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.

Pirates plunder Nigerian profits

The first “Nollywood” film, “Living in Bondage”, was a tale of witchcraft, money and betrayal produced by Okechukwu Ogunjiofor.

That was back in 1992. Today, Nigeria’s $450 million home video industry is the third biggest in the world, after Hollywood and Bollywood.

“I actually set out to be a film maker, so I got my training, came to Lagos. But since I could not do a thing on celluloid … I said to myself that there must be a way around it, there must be a new way to do the old things and that new way was trying to invent, you know, to experiment with VHS cameras. That experiment was what we did with ‘Living with Bondage’ and today that experiment has culminated into what we find and people call Nollywood,” Ogunjiofor told Reuters Africa Journal.

Despite the successes, money and betrayal still play their part. Film piracy means millions of dollars a year leach out of the industry.

An average Nollywood film sells about 50,000 copies, yet in Lagos alone millions of bootleg copies go for just $1, undercutting Nollywood’s price of $2.

Fed up with the pirates, Ogunjiofor, who has pioneered an award scheme to reward production excellence in the film industry, has now turned to TV drama and soap operas and wants to see more government support, and legal backing, to help film-makers build a reputable industry.

“As long as you are doing a good movie, you are a candidate of piracy. From the moment you go on location, they start buying materials to wait for your job,” Ogunjiofor said.