We must not look away from the crises in Africa-Maaza Mengiste

A single photo focused the world’s attention on Sudan in 93. As Gaza and MH17 dominate, Africa’s horrors remain invisible
In the photograph a little girl is hunched low, head bent to the ground, ribs jutting out from a too-small body wasting away from starvation. A few feet behind her, a vulture waits, avid and focused, for her to die. When this photograph, taken in southern Sudan in 1993 by the late photojournalist Kevin Carter, was published, the outcry from the public was immediate and visceral. Questions of ethics, and inquiries on how to help, flooded the New York Times. The Pulitzer prize-winning photo riveted the world and directed attention to the devastating famine in the country.

As controversial as the picture was, as problematic as it may have been for Carter to shoot it while the young girl sat, helpless prey to a vulture, the image sparked worldwide interest in the famine. People noticed and, suddenly, people cared.

Kevin Carter’s photograph, taken during the 1993 famine in Sudan. ‘The outcry from the public was immediate and visceral.’ Photograph: Megan Patricia Carter Trust/Kevin Carter/Corbis Sygma

Now, three years after independence, South Sudan, the world’s youngest country, is expected to declare that it is once again in a state of famine. The crisis has been caused by conflict between government forces and various opposition groups. Four million people are facing emergency levels of food shortages. One and a half million have been displaced and 50,000 children are at risk of death from malnutrition.

The situation has been called the most rapidly deteriorating humanitarian crisis today, but without an image startling enough to make the headlines, it has remained invisible. The world’s gaze is being directed elsewhere, towards the devastating news emerging daily from Gaza and the tragic downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17.


South Sudan is not the only African nation in crisis. There is also theCentral African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The three cases share one striking similarity: not enough attention is being paid to what’s going on. In trying to explain why, journalists blame the lack of bureau offices outside key cities in a few countries. Some point to news outlets’ financial struggles, and the shrinking number of journalists conducting immersive stories. Time is too short, money too tight, people too few.

It could also be that we have simply tired of African tragedies. If an image must grab our attention before we read an article, then perhaps we have seen enough. It is easy to conflate countries, to merge regions and blur the distinctions that differentiate one group from another. To hear of “ethnic genocide” in South Sudan is to hear echoes of the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur. Those children teetering on the brink of starvation recall the famines in Somalia and Ethiopia. Memory connects what we’ve seen in the past with what we are being asked to witness in the present. We come to photographs already tainted.

In January 2014 some of the 55,000 photographs of prisoners who had died while in a Syrian prison were released to the public. I opened a link online, troubled, and found myself unable to look beyond the first image: the emaciated corpse of a young man. Every part of him had been starved away. A graphic of a square black bar had been placed just below the sternum, covering a wound too gruesome for the public to see. These photos were a deliberate record of systematic torture and mass killings. They have been compared to the treatment of inmates of Nazi concentration camps. Yet, several months later, these photographs have not entered public consciousness, perhaps because there is nothing more to be done to save those prisoners.

Photographs of violence ask us to bear witness to atrocity. Bearing witness begs us to respond. When there is nothing left to do, it is easy to fall prey to numbing helplessness and confusion. It could also be that the war in Syria has grown more complicated. We are forced to contend with messy narratives and multiple sides, all equally ruthless. Any clear lines of demarcation separating “good” from “evil” have collapsed. It is easier to back away from those photographs until some event, too catastrophic to ignore, tells us how we should react. In the meantime, we try to forget.

But maybe confusion and uncertainty are what we should be feeling. The debate among editors and photography agencies about the graphic nature of photographs of Gaza and MH17 illustrates that there is no “right” way to think about such images of violence. Perhaps all of us, the general public and “experts” alike, are in constant negotiation with our capacity to bear witness and our need to protect our capacity for compassion. Perhaps there is something to be done even when the appropriate reaction feels unclear.

Maybe we have to allow our discomfort as another consequence of the violence depicted. Our shared confusion and disgust can bind us to those who are suffering, rather than draw us away from them. They too have had to witness.

To deny our own human reactions makes it easier to deny the humanity of those who are photographed. Though we cannot change what has happened, we can alter the symbolism attached to the images. Photographs can be more than a reminder of cruelty and the inevitable aftermath of war. There are narratives unfolding right now in South Sudan, in the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo that can be rewritten. We have the ability to strip away what we’re supposed to see – just another African victim – and gaze upon what we should: a human being. But first, we have to look.
http://www.theguardian.com/