African Children

It’s always a race. What time is the bird? What have the opposition got? Bodies? How many? How many do you have? No, don't bother. There is no interest. Maybe if you had some bodies. I had some bodies yesterday but there was a train crash in Germany. There’s always more interest in dead Germans than in (barely) living Somalis. Dead Somalis competing for the headlines with dead Germans?—no contest!

“How quickly can you get from Cairo to Dakar? Some Italian tourists have gone missing, maybe kidnapped.” “Well, I’d have to fly to Paris and get a flight from there to Dakar.”

That was the nature of my daily conversations with the newsroom in London.

I was not at home much as my son was growing up. Always on the road, chasing headlines. And when at home, consumed by the demons lurking in my subconscious, I lash out at those who care. The emotional gung corked deep down.

We do not give a toss. We are just there to record the stuff. Too many years, too many images. No breaks. The places and people morph into one horror show. Too few pretty pictures to ease the discomfort. And through it all, there is the little boy in Badoa. Sunken dark eyes. The contours of his skull barely disguised by the pallid skin. He sits quietly next to his mother. She is dying. He holds her hand. He has nothing else to hold on too.

I do my routine. Tripod out, white balance the camera and check out where the light is coming from.

I frame her face. There are flies perching on her eyelids. Her lips are dry. Her shallow breadth emits a rasping sound. I pan from her face to her hand. The hand that he holds so gently. And then up to his face. To those dark, sunken eyes. He stares directly into the lens. Not a sound. Just a hopeless look. I move back. Get the tripod. Get the wide shot. I move around trying to find the right angle. He does not move. Only his eyes slowly track my movements. I squeeze the tit on the lens. Done. I remove the camera and gather up the tripod. It is time to move on. I do not look at the boy (or his mother). I try not to walk away too quickly. I feel his eyes on my back. I can’t look back. Just get the shots. Do the pieces. Feed the pictures to London. That is my job. (They did not want the pictures. Maybe if his mother died on that brown raffia mat. Maybe if I had recorded her dying. Maybe then they would have taken the pictures in London).

Just sitting there. Next to his mother. Those sunken eyes clinging to me. Coming back to me at the oddest times, in the oddest places.

There are other stories. In other places. Child soldiers doing the bidding of their elders. Erupting volcanoes wiping out entire towns. Tyrants being toppled. Small revolutions. A decade of stuff. And always it is the women and the children.

In my country, I recorded the happiness of liberation. The darkness of racial oppression giving way to the inauguration of Nelson Mandela. The toads of the apartheid state now pledging their allegiance to the new order. State pensions secured, they try to convince us that there was no malice intended. But it is the children that we have to thank. Those brave, wonderful ones, the ones who ate the tear gas and felt the whips. Ten-year-olds locked up and tortured. Some crippled, others dead. The jails filled with those who were brave enough to scream, “No!!”. It’s the price that history extracts.

Archbishop Tutu reminds us that the facists are also God’s children.

I have a son—born free of the horrors of apartheid oppression. Gentle, intelligent and with all the possibilities that life has to offer. An African child. His large dark eyes curious right from the beginning. He enjoys reading and travelling. He is interested in the world. He has stood in the shadow of the great pyramids of Giza. He enjoyed Marakesh and Mombassa. In Malta we swam together, in clear blue waters, marvelling at the multicoloured fish. We share stories. He seems interested in my work. Sometimes I want to tell him of the boy in Badoa or the child soldiers in Sierra Leone. But I don’t. Not yet. He is a child of Africa.