If Some Africans Die in Some Bush, Does Anyone Care?

KARAMOJA REGION, UGANDA—We took the hospital by storm—half a dozen cameras, twice as many reporters, all zooming in on a few scores of malnourished children and their petrified mothers. Someone was supposed to have told the hospital administration that the press corps from Kampala was coming with our video recorders and tripods and tape players and questions.  But the message got lost somewhere between the town where we were staying and the place where we arrived.

It’s hard to send messages in Karamoja, an isolated patch of instability in Uganda near the borders of Kenya and Sudan, without basic infrastructure like mobile phone networks or roads. While the rest of Uganda’s economy has been growing steadily, Karamoja has missed out on the years of stability shepherded by current President Yoweri Museveni. Here life is as it has been for ages: cattle herders, agro-pastoralists, living in small settlements organized by clan and tribe, but with the modern twist of abundant AK-47s that make raids on neighbouring clusters of homes all the more deadly.

Uganda is otherwise a pretty safe place for aid workers, expats, journalists, and the like. Karamoja, however, remains too unstable for any non-essential personnel. As we drove to the hospital, we passed a human skull on the side of the road, marking an incident no one remembered specifically but everyone remembered generally as the kind of thing that left a human skull on the side of the road. Our Oxfam guide kept saying things like, “A priest was ambushed and died right here, just a few months ago.”  Or, “This was the site of a battle between the Jie and Dodoth tribes where many died.”

The day we took the hospital by storm, when we finally arrived at Matany, about an hour from one of Karamoja’s main towns, we spent a while trying to find the head doctor to get permission to work.  We were on a tight schedule because ambushes, the most common violence against strangers, happen after dark. We had to return to our hotel—three hour’s drive away—by 7:30 p.m. when the roads would no longer be even nominally safe.

After finding the head doctor, surprised by the sudden influx of so many journalists, we quickly left his office for the pediatric feeding ward. On the ward’s veranda, there were many small, hungry, and very young children, most so malnourished they had the look of old men and women, loose skin piling up on their sides, features exaggerated by the paucity of flesh padding them.

Out came the cameras and kit. Reuters, AFP, BBC, NTV and Ugandan broadcaster WBS, all focusing exclusively on one starving boy, a little older than the other children, too frail to stand. Realizing too many lenses were pointed his way for me to even attempt a photo, I left the scene and headed into the ward.

A cycle of droughts and floods—combined with a world food crisis that affects even remote places like Karamoja—means there just isn’t enough to eat. Children and the elderly are the first to fall victim to starvation. At Matany Hospital, there used to be only a four or five such cases per month but now there are up to twenty. Doctors at the hospital say this is just a small portion of children suffering from malnutrition in the region, since most families can’t even make the long journey to the feeding centre.

Some of the beds inside the ward were empty, but a few held small bodies that probably weighed less than my bulky camera. I started shooting.  I was the lone journalist in the ward—the others were content to all film the same boy outside on the veranda, where his need was immediate and the light was better.

These pictures were doubtlessly moving in the way images of starving children shots always, so I sent a text to a photo editor in Nairobi.  “Am at hospital 50 km from main town in Karamoja.  Many children starving, malnutrition rampant.  Have pix.”  He replied back a little bit later, “Not interested for now thank you.” Apparently, they had just done a piece of starving children in Ethiopia, and there’s only so much room in the press for these small bodies.

I thought of the media spectacle outside the feeding ward, and the mothers beckoning me to their children, to take a photo, to take a minute, to care. But I already knew my photos wouldn’t be published on a major news wire. I knew that even if I cared, I wouldn’t be able to tell the story to an audience who could rally outrage into change.

But it isn’t the job of news wires to care—it’s their job to spread news. And this wasn’t as bad as the famine in Ethiopia.  It was just a few dozen starving children, somewhere, in some bush, that few people had ever heard of and even fewer people could find on a map and fewer still had visited. Some Africans dying in some bush is not news. It’s sad, but it’s not news.

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See more photos of this trip to Karamoja at my Lightstalkers gallery or my blog.

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