Africa's photojournalists: The wars are not over

27 Jun 2013

Hollywood would have you believe photojournalism is glamorous, action-packed, full of glory. Nowhere is this less true than in Africa, where a few brave individuals have taken on the continent's most dangerous and insidious wars.

War photographers are either sleazy and glamorous, or noble and glamorous. At least this is what you will think if you believe the various literary or big screen adaptions of photojournalists over the years.

The first famous camp-follower's tale was Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, set in the fictitious Ishmaelia (read Ethiopia/Abyssinia) in the 1930's. The latest film adaption of a book on photojournalists is The Bang Bang Club, very loosely based on Joao Silva and Greg Marinovich's book of the same name about South Africa's bloody transition to democracy.

One might think that there would be a flowering of photojournalism in the continent that inspired those two books, albeit without the quarter-ton of luggage required by the correspondents of old. There is, after all, no shortage of conflict, famine and war on the continent to provide numerous scoops.

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