Alive in Africa

by Eva Dameron

Daily Lobo

Lucian Niemeyer used to be a businessman, but in 1987 he switched to photography, something he'd done all his life on the side.

"I had been a businessman," he said. "My wife said, 'Do what you want to do after that,' so I did. I had bought and sold several businesses and I was looking at something that I wanted to do."

In spring 2004, Niemeyer photographed the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda and Sudan. The photos are going into a book called Africa: The Holocausts of Rwanda and Sudan. The UNM Press book comes out in February.

Besides 185 pages of color photographs, Niemeyer tells stories of his experiences in Africa previously published in newspapers over the past 10 years.

While many photographers use black and white film to photograph devastating world issues, he uses color because it presents an unembellished image of life after genocide, he said.

He started the project in 1994 when a doctor invited him to visit the refugee camps in Zaire after the Hutu-Tutsi tribal genocide.

"I went there four months after the genocide - just weeks after the cholera epidemic which killed 300,000, and went to the refugee camps to document what was going on, so that the doctor could raise funds for medicine and food to bring back," he said.

He tells four stories in the book.

"Freelancing, the individual stories appeared in newspapers," he said. "As the project kept getting stronger, I told the four stories of holocaust."

The first story is about tribe-on-tribe genocide, he said. The second is on slavery in Sudan.

"The third was holy jihad genocide in Sudan, and the fourth was ethnic cleansing in the Nuba Mountains in Sudan," Niemeyer said. "The last study took me until 2004. I came back and wrote that story, contacted the UNM Press, who determined that they wanted to publish the whole book."

He said the saddest part of the genocide is the impact it had on children, which he illustrates with a photo of a girl in rags holding a bright yellow cup.

"A human rights organization had created an orphanage in the middle of a camp of 300,000 people in which anarchy prevailed," he said. "Outside of that orphanage I found this girl sitting with her cup looking very forlorn - the picture itself expressing very clearly the devastation of genocide."

He went to the Nuba Mountains after peace had come, he said. The Nubas had experienced a history of 5,000 years of persecution.

"Here was a group of people finally experiencing peace and it was remarkable," he said. "They had nothing. There was no material value in anything they had, but they had respect, dignity, and they were happy."

Niemeyer lived in a tent, and stocked up on as many PowerBars he could bring, he said.

"Starvation was rampant," he said. "We flew into one area and they were boiling grass for substance. These people have never even seen a light bulb. But the people are warm and they give you everything they have."

His experience in Africa changed his values, he said.

"It changes you totally, there's no question," he said. "If I could take everybody in America to Africa during those circumstances, there'd be a total change in America toward itself. Wealth and power aren't that important. It teaches you that dignity and respect can be found without material gain."