Jeffrey Gettleman has written a very disturbing article for the New York Times ( June 8, 2008) about the plight of albinos in Tanzania, Africa.

Two paragraphs from Gettleman’s story sum up the incredible situation:

“…at least 19 albinos, including children, have been killed and mutilated in the past year, victims of what Tanzanian officials say is a growing criminal trade in albino body parts.
Many people in Tanzania — and across Africa, for that matter — believe albinos have magical powers. They stand out, often the lone white face in a black crowd, a result of a genetic condition that impairs normal skin pigmentation and strikes about 1 in 3,000 people here.

“Tanzanian officials say witch doctors are now marketing albino skin, bones and hair as ingredients in potions that are promised to make people rich.”

 

Pieter Hugo: Sam Klein Karoo

 

News from today’s Africa generates one shock after the other: Darfur, genocide, Kalashnikov-bearing children marching to war, famines as regular as the monsoons, the ravages of AIDS, rapacious dictators, gang rape as a political tool, the Janjaweed wreaking destruction from the backs of camels. Even nature weighs in with tsunamis, floods and earthquakes.

We in the West sit in the comfort of our bubble and tut-tut as news of the latest atrocity rolls in, but the truth is we’re exhausted. We can’t absorb it all; the tragedy of post-Colonial Africa seems larger than our comprehension. Photojournalism and reportage , history in the making, only adds to the feeling of helplessness.

 

Pieter Hugo: Aside

 

Gettleman’s story itself is testimony to that exhaustion: normally a story in the New York Times is picked up by the media across the country: what you read on Monday is on TV by Tuesday and in countless other newspapers across the country. But by and large silence has greeted the Gettleman story: it appeared on Sunday and aside from seven minutes on NPR and summaries by a few minor media outlets, by the following Sunday, June 15, the story seemed dead; journalism’s restless gaze was fixed elsewhere.

 

Pieter Hugo: Mikhonzemi Welcome Makma

 

The work of the South African photographer, Pieter Hugo rouse us out of our apathy in a way that words and conventional photojournalism do not.

 

Pieter Hugo: Tabalure Chitope, aged 30, and her guardian, Eletina Nedi,

 

Ironically, if his name is any indication, Hugo is a man of Boer descent. The Boers, according to Wikipedia, are not only descended from the Dutch and the Germans; their ancestry also includes Scandinavians, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Scots, English, Irish and Welsh people; in other words, for all their imperfections, they are us: Caucasians standing across a divide from a world of darker-skinned peoples, whether that world is here or in Asia, the Middle East, or indeed, the Dark Continent.

 

Pieter Hugo:  Medisone Baja

 

Pieter Hugo is a man who sees far beyond that divide. Conventional photojournalism treats albinos – or for that matter, famine victims or refugees – as illustrations to a story; they are more symbols than human beings. But Pieter Hugo’s photography says all you need to do is to look in the eyes of these very real human beings and you’ll see the discrimination, the pain, and suffering that comes along with being a despised minority.

Hugo’s work is rarely explicit about atrocities. Yet his photographs speak volumes of the misery in present-day Africa. His portraits of the the African ruling class, judges and lawyers, his street people, the faces of those who have died from AIDS and his recent series of men who scrape out a living by exhibiting brutalized wild animals – these images form their own map of the troubled continent.

 

 

Pieter Hugo: The Honorable Justice Moatlhodi Marumo


 

Pieter Hugo: Mailam Mantari Lamal with Mainasar

 

 

Pieter Hugo: Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara

 

 

Pieter Hugo: Abdullahi with Mainsara

 

Look at the series “Hyena and Other Men” a group of photographs recently shown in New York to deserved acclaim. in these deceptively simple images you see it all, the poverty, the fury, cruelty, the tragedy. Look at the trash-strewn backgrounds of these pictures, littered with ravaged buildings and the wrecks of cars, where not even a plant seems to survive. Tarzan would not be at home in this apocalyptic Africa. Look at the powerful hyenas, animals as reviled as albinos, crouching abject and furious at the feet of their captors. They remind me how kidnap victims indentify with their captors as a survival mechanism. Look at the captors themselves; their stony faces, and their tattered clothing, a mixture of native dress and cultural cast-offs from the West; in fact, one man’s shirt bears hip-hop inscriptions. Are we surprised that that these men form a family ( seemingly without women) or that their children relate to hyenas and baboons the way our children relate to family pets? Not really.

 

Pieter Hugo: The Hyena Men of Abuja

 

I urge you to spend some time on Pieter Hugo’s website. You’ll see images that penetrate to the heart of the African psyche.