UGANDA

Who gains from pictures of suffering children?

I READ with interest Opiyo Oloya's commentary, "How does Africa gain from the documentaries?" (The New Vision, September 27, 2006). The commentary conjured up memories of my experience while in The Netherlands in 2004. As a student from Uganda, I was shocked by the pictures about Africa which I saw on Dutch Television. On several occasions, the images such as the one of a starving child, drinking from muddy water; or a very sick child dying for lack of medicine and orphaned by AIDS seemed to dominate information about Africa on Dutch Television. It was not the kind of pictures I was used to back home in Uganda. I saw for instance a picture of a bony child in Niger, being fed through tubes. The message accompanying the picture was summoning the viewer to give some money on a given account number to help save the starving nation. There were pictures of children drinking muddy water from a well, accompanied by appeals to the viewer to help give the children get better water.

For months, I did not see any pictures of smiling children from Africa, a memory I had from home. I did not see pictures of children happily running around, playing 'hide-and-seek' or football, unaware of their tattered clothes. But instead, I saw only pictures of starving children from war-torn northern Uganda, AIDS orphans from South Africa begging to be helped, or someone begging on their behalf.

Universally, children are seen as innocent, immaculate of the injustices of the world. And when it comes to disasters, such as war, epidemics, drought and earthquakes, children and women are considered to be a vulnerable category in society. "Like canaries down a coal mine, children often give the first indication that something is going wrong. Child malnutrition offers the most common index to famine; a child being disruptive at school may be the first sign of a family at war; child prostitutes and soldiers indicate a society in crisis; child-to-child murders are interpreted as a sign of moral breakdown," wrote one author, when commenting about the challenges of implementing children's rights in developing countries.

Yes, suffering African children on television have delivered the atrocities, wars, famines, and droughts in many African countries right to the living rooms of even those Western citizens who do not know where the continent is exactly located. If childhood is viewed as a 'golden age' full of innocence but vulnerable and therefore in need of adult protection, then negative pictures of African children portray a society that does not give proper care to their children. If no beautiful pictures of Africa are shown, what kind of conclusion does one expect from someone who has never been to any country in Africa, but only feasts on negative pictures of African children on TV?

Patricia Holland, author of Picturing Childhood says that, "Pictures of children contribute to a set of narratives about childhood which are threaded through different cultural forms, drawing on every possible source to construct stories that become part of cultural competence." What kind of narratives then, do pathetic images of hungry, lonely and helpless children deliver to those who feast on them in the West? Or, to throw back Mr. Oloya's question, "If we watch these documentaries about Africa's numerous ills, so what?" Social critics say that that negative pictures of African children aid fulfil the stereotype of Africa in the West; as a poverty, disease, war, famine etc infested continent where development has eluded the lives of many people.

Prossy Nakanjako
25 October 2006

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