Debunking Personal Misconceptions about Africa

Recently in English, my class participated in an unexpected but nevertheless engaging activity. We each had to fill in a blank map of Africa using images and phrases that we frequently associate the continent with. To be frank, I wasn't surprised when I learned that almost every person had a majority of his or her illustrations relating to war, genocide, inequality, political corruption, or other kinds of calamities. Because I tried to jot down as many "associations" that I could think of, I didn't realize until after the activity was done that every single phrase and doodle that I had put on my map delineated a negative aspect of Africa, whether I had a group of horse-riding soldiers setting villages on fire to depict the genocide in Darfur or a couple of small stick figures carrying AK-47s in Sierra Leone depicting the obscene numbers of child soldiers in that area. 

From what I remember, the first time that I ever learned about Africa was during my early elementary years. Around that time, I got hooked up with the idea that Africa was a place completely ravaged by starvation, disease, and violence. You might expect that my current perceptions of Africa would not be as foolish as the ones that I had at such a young age, but I do in fact sometimes make Africa and issues such as extreme poverty synonymous to each other. 

I think that our negative perceptions of what goes on inside of Africa are constantly being reinforced by the media. Most of the articles that I've ever read about Africa have been about controlling disease, violating human rights, dealing with humanitarian crises, and other grim subjects. As a result, I have a hard time getting rid of what I've learned about Africa years ago. 

However, we're almost done reading a novel entitled The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. It has focused mainly on the interpersonal relationships between the white American Price family and the Congolese natives. Kingsolver has made it clear to me that, at least in the village where the Prices lived, the Congolese didn't face hardships as calamitous as I imagined. They were definitely poor, but not in the context of their own society. What's really interesting is that Kingsolver blames the Price family for having their misconceptions about the unique culture, religion, and social dynamics of the Congolese. I need to remind myself that behind the facade of news stories and American stereotypes of African poverty, disease, and violence, there are underlying social and cultural intricacies in Africa as complex and developed as those in any other place that I cannot understand unless I actually physically go to Africa.  

The Memory in Photography

Last week, I was browsing through the New York Times when I came across a very intriguing article entitled "The 'Shame of Memory' Haunts a War Photographer" in the photojournalism blog "Lens." The first section of the piece described how Don McCullin, a world-renowned war photographer, had recently received several prestigious awards not with pride, but with self-reproach instead. His phenomenal work has borne witness to global atrocities such as extreme starvation and genocide, but McCullin delineated a certain guilt of not having been able to help, in any direct way, the subjects of his profound yet frightening images. He constantly copes with the "shameful memory" of having been a mere bystander in events, according to the article, as calamitous as executions. 

Initially, McCullin's "shame of memory" reminded me of Orleanna Price's guilt of not having objected to the "conquest of Africa" in The Poisonwood Bible (8-9). She claimed that she, as a conquest herself by her husband and already burdened by the responsibility of caring for her family, had no power and time to care about the resource, political, and human labor exploitation of the Congolese by the Belgians and other foreigners. When she eventually left the country (the chapter is narrated by Orleanna looking back at her past experiences in Africa), the one question on page 9 that she asked herself was, "How do we aim to live with it?" 

McCullin seems to have responded to his "shame of memory" by losing hope in the power of photography to change the world. Because the global atrocities that were the center of his work continue to exist, McCullin believes images are futile and inconsequential. Is there any other way in which McCullin can reconcile his memory of shameful inaction with the potential power that other quoted photographers in the article such as John Morris believe excellent war images have in shocking regular people?

The last half of the article grapples with that question by discussing how perilous going to Syria is for photojournalists. Many agree that the world should be cognizant of the hundred thousand deaths that have so far been caused by the conflict, but most major publications consider sending their photographers to Syria as thoughtless. What implications might this problem have for us? 

As a visual learner, any memory that I have of learning in history about Nazi death camps or the My Lai Massacre has come from the textbooks' supplementary photographs rather than the main text. Perhaps, statistics and other exact facts elaborated in readings and lectures may escape me, but the emotions of horror and disgust that I felt when I viewed such images will surely stay with me for a long time. I've read quite a bit about the deplorable humanitarian crisis in Syria, but the news articles describing the current standoff between Bashar al-Assad and the Free Syrian Army are not as effective as the few existing photographs in both preserving the sights of war that I have no experience of seeing firsthand and galvanizing the emotions. If fewer photojournalists are going to Syria to take pictures, what substantive memory might I have in the future of, for example, the devastating effects of the chemical weapons on those affected, a very contentious issue for the international community? Don McCullin described the futility of war photographs in working to eliminate the global atrocities that we see today; however, is there another medium with which we can look back into the past and clearly recognize what problems we need to fix? 

I don't disagree that "passive" photography may bring about a "memory of shame," but I do believe that photographs are very effective in containing the memories that we have of what happened in the past because they're so timeless. So, I hope that one day, we may all see the depth and power of such photographs and truly realize what McCullin really hoped for.  

Article: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/09/the-shame-of-memory-haunting-war-photographers/?_r=0