual stories in Africa. There’s a lot of daily news out there that is factually incorrect, slanted, or stereotyped. But, there are also a lot of projects committed to telling a different kind of story.

See Context Africa posts:

• Candace Feit captures Senegalese wrestlers in monochrome
• Mary Wiltenburg documents a year in the life of a refugee
• Sam Reinders pictures the complications of “poverty tourism”
• Paul Sika’s technicolor dreamscape
• Andrew Rice on memory, murder and Idi Amin
• Tim Hetherington on the culmination of ten years of taking pictures in Liberia
• Rob Crilly on how to write about a place as contentious as Darfur
• Nicholai Lidow on post-conflict surfing
• Jina Moore’s Q and A about forgiveness in Rwanda

Can you tell me a little bit about how the Katine project got started and why this particular village was chosen?

Katine is actually a sub-county in north-east Uganda, comprising six parishes with 66 villages, home to around 25,000 people (within the Katine sub-county is Katine parish and Katine village!). The project stretches across the whole of the sub-county.

The Katine project began in October 2007 by the Guardian and Observer in partnership with the African Medical and Research Foundation (Amref), Farm-Africa and Barclays. Amref is implementing the three-year development project on the ground  in Katine, with technical support on livelihoods from Farm-Africa, and it’s being funded by reader donations and Barclays.

Katine was selected by Amref as one of the poorest regions in Uganda. It is considered an opposition area politically and has been largely neglected by central government (prosperity in Uganda seems to be centred around the south, central and western regions). Katine has also experienced civil war, incursions from the Lord’s Resistance Army (fighting in the north) and cattle raids over the past 20 years.

The reason for the project is really to highlight how development works (the successes and the failures – it’s more than giving £5 for a malaria net). The work being undertaken on the ground is being followed on the Guardian’s dedicated Katine website.

The idea was sown a few years before the project began when editors at the Guardian began to discuss how we could show aid and development in a new way. New technology meant we could harness the power of the internet to publish regular updates and tell stories using videos and galleries.

We also wanted to ensure we heard more from the beneficiaries of the project – the villagers. So often aid is discussed in terms of victims and helpers and we get a one dimensional view of people’s lives. We wanted to give villagers the opportunity to share stories about their lives and to get their opinions on the project. We haven’t always been able to do this successfully, but this aspect of the project has really taken off over the last four months, with villagers using video to share their life stories and beginning to post comments on the Katine Chronicles blog and on articles.

We have two award-winning Ugandan journalists who work on the Katine project. One, Richard M Kavuma, spends  two weeks a month in thesub-county, and Joseph Malinga, who is based there full-time.

How does the team in Katine maintain such a high rate of content turn around with the challenges of electricity and internet in a rural area?

It can be challenging. The Amref office in Katine has a generator, which provides power, although outages are not uncommon. Attached to this office is a community media resource room for villagers to use. This is equippednwith five computers, so they can browse the Katine site and the internet inngeneral, and get some IT training.

Mobile phones are important, so when power goes down, information can benrelayed this way. There are also internet “cafes” in the nearest town to Katine, Soroti, which is around 22km away. Our reporters have been known to use these to file stories and pictures to us.

How does focusing long term on one village create a bettern understanding of rural life for media consumers who may have never traveled to a village?

I think focusing on one sub-county allows people to get to know the people, the local infrastructures, the cultural sensitivities etc that exist, which should give a greater understanding of the impact the work is or can have.

What kind of reaction has the Katine site on the Guardian platform received? Do you share that reaction with the people in Katine?

The reaction from readers has been mixed – lots of positive comments but also questions about why the Guardian has got involved in development. You only need to read some discussions on the blog to see this. I think, though, a lot of people who do comment on the blog are engaged with then project – perhaps questioning or praising the way Amref is working there and how the Guardian is reporting. We have shared with people in Katine what sort of impact the project is having, and some people do look at the website and read comments.

What are some of your favorite pieces on the Katine site?

One of my favourites is our first online chat between a primary school in Katine and one in London – the questions were great (they talked about football, the taste of termites, whether their teachers were nice, as well as the more serious issues of homelessness and poverty), and the children were thrilled when they received replies from a country so far away that they had only ever been told about. I think this sort of interaction addressed a few stereotypes that existing on both sides and highlighted the similarities that exist between children in London and Katine, rather than just focusing on differences.

Candace Feit is an award winning photographer who spent several years in West Africa. She’s recently moved to India, and photography from the region is worse for it. Her work is always thoughtful and beautiful, and tells some stories that make headlines and also important stories that don’t. I loved her recent series on Senegalese wrestlers, “Tyson vs. 50 Cent,” and she agreed to answer a few questions about it for Context Africa.

The point of this series is to highlight projects that go above and beyond daily news to tell a story of a place in its context. I also hope create an ongoing dialogue about what it means to tell contextual stories in Africa. There’s a lot of daily news out there that is factually incorrect, slanted, or stereotyped. But, there are also a lot of journalists committed to telling a different kind of story.

See Context Africa posts:

• Mary Wiltenburg documents a year in the life of a refugee
• Sam Reinders pictures the complications of “poverty tourism”
• Paul Sika’s technicolor dreamscape
• Andrew Rice on memory, murder and Idi Amin
• Tim Hetherington on the culmination of ten years of taking pictures in Liberia
• Rob Crilly on how to write about a place as contentious as Darfur
• Nicholai Lidow on post-conflict surfing
• Jina Moore’s Q and A about forgiveness in Rwanda

There are a lot of wrestlers in Senegal. How did you decide to focus on this particular group? How long did you spend working on this series?

You mention that wrestling is changing a lot in Senegal, from a village sport to big business. Did you get to see examples of the village counterpart during your time in Senegal?

At any point during the snapping did you do some wrestling?? Or weight lifting?

Today’s Context Africa is a special kind of post. Over at Christian Science Monitor, journalist Mary Wiltenburg and editor Clara Germani have worked together to follow “Little Bill Clinton,” a refugee displaced by the conflicts in Congo and Rwanda, currently living in Atlanta, Georgia. The effort took place in real time with a lot of multimedia pieces to help explain a complicated story. Both Mary and Clara agreed to answer questions for this post about context, sustaining interest in a long term projects, and the complications of cross-cultural exchange.

Read the blog (my favorite entry is African Kids Decode Michael Jackson), and check out this week’s CSM magazine cover story What it’s like to be a refugee in America, complete with great sidebars about refugee resettlement and a refugee gatekeeper’s lament.

Question for Mary: Can you tell me a bit about how this project got started and what’s next?

Mary: This project started with a question: What can we as journalists learn from the way people communicate online – through Facebook, Twitter, all of it – to inform our thinking about new models of storytelling they’re likely to respond to? The idea of a story unfolding over time, in intimate detail and a variety of media, appealed to me. It seemed like a natural pace at which to get to know a family and a community – both for me and for readers. Conversations with Clara about the idea led to a second question – What and who would be worth devoting a year to in this way? – which led us to the International Community School and Bill Clinton Hadam.

What’s next could be much more old-school: after the Monitor series wraps up next month, I’m hoping to write a book that will continue and expand the story.

Question for Clara: As an editor, how is working on a series like Little Bill Clinton different from the daily grind? How does the “real time” element change things?

Clara: Usually you edit only a slice of a story like this. Maybe 1,500 words on the sadness of a refugee child struggling to make it in a US school or 1,500 words on a UN refugee camp where safety from conflict is a cruel cheat because life doesn’t get better for most. But in this project, I – and our readers – lived week in and week out with Mary’s daily experiences in Bill Clinton Hadam’s home and classroom. It was the day-to-day blogging that was astonishing, delightful, and heartbreaking in it’s detail and insight: The roaches swarming Bill’s homework as he diligently tried to finish it alone at night; Bill’s verdict that the refugee camp had been kinda “stinky,” the slow piecing together of Bill’s mom’s traumas during 33 years as a refugee (losing a husband and son to genocide in Rwanda, losing a daughter who fled the refugee camp after being raped), the wonder of Bill and his brother overcoming language and cultural issues to actually get to grade-level status in an American school. So much richness went into the blogs that normally would have been sliced out by editing.

Another aspect of the project was that the reporter was going to become a part of the story by virtue of being so close to it. We anticipated this and never tried to deny that it would happen to some degree. At the beginning, it was my daily nightmare that a huge burden was being placed on Mary as a person as well as a journalist who had the newspaper’s ethics to uphold. These innocents were telling her everything, beginning to rely on her because she was one of few Americans paying attention to them. Early on we faced the dilemma of Mary’s frequent visits to Bill’s apartment and the fact that the kids were hungry: What do you do when you know that for the next year your reporter is going to be asking these people for access and information? The subtle quid pro quo of modern journalism (you give us information, we write about it and presumably civic forces will come to bear on your behalf in time) isn’t the kind of quid pro quo you’re going to be able to live with in a situation like this. These were the kind of struggles that weren’t going to end with a deadline in a few weeks – we had to cope with them throughout the year and apply our sense of integrity as we went, moment by moment.

Question for Mary: How was reporting with refugees in America different than reporting with refugees in Africa?

Mary: Really different – and counterintuitively so. You’d think the farther from home, the more “foreign” the reporting experience would be, but for me the opposite has been true.

Getting to know Bill’s parents in Atlanta has meant taking them out of context. It’s a peculiar way to meet people, torn out of their social fabric, stripped of the major relationships and clues – extended family, religious community, neighbors, jobs, educational backgrounds – that I would normally use to make inferences about people’s pasts and consider their presents. In writing about the family, I’ve tried to be sensitive to this – and I do think there are many things I’ve understood about them, and vice versa, that transcend cultural markers. But I couldn’t really place them, and I assumed this might be beyond me.

In the refugee camp I visited in Tanzania, though, I met a group of friends who had become Dawami and Hassan’s extended family over the decade they spent there together. It was a revelation. These friends – high school teachers, human rights activists, journalists, printers – were middle-class people uprooted from their lives. They had a nuanced analysis of the Tanzanian government’s refugee policy; education was their priority, and they were furious about the closing of their kids’ camp schools. For me, this made them feel very familiar. Despite our obvious differences of circumstance and culture, it was like talking with my parents’ friends in a mud-brick house on the other side of the world.

Question for Mary: How did traveling to Tanzania change or reinforce some of your opinions?

Mary: After spending time in those camps, I feel really impatient with the immigration debate back home in the US. It seems obvious to me that countries around the world need to establish paths by which those who cross their borders – whether fleeing violence or economic hardship – can work to earn their citizenship. While I was in Tanzania, the country was granting citizenship to 170,000 Burundian refugees who’d been living the country in productive, peaceful settlements since 1972 – an unusual move, and an excellent idea. It was also in the process of expelling several hundred thousand others who’d been warehoused in camps for decades, people with talents and skills who wanted to work and become contributing members of some society somewhere.

It’s not a perfect analogy to our situation in the US, of course, but I think for both countries, it does greater harm than good to keep families growing up within their borders in educational, professional, and legal holding patterns. The International Organization for Migration estimates 3 percent of the world’s population, 192 million people, now live outside the country where they were born. As an international community, we have to find better and more dignified ways of addressing this.

Question for Clara: How do you make sure your audience will connect to things happening in Tanzania? Or for that matter, even in their backyard?

Clara: One great thing about the Monitor is that there’s a presumption of reader interest in world events, that there is a presumption of importance of stories like this. Yes, we have to try to make them relevant to people who have never heard the word “mzungu” and don’t know if Dar es Salaam is a person or a place. And, yes, we have to figure out ways to “market” them via the web so that we get sufficient hits to justify the effort.

That’s what this project was designed to do: to use rich, compelling storytelling through words, audio, and video to seduce readers to what might ordinarily be unfamiliar and difficult to access. For those who found us, I think we accomplished that (look at the comments sections). The hardest problem was getting the project the exposure it needed to bring in readers for a first look.

Question for Clara: Is it hard to sustain a readers’ interest on a long term project like this one?

Clara: Well it’s not “The Bachelor” or “American Idol” – it’s REAL “reality” and it can be heavy. For readers with an interest in African issues, or refugee issues, or American poverty or education, the predisposition is to follow a project like this, and I believe there was a base of readers who did. But I’ll admit that it would take more than the average reader’s commitment to return daily to this boy’s story. I will say that once a reader’s heart was broken or warmed by one of these blogs, it would be hard for them not to occasionally pop back in for a look on the latest developments.

See Context Africa posts:

• Sam Reinders pictures the complications of “poverty tourism”
• Paul Sika’s technicolor dreamscape
• Andrew Rice on memory, murder and Idi Amin
• Tim Hetherington on the culmination of ten years of taking pictures in Liberia
• Rob Crilly on how to write about a place as contentious as Darfur
• Nicholai Lidow on post-conflict surfing
• Jina Moore’s Q and A about forgiveness in Rwanda

The debate about “poverty tourism” rages on the blogosphere on the pages of the HuffPo, Bill Eastery’s blog, and elsewhere. But, as Jina Moore (previous Context Africa feature), who wrote a great, nuanced piece about this for Christian Science Monitor, says,

If it’s that easy to be flip, you’re probably missing something.

Part of my goal in Context Africa is to look at projects that aren’t interested in easy answers. There are people out there asking difficult questions, and coming back with stories, photos, and other works that don’t provide straight answers. There’s a lot of daily news out there that is factually incorrect, slanted, or stereotyped. But, there are also a lot of journalists committed to telling a different kind of story.

Today, I’m happy to highlight the work of Samantha Reinders, who is currently based in Cape Town, South Africa. Her take on Township Tourism shows that nothing is as straightforward as it might seem and even something as divisive as “poverty tourism” can be looked at with nuance.

Here’s what she has to say about Township Tourism:

South African townships are historically rich, vibrant suburbs. It is in these townships that you can see the tangible legacy of apartheid as much as the insatiable hope for a brighter future. Touring them is important for visitors to begin to understand the complexities of modern day South Africa.

As a phenomenon it is as interesting as it is controversial. These images serve to create awareness of both the positive and negative aspects of township tourism – as a way to contribute to the very small pool of research done into the socio-cultural impacts of the trend.

My personal views on township tourism have changed considerably since I started the project in 2004.

I have seen the industry at large, as well as the actual tours, change for the better since the beginning of my study. Both the practice of touring the townships (solely looking through the window of a tour bus) as well as the perception that these tours are exclusively voyeuristic tours of poverty has changed slightly. Through encouraging media reportage, as well as positive word of mouth experiences, awareness of the positive aspects of township tourism has slowly been created. Tourists are treading more lightly in the neighborhoods they are visiting.

While many people take pictures during the Township Tours, most people don’t take pictures of the tourists themselves. How did people react to your presence and project on the tours?

People were initially surprised by my presence. Just after the tour guide introduced himself I also introduced myself and explained what I was doing. Everyone I came across was interested in the project, most asked many questions, and I think that my presence on the tours made the tourists really consider the impact of their visit. Most tourists came loaded with hundreds of questions about South Africa’s past and present, and I became quite involved in the tours in that I was another person who they could direct their questions at. In almost all of the cases the tour guides were black South Africans, living in the townships we were visiting. I’m white and live in the city…so I think it was interesting for the tourists to get both perspectives.

What made you decide to focus on this particular activity for a photo story? How does this differ from more straightforward travel photography?

Township Tourism, especially when it just became popular in the mid 90s, got really bad press in South Africa. And admittedly I was swept up in that. I thought the concept was horrible. A Brazilian friend in town was determined to do one of these tours and I went along with him and had a surprisingly good experience. So I decided to do a story on it and investigate the industry in a little more depth. As time went on I changed my mind about Township Tourism. Whilst there are definitely negative impacts on the communities involved when tours are run badly and mismanaged, I saw the positive impacts out way these in many cases. I left the project with a more 50/50 view of the industry.

It differs from normal travel photography in that is trying to tell an important story, trying to explain to the viewers the impact of this type of tourism, and show potential tourists how they can improve their experience on a township tourism for the community members of the townships they are touring. I’m hoping it will have a direct impact on the conduct of both tourists and tour guides.

What kind of reactions have you gotten to the photos?

Generally people are intrigued by the story. When I show editors it always leads to interesting discussions. No one has picked up the story to publish though ☹

Do you think photography has a role to play in post-Apartheid South Africa?

Absolutely. I really feel that photography has a massive historical importance. As South Africa moves away from the Apartheid regime I think it is integral for its unique story to be captured for prosperity. Much of South Africa’s past has been documented thoroughly through photography (the work of Kevin Carter, Ken Oosterbrook, Jurgen Schardeburg, Greg Marinovich, David Goldblatt and many others) – and its legacy is evident in many museums and books. So I hope that through this people can realize its importance in the historical sense.

See previous Context Africa posts:

• Paul Sika’s technicolor dreamscape
• Andrew Rice on memory, murder and Idi Amin
• Tim Hetherington on the culmination of ten years of taking pictures in Liberia
• Rob Crilly on how to write about a place as contentious as Darfur
• Nicholai Lidow on post-conflict surfing
• Jina Moore’s Q and A about forgiveness in Rwanda

So far, I’ve been pretty happy with the wide range of types of projects and regions of focus I’ve been able to feature on Context Africa.

• LATER TODAY: Sam Reinders pictures the complications of “poverty tourism”
• Paul Sika’s technicolor dreamscape
• Andrew Rice on memory, murder and Idi Amin
• Tim Hetherington on the culmination of ten years of taking pictures in Liberia
• Rob Crilly on how to write about a place as contentious as Darfur
• Nicholai Lidow on post-conflict surfing
• Jina Moore’s Q and A about forgiveness in Rwanda

But, they’ve been heavily weighted towards places I’m familiar with: East Africa, and specifically Uganda, and West Africa, and specifically Liberia. I’d love to feature more projects from different places and in different mediums. If you know of any projects that would be appropriate for Context Africa, I’d love to feature them. Ideally they would be well reported over a longer period of time, nuanced, and thoughtful.

I’d especially love to include some radio pieces. It’s not my medium, so I’m less familiar with what’s out there. I’d also love to include some pieces from North Africa and more from Southern Africa as well.

If you know of any projects – yours, your friends, other people’s work that you find engaging – leave a comment here with relevant information or send me an email at glennagordon at gmail dot com.