Access to Justice
Access to Justice |
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Back to Contents Introduction The second civil war in Sudan since independence from Britain began in 1983 and lasted for almost twenty years; one of the reasons for the beginning was a mutiny in Ayod in the South. Ten years later in 1993 photographer Kevin Carter visited that region intent on capturing images of the war, part of his role as a photographer; what transpired was an image taken in Ayod by Carter becoming renowned across the world, transporting him to fame including a Pulitzer prize for that photo and changing his life forever. It is a story of racism, war, famine, fame and suicide. It is a story which includes a fateful visit to Sudan; it is a story of a crawling starving child in Ayod; it is a story which begins and ends in South Africa. South Africa Carter joined with other white colleagues, Ken Oosterbroek, Greg Marinovich, & Joao Silva for protection to become known as the 'The Bang-Bang Club' as dubbed by a magazine which often used their pictures, “as in 'We're going to the bang-bang', meaning the front line”[3] of the increasing violent South African townships. Everything from AK-47s to spears were used in the black factional violence between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party and Silva describes a typical encounter: "At a funeral some mourners caught one guy, hacked him, shot him, ran over him with a car and set him on fire,"…"My first photo showed this guy on the ground as the crowd told him they were going to kill him. We were lucky to get away” ”.[4] The Bang-Bang club “…put themselves in face of danger…[and] were arrested numerous times, but never quit,".[5] Marinovich took a photograph in September 1990 of a Zulu being stabbed to death by A.N.C. supporters which would win him a Pulitizer. A few years later Carter’s turn came. Meanwhile the images of apartheid and repression and protest Carter captured appeared in South African publications but more frequently internationally due to local apartheid restrictions and Carter was noted for his audacious and daring coverage and it was said that "Few journalists saw as much violence and trauma as he did".[6] He had graduated into a profession that shone a mirror on the depravity of apartheid. And as a photographer he came into conflict with those white authorities who sought to uphold the system. His parents’ acceptance of apartheid was anathema to Kevin. "The police used to go around arresting black people for not carrying their passes," his mother recalls. "They used to treat them very badly, and we felt unable to do anything about it. But Kevin got very angry about it. He used to have arguments with his father. "Why couldn't we do something about it?" “. [7] He had dropped out of college and was conscripted into the South African Defence Force becoming part of the regime he despised. An example of his conscience being tested came when once he took the side of a black mess-hall waiter and “…some Afrikaans soldiers called him a kaffir-boetie ("nigger lover") and beat him up”.[8] Afterwards Carter went absent without leave and became a disc jockey though was fired. Carter was ashamed and made an attempt on his life, before returning to finish his time with the SADF. After finishing his military service he became a photographer. The photograph In March 1993 Carter paid his own way to southern Sudan, intent on documenting the local rebel movement from a conflict he felt the world was overlooking. He arrived near the village of Ayod which was known locally as the ‘hunger triangle’ because of the famine raging amidst the civil war and with colleague Silva from the Bang-Bang club he took photographs of the starving thousands at an overwhelmed feeding centre. He was distressed at what he witnessed and took a walk away from the masses of refugees. He would then hear a sound that would change his world. Wandering alone in the bush he heard a low whimpering cry and then seen a tiny emaciated girl crawling along in the dirt, trying desperately to make her way to the feeding center.[9] She then stopped. “She didn't have the energy to stand and…stood little chance of survival. If the plight of this little girl couldn't stir the world into action nothing would, as Carter knew instinctively and immediately. He crouched with his camera, ready to frame an eye-level shot”.[10] While in this position a vulture landed behind the girl. Carter waited for twenty minutes “…waiting for the patient vulture to spread its wings. It didn't, and he took the photograph as it was. - a hopeless child crawling in the dust, a hungry vulture waiting patiently, absolutely certain that it would have carrion soon”.[11] He then watched as the little girl resumed her desperate struggle and chased the vulture away. Publication Carter’s photo of the starving Sudanese child first appeared in The New York Times on 26 March 1993. The photo of the stricken child captured the world’s imagination and became iconic, syndicated around the world. It was an image that captured the full horror of the famine in Sudan and an example of the potency of photojournalism. Carter became famous and The New York Times became inundated with queries over what had happened to the child, wondering if the photographer helped the photographed and if the latter lived or died. Carter faced fierce criticism for leaving the child to her fate where starvation and vultures prevailed. Ayod Vultures are a silent spectre upon the human suffering at Ayod. Watching. “When only one person dies, villagers bury the body. More, and tradition in this part of the country is to lay them out for the vultures. Only the vultures are well fed in Ayod”.[12] This observance was recorded in April 1993 one month after Kevin Carter’s photo appeared before the worlds press. In the same month it was noted the danger of relief operations in that area. “In Sudan, the UN has scaled down relief operations to the famine-hit southern region of the country after a sudden upsurge in fighting between rival rebel factions put aid workers' lives at risk. The head of the UN's Operation Lifeline Sudan, Philip O'Brien, said yesterday aid workers had been pulled out of the towns of Waat, Ayod, and Yuai where an estimated 75,000 people are totally dependent on food handouts”.[13] The New York Times article of March 1993 where Carter’s photo first appeared noted the prevailing conditions in southern Sudan at the time. ”More than a million people are at risk of starvation in the swampy southern Sudan, the relief workers say. The people of the south, mostly Christians and animists, have been forced from their homes both by famine and by the Islamic fundamentalist Government's offensives in 10 years of fighting”.[14] It is an isolated region made inaccessible for much of the year due to the impact of rains and government restrictions on access.[15] And Ayod was impacted by these years of war and famine. “In its third consecutive year of calamity, Ayod's mechanisms for coping have collapsed. A system of kinship rights once sustained many, permitting the needy three nights of shared resources with any relative. But all resources are now depleted and aid is still limited. Even though the World Food Programme has 30 distribution points in Ayod, those who are merely "malnourished" must feed themselves on alternate days on wild fruit: lalob, wild cucumber, tamarind and wild fig”.[16] 60,000 displaced people were existing on little more than wild foods “…with malnutrition peaking at more than 40 percent”.[17] There was a dearth of medical supplies. “…There is no medicine left, except for a few boxes of Aspirin and antacid tablets”.[18] In January 1993 two months before the Carter photograph there was “…only one relief worker for the 100,000 people in the Ayod region”.[19] Those who survive wait in the exhausting heat outside feeding centers to see if they will live and the only “…water pump in Ayod has been broken for years…”.[20] “Those lucky enough to reach a feeding centre “…receive[d]…one cup of wheat or sorghum a day.[And Ayod]…- a collection of huts made from sticks and grass - is racked by disease and malnutrition”.[21] The area is one of the“…most critically affected by the famine,"[22] and the scrawny children arrive as “motionless, wizened scraps…appear beyond hope”.[23] And then comes the night. “Hundreds of children and adults have no clothing or blankets to protect them from the long, cold nights. At night, there is only the sound of children crying”.[24] One of these starving children was in Carter’s photo as she struggled to find her way to a feeding centre attempting to cater for the hungry multitudes. “In Ayod…The malnutrition rate of children under five was 40 percent by late January, 1993. The situation in Ayod was "critical, with daily arrivals of more displaced in search of food. Families in the area have little or no food…The situation worsened in March…”.”[25] and this is when Carter took his photograph. And in March 1993 many villages in the region had few children left.[26] Two months later Ayod was decimated. “Ayod no longer exists. Every home has been burned. Circles and rectangles of charred earth are all that remain”.[27] The region of Ayod-Waat-Kongor became known as the ‘hunger triangle’ and as the epicentre of famine and in the year that Carter took his photograph of the haggard child, where “…rates of malnutrition in Kongor were amongst the highest ever recorded in the world in what had previously been a food-surplus area”.[28] Previously in 1991 and 1992 massacres were committed on civilians in this area and food resources appropriated.[29] Warfare in the region included “…burning homes, villages, community structures, and grain, and killing women and children. These types of abuses have been the proximate cause of several famines in recent years”.[30] Many of the victims “…were elderly, weak, sick or for other reasons could not run fast enough; they were among those who burned to death inside huts the soldiers knowingly set on fire”.[31] During this time of affliction “It was impossible to move without stumbling on corpses and skeletons”.[32] What happened in this region claimed over 20,000 Sudanese lives and conditions were so ferocious to be considered impossible to ever happen again.[33] What Carter had seen and shown to the world from the region of Ayod in March 1993 was similar to the conditions prevailing in Somalia the previous year. “The scenes of death and starvation in southern Sudan are strikingly similar to those in Somalia last year, before the U.S.-led military coalition arrived to rescue the Somali people. The images are the same: adults with skeletal figures, gaunt children with distended stomachs and match-stick arms, old people too weak to stand, starving refugees who straggle into the town after walking for several days from the villages. The main difference is that there are no television cameras here. The people of Ayod say they have never seen a television camera. They have no idea what CNN or ABC is. Many had never seen a white person until a few weeks ago”.[34] One of those white people was a world weary photo-journalist. Suicide Osterbook a colleague of Carters in the ‘Bang-Bang club and a close friend was killed in April 1994 at work photographing a gun battle in a South African township. Carter covered yet another violent photographic session in South Africa the previous month. “Carter was covering the unsuccessful invasion of Bophuthatswana by white right-wing vigilante’s intent on propping up a black homeland, a showcase of apartheid. Carter found himself just feet away from the summary execution of right-wingers by a black "Bop" policeman. "Lying in the middle of the gunfight," he said, "I was wondering about which millisecond next I was going to die, about putting something on film they could use as my last picture” “.[35] A number of other assignments went wrong including a session at a Nelson Mandela rally; a cancelled interview with Nelson Mandela; he lost film photographing the UN in Mozambique; covering French President Francois Mitterrand's state visit to South Africa, he missed the deadline. He had financial problems. His relationship had fallen apart and he was temporarily homeless. When he took that photograph in March 1993 relief agencies assessing mortality in Ayod noted "…the prevalence rates of severe undernutrition in Ayod were among the highest ever documented”.[36] And that photograph he took of the starving Sudanese child lingered. Amidst all this he was told he won the Pulitzer. “As jubilant [ New York] Times foreign picture editor Nancy Buirski gave him the news, Carter found himself rambling on about his personal problems”.[37] The news of his Pulitzer prize was clouded by protests surrounding the circumstances in which he took his photograph of the starving Sudanese child.” 'It's the eternal dilemma for journalists - do you just record what's going on or do you get involved as well?’ ''.[38] The criticism deeply affected Kevin. “ ‘Few people knew how badly the Sudan had affected him. Just in the small area where he'd been working, people were dying at the rate of 20 an hour and he was there to compose pictures of those grisly scenes’ “.[39] A colleague in the Bang-bang club Silva noted that “ '[a]fter the Sudan, seeing what he'd seen, he'd been in bad shape..' “.[40] Kevin “…lived with the pressure to be first where the action is, the fear that his pictures were never good enough, the existential lucidity that came to him from surviving violence again and again”.[41] And in July 1994 over a year since he took the photograph, a few months after winning the Pulitizer, and after a lifetime of photographing horror, he took his life. Driving out to a place in Johannesburg where he had played as a boy he poisoned himself in his car. Johannesburg he said “…was so damn full of bad memories and absent friends”.[42] A suicide note addressed to his ”’parents and to Silva…[said that] “…he was "depressed . . . without…money for rent . . . money for child support . . . money for debts…[and] I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain . . . of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen…of killer executioners . . .” ".[43] Earlier that day Kevin had seen Osterbrook’s widow and told her of his troubles but she was still recovering from her husband's recent death and “…in little condition to offer counsel”.[44] Conclusion Carter confided to friends after he had taken the photo in Ayod that he wished he had intervened and helped the child; the convention for journalists at the time was to never to touch famine victims for fear of disease.[45] And he was alert to a dilemma of his profession. "I had to think visually," he said once, describing a shoot-out. "I am zooming in on a tight shot of the dead guy and a splash of red. Going into his khaki uniform in a pool of blood in the sand. The dead man's face is slightly gray. You are making a visual here. But inside something is screaming, "My God.' But it is time to work. Deal with the rest later. If you can't do it, get out of the game” “.[46] And a colleague notes “ "Every photographer who has been involved in these stories has been affected. You become changed forever…It is very hard to continue” “.[47] The horror and “…violence seemed to affect Carter more than it did other colleagues…Returning from particularly upsetting assignments, he would often cry, or try to drink or drug himself into oblivion. Friends grew used to his 3 A.M. phone calls, rambling about suicide…I couldn't distance myself from the horror of what I saw [he said]”. [48]Kevin was unable to leave behind that horror of what he saw when doing his job. And he added on that photo in Ayod that “ "This is the ghastly image of what is happening to thousands of children. Southern Sudan is hell on earth, and the experience was the most horrifying of my career” “.[49] A critic of Carter’s photograph chastised him for not helping the famished child while he captured her agony. "The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene”.[50] [When they criticised his inaction after taking that photo of the starving girl in Ayod] “Carter's morality was being called into question by people who could not have understood what it was like to be there in the Sudan”.[51] Though Carters own child, his daughter, looked at this from a different point of view, saying "…I see my dad as the suffering child. And the rest of the world is the vulture”. [52]Carter gained fame because of that photo but was open to the world’s opprobrium. After that photograph he “ sat under a tree, lit a cigarette, thought about his daughter, prayed to god, and cried”.[53] Affected and distraught he confided in Bang-Bang club colleague Silva “…and explained what had happened, 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” “.[54] "He was depressed afterward," Silva recalls. "He kept saying he wanted to hug his daughter” “.[55] It remains unknown the fate of that child in the photo; but the photo captured by Carter made the world hold its breath as the vulture landed behind the emaciated child who was one of many starving in Ayod in 1993. And each day that time death was taking its toll. “Every day, an average of 10 to 15 people die from hunger and disease in the Ayod district”.[56] And each day the vultures waited. “Often they are not buried. Their bodies are dragged into an empty field, where the ground is littered with the skulls and bones of the dead. Vultures circle in the sky”.[57] The girl from the photo in Ayod would never be known though her image would resonate; the man behind the lens would be known and lost. In August 1994 one month after Carter took his life in South Africa, the 10,000 to 15,000 thousand people in Ayod were living on food handouts distributed by the World Food Program.[58] A starving Sudanese mother describes what it is like: “"I came here when I heard there was food, because I was hungry. I used to eat seeds and the leaves of fig trees," says Nyatin Machok, stirring a pot of sorghum outside her family's straw hut…Her three children…have bloated stomachs. Mrs Machok walked for two days to reach Ayod. "I have nothing," she says, "and if we do not get food, we will die" “. [59] The owner of the copyright of Kevin Carter's photograph is Corbis. Back to Contents |
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