Conflicts make for great photos
but do you just admire the picture ….. and ignore the message?
2 million people dead, 4 million displaced, because of war, famine and disease, while the world watched and waited.
The Second Sudanese Civil War, was a conflict from 1983 to 2005, between the central Sudanese government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. It was, to a large extent, a continuation of the First Sudanese Civil War from 1955 to 1972.
Although it originated in southern Sudan, the civil war spread to the Nuba mountains and the Blue Nile. It lasted for 22 years, and is one of the longest civil wars on record. South Sudan became independent, six years after the war ended.
Approximately two million people died as a result of war, famine and disease caused by the conflict. Four million people in southern Sudan were displaced at least once, many of them repeatedly, during the war. The civilian death toll is one of the highest of any war since World War II, and was marked by numerous human rights violations, including slavery and mass killings.
The famine of 1993 was one of the most severe in the history of Sudan, and almost resulted in a failed state. The famine occurred in an area, where around 60% of the population was living below the poverty line.
It was against this background, that Kevin Carter a South African photo-journalist and Joao Silva, headed north into Sudan to cover the famine there.
Carter was keen to get away from South Africa, where he had recently spent some months romantically pursuing a woman who had not shown the least interest in him. Recovering from his unrequited love, he had met a teacher, Kathy Davidson who had re-re-energised him. The trip to Sudan gave him an opportunity to re-gather himself and get his life back on track.
Arriving in Sudan
Carter and Silva landed near the village of Ayod, where they had their first and immediate experience of starving people, looking for food. The feeding centre was swamped with people, but lacked any food.
Carter found the scene extremely distressing and took a stroll in the bush to calm his nerves.
At first, it was a soft whimpering sound, pitiful and animal like.
He moved quietly towards it, careful not to disturb the source.
Then it came into view.
A small African child was crawling weakly to the centre of a clearing in the bush.
The child was acutely weak and emaciated. Carter was watching the slow death of a human being, bereft of sustenance and barely having the energy to breathe.
He also knew instinctively, that this was a moment if seen by the rest of the world, could jolt them into action to help these forgotten people.
Carter crouched with his camera, ready to frame an eye-level shot.
As he did so, a vulture landed behind the child, awaiting what looked like the inevitable moment of death.
He clicked and clicked and clicked and clicked. The bird did not move!
Watching and waiting ……..
Carter said he then sat under a tree, watched the child struggle for a while, smoked a cigarette and ‘talked to God’!
Later he recounted, that he waited about 20 minutes for the bird to fly away. When it did not, he said he chased it away.
All this time, he waited and watched ……………… and then he left!
Alone again, the child continued to labour in his struggle to reach …………? He knew not where.
Carter returned to where Silva was and related the sequence of events, all the time wiping his eyes and saying. ‘I see all this, and all I can think of is Megan (his daughter). I can’t wait to hug her when I get home’.
Award and recognition
Carter received acclaim from critics and friends for his work in the Sudan. He also received the Pulitzer Prize for this photograph of the “girl and the vulture”.
It was reported that members of his family described that time, as the happiest of his life.
Someone later asked him how many vultures there were, in that area that day. He said there was one.
The response was, “No. There were at least two”!
It is said that Carter’s work drew praise and condemnation over the next little while, in almost equal measures, until finally, haunted by the horrors of the scenes he had witnessed throughout his work, and beset by financial problems, he took his own life, at the age of 33.
From 1983 to 2005, like Carter in 1993, the world waited and watched ……………
Is it any different today?
Note:
In 2011, the child’s father revealed the child was actually a boy, Kong Nyong, and had been taken care of by the UN food aid station. Nyong had unfortunately died four years prior in 2007, of “fevers”, according to his family.