Colours of Karamoja Exhibition At MishMash Gallery, Kampala Uganda

Uganda Tue 27-09-2011

Colours of Karamoja Exhibition At MishMash Gallery, Kampala Uganda
By Sophie Alal | AfricanColours.com

Colours of Karamoja, the exhibition at MishMash Gallery, operated in a different dimension from the stock images of “poverty porn” that usually accompany any discourse on life in post conflict Northern Uganda.

Cheeky-smile

Cheeky Smile

Zafarullah Hassim has been living and working in Karamoja for the past six months. As a conflict resolution specialist and an artist, he has been able to document the lives of people in various countries with conflict through photography and video. Colours of Karamoja is his latest photography and video project.

During the two day exhibition, from 10th to 11th September, the dual role of documenter and informant lay on the shoulders of Zafarullah. His camera was not just an apparatus but an agent to make sense of a community in transition from conflict with the simple push of a button.

There were no unnatural poses and contrived scenery. Neither was there any of the grotesqueries and shock very popular with aid agencies. It was more of a collection of ordinary scenes from daily life in Karamoja. A middle aged British woman who’d been working in Karamoja for the past two years exclaimed, “This is beautiful. It’s unlike what I usually see.”

Selection of portraits

Selection of portraits at the exhibition

While the atmosphere at the event was casual and inviting, one could not help but notice remarks of disbelief and sometimes disappointment at the lack of breathtaking images of pitiable helplessness.Such stereotypical images are most apparent in the repertoire of those newly broken-in expatriate aid workers on a mission to alleviate the vivid and terrible suffering of Africans, or to get ahead career wise -using every means possible.

Binyavanga Wainaina provides the most appropriate literary equivalent of this popular stereotype:

Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good. She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering.

There is no ignoring the positive value of what’s going on as Evelyn, a Karimojong lady, narrated with a voice trembling with excitement. “It was awesome. And this is what we need, to promote African culture the way these people have done it. I wish everyone was around. And the way they dress, they are really natural, the real real people.”

As usual, for the Karimojong, the colours were vibrant and all the photographs were brimming with light and colour. Bright light and sharp focus on the subject, casting minimal and sometimes no shadows at all.

The photographs mostly focused on individuals, with most looking into the lens of the camera as if to say, “I see you and I’m confident that you see me too,” allowing the viewer to have a very personal exchange with the images.

A hard life in the field shows a young woman with a blade of grass between her lips, and the sharp gaze of one who is on a mission. Her plaited hair is practical for the type of backbreaking field work that is not for the frivolous and weak. The minimalism of her adornments contrast with the young woman in All dressed up.

All-dressed-up

All dressed up

The latter exudes the seriousness and confidence of one who appreciates fashion and beauty. The glare of the sun makes her squint, but despite that her skin is well oiled and glows with health and vitality. She is bedecked in fine beads and an armful of bangles, much like anybody going out to have a good time.

The mood is sometimes playful, such as in Cheeky smile, where the little boy’s head is slightly tilted to the side to display his earring. We may neither know what he was thinking about or doing, but the general effect is pleasant.

Elsewhere there are busy women in their fields, children smiling, youth herding cattle, a trader at a market stall, a group collecting water at a borehole, a boy washing beads and so on. Thus the unspoken social rituals strive to counter the predominant views on culture, knowledge and art while at the same time engineering social change.

Susan Sontag’s seminal essay ‘On Photography’ serves as a reminder to consider the nature of the task of taking pictures: Photographs are memento mori. To take photographs is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability.

The Field of the future

The Field of the Future

Therefore it’s just not enough to breeze through any community and take some pictures for the sake of preserving memory. “I have been with these communities and I see the beauty and reflect that.” Says Zafarullah and adds, “These photographs are social mirrors for them to see themselves and give themselves hope and energy to be who they are and to smile despite all these difficulties.”

While it may not always be a negative thing to expose the grim realities of life, the agenda behind it must always be scrutinised. Such pictures can be propaganda tools that spread like wildfire in digital media leaving a trail of abjection and reinforcing unwelcome stereotypes. These often accompany narratives that show our post conflict communities as backward, uncivilized and bad minded, leaving a big problem on our hands. For the subject is without power, lacks self determination and is at the mercy of chance and charity.

Consider the Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting’s Marco Vernaschi, whose disrespectful "visual evidences" in April 2010 included unethically procured and distributed pictures of the exhumed and mutilated corpse of a young girl.

Zafarullah Hassim.

As the photographs in Colours of Karamoja have shown, if we decide to turn a new leaf and genuinely look at the human being in more humane terms, then it’s possible to imagine that other artists shall one day wake up to the richness and vitality of what has mostly been given negative expression.

Art then becomes not art simply for aesthetic pleasure but a chance to be sincere about the value of life. Thus it broadens appreciation of a society’s culture, politics, and values among other things, when the conflict has died down.

“So many people hear about Karamoja and all they have at the back of their mind is the negative bit about Karamoja: primitive, they are dirty and what not. I’m happy and commend the organisers for bringing Karamoja to the people. It’s unfortunate that not many have had the chance to see the kind of culture that the Karimojong have,” explained Hon. Auma Juliana Modest.

The photographs reflected a certain straightforward and ordinary dynamism. And the result was very persuasive.

Posted By: Allan Kapten

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