global thinking Archives

On Photography*

Posted by Annabel on 27/08/2013 communities, experiential education, global, impact, media, Photography, reality, skills, social justice, stories, volunteering, young people

Aug 272013

How would you feel if a complete stranger had a photograph of you on their fridge? Your hair a mess at the end of a tiring day, caught at an unflattering angle in your oldest clothes, damp and sweaty, longing for a shower.

You might feel that your soul had been stolen – plenty of people see cameras as frightening, not just annoying – or you might just be furious that your privacy had been violated by someone who doesn’t even know your name. A few years ago a group of young Chinese men surrounded me at a tourist spot in northern India, friendly, laughing, snapping away. I asked them to stop, but they didn’t. A tiny window into the lives of those whose faces pop up as screen savers the world over.

It can be tempting just to snap away vaguely, presuming it does no harm, but a quick walk round the block in someone else’s shoes provides a sharp reminder that it does. Many people who go on slum or township tours equate the experience to a trip to the zoo.

Enough.

Clicking the shutter should be the last thing you do.

Why are you taking the picture anyway? What will you use it for?

Now we don’t have to load film, check it’s caught, wind on, keep it in a dark place, make sure it’s developed safely and hope, pray we got the shot we saw. We’re digital, we’re point and shoot, we can take thousands of frames at no extra cost.

Yet it’s no coincidence that most photographers who have worked for long periods in war zones, disaster zones and among the desperately poor, are haunted. One ex-Sunday Times reporter told me he could not longer take those pictures after his first child was born.

You want to show people what you saw, but don’t give up on words. I won’t forget watching a student tell a friend about her day at a school in a South African township. Her voice became soft and tears came to her eyes as she realised that the children she was describing were far too small for their age because they had never had enough to eat. Talking forces us to engage; photography can let us off the hook.

Use the power of your camera wisely. Access to the lives of others is a privilege, so bring both good intentions and a critical mind.

Don’t forget to capture details, insights on the condition of people’s lives. Look for the things you can’t see. A near-empty drugs cupboard in a hospital can tell you far more than a picture of someone dying, and doesn’t compromise anyone’s dignity. Heads bent over a shared textbook, an unnecessary flower garden, feet in new shoes.

Seek out contrasts, juxtapositions that illuminate. Ordinary objects that tell stories.

Talk to people. Introduce yourself. Ask.

Sometimes people say no. Perhaps one of their friends, or someone nearby will say yes. Take the photo. Show them. Do it carefully, move to catch the light and their best angle. Many people have never seen a photograph of themselves. Don’t start if you don’t have time to finish.

Last January I was in Tamale, northern Ghana. I walked through the market with a local guide. He knew everyone, they catcalled as we went past. With his permission I took shots of the market, a riot of colour and activity. But I wanted the women. So I asked. Some said no. Some said yes. I started taking pictures and when I had a good one, I showed them. They were delighted. They were beautiful, astonishingly beautiful. Those who had said no, now fought to be next in line. We laughed, I teased them, they teased me, we had fun.

I took their names and asked permission to use the photos. Although I had showed everyone their pictures, I couldn’t give them copies. I promised I would send them, and I did. I don’t know if they arrived. If I could have done I would have printed them on the spot. We lost something very precious with the demise of the polaroid. I was converted after a trip to a remote part of Madagascar in the mid 90s by friends who insisted on taking and giving people their photographs. I had been completely against the idea. I could not have been more wrong. What could be more precious than a picture of your family?

Don’t underestimate the power of photography. In thoughtful hands a camera shrinks space, connects strangers and illuminates lives. In thoughtless hands it snatches and grabs, hits and runs, confirms stereotypes. Used to tell stories it is still the magic lantern that captivated our forefathers and made us leave home in the first place.

* See Susan Sontag’s 1977 book of the same name, and her later Regarding the Pain of Others. Also The Bang Bang Club and Ken Light’s Witness in our Time

Why Global Education Matters

Posted by Annabel on 11/06/2012 education, global, history, media, reality, schools, social justice, stories, Syria, young people

Jun 112012

Today’s New York Times carries a story about the Syrian President’s carefully polished image, courtesy of some very expensive Western PR. As well as the notorious Vogue feature on his British-born wife, there are surprisingly many flattering portraits of this most brutal of dictators. Although the horrifying events of recent weeks have been widely reported, it will take time to erase the carefully crafted, wholesome image of this glamorous couple. The NYT article quotes Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert who once worked for a charity sponsored by Mrs. Assad, explaining the appeal of the President and First Lady thus: “He speaks English, and his wife is hot.”

The article reminded me of my visit to Syria in 2003. At first glance everything looked normal. There were no public protests, no opposition marches and no tanks in the streets. The only unsettling things were the huge billboards covered with images of the president: here in an army uniform, there in a business suit or with his wife and children. Every shop and café had a photo of him on the wall. He smiled benignly on his people, the new young president. Sometimes he stood beside his father, the former president, Hafez. Then they were both smiling. People were desperate to chat, to practice their English. Women watched me from behind their headscarves, and when I smiled, they smiled back. Children waved and rushed up to me, not to ask for anything, just to meet, to say, “Hello, how are you? What is your name?” Conversation was complicated, and took place only in large open spaces with nobody close by. On the pretext of taking photographs I separated myself from the crowds and asked careful questions of those who hung around, obviously eager to find an audience. Could they listen to international news? No, it was censored. Could they access the Internet freely? No, it was blocked. Was there politics taught in school? Yes, all students had classes of political indoctrination. What did they think of America? Wonderful!

There were almost no other Western tourists in Syria that summer. Souvenir shops were empty, cafes were closed and everywhere people were suffering because their only source of income had disappeared. Hotels were operating on a skeleton staff and many people had lost their jobs. As I drove into Damascus, alone in a taxi, the driver pointed up to a brutal, heavily fortified building on the hill: an unmistakable piece of fascist architecture. “If you are a murderer you can be out in a week. If you criticize the president you can be there for life.”

Hama is a beautiful small town in the Orontes Valley, famous for its huge water wheels, or norias, which are used to feed the fields and fill the aqueducts. Their grinding, creaking and rhythmic groaning creates a soon unnoticed soundtrack like the whirring of cicadas. My memory retains a tranquil picture of a traditional town, where every woman wore a headscarf and loose topcoat, and every person waved and smiled. By night it was a dim, quiet city: by far the loudest noises I heard were the call to prayer and the sounds of the swallows swarming at sunset. There were peach, pomegranate and citrus orchards and gardens of flowers made possible by the plentiful water. I stayed at the Cham Palace Hotel, which was almost empty. In the evenings I swam alone in the pool in the garden. From the water I could see the weathered domes and dappled tile-work of the mosques and minarets of the old city.

On the plane home I talked to the man sitting next to me. This is what he told me about Hama: In 1982 the city, Syria’s fourth largest, with a population of 350,000 people, was destroyed on the president’s orders. Aerial bombing cut the roads so that nobody could escape on foot. The army surrounded the city and started shooting. Bulldozers and tanks followed, and then, to be sure that there were no survivors, cyanide gas was released. The old city was razed. Between 10 and 20,000 people were killed. In a case study of political violence, Hafez al-Assad, the then President, had ordered the attack against the Muslim Brotherhood, a group of Islamic insurgents inspired by Iran’s 1979 revolution. His aim was to teach a lesson for generations. Every family in the city lost someone. Exactly as he intended, it spread terror throughout Syria, and was barely reported elsewhere. What I had thought was the old city was in fact a complete reconstruction, distressed and pre-aged to fool the tourists. My hotel, with its swimming pool, was built on the mass graves of one of the neighborhoods.

This is why global education matters. The accurate representation of reality is too important to be left in the hands of market and profit-driven media. Some voices in the press are expert, brave and impartial; more are naive or careless; a few are being paid to misrepresent. How are young people ever to understand the world that their taxes and votes shape if they do not learn at school?

The best education in the world is one where children with different histories learn together side by side. There’s no better example than the family of United World Colleges which turns out outstanding, compassionate graduates year after year, many of them years older than their age-cohort because they started life as refugees. If we start seeing the world as a classroom, unfolding events as lesson plans and those who have lived life on the ground as teachers, then we will educate a generation of young women who will scoff at the idea that being “extremely thin and very well-dressed,” is more important than standing by whilst your husband orders the slaughter of children.

The Invisible Genius of KONY 2012

Posted by Annabel on 20/04/2012 current, education, global, media, reality, schools, stories, volunteering, young people

Apr 202012

After several weeks on the critics’ bandwagon I’ve suddenly realised the invisible genius of this campaign: it’s given us a reason to be proud of our young people again. Did you notice?

Our kids – the ones we constantly criticise for being plugged in or on the phone, not pulling their trousers up and not listening – just stood up in their millions and said they want to help African children they’ve never met. Did I hear a cheer?

Ok, the organisation that facilitated this revolution is flawed, and so is their message. They took a highly complicated situation, simplified it, added regrettable emotional schmalz and rocked it up, insulting everyone in the process. But can we just for a moment let that pass? This film has been watched by over 100 million people, and while we don’t know the exact numbers, we do know that a huge proportion were young. Millions of children have watched, and talked about, a half-hour documentary on an obscure, barely-reported war in a country few adults could find on the map. What does this tell us? That our kids don’t just care about their peers in other countries – they care passionately. That our kids want to be good people. That it’s time we helped them.

In 1994 800,000 Rwandan people were hacked and burned to death in 100 days. When the Head of Human Rights Watch in the US called the State Department to ask why the US government wasn’t doing more, she was told: “You have to make more noise.”

But how can we make more noise about things we don’t know are happening? We rely almost completely on two sets of institutions to tell us everything: schools and the media. Neither is serving the public well just now. Despite the best efforts of many hero teachers and heads of school, education is shaped by cookie-cutter thinking and a remorseless need for data, while media empires, driven by ratings and sales, fill our screens and news stands with celebrity pap or foreign reports that just don’t seem real.

Both let young people down.

How did we do when KONY 2012 came out? Did our columnists and media leaders provide clear analysis and helpful insight? Did our teachers stop teaching to the test for long enough to have a proper conversation and get beyond a cake sale? In a few, wonderful cases yes, but in the vast majority, no. And why should they? It’s hardly a winner with exam boards or media ratings. So everyone fell back on Google, the BBC, whatever was trending on Twitter; on the Culture-makers and Policy-makers who didn’t know what to say. I bet most households’ resident dinner-table expert was under the age of 18.

Why don’t we, just for once, listen to those young people?

Ten years ago I started writing and teaching courses on global issues. The reaction of my first class of 17/18 year-olds shocked me – they were really angry. Why had they never been told this before? (They were still reeling from the news that President Bush was not attending the Earth Summit, then taking place in Johannesburg.) Just as they were entering adult life, voting and paying taxes, they were told how much they didn’t know. Nobody likes feeling stupid. So we rolled our sleeves up and got started: poverty, global public health, complex emergencies, international institutions.

Then we took it one step further and found the people in our neighbourhood who were the experts: refugee and immigrant communities, local government housing officials, those on low incomes. There’s no better classroom than the community, and no more powerful resource than people telling their own stories. Every year I ask my classes whether I should run the class again. Every year they say yes; courses like this should be compulsory. Everyone should know that the top five arms dealers in the world are the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. Everyone should know that more than 20,000 children under the age of five die every day of poverty. Apparently it surprises our media moguls and curriculum planners that young people care about these things.

We can’t teach everything – the world is a big place, after all. Writing curriculum and planning courses isn’t about covering all the facts, it’s about developing skills and habits of mind that allow young people to understand events and situations for which they haven’t been specifically prepared. So if they had a sense of the issues on the African continent, or of the workings of the ICC, or of how civil wars tend to focus on resources not borders, then they would be better equipped to see that whilst Kony should definitely be behind bars, Invisible Children’s approach is reckless and irresponsible.

But let’s not forget that Invisible Children are experts, on both social media and our kids. So rather than demonising Jason Russell and his team, why don’t we try to learn from them. Here are some things they did right:

• Make the invisible children visible by telling their stories.

• Shrink the distance between ‘them’ and ‘us’ by bringing people together

• Empower and challenge young people all over the world to act

• Trust young people to care

Friends in schools all over the world reported children who had never before shown any interest in the news or politics asking about the video. If this is what Invisible Children mean by ‘changing the conversation of our culture’ then I for one am right behind them. At a time of deep budget cuts and growing social polarisation I can’t think of better news than an outstanding display of compassion and determination by our young people. Let’s see them, hear them, and cheer.

The Missing Link

Posted by Annabel on 26/11/2011 education, global, history, reality

Nov 262011

A few years ago, while I was living and working in the US, I devised a new optional ‘elective’ course for my teenage students. I began the first lesson by presenting them with a passage describing a community wracked by hunger, unemployment and epidemic sexually transmitted disease. I asked them what they thought and not surprisingly they talked of AIDS and poverty in Africa.

In fact the passage described Gaston County North Carolina, and was written by Martha Gellhorn as part of her work chronicling the impact of the Depression and syphilis epidemic on ordinary American men and women. Your grandparents, I said to my students. My point was not to embarrass them, but to make them think of life as a continuum. So many of the keys to understanding human experience lie on our own kitchen tables, yet too often we send young people into the world believing the world to be an alien place that they simply don’t understand.

To make my American students feel better about their country I drew a few parallels with mine. In 1910 life expectancy in London was 45 (the same as Sierra Leone today). The poor routinely died of malnutrition. One in seven children died before their fifth birthday.

My course was called Contemporary Africa, and was less about summarising the vital statistics of fifty-two countries than about a way of thinking. I explained the value of seeing things from other points of view, and used first-hand accounts and witness statements, personal stories and case studies to illuminate and humanise the big picture. I introduced my students to the rational actor framework and suggested that people generally do the things that make sense to them in a given time and context. Of course a factual framework helps too, so Colonialism, the Cold War and the Arms Trade made regular appearances.

As a more traditional History teacher, my aim had always been to bring the past to life, to cross the divide of decades or centuries and find points of contact. I wanted to make the dead real for my students, to make the ‘deadness’ unimportant, and to concentrate on the personalities and the situations. I wanted them to like or dislike historical figures for a reason, to get into their heads and to understand why they did what they did. My students were required to take on roles, defend positions and find the way in to often unappealing or alien points of view. We studied ordinary people, not just kings and queens. We looked at their houses and clothes, and at statistics on health, life expectancy and infant mortality. We tried, above all, to connect.

But I didn’t provide the missing link. I didn’t give my students of Nineteenth century economics recent newspaper articles about the coltan mines in the Congo from where the vital ingredients of their cell phones came. Nor did I show them photographs I’d taken in Ethiopia and Madagascar of farmers tilling the earth with wooden ploughs and oxen. I didn’t tell them my stories of former commercial sex workers in India and my visit to a brothel, any more than I reminded my current events students that London used to be a seething hell of child prostitution, dead babies and filth – in my grandmother’s lifetime.

So why don’t we put our study of the past and present together? Why don’t we take the hard-earned skills of analysis, imagination and empathy and use them to help decode the urgent issues of the day? Why not use those approaches and that understanding to make the world we live in more comprehensible, familiar and human? Perhaps then Africans would stop being crazy and frustrating, and start making sense. Kenyan street kids sniffing glue would seem as logical a response to hunger and cold as drinking gin in Edwardian London; and the traffic of women and children for domestic slavery and the sex industry not something new, but the continuation of an abominable and heartbreaking trade.

While we’re at it, why don’t we also take a rather more global perspective? A few years ago a black South African friend pointed out that it is strange that Europeans consider Africa a dark, savage continent. Looking from Cape Town, Europe was the instigator and venue for two savage world wars and a genocide that incinerated millions of people in purpose-built ovens. Selecting a particular lense, and then looking at the whole world through it is not only more fair, but also far more interesting.

If we want to create a big, compassionate society filled not with incomprehensible strangers but with ordinary people, then we need to fix the missing link: going round the world and going back in time are not as different as we might think. And in case that sounds like a case for progress and the superiority of the global north, it’s worth noting that London is currently experiencing a new epidemic of that ‘Victorian’ condition, rickets.