African Insights Ezine – July 2005

Kodak Moments

It was Grasshopper season in East Africa. Outside of the then Meridien Hotel were countless children with plastic containers going after those culinary morsels. Don’t knock it until you have tried them…rather tasty when fried.

For months I had been preparing for a three country filming of orphaned and needy African children by a western film crew. I had even hired a former Vietnam vet pilot who seemed to be in a permanent state of inebriation-- but he could fly and besides he had the right plane (former Irish Command Plane) and he could land it most anywhere including in a remote corner of Southern Sudan. Sometimes he would get confused about the town in which we were landing or departing…but we were just glad to be landing safely. Besides, I once hired a sober Ugandan pilot and we were lost in the fog over Kigali until I found the airport below.

On that day we would film at Gisemba Orphanage where the staff and children had prepared for weeks for the day that the film crew would arrive. They came to film the stories of some of the children who had suffered so much during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

Everyone was simply excited. Food had been prepared and sodas chilled for the guests and the children. Mother Nature seemed to give us a favorable day, but at the last moment she decided to bless Kigali with some rains that caused us to move the whole affair inside one of the dorms and there it became a bit cramped but did not cramp the spirit of the place.

The cameramen had a hard time setting up and the lighting was less than perfect, nevertheless the festivities began. Some of the Rwandan girls did one of their graceful, national dances (To me it is one of the most beautiful dances in all of Africa). The cameras captured all of it; the director and producer made sure that nothing was missed and he even did some interviewing through an interpreter—the atmosphere was festive and jubilant and everyone seemed glad to be part of this very special event.

Afterwards, the vans were loaded, the children standing around looking on. The director/producer was wearing his finest Banana Republic Store attire and was already seated in one of the vans which would take us to Kanombe Airport so we could board our plane.

One could sense this fellow was impatient and wanted to leave; this “shoot” was complete and he was anxious to move on to the next “project”. I spotted a little girl with a cute face, runny nose and mischievous smile as she approached the van we were loading. She jumped onto the director/producer’s lap who promptly shooed her away, which confused and saddened her! Just a few minutes earlier the white people could not get enough of her and the rest of the children--and now she was told “go away”!!

My blood started to boil a bit and I turned to the producer/director, looked him in the eyes and said “I see that you only came for the Kodak moment inside but not for the children.” His face turned red and no other words were exchanged but he knew how I felt.

A year earlier, I had worked with a BBC reporter from Leeds. He was one of the nicest people that I had ever met. He prepared a one hour radio broadcast about Ugandan orphans that was later aired on the BBC World Service.

With him it was not the Kodak moments but the sound bites, but he unlike the producer/director saw people as human beings with whom he spent time and was free to be. He was relational rather than task orientated, he enjoyed Africa.

He needed the sounds of Africa to go along with the words. We had already collected market sounds, bird sounds, traffic sounds, people sounds, children singing, but he wanted more. One evening after dinner, we drove along Entebbe Road toward Makindye when he heard drums and said, “That is what I want. I want to record that drum sound.”

I stopped the car and we moved down an embankment to some houses that showed this was not the upper middle class neighborhood of Kampala but where the underprivileged lived. Yet these people knew how to celebrate that which they had with music, dance, some food and drink, accentuated with laughter and the joy of being alive.

We walked up and my reporter friend had his disc player ready and was recording. We stood there watching some children dance and a few others play the drums. Suddenly the music stopped and we were being surrounded by angry men speaking in Lugandan, pointing to the recorder and shouting in English, “No pictures, no filming!”

I laughed and told them we were not filming; we were not taking pictures, but only recording sounds. One of the men came forward telling us that it was not right that we would be making money from pictures we had taken there. At the same time the other men shouted angrily, “Yes! Yes! It is not right.”

My son, Ryan, hearing all kinds of commotions came down to where we were all gathered, shouted at me asking if I was ok….I laughed and said “Soon.” He laughed knowing that his father thrived on chaos and loved situations just like this.

We did negotiate and showed our newly acquired friends the disc recorder allowing them to listen and their faces reflected the fact that they liked what they heard. I did say that the sounds would be used on a BBC Radio program about the children of Uganda.

I bought a round of drinks for everyone from the nearby kiosk and stopped by a few more times in the following weeks. In fact, we became friends and there was a realization that we had not merely come for a “Kodak moment.”

I was reminded to this event just last week as I read a BBC Africa account where an American evangelist, who is on TV daily in the USA, had come to Nigeria to speak to the masses. The organizing committee had promised that 2 million people would come nightly. It was more like 300,000, not bad for US standards, but for Nigerian standards it was rather small.

This evangelist had come in his private jet, had a line of Hummer vehicles transport him around with his body guards ever watching over him. He had a film crew to record “history in the making” so he could send these “Kodak moments” to his supporters stateside and raise more funds. However, this particular “Kodak moment” turned into a “Kodak disaster” and bills are still waiting to be paid. On the last night of his crusade he vented his anger at the very people to whom he came to minister.

People are more than Kodak moments, more than mere projects. Africans, like people everywhere, enjoy having a picture taken, but they like others in various parts of the world, do not enjoy being exploited, having someone do a shoot--conduct a camera event-- from which the people shooting the event realize financial gain but fail to share it with the people who are being filmed. Besides, shoot and run events miss out on the person you might meet, settling for a two dimensional character rather than the fullness and richness of that whole person.


Things in my life are at a turn and hopefully in the next few months I will be taking a trip to back East Africa, my digital camera is ready and I’ve bought some new 1-gigabyte flash cards that allow me to take hundreds of pictures on each card. These photos will be more than a mere Kodak moment but a recording of the people, events and places that I encounter during my trip to Mother Africa--and with each…I will ask… “May I?”…jon