Many of us who work in Africa, but live in the West, spend a lot of time thinking about the ways in which the Western media represents the continent.  All too often reporting — whether in print or in images — reinforces tired old stereotypes of an Africa that hopelessly trails the West, economically and morally.  James Ferguson puts it like this:  “It is never just Africa, but always the crisis in Africa, the problems of Africa, the failure of Africa….”

Yes, we know, there are indeed crises, problems, and failures in Africa.  They need to be reported.  What we ask for, however, is balance – for the acknowledgment that most of Africa is not permanently in crisis, that most Africans are neither starving nor dying of Aids, that most are not dodging bullets, that most are not refugees.  If readers and viewers are to understand the problems of contemporary Africa, they must be able to see them in this wider perspective.

There’s an additional point to be made.  Even where there are crises, there are not only crises.  As the historian Lawrence Levine once wrote, in a different, but related context:

One of the more elusive and difficult historical truths is that even in the midst of disaster life goes on and human beings find ways not merely of adapting to the forces that buffet them but often of rising above their circumstances and participating actively in the shaping of their lives.  …human beings [cling] to life, to each other, to those creative acts that [make] it possible to preserve… their culture, their dignity, their sanity.

Enter the photographer Marcus Bleasdale.

Click here to see Bleasdale’s photos and hear the Kimbangist Symphony Orchestra.

Bleasdale has done his share of reporting on Africa’s tragedies, often brilliantly.  He’s well aware, however, that there is much more to Africa than suffering.  Just a few days ago, he produced a story on the Kimbangist Symphony Orchestra in Kinshasa, the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo [DRC].  Few countries anywhere in the world have endured greater calamities more than the Congo.  As I tell my students, it’s been a rough 500 years.  Beginning with the arrival of the Portuguese and continuing through the slave trade, Belgian colonialism, the despotic rule of Mobutu Sese Seko, and the chaos that has followed him, things have not been easy.  And, yet…

And, yet, in the very heart of what we are prepared to see as darkness is light.  Bleasdale introduces us to 80 instrumentalists and 60 singers who are bringing the music Handel, Verdi, and Mozart to life in a way that very few of us in the West could ever have anticipated.  This piece is as important, in its way, as anything he has ever done.

The photos, not incidentally, are gorgeous.

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By the way, the orchestra is part of a much larger and astonishingly creative local musical culture.   You can check out DRC popular music, here.

This article was first published on John Edwin Mason’s excellent blog.

No related posts.

Dadaab is a town in northeastern Kenya approximately 100 kilometers from the Kenya-Somali border. It is home to three refugee camps which have housed refugees for over 15 years. And while most (over 90 per cent) of the people living in the camps are Somali, there are also refugees from Sudan, Uganda, the Congo and other countries in conflict.

A Day in Dadaab from MSF follows the lives of 4 people in the Dadaab camps as they tell their stories, sing songs and recite poems reflecting on the harsh realities of living in a refugee camp and the dangers they fled from.

This video from the presentation is of Mohamed, a former policeman and musician, who fled the fighting in Mogadish. After more than 10 years, he finds himself in Dadaab camp in Kenya where he has gathered together a group of fellow musicians and artists. His song calls on Somalis to recognise the fruitlessness of war.

Related posts:

1. Showcase: Exiled by weather
2. Conflict in Somalia
3. Boat refugees

Conditional Critical is an ongoing MSF project designed to highlight the plight of those caught up in the conflict in Eastern Congo.

Violent conflict has plagued this region for more than a decade. Hundreds of thousands of people are on the run, fleeing the violence in North Kivu, South Kivu and Orientale provinces. People are frightened. Many are sick or wounded. Others have been harassed or raped, or have had everything they own stolen.

The most recent additions to the Condition Critical site are four multimedia slideshows from duckrabbit (you can view them at the bottom of the homepage). As you may know, Benjamin, one half of duckrabbit, is also a co-founder of this site, so I won’t say too much about them for fear of embarrassing him, though I particularly liked the fact that they use the real voices and testimony of those caught up in the conflict.

There’s also a short history of the conflict in Eastern Congo and a series of eyewitness reports and testimony.

Related posts:

1. Congo’s gold
2. Hi, I’m a Mac
3. Cheka Kidogo – “laugh a little”

“The problem with a lot of documentary photography on conflict is that people are used to seeing them. I’ve become a bit immune to the images and what they meant to me and I felt that if I could do something that made the people look like real people, that you can look in their eyes and see that they are just like you and me, that we might start to have a different perspective on them.” Rankin, 2009.

When Oxfam sent British fashion photographer Rankin out to refugee camps in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to take ‘happy’ pictures, it ruffled a few feathers. However, there’s no doubt that Rankin’s photos of the Democratic Republic of the Congo have a great humanizing effect, and help balance the standard photographic stories that come out of ‘the dark continent’. Rankin’s photos of the Democratic Republic of the Congo tell the stories of people who, despite their circumstances, are part of the world, not apart from it. This behind-the-scenes video explains more (warning – autoplay).

Slideshows where photographers talk about individual photographs are usually a bad way to tell a story, they have a worrying ability to take the magic out of the photo, but I liked this one, as Rankin takes the subject head on with a minimum of pretention.

Hats off to Oxfam for having the idea and Rankin for bringing a fresh approach to an old story.

Related posts:

1. Congo’s gold
2. Condition Critical
3. Marcus Bleasdale; the Kimbangist Symphony Orchestra