Along with partner in all things Pulitzer Center, Jina Moore, I’ve got a story up on the Foreign Policy website about the “copyrighted” law in Liberia. It’s just as crazy as it sounds:

[Philip] Banks [the former Minister of Justice and current head of Law Reform] led a team of lawyers, a group called the Liberia Law Experts, to codify the country’s newest laws. The project, which picked up where an earlier pro bono effort by late Cornell University professor Milton Konvitz had left off, won just over $400,000 in funding from the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), according to e-mail exchanges between Banks and key legal players, obtained by Foreign Policy. Konvitz had codified laws up to 1978, just before Liberia plunged into 20 years of sporadic conflict. Those volumes list the copyright as belonging to the government of Liberia.

Defending himself in an interview with FP on Oct.27, Banks says he numbered, bound, and indexed the newer laws — intellectual work that he claims as his original property. Without his efforts, he claims, Liberia’s laws would exist only in loose-leaf pamphlets and would likely be lost. Banks says the DoJ funding wasn’t enough to cover his costs. So when DoJ declined to give him more, he asserted a claim of copyright on the work, according to an explanation of the issue he sent by e-mail to a justice sector consultant in 2006. It’s a claim he has appeared willing to relinquish several times for sums between $150,000 and $360,000, according to the e-mail exchanges, which were obtained by FP.

But Banks sees the copyright as an altogether different tool. “These are resources that you’ve had to expend in putting all of this together, and the question is, should you be compensated? I hold the view that you should,” he asserted in his interview with FP. “And for folks that have said, no you shouldn’t, I’ve said to them, go and get your loose-leaf.” DoJ, meanwhile, couldn’t find records of its agreement with Banks, but a spokesperson says it would be “highly unusual” for the department to have agreed to let Banks retain the copyright.

Read the whole thing here.

When I first started working as a journalist, I really hoped my stories would change something. After being disappointed again and again when things didn’t change, I simply stopped hoping for that as a result and instead focused on the importance of reporting – regardless of any kind of outcome.

And now I find myself, several years later, hoping that a story might change something. Fingers crossed that sometime next year, Liberian lawyers might actually argue, you know, law.

Photo from Telegraph

“It is crazy that we hear nothing about the Democratic Republic of Congo. The level of suffering there is horrendous, but it hardly makes the news. I heard awful stories of young girls being raped and people fleeing attacks on their villages. Despite the suffering that they have been through the people of Congo are just like us and need our help. I hope the exhibition will wake people up to what is going on.”

The NGOs, for example, get barrels of money thanks to the images that photographers generate of mortally sick or malnourished children, money that they use, among other things, to expand their projects… If I ask a local African what he would really like to do professionally, I often get the answer that they want to work for an NGO, because in their country, NGO workers live a rich life in comfortable houses.”

“In fact,” continued Martens, “I find it a very hypocritical situation. Not because journalists and photographers would be just a gang of profiteers exploiting others’ poverty by turning it into attractive or impressive images and making piles of money, but because none of the profits that these images generate return to the people that deliver the raw material: the poor allowing themselves to be filmed. This makes the exploitation of filmed and photographed poverty a perfect double (analogy) for rubber, coltan or slave labour. The economical value of these phenomena is denied to the local population, and consequently, they get hardly anything in return. The poor are never involved in getting anything back from the exploitation of their poverty, they have no ownership over it, they are mostly not even aware of the fact that their willingness to be photographed brings in huge amounts of money for the NGO’s.”

Lots of people bring shoes/books/toys from America or Europe to Africa. Westerners no doubt have these things in so much plenty that they become disposable. But, that doesn’t mean they should dispose of them in Africa.

From the BBC, an article about old computers sent to Ghana, with this funny photo and anecdote buried in the middle of the story:

To gain an idea of how people in the rich countries sometimes provide inappropriate gifts, you only need to take a look at Ibrahim’s footwear which he found abandoned on the same rubbish heap.

He is wearing a pair of red moon boots that once graced European ski resorts.

No, it has not started snowing in steamy Ghana. But this seemingly out-of-place attire provides good protection as Ibrahim trudges through the toxic sludge, smashing screens in search of scrap.

If you’re coming to Africa and want to give people material items, skip the overweight luggage fees, get here, ask people what they might want or need, and buy it locally to support the economy and the individual.

Northern Uganda is in the news these days. There is a whole series in the Washington Post about former LRA abductees returning home. And then there’s a PBS series on the same topic.

While I think it’s great that people around the world will learn more about former LRA soldiers in Northern Uganda, what about everyone else in the region?

According to research from the Survey of War Affected Youth (SWAY), at least 66,000 youth between the ages of 14 and 30 were at one point abducted. That’s a lot. But there’s a lot of people in Northern Uganda – about two million – and that means about 3 percent of people were abducted.

Former abductees certainly should have their stories told, but I personally think part of what makes it hardest for them to return is the fact that NGOs and journalists are primary interested in these stories when really, everyone in the region suffered.

This BBC special feature from 2007 shows how in one Internally Displaced Persons camp, every person, in every hut, whether or not they were abducted, was affected directly through the death of a relative or neighbor and through the harsh conditions of camp living.

Most articles like this Washington Post story seem to focus on the difficult of re-integration of abductees, but here are some direct quotes from a SWAY report:

• Relatively few (3 percent of males and 7 percent of females) report any current problems of acceptance by their families. Communities appear to have come to accept the majority of former abductees. Less than 10 percent of males and females report still having some problem with neighbors or community members.
• Such acceptance was not immediate, however. For instance, 39 percent of females reported that they were called names by their community when they returned, 35 percent said they felt the community was afraid of them, and 5 percent report that they own family was physically aggressive with them. Current reports by females of such experiences were dramatically lower, however—7 percent for insults, 1 percent for community fear, and 0.4 percent reporting family aggression.
• Women and girls who returned from the LRA with children were most likely to report problems with their families and communities upon return, although the vast majority now say they are accepted into their families. An important minority of these young women do seem to have more persistent problems with family and community members than other female returnees, however. For instance, 14 percent of these females report that their families sometimes say hurtful things to them—far more than that reported by other long-term abductees. The reasons for such challenges seem to vary from case to case, however, suggesting that targeted conflict resolution or mediation may be the most appropriate intervention.

I’ve done a lot of reporting about Northern Uganda, and more recently did photos for one magazine feature about a former abductee which will be published in a women’s magazine next month. I have concerns generally about women’s magazines, but an assignment is an assignment and I accepted it.

Too often, editors on the other side of the world decide what should be reported here and my options are to accept the assignment or not accept it – not to dictate the kind of content published. And if I don’t accept the assignment, someone else will.

While working on this story, I found everyone in the community treated the woman and her daughter very well. Until, that is, I started taking loads and loads of photos of the two of them alone. When I was taking photos of everyone in the community, no problem, when it was just the woman and her daughter, the taunts began.

People in the community thought that maybe the other journalist and I had given this woman and her daughter presents, money, or help with school fees. And I think it was this attention, and this suspicion, that led to the biggest problems for this woman and her daughter.

So, I took pictures of all the kids playing together as much as I could, and then did what I needed to do for the magazine feature. Here’s a photo that won’t be published in the magazine, but one I really like, of a bunch of the kids in the area playing together.

Can you tell which child here is the daughter of an LRA commander and former abductee? I hope not.

I’d love to see mainstream media stories about how communities are accepting former abductees back into the fold. Or how a lot of the problems former abductees have are exacerbated by attention to individual stories when everyone has suffered.

But, I’m not going to hold my breath.

Copyright Glenna Gordon. The walls at the Jinja Road Roundabout were painted with political empowerment slogans and murals just weeks before Chogm in November 2007.

I posted a few days ago, asking, where have all the Ugandan political bloggers gone?

First off, my post elicited a directly political post from Ugandan Insomniac, which includes a bunch of newspaper covers (something most people out of Uganda don’t get to see even if they check the Vision and Monitor websites every day) and had some much needed commentary on Andrew Mwenda’s new enterprise – which may be losing its edge, as more than one person has said to me. (Which makes me think back to my original comment on self censorship, but that’s another can of worms for a another post.)

Next, a great commnet from Antipop on why there might not be more political bloggers:

To be honest with you most of us come to blogger to escape from it all. The fires, the term limits, the land wrangles, GAVI funds, presidential jet, potholes, fuel prices, press freedom, FDC, NRM,…it is everywhere you turn. the papers, the radio, tv, in the bar, even the woman that sells cassava roots in the market will have something to say about how the soaring prices have everything to do with a MUNYANKOLE president. the last thing you wnat to do is come to blogger and find it. I guess we are just tired. There is only so much whinning we can do.

And while I am particularly fond of whinning, of both the political and nonpolitical types, Jackfruity blogs to point out that Citizen Media doesn’t have to be about politics:

One of the most important things to come of out last month’s
Global Voices Summit is that the political voices aren’t the only ones that need to be amplified. Cultural and social voices are equally important to an understanding of other places, and several recent posts attempt to present readers with a more nuanced view of countries that are only discussed internationally when a crisis brings them to our attention.

Meanwhile, another expat in Uganda laments the difficulties of trying to get more Citizen Media started. She asks, Can Citizen Media Change Uganda?

In short, no. During Elizabeth Kameo’s training on writing and gathering news, it became apparent that some of the participants were not convinced of the changes citizen journalism can incur. Most in the crowd did not believe that writing a blog post would motivate the Ugandan government into action. They’re probably right. Chances are the Ugandan government will pay little attention to a scattering of blogs – many left stagnant for long periods of time. There is a slim probability that someone posting about Kampala’s man-holes – pot holes that can engulf a man, more often a small child, that are found on sidewalks and other obscure places – will be filled once an MP reads about it. Chances are the government will not pass the domestic relations bill into an act. Or will they train policemen to respect recently passed legislation on rape, domestic abuse and circumcision.

Though people aren’t blogging much about the things listed above here, perhpas that’s because the need is less urgent than for people in other countries who do write more political blogs. (This is a statement with no empircal evidence, just a conjecture I’d be happy to abandon in the face of any such evidence.) An Associated Press article here showed how Zimbabweans are using blogs and text messages as a source of information. The article implies that people are using these means because there aren’t other means avaliable.

Maybe all of us living in Uganda should be glad that blogs have not yet had to serve this kind of function and that leisure and a relatively stable situtation in this country allows for putting up photos of kittens (which, by the way, ARE SO CUTE) and bashing Facebook groups.

After all, I love kittens and bashing Facebook almost as much as whining, of both the political and nonpolitical kind.

A widely read blog based in New York called Jezebel linked to my post on African Woman magazine yesterday. The Jezebel post, as of now, has 113 comments and 7,034 views. That’s a lot.

They range from a lack of understanding of fistula, to a desire to help, to a desire to blame George Bush, all the way to making fun of magazine editors for their insistence on inopportune alliteration. Someone finally googled Sylvia Owori, the magazine’s founder, and found an article about her on the MS Uganda site.

It’s really too bad that AW doesn’t have any sort of web presence, because almost no one who read the post on Jezebel has probably ever seen the magazine. I wish these 7000+ readers (and counting) had this kind of context. Readers on my site may have heard of, seen, read, or even own issues of AW, but when the readership changes from people-interested-in-Africa to people-interested-in-celebrity-gossip, the difference is palpable. The discussion changes from what a magazine for African women should look like to the dangers of a society without Planned Parenthood.

I’m glad that 113 commenters, and 7,034 viewers now might be a little more aware of Lovinsa, but I’m not sure that being aware of the flaws of a Ugandan glossy are the same as really being aware of fistula. Maybe some awareness is better than none, but maybe that’s the same kind of logic that leads one to say giving a fistula survivor a makeover is better than giving her nothing.

The Ugandan blogosphere is vibrant – lots of blogs, lots of ideas, lots of contributors, lots of words, lots of posts, lots of comments.

But where have all the political blogs gone? There’s this one, but that’s also a newspaper column, or this one, not updated frequently, or this one that’s not by a Ugandan, and some others that are more general to Africa and not specific to Uganda.

Or were polticial blogs never there in the first place? There’s plenty of thoughts on boda bodas, Big Brother Africa, the bad weather Kampala’s been having lately, being broke, and other aspects of life in Uganda that certainly aren’t apolitical, but they aren’t exactly government budgets and school fires either.

Here’s an email I got from a reader recently:

I’m wondering if you could suggest a site for me. I’ve been searching for a while for an online forum re: Uganda news and politics. It’s been tough finding more than news sites or sites that compile various news sources. I’m really looking for critical discussion on current events in UG and/or E Africa. For example, where are people posting about and discussing term limits, failed/successful development projects, UG economics, etc? NV and Monitor perspectives are so narrow and the discussion is lost after a day.

Where do you go for these sorts of discussions? Where might you suggest one goes for this?

And this one came to a list on I’m for Global Voices from a popular expat blogger, Jackfruity:

How about a cross-Africa post on the ICC‘s charges? Uganda has a couple of contributions (hopefully we’ll have more soon, but not a lot of people are blogging about it right now). What do you think? I’d be happy to put it together if people want to send me links.

I never really saw much from the Ugandan blogosphere about the ICC charges, though I’d be happy if I was wrong and there’s something I wasn’t reading. Omar al-Bashir’s indictement could have some serious repercussions on what’s going on with Joseph Kony, who is wanted by the ICC, and therefore what’s going on with an entire region of this country – millions of people.

But maybe they aren’t the people with blogspot addresses?

I’m technically an author for Global Voices, though I’ve done about four posts in the past year. Though I love the window into people’s lives (I’m thinking of you, and you, and you and everyone else) it’s not the kind of citizen media stuff that I find exciting – the kind that fills the gap between what the newspapers are saying and what people are really thinking.

Or maybe I’m looking in all the wrong places? I’d love to hear what readers think about this and basically just about anything else as well.

I want to know what people think about the structures that affect their lives, but I’m wondering if maybe the internet in Uganda is not the space to express them? Though there’s not a very heavy hand of government involved in internet censorship, maybe self censorship is so strong the government doesn’t have to be heavy handed?

Women’s magazines in the west tell you to suck in your stomach, buy some new heels, and you too will have the job/man/apartment of your dreams.

What happens when you take Cosmo and publish it in Africa without altering the formula?

From Fistula to Fab!

Basically, a staffer at AW went to Mulago and found a woman who was recovering from a fistula. They dressed her up in clothes with a sum total price tag of about half a million shillings ($300). Considering that this woman couldn’t previously afford transport from Wakiso to Kampala (UGX 2000 or $1.50), those are some pretty pricey clothes.

There isn’t much in the way of quoting this woman, or discussing what she might want for her future or her children, just how she likes having her hair done and how nice she looks when she smiles.

The makeover genre is popular in the likes of Cosmo and Marie Claire, but usually the subject is a quiet secretary or former band geek or some other social pariah ready to join a stiletto-ed consumer army. Taking this trope, and applying it to a woman recovering from a fistula repair surgery seems callous. Though the African Woman article focuses on obstetric fistula (those caused by problems during childbirth), a lot of fistula cases are caused by gang rape, violent rape, or foreign objects used during sexual violation.

It seems to me like someone who has had a fistula probably needs more than a makeover. Sure, someone might argue, providing more information and humanizing fistula is important, but I can’t help but wonder how this woman felt during the process. And moreover, how did she feel afterward, when the journalists, stylists, and photographers made a rapid exit for the next story, probably taking the fancy clothes with them?

Instead of a headline like, From Flabby to Fab! or from Yellow Teeth to Sparkling White! or some other you might find within the glossy pages of a Hearst Publication, From Fistula to Fab! trivializes a very serious problem without offering meaningful commentary or insight into things like medical advances, or people who are working to stop discrimination or incidence, or the voices of survivors themselves.

It would be great if African women had a magazine they could call their own. But they don’t. African Woman is just a transplant of the Western version, all the more problematic for ignoring the difference between yellow teeth and fistula.

Kevin Carter was a South African photographer who originally made his name covering the violence in Johannesburg townships during the drawn-out ending to apartheid. He and three other male South African photographers pounded the pavement every day for years.

Only two of the four survived.

It was during a brief lull during the ongoing violence in South Africa that Carter took a trip to Sudan. At that phase of the conflict, few images existed to show the magnitude of suffering and misery.

When his photo was eventually published in the New York Times, there was a public out pour: what happened to this little girl? So close to the feeding center, did she make it? Carter sat back down under the tree and the little girl, with a burst of energy, crawled to the feeding center.

The NYT called him to ask what happened – they needed to address their readers’ questions. Carter admitted that he hadn’t helped the girl, but insisted he was sure she had made it to the center. Eventually, for some reason explained by neither the book The Bang Bang Club nor the magazine article in Time, the NYT editorial said that it was unknown whether the girl made it to the center. People were outraged at Carter’s callousness.

Fourteen months after he took the now famous photo, Carter won the Pulitzer. Two months after that, he was dead – suicide, when he was only 33 years old.

Carter didn’t kill himself because of strangers’ judgment. He had plenty of his own problems. But feeling the appraisal of strangers, when it’s all you can manage to get out of bed and face things again the next day, is overwhelming. It takes a psychological toll to be out there, every day, doing this. I haven’t done war photography or conflict photography, but I don’t know that the kind of structural violence inflicted by poverty and famine, which I have covered, is so distant from the frontlines.

Carter’s suicide note was a garbled list of money problems and nightmares of violence.

The lingering memories of what I have witnessed, often incomprehensible to others, keep me up at night. I’m not going to do anything drastic, but Carter’s dilemmas remind me of Stephen at quarry just outside Kampala. In the quarry, Stephen and hundreds of others, mainly urban refugees who at one point fled the violence in Northern Uganda, pound away at piles of rocks for pennies a day with almost no opportunities for education, health care or advancement. At the quarry, it seems as if people have crushed rocks there for an eternity, and will crush rocks for another eternity.

I posted on this blog about how sad I felt about Stephen, how I wanted to do something to help, but what would I do? And would it be sustainable? A few people wrote in comments chastising me: I could pay his school fees easily, after all, what is $50 to me?

I responded a bit, posting here about ways people could help Stephen and the community.

But honestly, I felt bitter about these comments. I don’t know who these people were telling me that I should do more. Where do they live? What do they do?

If they haven’t been here, what they don’t understand is that right next to Stephen is another kid, equally desperate, also crushing rocks for pennies a day.

Yes, I can afford Stephen’s school fees – for a term, or even a few terms. But I probably won’t always be in Uganda. And then what? And what about the boy next to Stephen? And the little girl next to that little boy?

Some of the replies here were more thoughtful than just a base criticism – maybe my part, after all, is to take the photos that can tell people about suffering in a corner of the world they couldn’t find on a map. Maybe that was enough. Or, if I, or someone else, were to help Stephen, then that’s enough. We don’t have to save everyone, and helping Stephen is important too.

But Stephen is just one story. I haven’t yet written here about the pediatric feeding center in Karamoja. I’m still trying to sell the photos, publish a story, but the truth is, most people don’t care about some Africans dying in some remote corner of the some bush.

To me, this part is devastating. If my part is to take the photos and inform readers and interested parties, if I can’t even get my work published, then I’m not doing my share. It’s not for lack of trying, or because of some failing in the quality of my work, but because even the people who do care have a limit for this kind of devastating tragedy.

I sent an SMS from the feeding center to a photo editor. “At pediatric feeding center outside a town in Karamoja. Malnutrition rampant, children dying. Have pix.”

He texted back: “No thanks. We just did famine in Ethiopia.”

Ultimately, whether or not I get my photos and stories from Karamoja published, it probably won’t matter that much. After all, Carter’s photo was seen all around the world, and little has changed between when he took the photo in 1993 and now, 15 full years later.

In other related news, an American couple emailed me recently to tell me that they adopted Stephen’s little sister.

Stephen, however, despite photos, despite many inquires, remains in the quarry.

And the famine continues in Karamoja.

And the violence continues in Sudan.

Tomorrow morning, I will wake up, take more pictures, and write more stories, despite all evidence pointing to the futility of such work.

After all, it’s more futile not to try.


COPYRIGHT Glenna Gordon/AP

Ever wonder what Robert Mugabe and Joseph Kony have in common? Besides being generally unliked people in circles opposed to human rights violations, they both work with this man: David Matsanga.

Look no further for proof than Africa News Flash, a site whose headline is in blue with animated flames. There are even phone numbers to contact our friend Dave while he’s in Zimbabwe or the UK, where this member of the Acholi diaspora apparently makes his home.

The site includes headlines like, “The president will survive the media onslaught,” and “I have quit the casino politics of Uganda.”

Fun reading. Especially if it’s Saturday around 4 AM and the Penetcostal Church right next to your home is displaying unusual stamina and vigor…


Matsanga emerges from the bush, without Kony, at the failed Juba peace talks this April. COPYRIGHT Glenna Gordon/AP