Even before the experience with Life magazine, at thirty years old, I had started stepping away from America’s War on Terror. That summer of 2004 I had covered the transfer of power into Iraqi hands and had known it was the moment to make the transition to other types of coverage. I needed to branch out beyond the daily demands of breaking-news photography. I had learned how to work quickly and effectively, but it would always be difficult to experiment and grow as a photographer when working under the violent, restrictive conditions of Iraq. I wanted to see what else I could do, and for that I needed to try a different region. It was time to move on, from Iraq and from the destructive love affairs of my youth. I was single for the first time in many years, and ready to be.
My attention turned to Africa. For years I had imagined it a continent where I could lose myself in the people, the stories, the light, the colors, the heat, smell, dust, grime—and my photos. But I had been so wrapped up in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that it had remained a distant dream until New York Times correspondent Somini Sengupta e-mailed me with an idea: Darfur. The war in Darfur began in 2003 when rebel militias made up of ethnic black Africans began attacking the Sudanese government—composed primarily of Arabs—to protest institutional racism and injustices against their tribes. The Sudanese government retaliated without mercy. They bombed and attacked their own people across Darfur with air strikes carried out by antiquated Russian aircraft called Antonovs and then sent in armed militias on horseback, known as the janjaweed, to rape and murder villagers and pillage their homes. The conflict was ethnic but also over access to land and water. Wars often had as much to do with resources as tribal, religious, or national hatreds. Darfurians from the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa tribes organized themselves into two main rebel militias, called the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), to fight the Arab government’s attacks. By 2004 the rebels were completely entrenched in fighting the Sudanese government, trying to help civilians flee into neighboring Chad, and strategically working with journalists who sneaked across the border into Sudan’s Darfur region to help them document the charred countryside littered with bodies.
It was a perfect opportunity to start working in Africa and to focus on a story with a strong humanitarian angle. I was getting steady work with the New York Times and Time, and I had managed to save a little money during my long stints in Iraq, when all my expenses were paid for by the paper. It was the first time in my adult life I wasn’t consumed with anxiety over the next assignment and the next dime, and I could afford to take a risk.
I had no way of knowing then how important Sudan would become to me. I would return for five consecutive years and would establish a deep connection to the country and its people. My work in Africa would change my career, and my life.
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SOMINI AND I MET up in Ndjamena, the capital of Chad, and flew to Abéché, a Chadian town close to the Sudanese border. Our French military aircraft was manned by two extremely good-looking French pilots, who invited us to sit in the cockpit and watch the stretches of desert beyond the panorama of the windshield. I had never seen endless swaths of unpopulated, virgin land. The pilots showed off for us, tilting their aircraft to the left and right, and I ended up puking into a bag for the entire second half of the flight. So much for being a freshly single, veteran photographer and impressing the good-looking soldiers.
In Abéché we spent the night at a UN guesthouse before traveling by four-wheel drive to the remote village of Bahai, where refugees were arriving in droves from across the border in Darfur. In late 2004, there was little infrastructure at the refugee camps: The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the international aid groups were so overwhelmed by the sudden influx of tens of thousands of refugees that most had not received shelter or food and were accessing water through emergency water bladders set up in the desert by the NGOs.
As we traveled to Bahai I realized what a punishing journey it would be for refugees, with nothing but sand from horizon to horizon. I saw makeshift tents populated by malnourished civilians with fresh terror in their eyes. Skeletal villagers who had arrived seconds ago nestled under spindly trees with tattered fabric hung in the branches as sunshade. They were hungry, thirsty, and too listless to beg or move. I instantly reverted to the reserves of my memory for similar images: James Nachtwey’s images from the famine in Somalia, Tom Stoddart’s images from South Sudan, Sebasti?o Salgado’s workers from around the world, Don McCullin’s images of the Biafra famine. Darfur was not a famine, but it was the first time I had seen people who simply didn’t have food and were so weakened by their escape that they could barely walk.