Last night at dinner with a couple of friends including a great Ugandan journalist now studying at Columbia, we discussed just how hilarious President Museveni of Uganda is when rapping. Hilarious enough to post here?? YES SEVO!

Here’s a translation of the lyrics from the New Vision, via the Reuters blog:

The stick I cut strayed into Igara where Ntambiko reigns / Ntambiko gave me a knife which I gave to millet harvesters / who gave me millet that I gave to a hen / which gave me an egg that I gave to children / who gave me a monkey that I gave to the king / who gave me a cow that I used to marry my wife / She gave me a child I called Mugarura who raided back what belonged to me and my fathers.

As most of you probably already know, on Sunday night a series of bombs went off in Kampala at crowded locations where people were watching the World Cup. Over 70 people are already dead and a similar number are injured. Many are pointing fingers at the al-Shabaab.

My heart and thoughts are with everyone who lost someone, and with everyone in Kampala and elsewhere who no longer feels quite as safe.

Last week, I got an email from Benjamin Chesterton of duckrabbit asking my opinion of a post he’d written on the ethics involved in a series of photos by Italian photographer Marco Vernaschi of child sacrifice in Uganda supported by the Pulitzer Center.

(Full disclosure: I was the recipent of funding from the Pultizer Center along with Jina Moore in 2009.)

Before I even clicked on the link, I knew which photos he was talking about. I’d seen them, months earlier, and they struck me as somewhat off. I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly, but the dark and eerie photos didn’t look anything like the country I’d lived in for two years. I was in Uganda in January when I saw them and put up this tweet:

The blogosphere has plenty of opinions and posts about the controversy. See here, or here, or here, or here, or any of a dozen other places, including responses from the Pulitzer Center director Jon Sawyer and the photographer himself.

A quick summary of the controversy: photographer exhumes small girl murdered for sacrificial purposes to take photos of her body, then gives her family money, then clearly changes his story more than once and makes people suspect every “fact” in the situation may not be so “factual.”

First, kudos to Benjamin for bringing all of this to light. Second, I’m glad to see photographers and others who have opinions on something other than photoshop manipulation, which has always seemed beside the point to me.

Third, it’s clear that regardless of the specifics, Marco has made some dubious decisions. I think that’s something you can see in his photos, and perhaps why I felt some much discomfort when I first viewed them – not because he was uncovering something shocking, but because something was wrong. I’ve always said that how you take a photo affects how the photo looks.

Finally, I don’t like Marco’s photos because they don’t tell me anything I don’t know. They only make me think about him, and what he did to get into the particular situation that resulted in the photo.

Here’s the photo on the homepage of his website. It doesn’t tell me anything about the world or the people in the image, it just makes me think why on earth did that dude and those two women let him stand above him while they were having a sexual encounter? And what did Marco say to get them to agree to this? It’s voyeurism - nothing more.

Marco’s actions were clearly unethical. But enough has been said about that already that I don’t feel the need to say more here. Instead, I’d like to end with a word about a photographer’s approach. Did he have the best of intentions? Perhaps. But did he have his subjects’ best interests as his primary priority? No. He says he exhumed the body so that he could expose a wide spread problem. But had he instead respected the needs of the people with whom he was interacting, that respect would show in the photograph and ultimately it would do far more to promote discussion on the issue of child sacrifice than his sensationalist photographs manage to do. All his photographs manage to do is promote discussions about him.

I ask a lot of people. I ask for their stories, their past and present, their secrets, their fears. Most people give generously of themselves. They offer me a seat or invite me into their homes.

I’m always amazed by how much people share with me when all I’ve done is ask. But when I went to Uganda a month ago, I was especially astounded. At a time when an anti-homosexuality bill threatens to criminalize loving and living, several gay friends nonetheless invited me to their homes and allowed me to take their photos, to write down their names, to risk further exposure. They could have just said no. Many people I asked did. But a few didn’t. And I’m glad for it, and glad to share their stories here.

Read my article in Time, see a story a colleague wrote that uses one of my photos, and see more images on glennagordon.com.

Riots broke out yesterday in Kampala. At least ten people are dead, there’s rioting all over town and as far out as Mukono, and it seems like things are getting a bit worse than yesterday rather than cooling off.

Keep up to the moment with what’s happening by searching the hashtag #kampala or following these folks on Twitter:

@UgandaTalks, @Nnfrank, @UgInsomniac, @SolomonKing, @CamaraAfrica

Also, check Uganda Witness, which looks like it’s rolling out an Ushahidi type platform. BlogSpirit aggregates most blogs about Uganda. The Independent is timing out on my connection right now, but will hopefully be back up and running soon.

Here’s some background and analysis from AFP:

Protesters from the Baganda tribe, which is the majority in central Uganda, have been angered by government efforts to stop their ruler Ronald Muwenda Mutebi visiting Kayunga county, north of Kampala, where violence was feared.

Yoweri said his government would not back down on keeping Mutebi out of Kayunga. “I told him (the ruler) that the meeting in Kayunga will not take place until some conditions that will be communicated to him by the minister of internal affairs are met.”

Medard Ssegona, deputy information minister for the Buganda Kingdom, also refused to back down.
“We are not going to be intimidated by the government into giving up our demands,” he said, while adding that the group was ready for talks with the government.

Ethnic Baganda MPs walked out of parliament in protest over the issue Wednesday.

The traditional king holds a ceremonial position but also wields political influence.

The government shut down a radio station owned by the Baganda kingdom accusing it of engaging in “sectarian acts”. The king of the Baganda is expected to travel to Kayunga on Saturday, heightening fears of more violence.

Daniel Kalinaki, managing editor of the Monitor newspaper, said in an editorial the riots are the most serious test so far for Museveni, am ethnic Munyankole, as they have destroyed his relationship with the Baganda people.

“Among the debris in the blood-splattered streets lies something else: the broken shards of what was left of President Museveni?s relationship with Buganda.”

The Baganda are in the majority in central Uganda and the loss of this voter base would weaken Museveni’s position at the next elections.

And, to all my friends and everyone else in Uganda, stay safe. Journalists, don’t get too close.

I wouldn’t presume to say what Ugandans will learn from the book. I think that most of what it says are things they already know. The one thing that I think it might do–that I sincerely hope it will do–is encourage Ugandans who lost someone to think that the past is retrievable. I know that Duncan Laki’s story has already had that effect on many Ugandans. As for Americans, I hope they read this book and realize there is something more to Africa than elephants and tribal dancing and civil wars. As I said, the book is really about the Uganda of the present–a profoundly flawed country, but miraculously stable and politically vibrant and gloriously argumentative one. Maybe it takes the cartoonish figure of Idi Amin to get readers interested in learning about such a place, but I hope that by the end of the book they realize that there’s something far more ambiguous and multifaceted–more interesting–going on now than simple brutality.

Andrew Rice has written about Africa for The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and The Economist, among other publications. His article “The Book of Wilson,” published in The Paris Review, received a Pushcart Prize. Between 2002 and 2004, he lived in Uganda as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, an American nonprofit foundation. Prior to that, he worked for several newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Observer. A native of Columbia, South Carolina and a graduate of Georgetown University, he currently lives in Brooklyn.

(Photo of Duncan Laki courtesy of Vanessa Vick)

I’m very excited to be partnering with Awava. You can now buy blank greeting cards with images from my time in Uganda at the Awava Marketplace. Some of my favorite photos from Uganda are on sale in sets of five images each. And, just this weekend (Friday, Saturday, Sunday) enter the code

A larger portion of the profit will go towards supporting several groups of people in Uganda who are very near and dear to me. More about that later, so for now, buy a card, an awesome basket or two, and read more about Awava’s amazing work.

There are lots of ways to get started as a photographer or journalist. I wrote about a few of them here, and I wrote about a portfolio review and some great advice from the lovely Jamie Rose.

I met Jamie and her colleague John Anderson when they were in Uganda running a Momenta workshop. I didn’t take the workshop, just helped them with some logistics. But I saw firsthand how a photographer could benefit from their format and instruction.

With fifteen students, and three instructors, everyone who participated got one-on-one feedback on an ongoing basis and a solid foundation of professional photo skills, as well as career guidance and an understanding of the options for working photographers.

They’re running another workshop in Uganda this spring – Project Uganda 2009: Photography as a Force of Change - and it’s definitely worth considering if you’re not quite sure how to take your passion for making images and run with it, or if you want to take your skills to a new level, or if you just really want to meet Jamie.

Here are a few photos from last year’s students. You too could make these kinds of images, so sign up soon, and tell them I said hello .

All photographs are © 2008 Momenta Group LLC.

My piece in this edition of Ms Magazine.
See a bigger version here.