wolf böwig | kurosafrica. new wars. new maps. new words.

wolf böwig | kurosafrica - new wars. new maps. new words.

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between Matru and Bonthe

Sierra Leone 6/07

„Here I found my father 10 years ago“ ... Morie in Bendu Malen

Bendu Laden; Sierra Leone 6/07

„City of Rest“, a rehabilitation Center for traumatised youngsters, war veterans and drug addicts

Freetown; Sierra Leone 6/07

„City of Rest“, a rehabilitation Center for traumatised youngsters, war veterans and drug addicts

Freetown; Sierra Leone 6/07

Morie in Bendu Malen

Sierra Leone 6/07

„City of Rest“, a rehabilitation Center for traumatised youngsters, war veterans and drug addicts

Freetown; Sierra Leone 6/07

the girl is beaten up because she came too late to school

Bendu Laden; Sierra Leone 6/07

selecting fish

Bonthe; Sierra Leone 6/07

Mories´ classmates

Bendu Laden; Sierra Leone 6/07

Bonthe Island

Sierra Leone 6/07

Mories stepmother and her youngest child on their Kasava-fields

Bendu Laden; Sierra Leone 6/07

Morie on the Kasava-fields of his relatives

Bendu Laden; Sierra Leone 6/07

Morie

Bendu Laden; Sierra Leone 6/07

„City of Rest“, a rehabilitation Center for traumatised youngsters, war veterans and drug addicts

Freetown; Sierra Leone 6/07

morning over town

Goma, DRC

HIV- and Cholera patients in a Mother-Theresia-Home in Addis Abeba

Ethiopia

HIV- and Cholera patients in a Mother-Theresia-Home in Addis Abeba

Ethiopia

“they all want to win, despite the fact that winning is no longer possible.”

Africa is being ravaged since the last decade by a string of conflicts that span from Caprivi Strip in Northern Namibia to Uganda and the Great Lakes Region. These conflicts also bridge with volatile Westafrica - through deals and smuggling, tricky and everchanging alliances, blunt exploitation of natural resources and massive displacement of populations. This first continental war is both original in its dimensions and in its nature. It is likely that its most relevant consequence - besides the already unbearable toll in human suffering and casualties - will be the informal and “de facto” reshaping of the political map of Africa.

All along the XXth century, the map of the African continent kept the same borders defined by European powers at the Berlin Conference in 1884. But its clear today that Pandoras box is being opened for the first time, unofficially and amidst absolute chaos, in the heart of the former Belgian Congo and Westafrica.

These conflicts go largely unreported in Western media. Even when we do get some images coming out from that huge territory, they fail to bring us the comprehensive analysis and insight needed to understand such a complex war. Those images lack words maybe because they seem too often coming out of a language of silent and comfortable contemplation. To put it plainly, there’s a lack of people, of first-hand and first-person accounts, of individuals with names and faces. Real persons as opposed to characters - even journalism is becoming a stage. They make a difference between a “story” and a narrative - narrative in the sense of information that mediates our relation with others by making otherness closer and part of our intimacy. What defines Africa today, with “Congo” as the best case-study, is this absence from our attention - as if a whole continent went underground.

A point of order which is also a point of reference: the end of the world is where humanity ends. „Ashes of men“, „the Horror“ (as summarised by Colonel Kurtz in both Conrad and Coppola) is the absence of place, but beyond this, the absence of a map of one’s own, and still further on, the unawareness that it ever existed. The map can also be reshaped by emptiness, by fading it beneath our feet. Every individual who disappears is the burning of an entire library. The end of humanity is a place, the epicentre of nothing, and the immobility of the human condition. To summarise: the individual ceases to be so in losing the threads of his life, when expelled from the network of his fellows or in never even getting near to belonging to one - not even at the very remote distance fomented by hope.

What defines an individual without connections? The definition comes from a daily reality continually occupied by the impossibility of travel and the successive fractures of love, by the utopia of reconstruction and cohabitation with horror, by the inexistence of the future, and the violation of citizenship, by the death of dreams and the corrosion of objects, by the exhaustion of hope and the dismantling of the group (family, clan or tribe), the fragmentation of the body, and the insularity of language. The persistence of war through bombs, mines, traumas, abandonment, isolation, pain, hatred, indigence, hunger, ignorance and fear makes it seem that the marrow of the human condition has been mortally wounded, and mankind has begun to reproduce a vacuum in their own genetic memory. God remains out there somewhere - perhaps with even greater strength given the impotence of his people in the abyss - but the lines of communication have also been cut, along with all the calendars and rites of communion.

On the soundtrack for “Underground – Once Upon a Time There was a Country ” - a brilliant war film which, rather like “Apocalypse Now” by Francis Ford Coppola, puts a whole itinerary of dehumanisation onto the screen, - it was no coincidence that, following the opening theme (Kalashnikov), Emir Kusturica used a song by the Cape Verdian singer Cesária Evora. It’s called “Ausência”, “Absence”. Absence is not a matter of being far away. It is about not-being, or the loss-of-being, not-belonging. Absence is more than, worse than, different than exile. Exile is the distance from a human place, a centre of trajectories, a womb of dreams. Absence is the lack of place, or even before that, life in a space that is not a place. Exile belongs to the world of melancholy and, in its way, touches on that of poetry. In contrast, absence is the ultimate solitude and is inscribed in the pages of the most acute despair ... when dreams die, that means when war survives humanity.

text by Pedro Rosa Mendes

Morie

Bendu Laden, Sierra Leone

Morie was five years old when RUF rebels killed his entire village, Bendu Malen, in the remote Pujehun district. Around 1200 persons were slaughtered from dawn to dusk in that rainy season in 1997, according to the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The boy is the only survivor of that massacre. The rebels found him in his family house emdash where his mother left him asleep. They appointed Morie the chief of the village and they escorted Morie through the twelve hundred corpses so he could find his father, which he eventually did. “Daddy was beheaded and with his belly cut open”

Bendu Laden, Sierra Leone

“Face of war”, LURD rebel

Bhanga, Liberia

“VOTA” ... manifestation in Bissau

Guinea Bissau

he knows how to drink water only with his mouth emdash like the dogs. He learned to do it after the RUF cut both his hands and he had to survive alone in the forest, for seven days, until his wife found him leaning on a tree. The soldiers came from Kono and found me working in the farm. My children managed to escape but I was left behind and they got me along with six friends of mine. The six of them were killed on the spot.
He was pushed to a fence, where the rebels held his arms over the wooden bars. When Cisse saw the machete going up, he cried: “Oh, God!!!” They teased him: “Do you have a god?” The machete came down twice.
He now lives in the outskirts of the mountain town Bumbuna, in a ghetto for amputees that is far from everything they should have: food, water, medical assistance and security. I am a child. God made me a man. God brought me back to childhood. His prothesis are useless to him. He needs help even to dry away his tears

Bombuna, Sierra Leone

„the sound of his footsteps disappears into the sand. He himself disappears. We also disappear into the white darkness. ... you already know. So do I. It is not the knowledge we lack. What is missing in the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.“ Sven Lindquist, Exterminate all the Brutes Maitre Django (Karateka and champion of North-Kivu-Province) in the destroyed “Eglise Titanic”

truth in Sierra Leone has no price - unlike what happened, for example, in South Africa, where another commission could hold out amnesty for the guilty and a measure of compensation for the victims. In Sierra Leone, a general amnesty for all crimes was guaranteed, politically, in the agreement, signed in Lome, Togo, that brought an end to the war and laid the groundwork for creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In other words, truth was the price of peace
a witness is considering if he testifies or not

TRC-hearings in Mabarurka, Sierra Leone

between Bhanga and Ghanta

Liberia

refugee-camp “Titanic”.

Monrovia, Liberia

“VOTA” ... elections in Bissau

Guinea Bissau

crossing the Mansona River towards Bula

Guinea Bissau

women extract salt near Farim

Guinea Bissau

refugee-camp Plumkor

Monrovia, Liberia

former combatants in a rehabilitacion-center (City of Rest). Daid was whore and porter of an RUF-unit during the civil war

Sierra Leone

woman praying for peace at the old airfield in Monrovia while a UNMIL-helicopter is passing by

Liberia

Bumbuna, in a ghetto for amputees

Sierra Leone

HIV- and Cholera patients in a Mother-Theresia-Home in Addis Abeba

Ethiopia

HIV- and Cholera patients in a Mother-Theresia-Home in Addis Abeba

Ethiopia

HIV- and Cholera patients in a Mother-Theresia-Home in Addis Abeba

Ethiopia

HIV- and Cholera patients in a Mother-Theresia-Home in Addis Abeba

Ethiopia

HIV- and Cholera patients in a Mother-Theresia-Home in Addis Abeba

Ethiopia

30.7.03, the day Sankho died: man holding a portrait of Sankos wife

Sierra Leone

Prince, sitting in a shallow earthen basin filled with water, contemplates the ellipse of the Samuel K. Doe Sports Complex (SKD), in Monrovia. The baby is naked, wearing only a necklace around his neck. With his relaxed arms and his clean face, he has the dignity of an emperor. A small emperor (eleven months old) imprisoned in a huge coliseum. It was in this stadium, inaugurated and named by another head of state, that Charles Taylor galvanized his supporters with his preaching. It was at the SKD that the faithful heard one of the last of his mystical revelations, before his exile in Nigeria:
“Jesus is the President of Liberia!”

Liberia

Waterside Market

Liberia

HIV- and Cholera patients in a Mother-Theresia-Home in Addis Abeba

Ethiopia

HIV- and Cholera patients in a Mother-Theresia-Home in Addis Abeba

Ethiopia

interrogation by LURD-rebels

Liberia

refugees on their way to Saglepia

Liberia

former combatants in a rehabilitacion-center (City of Rest) for drug addicts

Sierra Leone

Bonthe; Sierra Leone 6/07

„City of Rest“, a rehabilitation Center for traumatised youngsters, war veterans and drug addicts

Freetown; Sierra Leone 6/07

Morie

Bendu Laden; Sierra Leone 6/07

Bonthe; Sierra Leone 6/07

„the sound of his footsteps disappears into the sand. He himself disappears. We also disappear into the white darkness. ... you already know. So do I. It is not the knowledge we lack. What is missing in the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.“

Sven Lindquist, Exterminate all the Brutes

Maitre Django (Karateka and champion of North-Kivu-Province) in the destroyed “Eglise Titanic”

Goma, DRC

new houses are built on the lavafields in the west of town

Goma, DRC

facing the Vulkano: lavafields in the southern part of town

Goma, DRC

Lake Kivu: porter with goods from Bukavu

Goma, DRC

tension is high: last night this man was injured by bullets of Interhamwe militias

Goma, DRC

in the “Mission Catholique”, Avenue Deux Lamps: Malaria is epidemic in North Kivu Province

Goma, DRC

Lava and dust ... Vodacom incl.

Goma, DRC

checkpost on the road to Rutshuru

Goma, DRC

last sunrise over Ongombo-West for the Wiese-family

Namibia

“we are one people”: manifestation on Independence Avenue against corruption and for namibian unity

Namibia

Hilde Wiese leaving the families graveyard on her last day on Ongombo-West

Namibia

female worker with her baby

Namibia

the killing fields of Andreas Wiese: more than 60 antilopes were shot here

Namibia

“who owns the land, you ask me?: ... all people who have lived, worked and died here, independent black or white, they own the land! That is our only future.”

Namibia

Hilde Wiese taking last notes before she leaves her house of birth forever

Namibia

“God forgive them, they dont know what they have done”; Andreas Wiese says. In his rage and hate he destroys it all ... leaves burned earth

Namibia

Hilde Wiese takes whatever is possible: female farmworker cut the last flowers

Namibia

day-by-day 400 Calla-flowers were exported to Germany since early 2004 … around 70 people had been in bread and work here

Namibia

… the last cows are trecked to another farm

Namibia

“God forgive them, they dont know what they have done”; Andreas Wiese says. In his rage and hate he destroys it all ... leaves burned earth

Namibia

“... were can we go ... what happens in future?” ... Wiese-workers and their families reflecting on the days to come

Namibia

SWAPO-manifestation in Windhoek: Sam Nujoma, former Namibian president, justifies the landreform. But none of the hundreds of government-run-projects is successfull, corruption is on the rise. Everything is going down to subsistancial economy. ... who owns the land?

Namibia

… where can we go?

Namibia

„... it makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always there. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting the ultimate practitioner“

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

sunset over Man

sawmill near Man

“80 years vanish in 8 minutes”: illegal logging near Sipilou at the liberian border

the roads towards the liberian border are guarded by FN (Forces Nouvelles) soldiers

“80 years vanish in 8 minutes”: illegal logging near Sipilou at the liberian border

“I grew up in an era marked by tragedy, cruelty and terror. Many elements interacted to produce an extraordinary atmosphere: the persisting revolutionary elan; hope for the future, fanaticism; all pervasive propaganda, enormous social and psychological changes; a ma§ exodus of people from the countryside; and, of course, the hunger, malice, envy, fear, ignorance and demoralisation brought about by the seemingly endless war, the brutality, murder and violence.”

Memoirs; Andrei Sakharov

there is no justice ... survivors of the massacre in Duekue finding shelter in the “Palais de Justice” in Man

“80 years vanish in 8 minutes”: illegal logging near Sipilou at the liberian border

landless squatters planting after illegal logging

there is no justice ... survivors of the massacre in Duekue finding shelter in
the “Palais de Justice” in Man

sunrise over Man

Ivory Coast