Fazal Sheikh

My first trip to the Sudanese refugee camp on Kenya’s northwestern border with the Sudan was with a United Nations High Commission for Refugees flight from Nairobi. Although the trip was nearly four years ago, it remains vivid in my mind because it was the first time that I had witnessed journalists and photojournalists at work. There were perhaps ten of us on the plane; aid workers, two journalists and one cameraman. Before embarking on the journey, we were briefed on what we were about to witness. From the cool and comfort of Nairobi, it was difficult to imagine the contrasts of the harsh and remote terrain of the northern desert. The United Nations Public Affairs Officer spoke in hushed tones about the 25,000 refugees in the camp. In particular, he lingered on the presentation of the facts concerning the “Unaccompanied Minors”.

These “Unaccompanied Minors” are a group of nearly 12,000 teenage boys between the ages of eight and eighteen who had been taken from Southern Sudan to neighboring Ethiopia to be “taught”. The implication was that the boys had been abducted by the minions of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (S.P.L.A) and had been taken to Ethiopia where the y were trained as soldiers to be used in the civil war against the Islamic north. With the fall of the Ethiopian government in 1991, the Sudanese were forced to return to the southern Sudan on foot. When the fighting renewed near Kapoeta, Sudan, the boys traveled, once again by foot, to northern Kenya. The U.N. Spokesman hinted at the manipulation of the “students” by the “teachers” (S.P.L.A. soldiers). Catch words like “manipulation,” “orphan,” “unaccompanied minor,” “training,” and “suffering” played in my mind as I boarded the plane for the north.

As we landed on the sandy spit at Lokichoggio, the journalists immediately began their work. Their stories had to be compiled quickly as they were leaving in the afternoon on the return trip to Nairobi. As I watched them work throughout the day, I noticed that they were drawn to the areas that the spokesman had suggested would provide the best footage. Sometime later, a foreign diplomat showed a similar attitude when visiting the camp on a “fact-finding mission.” He was unsatisfied with the children of the feeding center, as there were none of a sufficiently emaciated, ghost-like build to provide him the proper accompaniment in a publicity photograph.

As I sat in the camp several days after my arrival, I thought back to that first day and to my initial impressions about the camp, the people and my role there. I realized that my early thoughts concerning the boys and their plight had been heavily influenced by what I had been told in the Nairobi briefing. I remembered watching the journalists working and feeling a sense of unease, an inability to follow along and make the expected photographs. I had been to this part of Kenya before in the days prior to the refugees’ arrival, and now, during this visit, I moved about the village and the camp trying to make sense of the whirlwind in which I was engulfed. I thought back to my earlier visits to the area and I spoke with some of the shopkeepers I had met previously.

As time passed, I began to realize that the preconceptions which had been hoisted upon me in the initial briefing and the shock of the first encounter began to fade away and I was left with a broader, expanded sense of the people ad their situation. I realized on this trip what my project was to become; it would attempt to depict a fuller sense of the communities in this region, free of what I have come to believe is the sensational and, at times, predatory nature of mainstream photojournalism in the area. I decided to follow the photographs to be collaborations in which individuals would be free to express their humanity, their longings, their strengths, their solidarity. Where I had at one time avoided the areas of intense media coverage, I now approached those same areas with the determination that I would make photographs of people in the exact place but render them and their environment in a way that would belie the notion that they lacked humanity, or were stripped of their pride.

I am the son of a Kenyan father and an American mother. This dual heritage has afforded me the advantage of seeing with the eyes of an insider and with the added knowledge of someone who has a sense of how the situation is interpreted and represented in other countries. The history of renderings of Africans and their cultures within western media is replete with images that are bent on perpetuating the mystique of Africa as the “Dark Continent”.

The two bodies of work that I have most recently seen which deal with Africans are the images in the mainstream media from Somalia and portraits and portraits made by artists. In the artist’s work the subject of the photograph is chosen for his physical attributes. A fanciful dress or garment, a particularly fierce gaze, a boy with a sloped forehead suggestive of inbreeding, are used as measuring devices for photographic relevance. Once chosen, the subject is photographed in a makeshift studio. In the studio and away from his surroundings, the sitter for the portrait becomes a decontextualized model of exoticism consistent with the western perception of Africa as the place where wild, striking and exotic types abound.

In studying the recent representations of Somalis in the media, I realized that the subjects of these photographs, as is true for those in the artist’s pictures, were chosen for their physical attributes as well. A malnourished child, a haggard frame, and a vicious struggle for food are the subjects of the images of choice. These kinds of representations allow us to have pity for people while remaining detached and superior; they are, after all, the “other”.  You and I could never be in the same situation. In these pictures, people are like animals, victims of a fierce and primitive world.

It is my intention to create a body of work that will document these cultural and political transitions in Africa. In an effort to offset or provide a balance to the imagery that foregrounds visions of a mythic Dark Continent, I make more direct, unmanipulated renderings of the people and their home. By using this method, I may not be able to get a story in the course of a single day, but I believe I will gain and impart a broader understanding of the complexities of the situation. I spend weeks in any given area, initially without the camera, and have the luxury of returning to the same people and the same region repeatedly. Such visits allow the time and space for initial perceptions to give way to a more complex, layered reality which is the wealth of any community. My work has shown me that the people of these African refugee communities are not unlike you and me. It is my hope that this type of documentation can ultimately serve to prompt social change by making the hardships of the “other” more like our own.