The photo that has two tales of tragedy to tell

The photo needs no explanations and perhaps no introductions as well. It’s a photo that has become synonymous with famine. There is a chilling coldness in this photo. There are no expressions. Just coldness. The world doesn't know too much about that little thing coiled up in soil under the vulture’s eyes, except that it is a human being, a little girl who might belong to the village of Ayod in Southern Sudan.



The photo taken in 1993, clearly tells the story of famine that engulfed the Sudanese people at that time. The tragedy of innocent people caught between two warring groups. The civil wars in Sudan between the Northern and Southern provinces began as early as 1955. The political equations amalgamated with religion and regionalism are too complex just like in many African countries under similar conditions, but everywhere the basic reason of the conflicts and the resulting suffering can be attributed to a single cause. Communalism. The American Heritage Dictionary defines communalism as "Strong devotion to the interests of one's own minority or ethnic group rather than those of society as a whole." The Northern Province has a majority Muslim population while the South has Christians as the majority community. The apparent drift was further widened by the British regime, which controlled Sudan on later 1800's and early 1900's. They used the same policy that they applied in many of their other colonies. The divide and rule policy. In India, they used it to ignite communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims, and then they went fishing in the troubled waters. Unfortunately, the venom that they spilled still hangs around in India, and in Sudan. A couple of major civil wars lasted decades, killed over 2 million and displaced over 5 million people. Despite a peace settlement, conflicts still goes on in this country. Famines followed the civil wars, flexing muscles over the already doomed citizens.



Its was during one such famine when Kevin Carter, a young South African press photographer, arrived in Sothern Sudan in 1993. He came to cover the civil war, but the famine was what which touched him. He came across the little girl near the village of Ayod. She was resting while crawling her way to a feeding centre. Kevin waited about 20 minutes for the vulture to spread its wings, but it didn't. The photo was published in New York Times in 26th March 1993. It instantaneously created a stir-up in the American society. Words of curiosity, sympathy and criticism flowed in. The criticism was aimed at Kevin, for not trying to help the child. There are several versions for the reason behind his retreat after taking the photo without lending a helping hand to the child. One is that journalists were forbidden from having physical contact with the famine victims in fear of epidemics. Another one suggests Kevin had to catch an airplane that was leaving from the province soon. A third version says he chased away the vulture after taking the photo and made sure the baby reached her destination, but didn’t intervene. Whatever it may be, while the curiosity and sympathy that the photo generated in the American society in 1993 could not save Sudan from the biggest famine that it ever witnessed in 1998, the criticisms that surrounded the photo led to another tragedy.



The criticism peaked when the photo won Kevin the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography in 1994. The St. Petersburg (Florida) Times wrote, "The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene." The whole chapter made him mentally strained and he began taking drugs, which worsened his life. His girlfriend left him. He messed up an assignment with Reuters by losing a roll of undeveloped film. He became desperate. On 27th July 1994, he drove his Nissan pick-up truck to the banks of a river near his home near Johannesburg. He taped one end of a water hose to the exhaust of the truck; put the other end into the passenger side window. Then he got into the truck, put on the engine, and laid down with Walkman... His post-mortem report read carbon monoxide poisoning under the cause of death banner. He was 33. His suicide note kept on the passenger seat of the truck read "The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist."