I recently went with another reporter to photograph the Mununga II camp containing 8,000 people displaced from the war. This place has a sort of biblical aesthetic. There are two active volcanoes and most of the ground around Goma is jagged volcanic rock. The people displaced from the war sleep, eat, cook, and the children play atop it, constantly lacerating the bottoms of their feet.
The situation as it is seems sufficiently horrible but in order to get a photograph the wire services will run, you have to find ribs and death. That’s the problem with Congo, people in the camps are malnourished but not starving. It’s difficult to get that James Natchtwey gaunt-face / flies-on-the-eye photograph. People are dying slowly, which is more amenable to time-lapse than snapshot. A malnourished child has a distended abdomen and a bloated face. Something clearly looks wrong but a photo won’t cry out death.
According to UN OCHA (the UN agency responsible for coordinating with other UN agencies about humanitarian crises) there are currently 650,000 people displaced from the war and living in these Eastern Congo camps. There was recently a cholera outbreak in this one and I’m supposed to be headed north where the problem is measles. Yet it’s very difficult to get the attention of major media outlets because this tragedy doesn’t fit the long-established visual cultural of mediated Africa.
That’s one side of the PR dilemma. The other concerns the displaced. People here are extremely savvy when it comes to photography. I first noticed this when I was in Rwanda training a local in photography. Rwanda is an extremely hostile place to photograph because the population seems to think that every picture will end up on a UNICEF poster.
We were in the back alleys of Kigali’s Muslim quarter when my student asked for permission to take a photograph. Someone from the crowd that had formed behind us yelled, “Hey, they’re going to say you’re the poorest man in Africa.”
My student then took the photograph and we all had a laugh.
Flash to the camp in Congo.
First we had to meet the president of the camp and his wife to pay our respects and get permission to photograph anything. Once we had permission, we went through the camp accompanied by a young woman who proceeded to guide me to the huts of the most aged and ailing people. She grabbed an old man with a massive goiter and placed him in front of his hut. Then she pushed aside the cloth door to reveal the squalid interior.
I took the photo and we moved on and she grabbed another man, crazed, with jagged teeth. Same thing as before, setting him up for me. On it went, us going through the camp, her calling forth the elderly, dying, pathetic.
Thing was, the volcano and the suffering were just the insane backdrop of what felt like any loathsome PR job in Los Angeles.
I eventually escaped and joined a woman and her five children as she cooked dinner. The moment of intimacy allowed for some natural and poignant photographs. Satisfied that I had captured something real, I headed back to the car to try and drink water without anyone seeing. (You become precariously dehydrated in the camps and feel guilty drinking your private stash of potable water). Outside the car a group of 8-year-olds had gathered wanting food and to have their pictures taken. The driver put in a tape of Celine Dion songs while a skirmish broke out among the boys.
Celine sings: If I kiss you likje this and you whisper like that.
Outside the fight escalates, two boys shove each other.
It was lost long ago but it’s all coming back to me.
A punch is thrown.
If you want me like this and if you need me like that.
One of the boys picks up a large rock and is about to smash it against the other child.
It was dead long ago but it’s all coming back to me. It’s so hard to resist and its all coming back to me.
The violence stops, I gaze at the boy with the rock for a spell and then he drops it. We leave the camp and I file the photos and soon hear basically that they will not be used because there have been no new reports of cholera in the last few days and the photos lacked sufficiently dramatic elements.
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Andrew McGregor is a contributing correspondent. This is the second entry in his Congo notebook. His photos have been published by Reuters, the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse.
