As part of my research for what I hope will some day be a book entitled something like: Africa Existential: American Quests on the "Dark Continent" I've been slogging my way through back issues of National Geographic. This means examining scores of photographs of "tribal" scarification, pointy-breasted maidens, and vividly painted warriors. National Geographic has long been drawn to the exotic, and through the 1970s it was a rare article on Africa that did not feature wildly dressed natives, stunning wildlife, or both. Black Africans evidently spent most of their time dancing and holding ceremonies.
It was with no small amount of wonder and gratitude, then, that yesterday I ran across a 1979 article written by a woman from Uganda and her white Canadian fiance--the first I have found with a black African author. She had left Uganda to go to college in North America shortly after Idi Amin came to power, met her future husband, and they determined to live in Uganda and run a medical clinic. The article's opening photograph features the dark-skinned woman woman smiling comfortably at the camera while kneeling at her aunts' feet. Of the hundreds of photographs I have viewed of black Africans since 1945 in the magazine's glossy pages, this was the first in which I felt that the subject was being presented as fully human. It was as if a massive, if unspoken, barrier separating "us" and "them" had been breached. A later photograph conveyed a similar message. Here the young woman was wearing a more exotic costume and walking away from the camera with her white husband. They were holding hands.
I have found two major sources of photographs that dwelt on the humanity rather than the (perceived) peculiarity of black Africans long before 1979: those by black African photographers and those by the black American photographers of Ebony.
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