Africa News blog

from Photographers Blog:

The children of Dadaab: Life through the lens

Through my video “The children of Dadaab: Life through the Lens” I wanted to tell the story of the Somali children living in Kenya’s Dadaab. Living in the world’s largest refugee camp, they are the ones bearing the brunt of Africa’s worst famine in sixty years.

I wanted to see if I could tell their story through a different lens, showing their daily lives instead of just glaring down at their ribbed bodies and swollen eyes.

It was a challenging project. As one senior photographer asked, how else can we tell the story without showing images that clearly illustrate the plight of the starving millions? Few photographs cover all aspects of life in the camps.

Many of Dadaab’s children are dying. And then there are others who, despite living in the world’s oldest refugee camp, embrace their childhood; they play, go to school, care for their siblings and collect water for their families. I wanted to incorporate all of these aspects of life for Dadaab’s children into this project.

To tell the story, I combined Reuters photography captured during the height of the famine with footage I had collected when I was in Dadaab six months ago, before the severity of the crisis hit international headlines.

The point is, when news of the famine made it to the front pages, the children I had filmed in Dadaab were now only perceived as children on the frontline of famine. Not just as children who were excited with the furor we brought to the camp.

from Photographers Blog:

Me and the man with the iPad

By Barry Malone

I never know how to behave when I go to write about hungry people.

I usually bring just a notebook and a pen because it seems somehow more subtle than a recorder. I drain bottled water or hide it before I get out of the car or the plane. In Ethiopia a few years ago I was telling a funny story to some other journalists as our car pulled up near a church where we had been told people were arriving looking for food.

We got out and began walking towards the place, me still telling the tale, shouting my mouth off, struggling to get to the punch line through my laughter and everybody else’s.

Then there was this sound, a low rumbling thing that came to meet us.

I could feel it roll across the ground and up through my boots. I stopped talking, my laughter died, I grabbed the arm of the person beside me: “What is that?” And I realized. It was the sound of children crying. There were enough children crying that -- I’ll say it again -- I could feel it in my boots. I was shamed by my laughter.

from Photographers Blog:

No turning back as Africa’s hour arrives

The 2010 World Cup has been a memorable and momentous occasion not only for me, but for South Africa, the African continent and the rest of the world.

It has indeed been incredible. It has been a unifying factor, with people beginning to appreciate the importance of their national symbols such as flags.

As a photographer for an institution such as Reuters, one can say that I have been privileged to be a part of this historic occasion. It was indeed a privilege to be among hordes of international media covering the event. I was here during the Confederations Cup, but the feeling of covering the World Cup is enormous - it is part of history.

This has changed the perception of those who doubted that South Africa, or Africa as a whole, could stage such a magnificent tournament. Everywhere, people have been consumed by the World Cup. Cars have been decorated with flags, houses and shops - many with the South African flag.

PHOTOBLOG: Children in Kenya and Haiti forced to grow up fast, if they survive

I had a flashback the other day when I was looking at photographs from Haiti of 15-year-old Fabianne Geismar, shot dead in the head after stealing wall hangings from a Port-au-Prince store, crushed in the Jan. 12 earthquake.

The image of Fabianne sprawled on the ground, blood trailing over the paintings she’d grabbed, took me back to my own childhood in Nairobi and the sight of a 7- or 8-year-old-boy – probably the same age as me at the time – who was caught stealing sweets from a street vendor and was beaten and burnt with rubber tyres. They called it mob justice.

To this day, I’ll never understand why that poor boy had to die such a violent and senseless death for something so trivial. I feel the same way about Fabianne – she survived one of the most catastrophic events in living memory, only to be shot in the head for petty theft. And for stealing wall hangings where there are no walls.

Fabianne’s childhood was brutally stolen from her and it got me thinking about how quickly so many young people in places like Africa, Asia and the Americas have to grow up, forced to fend for themselves through child labour or prostitution, denied an education and exposed to violence, disease and hunger at an age when they should be learning and playing.

Of the 2.2 billion children in the world, 1 billion live in poverty and experience violence annually, UNICEF figures show, meaning nearly half the children in the world don’t get to have childhoods. There are also an estimated 132 million orphans in the world, UNICEF says.

Children under 18 make up almost half of Haiti’s 9-million population and the country faces the highest rates of infant and child mortality in the Western hemisphere.

Officials fear thousands of children have been separated from their parents, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation by child traffickers, being illegally adopted by other countries or forced into child labour in order to survive. Around 150 million children worldwide aged 5–14 are engaged in child labour.

from Our Take on Your Take:

Too busy with pirates

My initial contact with Abdinasir Mohamed Guled was when he submitted a photo to our user-generated content service, called You Witness at the time, now Your View. The caption read "hi reuters" and the location was listed as Mogadishu suqa holaha district. This was enough to peak my attention.

I spoke with Abdinasir, who at the time was busy covering the story of pirates off the Somali coast. Below is his account of his journey from contributor to You Witness to regular stringer for Reuters.

A Somali family arrive at the Elasha Biyaha camp for the internally displaced  after they fled from renewed clashes in Mogadishu, May 13, 2009.  REUTERS/Abdi Guled

"Before working for Reuters I was working for a local radio station in Mogadishu and for various websites. I was working as a producer and would contribute to CNN.

I do like taking photographs, however it is not always easy in Somalia. One day I took a picture of Ethiopian soldiers walking on the street. They were really annoyed. One of the soldiers asked me what I was doing and I told him I was fixing my camera. He asked me to show him the picture and told me to leave the area. Be careful, always.

from Photographers Blog:

Death all around

A Congolese refugee in a tattered baseball cap, worn clothes and blue flip-flops begged me for a cigarette at Kibati, a camp for 65,000 people displaced by fighting in eastern Congo.

I scolded him, saying smoking was bad for his health, as if anything could be worse for your health than living in this conflict-racked corner of Democratic Republic of Congo.

Machine gun fire erupted nearby and people dived for cover, ducking into rows of flimsy tents made from torn sheets of white plastic stretched over sticks.

"Mister, mister, come lie down in here," a voice called from one tent as bullets hummed nearby like an electrical current.

I snapped a few blurry pictures of people running before crawling through the curtain door of the tent, where a man and two children huddled on the ground. I kneeled above them and took a few more photographs.

from Photographers Blog:

Maasai fertility blessing: Audio slideshow

Click on the play button above to view an audio slideshow on the Loita Maasai in Kenya blessing women from their village to ensure they have children in a rare fertility ceremony.

from Photographers Blog:

Violence in South Africa: Audio slideshow

Reuters photographer Siphiwe Sibeko talks about his experiences capturing dramatic images of the outbreak of violence in South Africa.