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« December 2008 | Main | February 2009 »
David Hecht, for the Pulitzer Center
Food production in Nigeria is not keeping pace
with population growth. The question is why? The country is not lacking in
arable land and has not had a major drought for many years. So maybe the reason
has something to do with changes to the way Nigerian societies are organized.
The country is a federation of states. In
northern Nigeria, where food shortages are most acute, the society is organized
into Muslim states known as Emirates, which were ruled by Emirs under
colonialism. But since Nigeria’s independence, though the Emirs still
hold sway, each emirate also has its own state governments, which are
responsible for passing laws and allocating resources.
I talked with Sani Abubakar Lugga, the chief
advisor, or Wasiri, to the Emir of Katsina about problems of food production.
Below are excerpts from that interview
HECHT: Have the Emirs traditionally played a
role in food production?
WASIZI: Before the advent of Islam -- I am
talking about a thousand years ago -- the kings of Hausaland were the primary
movers of agriculture -- food production and livestock as well as crops like
cotton used to produce cloth. The term Emir only came about after the Sokoto
caliphate Jihad (1809) to purify Islam [at which time] the pagan kings were
made Emirs.
HECHT: So how did these Hausa kings of old
encourage farming?
WASIZI: If you look at the cities of the old
kingdoms, like Kano and Katsina, you will see they all have [protective] walls.
And the town walls at that time were an enclosure of not only the residences of
people but of their farmlands as well. That was to ensure that, even during
tribal and inter-communal wars, enough food was being produced. So that even in
the advent of a raid, one town could [withstand a seige] for four or five
months because they had all their farmlands and livestock within the enclosure.
HECHT: Did colonization change all that?
Elliott D. Woods, for the Pulitzer Center
Gaza City — It's too early to start talking about burnout, but let's face it — it's already here. It's not just me, it's the whole of the Gaza Strip.
The journalists who began flooding over the Rafah border crossing a few days before the Israeli cease-fire have practiced scorch-and-burn journalism among Gaza's war-weary population, and the endgame is near. The funerals have been chased, the flag-sheathed bodies buried, the tunnels explored, the cease-fires reported, the photos snapped, the wounds recorded, the tears collected into metaphors.
There has been no shortage of excellent work, but the work has been hard on the individuals who have facilitated it, and the doors are starting to close.
Asim Rafiqui, for the Pulitzer Center
On the Getty Images archive you can type in 'Gaza Destroyed' and retrieve over 5,500 images to select from. If you run the query 'Gaza Funerals' you will get back over 7,000 images. I was unable to check the Corbis archives because at the time of writing this entry their site was undergoing maintenance. But I am confident that I would find a similarly large number of images for both the queries above.
The challenge for a photographer arriving in Gaza is that s/he is walking into a place that has been consistently and extensively photographed for decades, and that there are many fine, talented and professional Palestinian photographers who carry out this task for their various agencies. In addition, some of the best and most talented international photojournalists have also made Gaza the focus of their work.
I have arrived in Gaza in the aftermath of Israel's most recent military operation against the region, Operation Cast Lead. And I find that though the scale of this latest venture is larger than anything I can remember from my previous travels to Gaza, its impact and consequences are very familiar.
The official numbers state that over 1,300 people have been killed, of which it is believed that nearly 400 were children, about 100,000 made homeless, and about 5000 left injured.
I arrived here just as the cease fire had been declared, and I was immediately struck by how familiar it all seemed.
My first trip to Gaza was in 2003. I then returned and continued to document the situation here, particularly in Rafah, Gaza, in 2004 and 2005.
Continue reading "The Familiarity Of It All: Photographing The Gaza Aftermath" »
Asim Rafiqui, for the Pulitzer Center
The water pipe has many names.
In the balkans it is called a 'lula' or 'lulava'.
In Egypt and the Persian Gulf it is often referred to as a 'shishe'.
In Iran it is called a 'ganja' pronounced as 'ghelyoon'.
In India and Pakistan it is called a 'huqqa'.
In Jordan, Greece, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Israel, it is called by the beautiful name of 'narghile' -- a word that has its roots in sanskrit.
But I doubt if it has ever been called a weapon of defiance.
In 2003 I decided to rent an apartment in the city of Rafah, Gaza and document lives of the people living along the border with Egypt. These mostly refugee neighborhoods were under assault from Israeli armored bulldozers and tanks – all part of the construction machinery being used to build the steel wall along the Philadephia Corridor – the code name the IDF used to describe the stretch of land it controlled between Rafah, Gaza and the Egyptian border.
Alex Amend, Pulitzer Center
GlobalPost.com,
a new for-profit and online journalism outlet, launched last week with
a bold mission: Reestablishing traditional international journalism
values in the digital age. The Pulitzer Center is pleased that original
reporting from its own journalist grantees will be featured on
GlobalPost.
Within the battered redoubts of traditional news media GlobalPost has been greeted as a beacon of hope, with enthusiastic coverage from MSNBC, The Wall Street Journal and Columbia Journalism Review.
Elliott Woods, for the Pulitzer Center
Residents of Zeitoun, on the edge of Gaza City, watch in fear as an Israeli F-15 streaks by on Sunday, Jan. 18, the first day of the Israel's unilateral cease-fire. Moments later, the villagers pictured here unearthed the remains of the last missing members of the Samouni family in the rubble of a bombed-out house. Twenty-nine Samounis — all civilians — were killed during Israel's three-week war with Hamas. Palestinian and UN health officials claim that civilians comprise more than half of the 1,300 Gazans killed during the war. —Elliott D. Woods
Asim and I woke up to gunfire this morning, despite the fact that
both Israel and Hamas announced unilateral cease-fires last Sunday,
January 18. The shots weren't aimed at anyone—as far as we know.
Israeli gunboats are patrolling the Mediterranean coastline beside Gaza
City, pumping out rounds at empty stretches of beach.
The staff at Al-Deira Hotel, where Asim and I met our driver and translator this morning, shrugged off the shooting, which shook the windows of the hotel and put customers like us ill at ease. If anything, the staff seemed bemused, annoyed, tired. Almost a week after Israel stopped dropping bombs, and twenty-four hours after IDF soldiers withdrew from Gaza, drones still buzz overhead and gunboats are harassing the shaky sleep of residents here.
It's categorically inaccurate to say that Israel has ceased its fire — the Israeli military hasn't let up on its psychological war against the people of Gaza.
"The occupation kills you slowly," said Mahdi Sultan, whose father was killed by an Israeli air strike in Beit Lahia two weeks ago.
"It's the fear and the constant threat," Mahdi said, that gets to you in the end.
Learn more and see all "Inside Gaza" reporting here.
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