The Zanzibar Chest by Aidan Hartley

Author:Aidan Hartley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2016-12-09T19:01:29+00:00

The media had covered famine in Africa repeatedly since the catastrophe of Biafra in 1968 and the hunger story had become a separate news genre. TV broadcasts aimed to stimulate moral outrage and claimed that individual viewers in the rich world didn’t have to remain mere spectators. News went out hand in hand with charity appeals that told people they could “do something” to save the children pictured on their screens. After the media circus of the 1984 Ethiopian famine, it got harder to shock people into responding. We were told that Europe and America had come down with “donor fatigue.”

In this state of affairs there was no way to sell the story unless you could expose suffering on a scale rarely or never witnessed before. I once traveled with a British TV cameraman to a village in Sudan where the crops had failed. Our guides ordered the kids to parade in front of us and display their swollen bellies and thin limbs.

“I’m sorry,” said the cameraman. “They’re not thin enough.”

The Africans looked at him astonished.

“I can see they’re hungry. But to the viewers they just don’t look that far gone.” The journalist had to get thin ones. If he didn’t, he would not be doing his job. He had been sent to find thin ones. He turned to the Africans and enunciated in a voice both loud and slow, “NOT. THIN. ENOUGH!”

There was no shortage of thin people in Baidoa, where in town alone four hundred people a day were dying. Baidoa looked like a concentration camp without the barbed wire.

The peasants who had initially starved in their villages had been sucked into Baidoa by the magnet of news that the foreigners were dumping food in town and along the highways. Somalis gave the 1992 famine the epochal name of the Time of Swollen Feet because the peasants had to trek so far to reach the feeding centers. I saw how tough their feet were when I found a skeleton the maggots had picked clean but for his hard soles. Many died on the road but when they reached the feeding centers they were so weak and without proper shelter or hygiene that multitudes swiftly fell victim to disease.

Rose’s feeding center was a big white tent, a sort of marquee. Her charity’s logo appeared on the roof and on a flag fluttering on tent poles, so that it was highly visible. It looked like a trade show display but apparently it was so the camp didn’t get bombed in an air raid.

Inside the luminescent, yellowish glow of the tent’s interior, I saw rows of small creatures sprawled across the blue plastic groundsheet. They didn’t look human, but rather like the crew from a crashed Martian spaceship with their oversized heads, bulging eyes, and plastic tubes in their noses and arms, crapping watery puddles. ­Slack-­breasted, listless mothers sat or lay with them.

“That one’s circling the drain,” said Rose pointing at a child. “You know, like a spider in your bath?”

The nurses constantly used such language in the camps.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.