Yes, I feel at home everywhere. I think a writer is essentially without home outside of their art and maybe language, so even in Nigeria, I felt a certain displacement. But I like to think of myself as a more global soul. I think we all have to now, the way the world has changed, you know?

Do you write about Nigeria and Nigerian characters out of a specific need, obligation, or impulse? Does Nigeria exist in everything you write?

I don’t write about characters based on where they are from. Characters coalesce around an idea, a hope or even a burning issue and then slowly evolve to tell their narrative. There are characters in my books from all over the world. I don’t know if Nigeria exists in everything I write. No, scratch that, it must. It must because it is a part of me, so yes, the answer is yes.

It seems that most of your characters witness or take part in extreme brutality—mutilation, rape, massacre, and war. How do you prevent sensationalizing these events? How does writing about such devastation affect you personally? Are you able to separate yourself from your art?

I don’t know that most of my characters do. Some do. Some don’t. Here’s the thing, I am drawn to areas of silence, to loss around silence and so I am engaged in some form of recuperation, some kind of exploration of my own understanding of the world and its seemingly irreconcilable horrors and beauties. Nothing prevents me from sensationalizing these narratives, but they would be uninteresting and would yield nothing to me as a writer and a human being to do so. Writing is a kind of spiritual practice for me and so I am always looking for ways to turn everything towards light, towards transformation, but a real one that isn’t sentimental. I don’t if I ever truly succeed, but I keep trying. Yes, I am able to separate myself from my art. Can you imagine how awful a person I would be if I didn’t? I don’t take myself seriously, but I take my art deadly serious.

Is it easier to live in your art or in your life? Is there a distinction?

Yes there is a distinction. There is a way in which an artist has to move outside their own life, their own limitations or even moral sense in order to portray or create a convincing world. In that sense, I can be for gun control but write a convincing and committed character who is in the NRA. Does this make sense? That who an artist is in the world doesn’t have to reflect what they portray in their art.
It is always easier to live in art, I think, because in a way it is a remove from the quotidian difficulties of everyday living. The harder thing is to live in your life while making and holding onto the artistic imagination. This is what I do because it is all I know how to. There is a curious way in that in the Western imagination the writer or artist comes to occupy a more privileged position than most people. This is not the way it is necessarily viewed in other parts of the world. An artist is important but no more so than anybody else. We are playing our part to keep our humanity alive.

You published your first novel at sixteen. Were you writing poetry then too? How do poetry and prose provide different vehicles for expressing yourself? Do you consider yourself more a poet or a novelist?

Everyone writes bad poetry when they are young, although there are some who continue to write bad poetry even when they should know better, but I was primarily a fiction writer. I read and loved poetry but it was a form that I considered too grand for me then. I mean poets were Eliot and Yeats, you know?
Poetry is the only art form where language is the subject, so when I am trying to work through ideas that themselves seem ineffable, when I need to invent a language for some impulse, I turn to poetry. I don’t think of it as self-expression. I think it is more than just that.
I think that I am a viscous writer—I flow between forms, with difficulty but with joy. My friend the writer Colin Channer refers to me as bi-textual. Maybe I am.

You’ve used the phrase “kernel of the narrative thrust” before. Could you explain this? Is the kernel something you consciously create or something that arises organically out of your work? If it emerges, when in your writing process do you usually find it, and how do you know when you’ve got it? If the kernel is a conscious creation, what advice do you give writers for creating it?

The kernel is the thing you cannot name, or at least name well. It is the impetus for the work. It is the thing that you are struggling with that gives rise to a whole novel in order to explain it. It arises organically when a writer begins to engage in the world, when a writer breaks from the focus on self.
If you take the novel, Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, the kernel of the book is the idea of a man who is incapable of love, true love, which requires the loss of self to some extent. The whole arises out of this struggle, which ties into Baldwin’s general philosophical engagement with the world, which is that the lack of love is the only perversion.

If you could meet any African artist—author, painter, sculptor, musician, lyricist, singer, designer—who would it be? Why?

I would have loved to have met Bessie Head and to have spent more time with Yvonne Vera. Bessie wrote the most psychologically intense novel in African literature ( A Question of Power ) and was playing with form like the French writers, and Yvonne’s ability to use language to transform the world remains a large influence on me.

Pamela Gien is an artist who was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and emigrated to the United States over 20 years ago. She is the author of the Syringa Tree, a play about the experience of life during apartheid South Africa from the perspective of a young child. There are 24 characters in the play, and Pamela, an actress by profession, plays them all. Pamela Gien won the OBIE Award for Best Play 2001, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, the Outer Circle Critics Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, a Drama League Honor, and a nomination for the John Gassner Playwriting Award. The Syringa Tree had its world premiere at ACT in Seattle, followed by a two-year run in New York. Pamela has since travelled around the world, including London and Cape Town, performing the play, astonishing audiences with her adept portrayal of such diverse characters, and moving them deeply through the raw emotions and profound insights contained within the story. Pamela has also written a novel of The Syringa Tree, published to excellent reviews in August 2006. She is currently at work on another story set in her homeland of South Africa.

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When did you leave South Africa, and why?

I was born and grew up in South Africa, and went to university there – I went to Wits university. And I met my husband when I was in South Africa – when I was very young actually – about 16. Then I went to study in Paris for a while, and I loved being overseas. I loved the whole newness of it. I’ve always been interested in travelling, so when I came back to South Africa, I had, I suppose, that little seed of wanting to travel more, but also wanting to settle down and start my career. I did work in South Africa for about four years after we got married. We got married in 1980. I did a lot of work with Pact and SABC and some workshops with the Market theatre, different things that most actors do in South Africa.

Both my husband and I had thought about travelling, just for a year to start with, that was our plan. We just thought we would see the world and try to do a year of travel, and … I remember coming home from doing a show, and he was at home reading the newspaper, and I said to him, “Maybe we should go and see the world, and see America,” because I’d never been to America, and he put the newspaper down, he said, “When would you like to go?”

Within three months, we had packed everything up and we were on our way. We put everything in storage, we didn’t emigrate then, we thought we were really going on a year’s trip. But … as I’ve travelled around the world with the play, … I hear from so many South Africans who say to me: “I always thought that I would want to leave if things didn’t change. I always was so uncomfortable with what was going on there.” And that was my feeling really. I think I left for two main reasons: the first was that I was a young person, I was curious and excited to see the world, and then I also was profoundly uncomfortable and sad, in a way I probably could not have articulated then, about the state of how things were at home.

Where do you feel is home, and has your definition of home changed over the years?

Well, interestingly, whenever my husband and I speak about going to South Africa to visit - we both have family there and we go back and forth – whenever we speak about going there, we always say, “We’re going home.” So even though we’ve lived in America for 25 years and …I know that I deeply love America, I know that I feel tremendously grateful to have had the opportunities that I’ve had here, and to learn and be part of a culture that I admire, …it really moves me to be part of a nation who have gone through a lot of what South Africa has gone through, but at the same time, I think it moves me because I am so deeply South African. I love what the American constitution says, precisely because I am a South African, because of what we’ve all lived through. So while I’m grateful to call it my home, South Africa will always be my real home…whenever I go there, I feel completely at ease and completely at home, in a way that I don’t feel anywhere else.

How often have you returned to South Africa since you left?

When I first left, I came back quite frequently to work, and to see my family - the first eight or nine years. After that, there was a period of time that I just stayed away. It was during that time that I started to really allow myself to feel the feelings I had about it, even though at the time, as I said, I couldn’t articulate them very well.

I struggled and struggled with my feelings about having left, and I feared that if I went back [again], I would be overwhelmed emotionally…I wouldn’t be able to cope with it. And then I feared that if went back, I would never be able to leave again. And I think that told me how hard it was to leave in the first place…you don’t realize…one has so many conflicting feelings…but at the same time, it’s a wonderful feeling to have that richness in your life, in your internal life. It’s difficult, but it’s also enriching.

The first time I came back [after that period] was at least five years ago. It was after I did the play in New York – I remember leaving New York, and knew I was heading out, to home. I think I must have cried all the way there, cried when we landed, then the worst was when we left again, and I was a ball of tears all the way back again.

I’ve come back almost every year since then. But after I came back, I remember…instead of being overwhelmed with my own feelings, I was overwhelmed with what was happening there. It was so powerfully different, and for all the problems and things that still made me feel sad – you know, it still made me feel sad to see somebody with a bundle of sticks on their head and nothing….There’s something different about the feeling in the country, a spirit of ownership. I noticed it from the minute I arrived at the airport in Johannesburg – the guy who offered to help me with my luggage, and he got a trolley for me, and he said, “Let me run with you to the next terminal,” and he was so proud to help me, and I just found that so different…there was something so proud, so owning about it that I found myself so much more moved by those things…my own feelings didn’t seem to matter so much anymore.

Do you want to talk a little bit about how you came to write the play?

I never in a million years expected to write a play or to write anything at all because I’d been an actor my whole career. I was working in a professional acting class with Larry Moss, who I’d say is probably the best acting coach in the world at this point… I was so lucky to be recommended to his class by a fellow actor here in Los Angeles, when I first came to Los Angeles from New York…I majored in Dramatic Art and English at Wits, and trained in Paris a little bit, but I hadn’t ever studied just pure acting in an acting class, so the whole thing was very new to me.

…He came into class one day…[and] gave this particular exercise, which was, “Turn to the person next to you, and tell them something that happened to you. It could be something that happened a long time ago, or something that happened this morning, say in the bank. Just turn now and start speaking. So I turned to the chap sitting next to me – his name was Bjorn Johnson, he’s an actor – and I don’t know where it came from, but into my mind flooded an image of my grandparents’ farm, Clova, and I thought, Gosh, what in the world am I thinking about that for? I won’t think about that.

My grandparents were attacked on their farm. I was ten years old when it happened, and as a family we sort of moved on from it, it was very traumatic at the time, it was quite an unusual thing at the time. I mean now it’s…sadly an everyday occurrence…you know, what’s happened to the farmers in Zimbabwe…now one wouldn’t be surprised to hear something like that, but in those days it was shocking because this was a farmer – He was English, he’d come out from England when he was a young man – beloved of the African workers on his farm. I mean, they used to follow him around, and they helped him build the farmhouse, they loved him…he really was beloved and a decent, kind, humble man. And the farm was an extremely simple place, it wasn’t a fancy farm at all, it was the best kind of South African farm – you put your shorts on and your flip flops and your hat and off you go, and that’s the best of all possible worlds. As a family – he was my mother’s father- we all dealt with it and moved on, but it was such a painful event, we never discussed it, we never really raised the subject out of respect to my mother…So, here I was all these years later on another continent, and this image came to my mind of walking with my grandfather on the gravel road that led from the gate to the farmhouse, and I just thought, What in the world? I quickly thought, I won’t think about that, I’ll try to think of something else, and as I thought that, Larry said to the whole class, “Don’t censor whatever it is that just came into your mind, tell that story, it will choose you.” I thought, Ah, no! And then I thought, Well, I’ll just quickly tell the story about that and then we’ll move on. And I told Bjorn one of my thoughts…driving home from my grandfather’s funeral, and I was, as I said, ten years old, and as I was telling him these thoughts, I was thinking, Gosh, that was a strange thing for a ten-year-old to be thinking about, and then we switched sides and Bjorn told me his story of something that had happened to him. The exercise lasted only three minutes.

And then Larry said to us, “The next part of this exercise is to stage the story that you’ve just told.” So I thought, Ah, no! This thing’s never going to end. He said, “You can come back in a week, in a month, two months from now, with some version of it staged. It can be using other actors, you could do it own your own, you can read a text, you can make a small film, you can do anything but just bring it in a fleshed-out form.” And I went home thinking, Well, I’m never going to go near that exercise. And something – I don’t know – well, I know now what it was, it was that I had a real need to deal with it, …every day I woke up after the class, I had little snippets of memory and things coming to me that I had not thought about in decades. And there was something quite wonderful about remembering things, and also something quite painful and difficult about remembering things. So interestingly, I was the very first person to bring that exercise back, even though I was probably the most reluctant.

And then that’s how it really started. I did probably like a 20-25 minute improvisation, which, in retrospect, had all the bare bones, it sort of had the skeleton of the play. Growing up, it had a monologue in the bed, as a child, it was all through the child’s voice. It seemed from the very first moment it was through the child’s voice. I don’t know why it had to be that, but it just naturally was that. And it had going out to the fire at the back of the house, with our huge syringa tree, and the people gathered around the fire, then it had my relationship with my nannies, and the wedding dance…it was very primitive, just an improvisation really…and then it had leaving to go to America at the end. So, as I say, in retrospect, it was the whole spine of the story. And at the end of it, Larry said – and I was shaking from head to toe because I had never stood up to do my own material or felt that exposed before – Larry said, “Can you look out and see your colleagues?” The whole class was standing and people were weeping, and Larry said to me, “These are such important stories from people’s lives. We need to hear these stories, we need them because we need to learn. You have to write this as a play, and you have to write this as a film.” He said that I left that class like a deer in the headlights with wide, staring eyes (laughs). He thought I’d never come back!
But after that, I came home and I really just started to write even though I had never written anything. I just sat down and started, and then I couldn’t stop. I wrote it in about eight weeks. I gave it to him and we started to work on it….

When I first started working with Larry, I kept saying to him, “But who would be interested in this? It’s just my funny little life. It doesn’t matter to anyone, it doesn’t mean anything to anyone.” And he would say to me, “This is such a universal story, …it’s so much about all of us. It’s about all of us…who have struggled in any way in this world,” and so when I hear from South Africans like you, Daniela, and South Africans of every race, it means the world to me to have someone say to me, “That was my story. That was my story. You told my story.” Every time I hear it, and I have hundreds of letters from people who’ve said to me they connect so deeply to the story because The Syringa Tree is their life.

I remember in the Syringa Tree, Elizabeth, at an older age, remembers her youth in South Africa, “I was really somewhere.” That just really struck me, and I am just wondering how important the concept of place, of home, is in your writing, and how much influence do you think one’s connection to a place has on a person?

Well, I think it’s enormous…and I think it unfolds more and more as you get older and as you travel more in life. I don’t mean travel to different destinations, I mean travel through the journey of your own life – emotionally and intellectually… I think our early beginnings are so influential and we either try to reinforce those in our life, try to implement and recreate the safety and the peacefulness or the good aspects of that, or we rebel against what those early beginnings were, or it’s a combination. I find myself very much drawn to things that feel familiar to me, and when I understand why they feel familiar, it’s always because there’s an element of home in them for me…There’s a place I love to go to here. It’s called Ojai…a place in California …which is considered to be sacred ground for the Indians…it has a very special feeling to me, and I took my sister there recently.…I’d told her over many years how much I love this place, and how any chance I get, I go there. And I said to her, “It’s something about … these hillsides out in the sun that have dry kind of things growing on them and then they have scented geraniums …and then there was a smell in the air, and it was the smell of wood burning fires, and the architecture of the building…white, plastered walls and cool, cement floors. And my sister said to me, “Pamela, this is like the farm – it’s like Clova.” I hadn’t made that connection, I supposed I hadn’t allowed myself to make the connection, but the minute she said [it] to me … I cried because I suddenly understood that’s why I love it there. I think I try to recapture some of what feels familiar and loving and kind in life, and I think that’s what home really is. It’s a feeling of safety, it’s a feeling of belonging, and I think South Africans struggle a lot with that all around the world. You know, where do we really belong? Where do we fit in? Who are we?

When I brought [the play] to Cape Town, it was truly one of the most amazing experiences of my life to be performing for South African audiences. And when I was a young actress there, of course all South African audiences were segregated, so it was all whites only. I remember as a young actress working for Pact, we all signed a petition … requesting that black actors be allowed to perform with us on stage. And so now, when I went to South Africa, and there I was, a white girl essentially playing characters of every race, I thought, Gosh, we’ve come so far…where black audiences…were so open to that. And that was a worry, when I first went there, I just wasn’t sure, I thought, they may just hate the whole idea of that. …. My first audience was almost all black, and they just stood up and cheered the roof off at the end. They were just an astounding audience actually …I mean, I think I cried at the end, and I put my hands down on the stage, and I thought, I’m really home. I’m really, really home. I’m home in so many ways. I’m home physically and I’m home within myself…..It was an enormous gift to me to have that kind of acceptance there, and I’ll never forget it. I’ll treasure it for the rest of my life.

And what is your perception of South Africa today compared to the era of The Syringa Tree or the different times that you’ve been back? How do you think it’s changed or hasn’t?

Well, you know, it’s so interesting that you said, “or hasn’t.” When I was there with the play at the Baxter, Manny Manim, the artistic director of the Baxter, said to me – I think he was quoting someone else, I don’t know who, but he said, “Everything changes and nothing does.” Isn’t that wonderful? And that just summed it up for me…everything has changed and nothing has. And I suppose what has changed…I’ll tell you a lovely thing that happened to me when I was in Boston doing the play. John Kani, the wonderful South African actor who was dealt with very punitively by the apartheid government for doing Fugard’s plays, an extraordinary man who’s lived a truly astounding life, said to me about South Africa now, “You know, Pammy,” he said, “I still see the man walking by the side of the road in the vlenterbroek (ragged pants),” he said,” but now he walks with face up. Face up!” I thought that was so beautiful - it was such a simple way of saying there are still tremendous problems, there are still things that are so difficult, but it has changed. That terrible spectre of apartheid is not there - that’s a magnificent change. Then I think…the crime is something that bothers me tremendously. The latest xenophobic attacks, I think have saddened every South African and people throughout the world …. A friend said to me, “I’m so sad to see that South Africa isn’t what I was thinking it might be by now.” Because people, internationally, have such hopes for South Africa. There’s such a sense of optimism, so when you hear something like that, it’s almost like going backward, but I try to think of those things as the problems that are to be expected after decades of oppression. These things come because people were denied educations, were denied the basics of human dignity.

But then also, as John Kani said to me, we’re ten years (it’s longer now, it was ten years then), ten years into our freedom, no one can take it from us…. But now we have to stop feeling that we deserve anything and everything and we have to work for things, we have to make change, and make it powerful, and make it good again. People were without for so long that then they felt they could demand everything, but what they have to learn is that you only truly get what you work for, what you earn, what you create, what you dream of and build. And that’s the next step for our country. So I feel hopeful when I think of it in those terms. And I feel hopeful when I see the terrific camaraderie between people of every race there now. It’s exciting. At the same time, it’s very saddening as a South African to hear the stories coming out of Johannesburg, out of Cape Town. I mean, I hear terrible, terrible things of people being shot in their driveways or attacked in their houses and you wonder…when will that change? When is that going to be taken in hand and controlled? I don’t understand how the country can prosper if basic issues of safety are not addressed.

Recently, I came out to do an article, and the black gentleman who drove me to the airport - he drives for the hotel - said he’d been hijacked four times … “… the last time they drove me to a dark place in the township, and I was on the ground begging for my life …. I told them I have small children. Please to spare my life….They wanted to kill me for the car.” I said, “That’s been going on here for a while…why do the police not do anything?” He said the police are so corrupt that they actually know about everything that’s going on and they won’t fix it, they don’t care. He said he felt hopeless about it, and that many blacks feel tremendously unsafe….It’s very difficult…when these fundamentals are not in place and respected, when there aren’t consequences for lawlessness, it’s very difficult to build a prosperous country. It saddens me that people will stop going there because they hear that it’s unsafe. And that’s very difficult…

If you could meet any African artist – author, painter, sculptor, musician, lyricist, singer, designer – who would it be? Why?

Ah, my goodness! Wow .… Well, my list would be endless, but I’d have to say probably on the top would be Miriam Makeba …her click song – growing up, it was a song that we all knew and sang and…I remember my nanny teaching me how to make the clicks, and I think it was…a song that connected us to each other in a way that was to do with our history and the place and our relationships at the time, and …to me, it was very powerful. I just think her voice is astonishing in that way…But you know, there are so many, … I wish that I’d had the chance to meet Alan Paton … I wish that I’d had a chance to meet Adam Small, the poet who wrote during the 60’s and 70’s …he called the coloured people, “God’s forgotten.” That was a very powerful image to me when I was growing up, and I remember thinking, How can that be? How can that be? If God is all-powerful, how could he forget anyone? It really was an awakening image for me.

Praise for the novel of The Syringa Tree by Pamela Gien
A gorgeous, hopeful, heartrending novel. . . . This uncommonly moving, deeply humane novel nearly dances in a reader’s hands with the rhythms and the colors, the complicatedness and the inimitability of southern Africa.”
–O The Oprah Magazine

South African photojournalist Guy Tillim, born and raised in Johannesburg, began taking pictures in the mid 1980s during the last days of apartheid. Initially part of the photocollective Afropix, Tillim went on to work in some of the most notoriously challenged parts of Africa, sometimes for agencies such as Agence France-Presse and Reuters. He has photographed child soldiers in Congo, refugees in Angola (’Kunhinga Portraits’) and life in the high rises of Johannesburg. But Tillim’s work counters First-World expectations of these places; in between his portraits of those caught in the aftermath of war or displacement, he is apt to capture the stillness of these spaces as well. During an election rally, he might shoot toward the sky, capturing the tops of raised arms beneath a tree that fills most of the frame; or turn away from the action to shoot the rapids of the Congo River, or an empty bed under mosquito netting. In famine-stricken Malawi, Tillim chose to take classically-lit, Caravaggio-like portraits of its residents. That these moments of repose dominate a body of work shot in some of the world’s most war-torn places is a testament to the quietude of Tillim’s vision. His photographs have a hush and luminosity that runs counter to traditional ideas of photojournalism.

Tillim has won numerous awards for his work, which has been shown in galleries and museums throughout the world. He lives outside Cape Town.

You started working professionally in the mid 1980s, during the last decade of apartheid. How and why did you start taking photographs? Who were major influences for you as you began your career?

I started to take photographs in 1986 — it was a way to see what was happening in my own country. I left a white boarding school at 17, went to University and became vaguely aware of what was going around me for the first time in my life. I wasn’t particularly interested in photographs at all. The camera was a passport—what was going in the country then was interesting to the rest of the world. It is hard to imagine the separation of the races. We [photographers] instantly had work, we had an audience—which is more difficult for fine art photographers. We sold images to the wire agencies. I worked with a collective called Afropix that was instrumental in getting photographers together and recording the news. I’m afraid that to some extent I was bought by the foreign media; there was a way to view what was happening in South Africa that was devoid of subtlety, and to some extent we bought into that. Yet there were some photographers—such as David Goldblatt—who weren’t working within that idiom at all. He [David] was doing his own thing. Some of his photographs will have staying power for a long time. Others—of the barricades, of the townships, or civil strife—are not necessarily wholly indicative of the period.

You began your career as a photojournalist but your work can now be found in art exhibitions such as Documenta 12. Do you continue to see yourself as photojournalist? What is the process by which documentary photography comes to be seen as art?

I think we can’t really invent labels for ourselves, though we might try to live up to them. Most of what I have been working on in the last 10 years has on my own recognizance. Whether you’re a photojournalist or not seems to be straightforward, except when you challenge the notions of how images are recorded. Perhaps you ask questions of visual language, or challenge preconceptions. I’m not really sure how it happens for myself, that is, going from working for newspapers and magazines into an art gallery. But they’re not mutually exclusive. In 2005, the work I did in Johannesburg [the Jo’Burg series] was published in a book and shown in galleries, as well as published in magazines and newspapers and so on. Same with thing with Documenta 12—my images of the Congolese election were also shown in Congolese daily newspapers.

Visual language is not as sophisticated as written language. There’s a lot more gray area, and misconceptions about what make a good image. You have to look at a whole body of work, look at intention. I think this has gone hand and hand with the flowering of visual language in the last decade. Conversely, it has coincided with the demise of photographic essays. If you think of the picture magazine of the 1980s, they ran long picture essays; this is not happening anymore. Many big agencies have been bought by Getty and Corbis. Images are more cheaper and readily available. This conception that photojournalists are arbiters of truth is being questioned somewhat. The idea that a photographer can stop a war—these ideas which were currency in the 80s and 90s—has somewhat dimmed.

Some of your photographs — for instance, those in the Jo’burg series — depict quite personal spaces, such as bedrooms. How do you go about gaining the trust of your subjects so that they allow you this access? How long did you spend on this project, and why did you chose this particular block of high rises?

I spent a lot of time in Johannesburg, rented an apartment there and lived there for four or five months. I got to know people, they saw me around. I would walk by their door and they might invite me in. Yet a lot of the time I was shown the door very smartly

I spent about five months working on [the project]. Those high rises are the center of Johsannesburg, formerly white Johannesburg. Jo’burg is sort of the little New York of South Africa—a powerhouse. It’s an extraordinary city. With the end of apartheid, black people who had been excluded from economic activity have moved into the city. And the whites became really scared, they put up high walls. For a long time Jo’burg was a lawless place and got a bad reputation. People moved in where they kind of rented out space and things were overcrowded, and crime was rife. But I knew it well, it was where I was born. It was emblematic of a city becoming an African city, its color, its darkness. It’s a very vibrant place. For five months, I was the only white guy on the block. I had a sort of diplomatic immunity.

You have said that, as a photographer, ‘neutrality is a luxury’ and many artists working in Africa might feel similarly. Taking this statement beyond the context of the work itself: was there ever a time when you became involved in the lives of your subjects beyond the relationship of observer and observed?

Sometimes you end up helping people who are injured. In Johannesburg—one of the people I got to know quite well—their child died. You help with that. You do become involved a little bit. Over my years as a photojournalist, I’ve had to help people get to hospital.

You have written there is a ‘dual journey’ that occurs when you are working, one that is both external and internal. Can you elaborate on the interior journey that occurs for you in the course of your travels and your work?

The internal journey can become the subject of your photographs, I think, and is really important in a sense— that is the difficulty— to overcome that. Because of the nature of visual representation you’re very much in danger always reinforcing preconceptions, of not really seeing things. Of reporting your idea of what you’re looking at, of your own preconceived notion. You have to get beyond that, not be so concerned with your subject —that’s kind of an attachment. It’s a strange contradiction. The conventional wisdom that you become concerned with your subject—that’s everything—and you can portray them in a way that you can help, further some idea of the human condition often it leads you into a very blind area. This kind of iconography that is so prevalent in photographs, to get away from that—that’s the internal journey.

Can you recall a specific instance of this?

I went to Petros Village in Malawi for a few weeks for a commission: ‘Go to Malawi and photograph famine’. So I stayed two weeks in a village to photograph famine, but I realize I couldn’t because I couldn’t understand famine. What did I know about famine really? I can’t really know. I know what someone who is hungry should look like, and I can make people look like that too. Bu the other way to approach it is to move away from that, and let the subject speak for themselves. You might find that some people go about their day and you photograph that, so you might photograph famine and yet have someone smiling. You can’t reinforce your ideas that everyone is a victim. It’s almost down to a political position. People are not necessarily victims, but they need access to markets. Some of them are hungry, some of them are not. I’m not going to photograph in the sense that they are dying— they’re not dying, they’re living a precarious existence. It changes the way you photograph them. Your internal journey becomes more important in a sense. Often photojournalists use as a justification ‘we can help you’, but that’s not necessarily the case. The only justification is really you trying to take a journey. You try and find out why you’re there.

How were your images of Malawi received?

In the end it worked out well and those pictures were seen widely. The goals were realized in a sense that these pictures were seen in a lot of places. If I had just photographed famine victims, that might not have been the case. I couldn’t have done it that way.

This idea you have of a place and how you might work is often not how it is—you have to overcome what seems like a bit of a void. Often in these places, people are living very hard and it’s very depressing.

You were recently awarded the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography from the Peabody Museum at Harvard. How did you spend your fellowship year?

I ended up photographing buildings from the colonial period— in Angola, Mozambique, Congo, Madagascar. There’s a ten year period in the late modernist world where there was this grand colonial architecture built in Francophone Africa and Lusophone Africa. It was this strange contemporary mythological time. These buildings are impressive, for all their inappropriateness they’re nonetheless they form part of a contemporary African stage. If you look at them a certain way, they’re just kind of floating worlds. Think of eastern Europe in the 70s and 80s—this kind of landscape and architecture was embraced, was loved, even though it represented a authoritarian vision. [The architecture] is celebrated as a kind of quirky machine. What it represented was this totalitarian power over people’s lives. There, it has somehow been transcended. In Africa, that’s not the case–these spaces are shunned. [that world where you can look at your space where see it as a strange and beautiful. The buildings are very much inhabited but many are decaying, so the challenge was not to become a connoisseur of decay, or come up with some sort of Havana-esque vision. I’d though about this project for quite a kind of a number of years, wondered how I’d ever get around to it. Then the fellowship came.

If you could meet and talk with any other African artist — author, painter, sculptor, musician, singer, designer – who would it be? Why?

I really like the people I’ve met already. Maybe the photographer Samuel Fosso—his is the only picture I’ve ever bought, a self portrait. He’s a young photographer working in a studio and he made a photograph at the end of a roll where he dresses up— he’s got these big round sunglasses, with a 70s-style high collared shirt open at the chest. It just has attitude. He’s having fun, he confounds you’re expectations of Africa, and he does it well.

According to the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF), more than 2.2 million people in Tanzania are living with HIV/AIDS and an estimated 2 million children have been orphaned as a result of the disease. This doesn’t seem to daunt Liduke who has been working with Tanwat’s HIV/AIDS Program since 1996. She is also a founding member of the Kibena Women’s Association, a group of professional women who provide support to women living in the local villages, and to children orphaned by HIV/AIDS.

As well as working with local community groups, Liduke has been working with McGill University’s School of Nursing. She is the school’s first International Clinical Instructor in Africa, and has traveled to Canada to meet with Canadian healthcare professionals and to participate in an International AIDS conference.
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Why did you decide to become a nurse?
I really liked to be a nurse since I was a child. And my mother also wanted one of her children to be a nurse. She felt that is a very good work and she compared with God’s work. I was the only one who was interested to go into nursing. My two sisters are teachers, one of my brothers was a veterinarian, and two of my brothers were working as car mechanics. All three brothers have died and we are three sisters remaining. My father and my mother also died.

How did you get involved in working with people HIV/AIDS?
I’ve been a nurse at the Tanwat [Company Hospital] since 1994. We started the HIV program, called the Workplace Intervention Program, with the company. We worked together in cooperation with AMREF, the African Medical & Research Foundation. From research in 1996 we found that there were cases of sexually transmitted infection of HIV/AIDS. At that time the company thought that it was good to start the program so we can give awareness to workers and their dependants to let them know that they were at risk for HIV/AIDS.

At that time, I was working with workers and their dependants only. But since 2001, Tanwat extended the program to 19 villages. Our workers also are living in the villages and coming to work, so we thought it would be good to extend to the villages.

In Bulongwa, I have three village-based groups made up of people living with HIV/AIDS. One of which is called PIUMA. [Ed. According to the Highlands Hope website, the PIUMA HIV Counseling and Testing Clinic is an independent, community-based clinic with leadership drawn primarily from local people living with HIV-AIDS.]

The other groups are CHAKUNIMU and TULILUMWI. They do community work, sensitization on development and HIV/AIDS awareness.

We started with prevention and awareness, and then in 1998 we started voluntary counseling and testing. We do testing for free—people don’t have to pay for voluntary counseling and testing. In 2006 we started care and treatment with the help of the National AIDS Control Program and some international help. The government is giving us antiretroviral drugs (ARVs). This is a national program: all the care and treatment programs are supposed to give free ARVs to all the clients. Up to now, we have enrolled 557 people in our care and treatment program. Of those, 420 are on the ARVs.

What are some of the biggest issues you encounter in providing care and treatment?
For the treatment we have no problem with access to ARVs, but we have a problem with drugs for opportunistic infections. The government is not supplying them for us so we have to buy them. And people here are very poor. You can’t tell them to buy the drugs because they have been sick for quite a long time and sometimes they have used all their money. So Tanwat buys the drugs and gives them to those who are not able to pay. Those who are able to pay, they pay. But for those who are not able, they are not paying.

Transportation is also an issue. For me I travel quite a lot because I have these 19 villages to go to. The roads to some of the villages are very bad. Especially during the rainy season, it is really hard to travel.

How do people react when you talk to them about HIV/AIDS?
At first when we started, the people they didn’t want to talk about HIV/AIDS, but now they understand. And they can talk openly—we can discuss it. Even those who are HIV positive are talking too. But at first it was very, very difficult.

Have you lost anyone in your family to HIV/AIDS?
Yes, one of my close family members died of HIV/AIDS.

Are you optimistic? Do you think things will get better with HIV/AIDS in your community?
I think so. In Tanzania we have a very high prevalence of HIV/AIDS but at the villages I have been going since we started the program the prevalence is going down. People now they started to understand what is HIV. They go for voluntary counseling and testing and they get treatment and they do their work. Now we have started with schools. We have a program in primary schools and secondary schools. It is much better to make people understand before they get HIV.

You are also a volunteer with the Kibena Women’s Association. What does the Association do and how did it start?
I’m a coordinator for the Kibena Women’s Association. We are 20 members and we started the Association in 2005. We are teachers, nurses, accountants, in agriculture… all professionals. I just talked with a few women and it was my opinion that we needed to work in a group so that we can help other women, mainly in the village. Not in town because in town there are many people who are helping. In the villages they don’t get help because, you know, people don’t want to go to the rural areas.

The life of village women is tough. They are the ones who wake up early in the morning and the ones who go to sleep late. Women in the villages do all the work of the field, taking care of the family, making sure the children have gone to school, making sure the family has daily food at home, doing all daily home activities, etc.

So we decided to get together so that we can raise the voice of women and educate them on various matters including HIV, income-generating projects, empowering women to have one voice etc.. We are also taking care of 17 orphans, [several] of them in secondary school, the remaining in primary school.

It must be challenging to do the work you do. What keeps you going?
My family makes me strong every time, whenever I become tired with the work. Also I love my work and job as I feel it is a part of my life. I really like to help my community. That is my heart, the feelings from my heart.

Presumably, we can all agree that conserving our natural wonders and resources is a noble and necessary task. The question, then, is how best to go about doing so. To find out about one innovative approach, we spoke with Sibylle Riedmiller, the founder and Project Director of Chumbe Island Coral Park (CHICOP).

Located off the coast of Tanzania, CHICOP is a nature reserve that combines conservation with environmental research and education. It is a private initiative that aims to be sustainable not only in an ecological sense, but in a financial one as well. Rather than relying on donor aid or government subsidies, the park supports itself through ecotourism, as it brings travelers and students from around the world to experience the island’s coral reefs, pristine beaches, and rare wildlife.

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What are some of the main threats to coral reefs throughout the world and around Chumbe Island in particular?
The threats around the world are well known: overexploitation and destruction of coral reefs by unsustainable and destructive fishing methods (in Tanzania dynamite fishing and beach seining in particular), coral mining, pollution by coastal development and intensive agriculture, and last but not least, the effects of climate change: coral bleaching and acidification of seawater.
We have since 1992 been able to stop fishing and anchorage in the Reef Sanctuary on the western side of Chumbe Island, which is now a small totally protected and fully managed marine park. However, the corals there also suffered temporarily, but quickly recovered from the 1998 worldwide bleaching event, and we needed active intervention to control Crown-of-thorn starfish and Diadema sea urchin outbreaks from 2003.

At present, the reef is in excellent condition concerning biodiversity and biomass, compared to many other reefs in the region, as shown by our regular monitoring and comparative research by independent researchers. There are over 200 species of reef-building corals, which is about 90% of all found in the region, and at least 423 species of fish, and we are still counting! When the world-renowned coral specialist Charlie Veron visited Chumbe a decade ago, he even found a new coral species which he wanted to name ‘Oulophyllia chumbensis’, but then the specimen got lost and we’re waiting for an opportunity to send another one…

Nevertheless, even the most professional and effective MPA management can do little against the effects of global climatical trends that are indeed worrying. With our Environmental Education and Awareness programs for government officials, fishers, schoolchildren, and last but not least, ecotourists, we work towards changing human behavior, which will determine what we leave behind to future generations: a healthy, productive and stunningly beautiful coral reef, or more underwater graveyards like there are so many in the region and worldwide.

Getting the Chumbe Island project up and running turned out to be a long and trying process. Would it have been easier to do somewhere outside of Africa?
Around the world, nature conservation has historically been a state monopoly, and private sector involvement and investment was not often encouraged. In this respect, we were fortunate to find and take advantage of a political and legal window of opportunity in Zanzibar in the early nineties that made Chumbe possible. The absence of limiting conservation policies, laws and institutions allowed for unique and very innovative contractual arrangements between the Government of Zanzibar and Chumbe Island Coral Park Ltd. that created the park, based on political reforms ending decades of isolation of Zanzibar, including new investment policies that encouraged direct foreign investment.
On the other hand, major governance issues, such as institutional weaknesses and rent-seeking by some officials delayed implementation and thus increased investment and operational costs unnecessarily, which obviously has an impact on investment success and commercial viability. It took us 8 years of park development until we could open for commercial operations, and until a few years ago, the Project Manager had to spend up to 80% of her time dealing with cumbersome government bureaucracy on routine issues, not island operations as you may expect. This has improved now fortunately.

In addition, there are no tax incentives for investing into non-commercial park establishment, management, research and education programs, which now make up for about a third of our staff and operational costs and thus reduce profits accordingly. Indeed, we employ 42 staff with only seven rooms, which is three times the international average for eco-lodges according to a recent study of the International Finance Corporation. All this is not really acknowledged. These particular governance framework conditions may indeed be more favorable elsewhere.

Another reason why private investment into conservation may be less attractive in Africa is that there is so much competition from generously funded donor aid. For example, for a donor-dependent country like Tanzania, where over 40% of the government budget is paid by donors, there is much temptation to see state-run conservation as a more ‘profitable’ approach for both, government and aid agencies. Local people in and around the parks rarely benefit from this bonanza and are quite often alienated, not to mention sustainability, which is systematically undermined, in spite of all good intentions and declarations to the contrary. It is like drug addiction, the more you get the more you need.

It may sound cynical, but aid agencies also have institutional and vested interests (William Easterley once described them as a ‘Cartel of Good Intentions’) and are not particularly known for transparency and accountability neither back home nor to local people in recipient countries. There is an incredible amount of wasteful spending and leakage when aid money funds conservation, and there are real concerns about ‘aid effectiveness,’ which are not really addressed, as the spending pressure is so high. I have worked in the aid industry for most of my professional life and believe that I know what I’m talking about.

What are some of the challenges you have run into that are unique to running a marine park rather than a nature reserve on land?
Indeed, Tanzania’s most important tourism attractions are the world-famous terrestrial wildlife parks, and the government has decades of experiences in establishing and managing them, though with very limited community and private sector involvement. Just think of the world-famous Serengeti, Ngorongoro crater, Kilimanjaro parks among several more!

In contrast, marine conservation is a fairly recent addition to the development agenda here, and policies and the legal and institutional framework were only created from the mid nineties. The privately established Chumbe Reef Sanctuary was actually the first managed Marine park in Tanzania, and also officially recognised by the Zanzibar government in 1994 and the international conservation community (UNEP-WCMC, IUCN) from 1995.

Being a front-runner at local, national (and even international) levels has its costs. People don’t understand what you are talking about, don’t believe you, suspect a hidden agenda. In the early nineties, few people in Tanzania knew anything about coral reefs, they are not taught about in schools and the national language has no word for them (even fishers refer to them as rocks and stones). So officials wondered why this foreign investor cared so much about those underwater rocks? It took many years of awareness creation and actually proving on the ground that all the conservation and education work is real, until some of this was understood and acknowledged. International recognition is of utmost importance here as well, and we worked hard for that. The many prestigious international awards won by Chumbe, both for conservation and ecotourism, helped convince officials and the public that the Chumbe Project is indeed something Zanzibar can be proud about.

Also, where private land tenure is well accepted, as in many countries even in Africa, private reserves can be developed with relative ease by the owners. In contrast, water bodies, in particular the oceans, are commonly seen as public property or no-man’s land, and badly suffer from the tragedy of the commons around the world because of that. It is the Wild West (or East) out there, where massive overexploitation and destruction of marine resources threaten the productivity of fishing grounds. In Tanzania, rampant dynamite fishing all along the coast is the biggest challenge.

Nevertheless, turning the whole of the uninhabited Chumbe Island and the adjacent reef into a park, was an accepted investment proposition in the early nineties, and we are grateful for that. As you can only lease land in Tanzania anyway, the idea of leases and contracts for both, the western reef of Chumbe and the virgin coral-rag forest on the island seemed fairly logical. The creation and official recognition of the Reef Sanctuary and Management Agreement with the Government of Zanzibar have worked well so far, together with the development of the Chumbe Forest Reserve. In fact, we run an island reserve, thus doing what is demanded in the conservation world today, that is integrated ecosystem based management rather than protection of particular species only.

The downside is of course that leases and contracts have a limited duration and extension is not guaranteed, and may be subject to political pressures and thus insecurity. Ideally, nature conservation should be for perpetuity. Thus policies and instruments need to be developed that increase security of tenure for the conservation-minded investor. Investment into conservation is by definition long-term, foregoing short-term profits from resource exploitation, and there need to be incentives for that!
Altogether, the challenges have more to do with the fact that Chumbe is a privately established and managed park based on leases and contracts, and we share these challenges with other private nature reserves around the world.

What role does environmental education play in your enterprise and in conservation in general?
Environmental Education and Awareness creation on coral reef ecology and marine conservation have always been on the top of our agenda, indeed one of the main reasons for creation of the park. Even the company registration documents are explicit on that.

As mentioned above, to win the support of government officials for the project in the early years, a lot of time has been spent for awareness creation on coral reef conservation among them. The Park rangers have also been ‘educating’ local fishers for many years, as explained further down, and this continues up to today.

Indeed, you may have expected me to mention ‘fishers’ among the main challenges to the park above. Interestingly, people in the conservation world always assume that fishers are the greatest challenge to marine parks. They were not around Chumbe, as few people depended on this reef before creation of the park, and because we put so much emphasis from the very beginning on communicating with them.

For a number of years already, schools are the main target of our Environmental Education Program. There is a classroom in the Visitors’ Centre on Chumbe with a library and many interesting exhibits, and CHICOP has, since 1999, organised school excursions for secondary students and their teachers to Chumbe Island. Until 2008, over 2500 students and 500 teachers from more than 35 secondary schools, as well as some primary schools and local and overseas universities have visited Chumbe Island. They come for a one-day school trip and are taken along nature trails by the rangers and also learn how to snorkel, which is a unique opportunity for girls in particular!

Teachers are also given guidance for practical field based environmental education. Relevant teaching materials have been developed and teachers’ seminars organised to help prepare and evaluate these island excursions. As coral reefs hardly figure in school syllabi and examinations of both primary and secondary schools, teachers had to be convinced that the Chumbe Environmental Education program is not a waste of time, and together we have managed to explore topics in the syllabi that can be used to create a link between the island excursions and classroom teaching in schools.

CHICOP has also encouraged the formation of Environmental clubs in schools, and now created the “Chumbe Challenge Environment Award” for students. Fortunately we always had very competent and committed volunteers helping us with the Education program (and other programs) and taking it to the professional level where it is now, hopefully also gradually influencing the formal education system, though this is a very long process.

Last but not least, all guests to Chumbe are also taken along nature trails in the forest and the reef by the rangers, and are also experience the eco-architecture and sustainable technologies of the bungalows, where water and energy needs are provided by rainwater catchment and solar panels, and where composting toilets avoid any sewage. Indeed, everything on Chumbe is part of an educational experience for everybody!

Fishing has long been a staple livelihood around Chumbe Island. What interactions do you have with the local fisherman?
This is actually not true! The coral reef west of Chumbe Island has traditionally been a no-go area for local fishing boats, as it borders the shipping channel between the capital Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar, where the local traditional sailing boats would be in danger and also obstruct the way of large vessels. Also, when we started to develop Chumbe in the early nineties, few boatmen could afford the outboard engines needed to go to this most distant of the islets surrounding Zanzibar town.

After much search around Zanzibar in 1991, I actually choose Chumbe for the park for this very reason, that it wasn’t much fished and that there would be no need to displace local people!

Nevertheless, there was some local fishing going on in the area of the future park, and it was to be expected that fishing pressure would increase with the growth of both, the local population and tourism. Therefore, conditions appeared favorable for the creation of a marine park that depended on co-operation with local fishermen, not government enforcement. From the very beginning our main argument with local fishers rested on the potential of a small no-take zone, to become a major breeding ground for fish, and thus restock fishing grounds in the vicinity, the famous ‘spill-over effect’!

Thus ex-fishers were recruited as Park rangers from neighboring fishing villages and employed and trained by volunteers from 1993, mostly for communicating with local fishers, on why healthy coral reefs were important for the future of fisheries and the reasons for totally closing the reef sanctuary.
This approach worked well. Indeed, after a few years some fishers started reporting increased catches around the park, though the effect can of course be reduced by more fishers coming to the area.

Fortunately, for over a decade, and due to the committed work of our park rangers, we have no major problems with fishers or other users, and the project is well accepted by the local communities. This puts us in a unique position among Tanzanian parks, but then the closed area is relatively small which makes surveillance easier of course.

As a measure of success, we were very pleased indeed, when some fishers interviewed by a researcher some years ago even suggested that CHICOP should close and manage another reef in the area, to also turn it into a fish breeding ground!

As a bottom line, we strongly believe in the benefits of training local fishers as park rangers, rather than recruiting civil servants for this role who often come from upland regions with a different cultural background, as is the case in most Tanzanian marine parks. We understand that government can only employ formally educated people, while fishers have less access to the education system traditionally and very rarely study at universities. You may actually not find a single marine biologist in the country who has a fishing background!

It is one of the advantages of private park management that you are not bound by such restrictions and can employ and benefit local people directly, which makes a huge difference to them. The time and costs of training on the job are considerable of course, but then you have very competent and committed staff who are also respected by their communities. Our rangers now run the park and all monitoring and education programs, assist researchers and also act as enthusiastic and very knowledgeable guides. Indeed, our visitors’ book is full of praise for our rangers and for all staff, most of whom we trained ourselves on the job! I also find the website www.TripAdvisor.com very interesting for independent guest feedbacks, where the rangers are often mentioned by name.

Are the attitudes towards conservation – including the actions of governments, private enterprise, and civil society – moving in a positive direction in Africa?
This is an interesting and complex question, I can only answer from our perspective.
Certainly, the large-scale plundering of forests and oceans has accelerated massively in recent years, also in Tanzania, driven by corrupt networks of government officials and local and foreign business people, often from China. Though national parks generate income like never before from the booming tourism industry that has become a leading sector of the economy, the government nevertheless promotes massive infrastructure projects and resource extraction in protected areas, such as the building of a soda ash factory in the world-famous tourism attraction and Ramsar wetland site Lake Natron that would wipe out the endangered Lesser Flamingos, and the planned new deep sea harbour in Mwambani Bay, which happens to be an area also earmarked for a marine park to protect the Coelacanths, a recently found sizeable population of this Cites I species of extremely rare fossil fish. Not to mention local fishers and seaweed farmers who would loose their livelihoods!

Local people start reacting as resources they lived on for centuries are being depleted and they are driven out, the tourism industry is up in arms, and the press has become very outspoken to report such plunders, something unheard of only a few years ago.

Therefore, Yes, - there is much more awareness, much more sense of urgency about protection and preservation of parks and wilderness areas, their biodiversity and ecological services, and more understanding of the role of ecological services in supporting sustainable development for local people. Certainly there is also more awareness and involvement of communities and private enterprise in conservation.

For example, in Tanzania, policies and legislation were enacted for community-based conservation and community-based tourism, but implementation by government is slow or even stagnant. Therefore, some tourism operators have now taken the initiative and started working directly with local communities, to win their cooperation in exchange for a share of the profits, in the photographic tourism and hunting industry and even around coral reefs. The Friends of Maziwi Island Society is one interesting case, where tourists pay an extra snorkeling fee to local fishers for patrolling and keeping dynamite fishers out of this island off Pangani, which is a national park but not managed on the ground by Government. These are encouraging developments of direct win-win arrangements between resource users from the formal and informal sectors who share a common interest in preserving nature for the benefit of all.

On the other hand, No, as governance problems, lack of transparency and accountability remain a major problem, and short-term, sometimes personal, profit seeking schemes supersede concerns for long-term sustainable management and environmental conservation of resources for the majority of people and future generations. Also, even where well-funded, many conservation activities still only manage of fraction of what is needed to ensure ecological integrity. There is also a real problem of lack of political will for law enforcement (e.g. concerning dynamite fishing in Tanzania), and lack of coordination and duplication of efforts by international agencies. Development agendas are sometimes donor-driven and follow well-funded international fashions, while effective action on the ground that responds to local problems is sacrificed for the sake of ‘staying in business’ in a particular country.

If you could meet any African artist – author, painter, sculptor, musician, lyricist, singer, designer – who would it be? Why?
We are lucky to have an African musician working with us as Management Assistant: David Murphy who has his own band in Zanzibar called “Akenathon Family”. Zanzibar has also become a regional cultural center with the yearly Festival of the Dhow countries, the Zanzibar International Film Festival ZIFF and Busara Music festival. I personally love good movies, both documentaries and feature films, and make sure to see as many films as possible shown during ZIFF and rarely found elsewhere, and meet the directors who are sometimes present. Last but not least, tourism has created a thriving market for local artists and handicraft, and you can still find many beautiful pieces of artwork, such as paintings and carvings among the mass-produced souvenirs. Our bungalows on the island are decorated with original TingaTinga paintings, a style typical for Tanzania that has become famous around the world.

Isilo Labantu photographers study the fundamentals of photography, meet once a week to critique their work with professional photographers, and sell their work in the galleries and shops around Cape Town. In addition, several times a year, they enter a particular neighborhood for a “Flash Photo Weekend”: documenting daily life for a 48-hour period before hanging selected images in a public display, often on clotheslines, the sides of houses, taxi ranks, community centers, and street corners.

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Explain the birth of Isilo Labantu. How, when and why did the idea of the organization arise? How did you and Alistair Berg come to work together, and what are your roles now?

Alistair and I came to this project in very different ways. But it was inevitable that we connected and joined forces. In 2003 my husband and I were in desperate need of a sabbatical from New York City. Joe is an independent radio producer, and I am a photographer and new media producer. Cape Town was the obvious choice once we got a fix on its unbelievable cultural mix and beauty.

Shortly after we arrived, I befriended a woman, named Momtolo, from Site C, Khayalishta. Momtolo was the housekeeper for a friend of a friend. I asked her dozens of questions about her life: how did she pay for her transportation, how did she manage grocery shopping, how much did it cost to get to the doctor, how did she make her meager salary stretch to feed her extended family? Momtolo was incredibly candid. She began showing me around her neighborhood and I began photographing there every week. I worked digitally so that I could print everything at home and bring photos with me on each visit. Momtolo and I were a good team. She began pointing out things she knew would pique my interest: warm sunlight in someone’s kitchen, flowers growing out of a sandy front yard, a fresh coat of paint on a dilapidated door. By the end of the year I had amassed a great body of work. The only logical thing to do with the work was to hang an exhibition in her front yard, on the clothesline, which happened to border a very busy intersection. It was the most satisfying thing I have ever done. People came by all morning long, asking why we were showing pictures, pointing out their friends and relatives in the photos, running home to fetch them, and asking us to do it again soon.

I returned to the States with the hope of raising a little money for Momtolo’s community. I put the work online and sent out emails to friends and family. The response was overwhelming. I sold hundreds of photographs and was suddenly sitting on what, by South African standards, was a substantial amount of money. I pondered for a long time how to best use it. And then the answer became obvious: train photographers from the townships. And that’s what I was pursuing when one of my contacts put me in touch with Alistair. We began emailing and realized our visions meshed.

It turns out that the clothesline model is a perfect one for our group of photographers, and we replicated it on a much larger scale in Site C in Khayelitsha in 2005. We set up a mobile studio in a friend’s garage with computers, battery chargers, and enough peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to get us through the weekend. From sunup on Friday to sundown on Saturday, the group roamed the neighborhood documenting life there. We printed all Saturday night and hung an exhibition on the side of a spaza shop near the taxi rank. We hired a local dance troop to entertain the masses as they wandered through. It worked perfectly and these Flash Photo Weekends, as we have come to call them, have become a regular part of the group. We are able to edit on site so we can offer feedback like suggesting a photographer to return to a particular home when the sun starts to set and the light deepens, or at bedtime as ten people negotiate several mattresses in a single room. Mostly, we ask again and again, “what is this photograph about? What are you trying to say here?”

The photographers improve by leaps and bounds every time we do this. And, we are amassing a large and amazing body of work, which we are now selling in tourist shops and turning into a book. Several of the photographers are making a living selling portraits in their communities or working for newspapers and magazines. And many more are supplementing their income (or their family’s income) with sales of cards and prints that we market in shops in Cape Town.

I am living in New York City at the moment. Alistair and his family live in Cape Town. We are in touch via email (thanks to Skype) and I return to Cape Town regularly. When I am in town we do as many Photo Weekends as we can. This past trip we did a lot of strategizing for the group. We found studio space in downtown Cape Town, which we desperately needed. Now the photographers have a place where they can edit their work and meet with each other throughout the week. Alistair meets with the group every week and is in constant communication with the photographers. Back in NYC I am doing some fundraising and starting to put the book together. We want to get it on the shelves for the 2010 World Cup.

How many photographers are a part of Isilo Labantu? How did they come to be a part of the organization?

Everyone has a different story about how they came to the group. Some were in a loose collective that has since disbanded. Others came through AMAC (Arts and Media Access Centre), where they were taking art classes. Unfortunately, AMAC has since disbanded as well. There are so few resources for artists and photographers from the townships so word has gotten out. People have brought in their friends and siblings. Sometimes they stay around for just a few photo shoots, and sometimes they get hooked. There is a steady core of about six photographers, who are mentors to the more novice photographers.

The photographers use donated digital cameras. Where do these cameras come from, and what other type of support makes the organization possible?

Every year I send out a request for used equipment and get a dozen cameras to add to our stock. Most Americans are on their second- or third-generation equipment so there are plenty of old cameras lying around in closets. The early cameras are great to learn on. But, we have come to realize that we need to be teaching everyone the same camera. Otherwise, there is a learning curve each time someone takes a camera out. So, for the Photo Weekends we keep about ten Canon Powershot S70s, which we buy on Ebay whenever we see a good deal come up. We don’t want the equipment to be too fancy since theft is a big concern in the townships. The Powershots are fantastic cameras, and the caliber of the work is such that the images deserve to be made with high quality cameras.

We got a grant from the Open Society to create alternative distribution models for photography around the world. We have also received some very generous donations from individuals. It is one of those projects that is easy lifting: we have kept our goals modest and we are growing slowly so that it’s all manageable considering that Alistair and I both have busy lives.

What is the most rewarding aspect of Isilo Labantu?

The most rewarding…. In the same way that the Photo Weekends work on many levels, the whole project works on many levels. It’s exciting to see the work. It’s fresh and honest. It’s rewarding to see the progress that each photographer makes, even within just one weekend shoot. It’s such a great feeling when we are editing thousands of images in one day to see a clear vision take shape in one photographer’s body of work. And the sum is much larger than its parts. The group has developed a body of work that I am certain is unparalleled in it’s depth and examination of life in the townships today and the fact that people are making a living in a place where steady work is a rarity.

As a professional photographer, how has the organizing Isilo Labantu and the work of its photographers influenced your own art?

Working with Iliso Labantu has changed not just my photographs but how I see the everything. I see South Africa as a microcosm of the world: the growing disparity between rich and poor, the uneasy but beautiful mixing of tradition and modernity, and the separate worlds we construct and inhabit due to fear, ignorance and a reluctance to be outside our own comfort zone. I try to make images that depict these issues, but often I find that the power of the image is waning here in the United States (not so in South Africa though where I am often humbled by people’s excitement when they get a photograph of themselves.) I find myself gravitating to projects that create community around these issues. Iliso Labantu does that in a myriad of ways.

How do you envision the future for Isilo Labantu?

We love having our own space, and now it is time to get all the photographers proficient with computers. Until this year, Alistair and I did all of the editing but we want to hand that over to the photographers. This will help them in the marketplace as they seek more commissions, but even more so, this will remove the mediation that Alistair and I can’t help but bring to the table. We would like to step back and stay out of the way as the photographers hone their vision.

If you could meet any African artist—author, painter, sculptor, musician, lyricist, singer, designer—who would it be? Why?

I’ve already had the great fortune of getting to know the South African photographer David Goldblatt. He has been instrumental in helping me think about the role Iliso Labantu has in documenting post-apartheid South Africa. And he has been a friend and mentor, influencing my own work and expanding my mind with the stories he collects while traveling across the country in his kitted-out camper.

As far as meeting new artists, there is a gorgeous contemporary design aesthetic emerging in South Africa. I would love for Iliso Labantu photographers to collaborate with some of these artists on new projects. I think we are all trying to make an honest assessment of our own traditions and communities, myself included, and I think we could make some fabulous work together.

For more images and information visit: www.ilisolabantu.org.

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You dropped out of law school in your 3rd year to write your first novel Dog Eat Dog. Why was writing so important to you and how did you know that was the time to focus on your book?

You are right…I did law for four years both at Wits University (one year) and University of Cape Town-UCT (three years). That was after I had graduated at Wits with BA (African Literature and Political Studies). Cape Town was a lonely and strange place for me, as I came from a more cosmopolitan city of Jo’burg. Some people who had been in Cape Town might agree with me that although the city is fondly called ‘The mother city’, it is not ‘motherly’ at all. For a Jo’burger like me, it was like I was outside South Africa where people behaved in a strange cultured way. It was difficult to adapt. Strangely, I missed the barking of the dogs at home during the night. I missed the drunken people from the seven shebeens along our street. I missed the township lingo/tsostitaal, I missed the kids playing diketo in the middle of the street, and so on. To escape from this loneliness and strangeness I decided to write, although informally. That does not mean that I was consciously trying to be a writer. Off course I wanted to be a lawyer, but I got bored memorizing all those Acts and Cases for the exams. At the end I failed some of the courses, and I was forced to stay another year in that boring city. I decided not to. So, I asked myself one question: what else can I do besides being a lawyer? That’s exactly writing came into my mind. It was in fact my second choice from being a lawyer, although I had done literature in my first degree at Wits. I don’t know whether I should say that writing chose me at the right time when it was difficult for me to separate criminal law cases and civil law cases at the law school. Call my first novel Dog Eat Dog ‘a crazy experimentation that had fortunately gone well’ if you like.

Where do you find inspiration for your characters and stories?

I find my inspiration almost everywhere, but mostly in the township. The fastest way to develop the loathing, loving and the knowledge about South Africa’s rich sub-culture, especially from the black perspective, is to go to a nearest taxi rank during peak hours, with your pen and paper (no laptops because you might get robbed). Whilst there, stand in the queue for a taxi ride to the township (any township). In that way you can write a great introductory chapter about South Africans. In the township you could go to the nearest ‘shisanyama’ (barbecue place) or car wash, or funeral where you’ll see the lifestyle and popular music being played from the giant speakers inside the flashy cars. That could be the body of your book. In the shebeen an old woman would be opening her beer with her old decaying tooth while talking about the present problems of power shedding with her equally drunk daughter. In the shisanyana an old man with gout would be wrestling with half-barbecued meat while talking about how he hates the Mozambicans, Zimbabweans and Nigerians because he thinks they are the reason he is unemployed. At the car wash seven youth could be sharing one piece of cigarette and a quart of beer while discussing how they do their hijacking. It will be up to you how you interpret these stories-and all these are some of my inspirations.

You once said “Our contributions to literature today should be to write about issues that are directly facing the youth” and when on to talk about issues such as HIV and Aids, poverty and homophobia. Which issue do you think is most important to youth in South Africa today?

All the issues are important and they are linked in someway or the other. But if I am forced to rank them I would probably mention HIV/Aids as the most important to youth in South Africa today. The youth are definitely dying young today, mostly due to this non-racial virus, and we seem to be ignorant as the youth. I hope that our contributions could help bring the awareness.

Your parents sent you to Limpopo province for your education to keep you safe from the violence of the Soweto schools. Still, in your matriculations year, the schools were disrupted by turmoil when Mandela was released from jail. How did that experience help to form your eventual topics as a writer?

Yes, there is a lot of reference to ‘South Africa in transition’ in my writing, especially in Dog Eat Dog. The title itself tries to capture ‘the mood’ of that transition into a democratic process, e.g. the first democratic elections of 1994, the influx of black students into what was formally ‘whites only’ schools and universities, and so forth. Of course I was part of these experiences and changes, and because of that I think I was in a better position to interpret the situation than anybody that was not there. That is perhaps the reason some analysts of my work have wrongly insisted that my work is believable and auto/semibiographical. I guess it is because I wrote about things that were/are happening right in front of my eyes, and it is difficult to ignore them. But where they are actually wrong is where they ignore a huge element of fiction in my work.

Of course I’m not aiming to win a Pulitzer or Commonwealth Prize, because I will not achieve that. Although I would not mind prizes, I want my writing to provide my readers with everything they need to imagine the world around them. I want to keep motivating their desires and ambitions, and help them to dream about things that are missing in their lives. I want my characters in my novels to find many friends in many places around the planet, and give them the survival skills while facing challenges in this multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-creed and multi-lingual society of ours.

Dog Eat Dog has been described as a semi-autobiographical sketch of yourself. How do you evaluate your own life to find scenes that tell the bigger narrative you are trying to feel?

The problem with writing in first person narrative is that most of your readers tend to think that you are talking about yourself, and it is very difficult to convince them to think otherwise. That has been a problem to me ever since I wrote my two novels, Dog Eat Dog (2004) and After Tears (2007) and I have called by the names of my main characters. Before people read After Tears I was called Dingz behind my back and now people have started calling me Advo. Let me use this opportunity to, first, to say that Dingz and Advo are just fictional characters, secondly: Niq Mhlongo is different from these two characters. However, Dingz and Advo in both novels are my own creation that was informed by my own observation of my own world. That observation was also influenced by my own interpretation of the situation; hearsays; dreams; thinking and everything that involves creative thinking and writing. I hope people understand the fact that although both settings of these two novels are in the places that I had been before (i.e. Township and University) does not necessarily make my work semi/autobiographical. However, what happened or happens (not necessarily to me) in everyday life in these places informed and continues to inform my writing.

If you could meet any African writer, artist, author, painter, sculptor, musician, lyricist, singer or designer, who would it be? Why?

This is a difficult question because I grew up admiring all the writers that were published by the African Writers Series, from Achebe, Ngugi, Armah, Mwangi, Emecheta, Ekwensi, Mphahlele etc. But right now I have two writers in mind, one is still alive and the other one has unfortunately passed away. I’m talking about Ben Okri (The Famished Road) and Dambudzo Marechera (House of Hunger). With Okri I would probably ask him to share with me the secret herb that he had smoked the day he decided to write that wonderful book, The Famished Road. I would love to write a book like that in the future as well. With Marechera, I would ask whether by House of Hunger he was actually referring to his country, Zimbabwe. If so, how were his predictions so perfect?

Also a certified teacher of sustainability, Stephan has studied earth restorative farming and living practices called “Permaculture.” He studied on the island of Hawaii in 2001-2002 and in Costa Rica 2003-2004. Stephan is the founder and president of the Coalition for a Sustainable Africa, an international coalition dedicated to creative and collective solutions to the inextricable economic, social and environmental challenges facing Africa today (CSAfrica.org). a.magazine talked with Stephan about his work in Africa and some of the projects he and CSAfrica are working on now. –

Describe how you came to help found Coalition for a Sustainable Africa and you became interested in sustainable development in Africa?

I had an awakening in 1997 after leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Moving from Boston to San Francisco, I chose to return to college where I then gravitated towards Environmentalism. I also became a bit obsessed with all things ‘Africa’, which had always been so culturally foreign to me growing up in the white suburbs: African history, folklore, drumming, dance, art, music, etc. It occurred to me that whether one believes in Evolution or Creation - as The Chemical Brothers chant in one of their songs - “We came from Africa.” After learning how colonialism and corruption essentially wiped out Mother Africa, I was profoundly bothered and strongly desired to give back to what we have so mercilessly taken. After moving to Los Angeles years later, I had a conversation with Lauren Segal, Founder of NextAid.org, which later turned into a dinner in my kitchen. Surrounded by friends who were facilitating on-the-ground work in Africa, there was one common idea shared by us all: sustainable and best practices were key guidelines in our call to action. So really, over a dinner of lentils and salad, CSAfrica was borne. CSAfrica quickly grew and developed when we decided to expand the invitation to other friends and their organizations. We realized that by raising our collective voices, we could initiate a more powerful venture and have a great time as well.

Film is a medium by which one can share a story. In an emblematic sense, the human species have always been sitting around campfires telling their stories. Really, the sharing of these stories is a primal human experience. In these stories, ultimately all humans share that they want the same things: justice, food and a place to rest — love and peace. Without true sustainability, these essentials will be quickly lost within our generation, and by all indications, in Africa first. Films have the power to uplift and inspire. Our beautiful stories have the power to shape our lives, change the world and possibly save our species one audience at a time. For these reasons I thoroughly appreciate having worked on ‘The 11th Hour’. The film is all about us and the way we are thinking. You have studied “permaculture,” a way of sustainable, earth-restorative farming and living practices in Hawaiii and Costa Rice. Can those practices translate to African communities? How?

Absolutely. Permaculture is a view - a lens if you will - by which one can see just about all things and can be employed everywhere. Permaculture was started in Austraila by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the 1970s. It means permanent agriculture as well as permanent culture, particularly in human system designs like the development of agricultural systems. All of CSAfrica’s member organizations embrace this forward thinking. Personally, when I ‘woke up’ from the spell of Christian fundamentalism, I really saw that we are each responsible for how we live on this planet. Mollison’s quote, “The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children,” really resonated with me. I chose to leave on a two year sabbatical to better understand how nature works and thus how we can better live on our planet. Of course, the lure of Hawaii and Costa Rica’s natural beauty was a huge draw as well!

How is being an American working toward sustainability in Africa an advantage? A disadvantage?

As Americans we have a unique cultural proclivity towards self-reliance as well as an appreciation for ingenuity. These values very much help foster a “can do” attitude, which, I feel, is contagious to the communities we work with. As we know, many Africans are devastated emotionally and economically from oppressive, colonial style leadership and dictatorships. I see CSAfrica as an important component in that our member organizations are actually empowering local communities to be active in working towards their own prosperity.

The disadvantages are numerous. Sheer distance is one, as fuel costs continue to rise; the ease and convenience of flying to Africa (or anywhere in the world) will become unrealistic to many (and unsustainable for most all). CSAfrica finds itself with the focus of empowering Africa’s local residents who live and understand their regional and cultural considerations. So here as a disadvantage evolving into an advantage: we are forced to really concentrate our efforts on training and strengthening each small group and community at a time, the best we can. This is in contrast to the old-school template of international aid where millions of dollars have been wasted on infrastructure, where Americans no longer have the resources to waste as we once did.

Another disadvantage is that often we Americans have high expectations in regards to our efforts. Some of your readers may be familiar with a concept called “Africa-Time”, just one example of a culturally riveting dichotomy. As Americans, we tend to appreciate that Puritanical work ethic, the pioneering spirit. In Africa, we must accept the reality that these are our own specific cultural expectations and do not necessarily exist for Africans (without over-generalizing). Our sense of urgency or priorities may not always be what the locals on the ground actually value. Therefore, in honoring those we assist, we must constantly re-evaluate our effectiveness. This can tend to slow our work down considerably, but in the end this is ultimately much more sustainable.

CSAfrica is working in nine countries on the continent. Describe a project you are involved with here that has made you proud.

Our current campaign “Trees for a Sustainable Africa” is a tree planting, tree conservation, and tree research initiative under the UNEP “Billion Tree Campaign.” Tree planting, conservation, and research will focus on preserving local biodiversity, enhancement of natural beauty, prevention of soil erosion and for the offsetting of carbon emissions.

“Bees for a Sustainable Africa” is a campaign we are developing to deal with the problem of honeybee depopulation, colony collapse and die-off. As we see it, if human activity such as pesticide use and GMOs are the cause, humans working with nature rather than against it can be the cure. Our idea is to empower local women to lead communities with organic, micro-bee-curation businesses. Stay tuned!

If you could meet any African artist—author, painter, sculptor, musician, lyricist, singer, designer—who would it be? Why?

If I had to pick just one, and if I can pick a group of artists, I will have to say Orchestra Baobab.

They fuse Senegalese, Pachanga, and Afro-Cuban influences in Griot and Wolof adaptation. Basically it can be argued that in the early 70’s these guys were the real inventors of House Music! At first they played in small clubs and studios in Dakar, so their early recordings have a warm analog sultry sound, which I really love. So much raw emotion… I find their tracks extremely moving.

Kwesi first came to the U.S. as an undergraduate at Franklin and Marshall in 1993. Graduating in 1997, he was hired at Westtown as a Math teacher, dorm parent, and soccer coach. His dream of starting a school in his hometown, however, was never far from his mind. While at Westtown, he earned a Masters Degree in Mathematics at Villanova University and soon rose to Department Chair.

Melissa graduated from Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia, and arrived at Westtown School in 2000. She has served as a dorm parent, a Spanish teacher, and a director of the school’s service program. Melissa and Kwesi were married during a one-year sabbatical spent in Bremen Esiam in 2005, during which time they fulfilled a lifelong dream of Koomson’s when they broke ground on not one, but two schools.

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Tell me about Heritage Academy.

My husband Kwesi and I met while both teaching at Westtown School, a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania. Kwesi is from Breman Essiam, a small village in the Central Region of Ghana, West Africa. When he was a boy in Ghana, he was fortunate enough to receive scholarships to continue his education. Kwesi saw a need in his home village for quality education that needed to be available to bright yet poor students and their families. For at least seven years, Kwesi dreamed about starting his own school. In 2004, we went to live in Ghana for one year in hopes of starting Heritage Academy. We started with 32 students on full tuition scholarship. The students were selected based on their performance on an entrance examination. That same year, Faith International School was about to close. There were 85 children in the program in a one-room schoolhouse with no furniture and two teachers who hadn’t been paid in two years. We bought the school and now there are 300 students, paid teachers for each of the grades (PK-8), and a lunch program to ensure that students eat a healthy meal each day. We built eight temporary bamboo open classrooms until we have the money to build a more permanent structure. So Heritage is now two schools: Heritage Academy Breman Essiam, and Heritage Academy Ochiso. In July 2007, we celebrated our first graduation with the founding students at Essiam. Heritage had a 97% pass rate on the National Exams they had taken the previous April. We now have 450 students at this site.

Can you say more about the school’s philosophy?

In Ghana, school is structured in such a way that students are taught what they need to know in order to pass the National Exam at the end of ninth grade. Everything is taught in the manner of rote memorization. At the Heritage schools, we are taking it one step further. We are teaching students to think, to ask why? To become active learners, not just passive students. We live by the philosophies of Knowledge, Integrity and Discipline just to name a few. In our summer programs we serve two functions. First, we bring together our students and students from other local schools (on scholarship) for intensive course work. We are trying to spread the idea of active learning throughout Ghana and by bringing in students from more traditional schools, they get exposed to a different way of learning. The other purpose of the summer program is to train teachers. Experts in the field of education come to Ghana and offer seminars on emerging perspectives on learning. For example, we’ve had seminars by Carol Metzker, author of Appreciative Intelligence.

How many times have you been to Ghana?

I have been to Ghana a total of three times. I went the first time for a year. After eight months I needed to get away. I came home to the States for 6 weeks, but I missed the people, culture and community (not to mention my hubby!) so much that I decided to go back for the last month or so. This past summer I was there for five weeks helping to lead a group of teachers from the US who wanted to teach in our summer school program. I love people watching in Ghana. I love seeing my nieces and nephews and playing games with them despite the fact that there’s a bit of a language gap. The color of Ghanaian cloth, the dress that one sees all around, marketing, interacting with the locals, the respect for family, elders, and the relaxed pace of life are all things I cherish about life there. I love fufu and groundnut soup! What I didn’t love was waiting….In the US, I work from to-do lists. In Ghana, a to-do list I might make here for one day could take as long as a week to accomplish there. Also, it’s hot and I don’t like to sweat!

Tell me about the Schoerke Foundation.

The Schoerke Foundation recently acquired 501(c)(3) status! It is set up to provide scholarships for the students who perform well on the entrance exams for school. Now, with our 501 status, we can begin fundraising. It costs $75 to fund a student for an entire year of school. That includes school fees, transportation, lunch, and books. Right now we are funding students who live near the villages of the two schools. Eventually, we hope to also provide scholarships to high school and college students who want to work as interns during the school year and/or during our 3-week summer programs.

Are there issues that arise in your dealings with the school or even your travels in Africa that are unique to being a white woman? or a white woman married to a Ghanaian?

The minute a foreigner is out in public in Ghana, one always has to endure the endless calls of “Obroni!” This term of endearment literally means “foreigner”, but frequently gets translated as “White person”. At first it’s cute to hear the kids and see their excitement, but after a while it wears on you. In the markets, people assume that I’m rich since I’m white so they tend to charge me more for items such as beads, wooden carvings and even every day groceries. As for being married to a Ghanaian, everyone in the village knows who I am. They all look out for me. I’ve picked up some Fanti (the local dialect) and that makes a great impression with the locals.

And you teach the art of batik, don’t you? Did you learn this in Ghana?

Yes. During my first visit to Ghana I took classes and learned how to batik (wax resist on cloth). I batiked the bridal party attire for our wedding here in the States this past April. I hope to one day be able to do more with batiking: placemats, tablecloths, etc.

If you could meet any African artist-author, painter, sculptor, musician, lyricist, singer, designer- who would it be? Why?

I suppose I’d like to meet the folks who initially discovered/invented the art of batik and bead-making. I’d be curious to know how they figured out these art forms. What was the creative/experimental process that they went through?

I’d also love to meet Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize recipient from Kenya. I’d love to share with her what we are doing in Ghana.

If you would like to donate to the Schoerke Foundation, email Melissa Koomson for more details.

Descriptions of Salopek in an August 2006 article by Evan Osnos and Matthew Walberg, Tribune Staff reporters, resemble that of an adventurer and anthropologist: “He has a reputation for doggedness and precision, bordering on obsession, with little regard for physical obstacles. He tends to go unusually long periods without food or sleep, according to those who have worked with him. He is a minimalist, known for traveling with little more than what he carries on his back…He has years of experience as a commercial fisherman and farmhand, and he often asks his subjects if he can work in their fields or on their boats. For his most recent Tribune story, a study of America’s addiction to oil, he worked as a clerk at a gas station in South Elgin. Part of his motivation, his friends said, is Salopek’s belief that it is important to balance the mental exertion of writing with physical challenges.”

In 2006, this two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who shies from the limelight became the subject of headlines across the globe after pro-government Sudanese forces detained him, along with his Sudanese interpreter (Daoud Hari) and Chadian driver (. Salopek was charged with espionage, passing information illegally, writing “false news,” and entering Sudan without a visa, in a Sudanese court in al-Fashir, North Darfur. Salopek strongly denied the charges against him. He was detained for just over one month. Governor Bill Richardson negotiated his release one day before trial.

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The story goes that you became a writer to earn repair money when your motorcycle broke down in Roswell, New Mexico. Of all the odd jobs you could have taken, what drew you, in Roswell, to reporting—and what kept you hooked?

It was two dollars and ten cents more an hour.

I was working a couple minimum-wage jobs at the time, as a butcher’s assistant during the day and as a baker—I use the term loosely here—on graveyard shifts. My nighttime gig was at a donut shop. I fried donuts. My colleagues were undocumented Mexicans who sold coffee and baker’s dozen specials to U.S. border patrolmen every morning. Basically, there was a kind of entente in the donut shop between these two natural enemies. Donut shops can be that way.

Applying at the local newspaper was a lark. I’d never worked in an office before. I showed up for my try out with beef blood on my pants and I had to be shown how to dial 9 to get an outside line. I sure as hell didn’t know the difference between a byline and a dateline. So it’s stretch to say that journalism ‘drew me’ out of my life of menial labor in an operatic way. It paid more. I took the job.

What kept me hooked? I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the small cow towns and gas fields of southeastern New Mexico. But working as a reporter on the police beat in Roswell, I was exposed to some pretty bizarre criminality. On the surface it was a straitlaced outpost of strip mall Baptist churches, dollar stores, sad, desultory parades, and immense iron horizons that never seemed to budge. But underneath, what a cub reporter saw was some heavy spiritual malaise, some numbed dislocation out on the prairie, some spectacular rage. I’m thinking here about the volume of sex crimes. So call it prurience, at least at the beginning. But then I learned that reporting could be a way to push through the smooth, artificial, cellophane surfaces of things or, in this case, lift up the corner of an average-looking, Western town and peer at all the heartbreak and frailty hidden beneath. Not all of it was bad—not by a long shot. I think that even as a twenty-three-year-old voyeur bumbling around rural New Mexico, I was blown away by the toughness—the strange, awesome, scarred vitality—of our kind, an early lesson that would serve me well in Africa. And while I think it’s convenient in these internal screenplays that we constantly write about ourselves to identify certain moments and places, these Roswells, as key turning points in life, the truth is usually more complicated. I resigned from the paper after seven months and went to live in the mountains of Mexico. I was attracted to other things at the time. I would dance around journalism for years.

Describe how you prep for a story.

I read a lot—online stuff, books, news articles, magazines, and where appropriate, primary sources such as academic and governmental reports. I’m a scientist by training, so I’m used to data dumps. I don’t read too closely. I read fast. I highlight in passing. I file. I return to this material later, for closer scrutiny, as necessary. I continue collecting written matter while in the field. Say the assignment is in Congo. I’ll shred a crudely boosterish in-flight magazine if useful ideas lurk therein. I keep all maps—national, regional, local, and hand-drawn by the Lebanese beer trader in Kisangani. I decode the smudged text on the visa stamped in my passport. I collect religious tracts, quack leaflets, rebel manifestos, letters of safe passage, and the titles of old Belgian books moldering away in mission stations along the Congo River. Once, I copied down the sixteen neatly-typed regulations pinned to the doors of a house of prostitution where a photographer and I were confined for three days by MLC insurgents. (This wasn’t as pleasant as you might think.)

Only after much reading do the first interviews begin. Sources respect journalists who are informed, prepared. They lead you to other people, to more reading material. It is possible, I suppose, to over-report a story, but I haven’t yet experienced that problem. That said, when the choices are mine, I make few actual travel preparations. My physical progress through a story, the fieldwork phase, might seem spur of the moment, even rudderless to other people. Mostly, this is because all plans crumble to dust in the parts of the world I cover. It’s also an expression of deep fatalism, an artifact of my Latin American upbringing. Seat-of-the-pants navigation invites the rewards of sheer chance.

How did you come to focus the majority of your reporting on Africa?

I first came to Africa in 1995 on assignment for National Geographic. The story I wrote wasn’t terribly good, but I’ll never forget my first morning in Africa. The place had me at the first bird songs of dawn. This was in Entebbe. I remember standing a few nights later on the side of a volcano in Congo, looking out on the winking fires of hundreds of thousands of Rwandese refugees camped on an old lava flow below. There were genocidaires hiding in the jungles and a moonlit cloud drifted across the volcano’s summit, hovering there like a spaceship while its undersides reflected the magma’s otherworldly red. I was staying at an evacuated tourist lodge called Karibu—‘welcome’ in Swahili. I was the only guest. The house band played Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ with some wiry Papa Wemba riffs. I felt so sorry for the musicians that I walked to the stage and solemnly shook each of their hands. I’d been to some pretty wild places before but nothing like this. Three years later the foreign editor of the Chicago Tribune called me at home and offered a choice of openings at several international bureaus. I didn’t hesitate long in picking Africa. The continent was at the bottom of the foreign policy totem pole. But its future was totally uncharted, unscripted. There is no other region in the world with its blank possibility.

How is being an American journalist covering Africa an advantage? A disadvantage?

I’ve found that Americanness isn’t a big issue in working here because my skin color will always trump the passport I carry. I am white. Whether I like it or not, Africa’s maddening skin game defines my worth, my power, my unreliability, my ancestral sins, the sum total of my identity via my dose of melanin. Goodbye subtlety.

True, on a superficial political level there remains—amazingly—some residual good will towards Americans in Africa by the simple virtue that we weren’t a colonial power here. But that’s been eroded by deepening anti-American anger in the Sahel, or Muslim black Africa.

So again, black and white are the only flags that really matter to most U.S. journalists toiling in Africa. Everyone handles this differently. (See Keith Richburg’s controversial book Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa.) In my own odd case, it led to some revelations. Having grown up among bronze people in Mexico, I’ve never felt completely at ease in the dominant white culture of America. Walking down sidewalks in the States, I’ve always felt like a role player, an impostor in my own skin. In Africa that same splotchy pink hide identifies me instantly as the outsider that I truly am. So my alienation is made manifest here. I feel more at home in my body because of this.

Your coverage in Africa has placed you in some pretty perilous circumstances. How do you deal with fear as a reporter? Why do you think you’re drawn to such hot spots? (And did you ever wish you were in Scottsdale covering a Diamondbacks game instead?)

I handle fear the same ways as you. I suppress it. I ignore it. Or I try to sublimate it into the work. Succeeding too well at this can be dangerous. Fear is healthy for all the obvious reasons. I report in conflict zones because I am fairly decent at it. We all want to be competent. There are the usual laddie reasons condemned so mightily in Chris Hedge’s War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. There is bearing witness. There is the inescapable fact that a lot of strife happens in Africa and to cover it from afar would be a dereliction of duty. Thankfully there is much less warfare today than five years ago, when I was last based on the continent. And as for Scottsdale, well, I found wars raging in American towns but they are simply kept out of sight.

Of which story are you most proud?

In Africa it would have to be “Fade to Blue,” a long story about pirate fishing in Angola, which nobody appears to have read. I’m a former commercial fisherman and the piece outlined the sordid protein theft taking place off the poorest coastlines of the world. That article sank without a bubble. Outside of Africa, it was a dispatch about horses during the Kosovo war.

If you could meet any African artist—author, painter, sculptor, musician, lyricist, singer, designer—who would it be? Why?

I would have liked to sit down with Ali Farka Touré, the renowned Malian guitarist, because he went home to live in his village. That says something about a man. He died last year. There are plenty of other African musicians (Oliver Mtukudzi) and writers (J.M. Coetzee, Chinua Achebe) of awesome virtuosity. But I’ve discovered that meeting an artist doesn’t get you any closer to the mystery of their art. I remember watching Cormac McCarthy on Oprah and seeing only an embarrassed old man who licked his lips while talking. Such encounters are deflating. They just confirm the impenetrable isolation that goes with art-making. So maybe I take Touré back.

[Salopek works in a sheep barn “hotel” in Afghanistan in 2001. “He’s very, very intense,” says Tribune photographer Nancy Stone. (Tribune photo by Pete Souza / August 28, 2006)]

[Paul Salopek takes notes in a canoe on the Ivindo River outside of Makokou, Gabon, on November 15, 1999. (Tribune photo by Nancy Stone / August 28, 2006)]

[Salopek (center) is shown inside a court in El Fasher, nothern Darfur, on August 26. (Reuters photo by Candace Feit / August 28, 2006)]

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