This is what it's like to be British

rip Rik Mayall

There's a furore in the UK at the moment about British-ness and the 'Trojan Horse' of Islam destroying Britain through religious schools. Michael Gove came up with this idea of the 'Trojan Horse.'

To be perfectly honest, I am quite hostile to the idea of religious schools. By their nature, they are religious and so promote certain beliefs and values. I know because my daughter has been to a couple of religious schools. Not too religious, but it creeps in around the edges. I prefer secular education. Halloween should be Halloween, not Hallelujah-een ( I'm not kidding you). Keep Ned Flanders out of Britain.

Michael Gove (who is also a bit Ned Flanders) is hostile to the idea of religious education too, or at least Muslim education. That puzzles me. A few years back he was supporting them, saying how fantastic they are. What did he think would happen when people starting building Muslim or Jewish or Hindu or Christian schools? That they wouldn't be religious?

It's the same when the government in Britain says immigrants should 'integrate' and learn English. And then cut funding to the very places that do exactly that, removing the possibilities that so many people are trying to make happen.

It's quite something to see a classroom filled with Somali, Polish, Kurdish and Brazilian immigrants all getting on and sharing their lives, integrating and learning both a language and a whole host of different cultures. And to know that when they go home at night, they will be able to help their kids with their homework, they will be better able to navigate the school system, or the medical system, and get a job and get on and become good, honest hard-working members of society - you know the rhetoric.

And then to see the funding for those same programmes cut, to see the possibilities they provide ripped away from communities who need them most, who value them most, who do want to learn English and 'integrate'. That's heartbreaking.

Or to see smart 11-year-old kids who have just arrived in the country and never been to primary school, who are desperate to learn but don't even know how to hold a pair of scissors or write their name, struggle and flounder and sink because the schools don't have the funding or the skills to teach these kids. Instead they are slowly shuffled to the back of the class and put on a virtual scrapheap because that's what 'integration' means. It means ignoring the problem, pretending it doesn't exist, making it even worse. That's heartbreaking. I used to teach them when they were spat out at the other end. It was our job to turn them round in some way and we did that by addressing the problems and teaching towards it.

I don't think Michael Gove is remotely interested in any of that though. He is interested in the empty rhetoric of Britishness and integration and he is happy to sacrifice others for his ambition. And the idea of having so many more faith schools was still his idea in the first place. Here's an article where he praises faith schools from a few years back.

I originally had something else up here and it connected to the great Somali writer, Nuruddin Farah, but I was asked to take it down so I did.

But Nuruddin Farah is great so here's a link to what he wrote about the complexities of life (and Somalia is very complex)  in this article

In a hotel beside a Norwegian fjord, encircled by snow-streaked mountains, the novelist and playwright Nuruddin Farah has his mind on warmer waters."Are they pirates?" he says of the Somalis who hold ships hostage off the Horn of Africa, where he was born. "What they do has the characteristics of piracy. But that wasn't how it started." He fixes his eye on the Arctic trawlers in the harbour. "The majority were fishermen who lost their livelihoods to Korean and Japanese and European fishing vessels, fishing illegally in Somali waters. I'm not condoning the things they're doing. But there are unanswered questions. Someone is not telling us the truth."

...

"Somalia is no longer what it was. It's past reconstruction. How can you reconstruct a country that's self-destructing continuously?"

....

 He was once attacked online for insisting the "Afghan-type body tent is not culturally Somali. I said: 'My mother never wore a veil, nor my sisters.' They said my mother was not a Muslim." In the diaspora, he argues, "the majority could not articulate their Somali culture. The less you know about Islam, the more conservative people become."

...

In areas al-Shabaab controls, says Farah, they have "forbidden song and dance because they're closer to Wahhabism than most Somalis". Theatre that is verse-based, and sung to music, "challenges everything such groups represent. They say it's evil, Satan's work, and that a woman's place is not on the stage." Yet visiting Mogadishu in the spring, he found people "playing music and singing in tea houses and at parties. Women have created their own space."

Alixandra Fazzina - A Million Shillings: Escape from Somalia

I was blown away by Alixandra Fazzina's pictures of Somali refugees trying to get to Yemen. Here is a slideshow that show the pictures from her book , A Million Shillings: Escape from Somalia. Great music, great pictures but the two absolutely do not go together; a case of the music working against the images.

The words below are from an interview in the August issue of the BJP.

 

“It’s important to get over that this isn’t a choice, it’s something forced on people,” says Alixandra Fazzina. “Becoming a refugee is one of the most horrible things that can happen to you, especially if it’s the result of conflict. Too often stories on refugees end up being a statistic.”

Allixandra Fazzina has faced death shooting her story – both her own and that of the Somali refugees she’s photographing. Fleeing civil war at home, desperate Somalis are making their way to the Gulf of Aden, where people smugglers wait to take them to Yemen. It’s a journey fraught with danger. Some estimates suggest that only one in 20 of those smuggled make it, the rest falling victim to drowning, exhaustion and the smugglers’ aggression, and Fazzina was not immune to that aggression. “If the militia saw me pointing the camera at them they would fire at my feet; sometimes they would fire at my feet when I arrived just to warn me,” she says.

Fazzina is referring specifically to her project, A Million Shillings, which details the desperate journey Somali refugees take across the Gulf of Aden. But her words could equally apply to the other stories featured here, from Burmese Muslims cut adrift in Bangladesh, to young Afghans reduced to poverty in Greece. Even the comparatively wealthy Westerners forced to leave Dubai deserve sympathy – having staked their fortunes on a dream, many now face ruin. But too often that sympathy is not forthcoming because, as Fazzina also points out, migration has become a dirty word. It’s also a blanket term, covering a broad spectrum of people.
According to the United Nations, a refugee is a person who “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country”. Such people don’t automatically become refugees – they must apply for this status. Until it is granted they are asylum seekers; if it is denied and they stay in the country they become illegal aliens. Like the unrecognised Burmese Muslims in Bangladesh, they are denied freedom of movement, permission to work and basic human rights.

“It was incredibly scary. It just takes one militia who’s high and thinks it’s funny, and they were shooting so close of course they could have killed me. Mostly they’re just drunk or they’re chewing khat or they’re on hash and they’re really psyched up. They love firing their guns, it’s a macho thing, and they’ll just shoot randomly at the refugees. I witnessed summary executions on the beaches – refugees who were too scared to get on the boats were told to kneel down and shot there and then. I was told, ‘This is the bad time, you need to go away now’.”
In fact, Somalia is so unsafe that few NGOs venture there, and when Fazzina started the project at the end of 2006 she had little backup. She flew to Bossaso, a coastal town well known for smuggling, with little more than the address of a guesthouse, going straight from the hotel to the UNHCR in order not to compromise its security. From there she was pretty much on her own but, she says, connections were key – other journalists have been killed trying to cover the story. She found a translator who’d worked for the US forces in Mogadishu, whose English was rusty but whose knowledge of the area and its people was invaluable. She also photographed in Yemen, where exiled Somali journalists were able to help her – Somalia is one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists to work, and many have fled for their lives.
But Fazzina also worked with the smugglers themselves, both in Bossaso and Djibouti, another popular crossing point, and says she couldn’t have done the story without them. That made her happy she wasn’t directly working with an NGO, as she would have been putting them and their work at risk as well as herself. In Bossaso there are eight main smugglers, known as the “big fish”, and she got to know one called Omar. “I made sure I met him at the end of my first trip, then I got out of town,” she says. “I met him in the town and interviewed him, then he allowed me to go to one of his safe houses, where people wait before making the journey. I told him my story was about the refugees and why people were living this terrible life, and he was very happy to be photographed.
“The next time I went back to Bossaso, I went out to one of the departure points along the coast [with her translator]. We got fired at and then on the way back, on a road controlled by the smugglers, a car started coming towards us. I was very nervous and when it stopped, and armed men got out, I was debating whether to get out of the car or stay in it and hide. Somehow I decided I’d get out, then Omar suddenly appeared out of the truck with his militia, running towards me with his arms open.”
It’s a terrifying story but Fazzina almost laughs as she tells it, out of sheer relief and disbelief. Gaining the bad guys’ trust was essential, she says, and to do so she had to work out how their world was structured. “The smugglers are from different ethnic groups and the refugees generally stick to the smugglers from their clan,” she says. “I worked with the elders of the community and explained what I was doing to them and, although the smugglers are really the warlords, the elders would say to them ‘OK she’s going to do this, if anything happens to her something will happen to you’. I went through the tribal system, working out which vehicle I should be in, which clan my driver should be from.”
Fazzina also got to know people attempting to cross to Yemen, and their heartbreaking stories are told in her book, A Million Shillings. Originally she had hoped to follow one group of refugees from Somalia to Yemen, but she quickly realised this was impossible because so few make it. Of one group of 135 she got to know, just 11 survived. She took pictures of the women waiting to board the smugglers’ boat just a few hours before they died, smiling and laughing into the camera. Those pictures haven’t made it into the book because they were too personal – “I didn’t want the book to be about me,” she explains.
Other images she had to leave out because she couldn’t take them in the first place – because they were too dangerous or because she laid down the camera to help the people she was shooting. She and her translator were the only people on hand on a beach in Yemen when a boat laden with dead and dying refugees landed, for example, and she immediately stopped shooting to pull the dead off the boat and give water and emergency first aid to the weak survivors. “As a human being you have to intervene, although it probably would have been one of the most dramatic images I could have shot,” she says.
Fazzina also shows the bleak reality the refugees face when they arrive in Yemen – housed in impoverished camps, many move on to try their luck elsewhere, in Saudi Arabia or even the UK. She discusses their options in the book but doesn’t pursue them, “or the book would go on forever”. Even so, she ended up with thousands of images and it took her months to edit them into a coherent narrative, plus write the very thorough texts that go with it. She then had to raise the funds to publish the book, persuading the International Office of Immigration to pay for the printing.
The result is both interesting and serious – the format of a novel rather than a usual photobook, it’s the antithesis of the glossy coffee table read. Given the subject matter, it feels appropriate, and Fazzina hopes the format will encourage people to go into both story and her subjects’ lives. “It’s more about the story than the photography, I almost had to put the photography second,” she says. “As a photographer that prioritising doesn’t feel right but the storytelling is really crucially important. The point of the book is to raise awareness – hopefully some good will come of it.”

BJP interview here

What does collaboration mean?

Colin Jacobson comes up with some comments on the World Press Photo in his Foto 8 blog post, especially why there are such limited captions on the winning entries - a mystery considering the Press that comes between the World and the Photo.

It's a point that is especially relevant to Farah Abdi Warsameh's picture story of a Somali being stoned to death. Swiss photographer Matthias Bruggman, who says he is the "last white guy, to the best of my knowledge, to have gone to that area" (in Somalia) comes up with an explanation of how the victim came to be stoned.

...the story I've been told (but haven't been able to check, for obvious reasons) is much more mundane - an official wanted to sleep with the guy's wife, he paid a witness and got him killed.

Which kind of puts a different tack on things. Anyway, the real reason Bruggman is pitching in is because Jacobson has these comments to make about the Somali Stoning pictures.


"The rather disgusting pictures in General News Stories of a man being stoned to death in Somalia raise some interesting ethical matters. Obviously, there was collaboration between the photographer, Farah Abdl Warsameh, and those carrying out this gruesome death sentence and without wanting to sound frivolous, the last thing on the unfortunate victim’s mind would have been a request for model release (though it could be an interesting debate as to whether those about to die can legitimately claim rights over their image). What we can deduce is that a photographer who is prepared to document such a horrible event must have a peculiarly strong stomach."

The key word here is collaboration and it is one that Bruggman picks up on in no uncertain terms.



Second, the calling out of a Somali stringer as "collaborating" with the insurgent group that stoned a man. This is, quite frankly, shows a tragic, and complete disconnect with the realities that Somali photographers face. Collaborating my ass. The guy either lives in Afgooye, the town where the picture was taken, or had to get there from Mogadishu, through an extremely dangerous road. These guys are taking an impossible amount of risk to get the story of their country, which no one gives a rat's ass about outside of militant islam and pirates.

......And later.

Maybe it's just a dreadful lack of command of the english language on Jacobson's side. Or the symptoms of too many years behind a desk. Describing Somali photographers as "collaborators" from a lofty position in Britain is of a level of disconnect only matched with bringing up model releases right behind it.

Coming from a state of fearful ignorance about all the characters concerned, I'm with Bruggman on this - it does seem strange why Jacobson should use the word collaboration (in an implicity pejorative sense ) in connection with Warsameh. It also raises the ethics bar on photography and news gathering in general?

What is collaboration, who is a collaborator? Is anyone who photographers evil deeds a collaborator, is anyone who misreports or underreports or exagerrates a collaborator, anyone who works with a particular brand or ownership of press, or reports on events in particular places from a particular standpoint. Are these people now or have they ever been collaborators - Nachtwey, Hetherington, Broomberg and Chanarin, Meisel, Teller, Richardson, McGinley, Clarke, Parr, Griffiths Jones, Adams, McCullin, Mann, Meiselas?  And if they are collaborating, who are they collaborating with and to what end?

World Press Photo Winners

It's that time of year again - The World Press Photo have their winners up. The above are from Somalia, Palestine and, Palestine again.

Let the gnashing of teeth begin.