“Sahel – the End of the Road”
by S. Salgado
ISBN: 0520241703
East Africa, Autumn 2009:
(from Oxfam)
“In Somalia, this is the fifth successive season of poor rains, in Ethiopia it is the fourth and Kenya the third. Communities in northern Kenya recall that rains used to fail once a decade, whereas now they fall every two or three years. The weather in north-east Uganda is also becoming increasingly unpredictable, with longer dry spells. When the rains do come it is often in the form of heavy showers causing floods and landslides.”
What in 2009 makes people from primary school-age up to great-grandmothers simply mutter the words “Climate Change”, and shrug their shoulders in resignation, is not an entirely new phenomenon. The effects of climate change have been felt and experienced by communities living and trying to survive in the affected areas for as long as half a century.
What has changed though, is the label. The symptom has got a name now – and as it happens with all ill, what can be labeled is only half as scary as a largely unknown, unlabeled condition.
Flash back: Summer 1984 – Sahel region of Africa:
An area that encompasses the east African countries of Chad, Ethiopia, Mail and the Sudan suffers from the ongoing consequences of the worst drought, and resulting famine, as far as the memories of the local tribes can remember.
Starting with an entirely rain-less period lasting from 1968 to 1972 (also called the Sahelian Drought), the drought continued throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. Livestocks and plants perished, water repositories and sources such as entire lakes and underground depots, dried out. Food became the the longer the scarcer, and at its peak, several million people had barely any or no food at all. The “Sudan Famine” made the news worldwide throughout the years 1984 to 1986, often relegating international cold war politics to page 2 of the papers.
The drought and the subsequent famine left the whole region devastated and its people exhausted. It had costs hundred of thousands their lives, families, homes, existences, pride and will for survival.
The region was starting to get back on its feet again – until now, in 2009, the signs of a déjà-vu cannot be ignored any more. History seems currently to be repeating one of its saddest humanitarian chapters.
At the peak of the famine in 1984, the NGO Doctors Without Borders and the documentary photographer Sebastião Salgado started to collaborate on a 18 month project that would give a face to the people in the famine struck areas in the Sahel zone.
True to the saying that “A picture says more than a 1000 words”, the results of this project were largely left to speak on their own behalf.
“Sahel – the end of the road” is a haunting compilation of the most significant photographs Salgado took during this 18 months field stay with Doctors Without Border in refugee camps across the whole of the Sahel zone.
Each picture strikes an only difficultly to achieve balance between emanating sheer horror due to its subject matter, and the beauty and elegance of a black/white composition and lights that on occasion even appear removed from reality.
It is thanks to how skillfully Salgado put the horrors of the famine into scene that one cannot but look at the pictures and linger over their content, without looking the other way.
Despite having been taken a quarter of a century ago, the pictures show scenes that are timeless in their content and message.
Knowing that the Sahel zone is yet again experiencing the start of another grand scale humanitarian catastrophe, the pictures become alive over and over again. The children in the pictures would now be the parents of the children that in the present are suffering from the same ills and miseries as their parents did in their youth!
Note: The author royalties of this book are all donated to Doctors without Borders.
Copyright note: All photos by Sebastião Salgado from the book “Sahel: The End of the Road”, University of California Press, as found on Google Images.
This book is available from your nearest book store, or online from Amazon.
