I am year-and-a-half resident of Oak Park. I have lived here that long, at first very reluctantly, then somewhat ambivalently, and now, finally with great enthusiasm.

The initial reluctance I blame more on myself, my circumstances in moving here, and my sluggish, even inert, bare involvement in the actual moving process. My then-boyfriend and I had been served notice by his landlord, that they were selling his townhouse in midtown Sacramento soon; we had very, very little time to find a new, comfortable, and appropriate place to live.

We are both underpaid freelancers of a sort; he is a bartender/house painter/will be-something-more-fulfilling later in life. I am an avowed, diehard, almost lifelong freelance journalist. I have lived and worked abroad, primarily in Africa, and never, ever expected to come back to my hometown, Sacramento, for any great length of time - other than the obligatory holiday and family visits. But a serious of vehicular accidents that I was involved in and seriously injured in, the first in a motorcycle accident in Uganda in 2004, then a near-death car accident at 11:30 am on December 26th, 2006, in the suburban neighborhood of my mother’s house in El Dorado Hills, left me, on both occasions, crippled, though temporarily, both physically and emotionally.

After the Uganda accident, where I shattered my ankle while on the fourth month of a nine-month Knight International Press Fellowship, I was summarily requested, by my sponsors, to return to the States to rehabilitate properly.

The rehabilitation part was easy. The ignominious return to Sacramento was very, very hard. I moved in with my then very new-boyfriend, did my physical therapy perfunctorily, and not much else for about six months. After all, I hadn’t planned on coming back. Not to Sacramento and maybe not back to the States. Ever.

But there I was living in midtown, a nice, jivey, area in downtown Sac, with close, world class restaurants, clubs and shops, and a very kindly, patient, attentive, and handsome boyfriend. So things weren’t ALL that bad, right?

Well, I got it into my head that I wasn’t finished with Africa, and it wasn’t finished with me. This in spite of the fact, that after I had achieved a master’s in journalism in 1991, I promptly took off for South Africa, in the wake of the release of Nelson Mandela, expecting great things for the “new” South Africa, and for myself, a relatively untried, first-time freelance foreign correspondent. I went over there very fecklessly; I had no contacts and no media outlet guarantees. I gave myself six months to make a go of it. After I managed to not starve in those first six months, mostly through the incredible largesse of local friends I made almost immediately, both black and white, both in the business of journalism and outside of it, I decided to give it (southern Africa) two more years. I KNEW that the country’s first, free, and fair democratic elections were coming, and I had to be there to witness that.

Well, that day came and went, not without disruptive, awful violence, some of which hit close to home; one photographer friend of mine, Ken Oosterbrook, talented, dedicated, and crazy-brave, was hit by “friendly fire,” meaning the South African Defense Force, and was killed, during a live shoot-out between the SADF and some black township dwellers.

Another acquaintance, Greg Marinovich, was also shot that same day, but survived and recovered completely. He went on to write about that and other exploits of members of the so-called “Bang-Bang Club," a band of local photographers who kept their ears to the police radio waves, paged each other, night and day, and tracked the violent outbreaks, wherever they might be, whenever they might occur, 24-7. Doing so had won Marinovich a Pulitzer, for taking the photograph of a live “necklacing” in a township. A necklacing is when a mob of angry township dwellers, affiliated with either the Inkatha Freedom Party or the opposing African National Congress party, would clash, single out a primary conspirator, throw a rubber car tire around his neck, light it on fire and dance around in glee while they watched him burn to death.

Marinovich took this photo, did not intervene with the necklacing process, either to protest it, or stop it, won the Pulitzer Prize Award, and never looked back. That was all well and good, as those seasoned war journalists among us knew that we were not the story, we were the story-tellers; no matter how horrific the things were that happened before us, we generally did not intervene; the thinking was that the greater contribution would be to get the story or photo of the horrific event out there in the world at large. That way, change would likely take place on a larger scale, for the greater good. It was Machiavellian, I know, and I’m not sure I was always good at adhering to that principle, but I NEVER judged those who did.

Unfortunately, those outside the fairly rarified world of war correspondents, often did. That was apparently, in large part, the cause of the death by suicide of another member of the “Bang-Bang Club,” Kevin Carter, also a good friend of mine at one time.

It was just three months or so after Carter had won the Pulitzer Prize for that now infamous photo he took of a tiny refugee girl in the Sudan, crawling vainly towards a feeding station, while a vulture stalked her over her shoulder.

Carter was a much more emotional and empathetic war photographer than his buddy, Greg Marinovich. Nevertheless, as he told us friends back in Jo-Burg, he did what was expected of him; took the photograph, then sat down, unmoving for a time, torn with emotion, but did not otherwise intervene. It was almost certain the little Sudanese girl would be dead within hours, with or without the feeding station or Carter’s intervention. So he finished up his assignment in the Sudan, and flew back to Jo-Burg.

Not long after that, he was informed that he had won the Pulitzer for that photo. We were all overjoyed on his behalf. He was a chronically underpaid, underecognized, courageous local talent and this was to be his big break.

Instead, it turned out to be his downfall. The whirlwind attention of states-side editors and interviewers, most of whom had little or no experience with actual war reporting themselves, began to pressure Carter with questions like “ What did you do, when you saw the dying little girl?” “Didn’t you pick her up and carry her to the food station?” “Didn’t you at least shoo away the vulture?” “Didn’t you try to save her somehow?”

But Kevin had done none of those things. Those of us in Jo-Burg knew this, because he told us so. He was among friends and like-minded colleagues with us; we did not expect him to do anything more than he did, which was to take a spectacular, world-changing, award-winning photo, and then move on to document the next calamity, the next unbearable injustice.

Nevertheless, the scrutinizing and judgmental international press and media were not satisfied with the true account of events. They hounded and pressured Carter, who was already somewhat emotionally fragile, until he finally began telling a different version of what happened that day in the Sudan. The more he was hounded and judged, the more his story morphed. First, it was that he had shooed away the vulture. Then, it was that picked up the little girl and carried her to the feeding station. Finally, it was he had carried her to the feeding station, and then went and sat under a nearby tree and cried for hours over the trauma. Of course, none of that happened. But the new versions shut up his critics. (One judgmental ass had even had the nerve to write to the New York Times, criticizing Carter and the paper for printing the photo).

When Carter came back from his whirlwind, stateside press tour, he did not exactly get a heroes’ welcome. It wasn’t his fault really, I mean really, whom, except for maybe someone like Marinovich, could have been inured to the criticism and questioning surrounding the circumstances of his actions? We at home in Jo-burg were not upset that he HADN’T intervened with the dying little girl. We were disappointed that Carter, who was too sensitive by far to do what he did and see what he saw, day-in and day-out, had felt the need to change his story to get the ravenous critics off his back.

Soon thereafter, Carter, already prone to abusing alcohol and drugs, fell into a profound tailspin. He got great assignments and well-paid jobs from prestigious news agencies after his award, but he kept screwing up even the simplest assignment. Towards the end of his life, he was sent to take some very straightforward photos at a regular press conference in Mozambique. He went, took the photos, and came back. But when he got off the plane in Jo-Burg, he couldn’t find his rolls of film. He panicked, he went into a kind of shock, he called all his friends to arms to help him find the photos, but he couldn’t locate them anywhere. Embarrassed and ashamed that he, a veteran war photographer, had screwed up such an easy assignment, he turned to more drugs and alcohol and sank into a deep despair.

He started calling around to his friends, saying that he was depressed and suicidal. (At the time, I was in the US with my then fiancé, who was also a friend of Carter’s. So we didn’t get the suicide threats, though he had once threatened to commit suicide to me, when I broke things off with him after a brief affair). He had attempted it once, at the age of 19, trying to escape conscription into the SADF, but was thankfully saved. Since that time, he had threatened to follow-through successfully, but nobody really believed him at this point; he had threatened before and NOT done it, and besides, he’d just won the Pulitzer; it seemed he had everything to live for; his bright, new future, and his beautiful four-year-old daughter. Not to mention the load of female groupies he had collected around the world after winning the Pulitzer.

Nonetheless, the other pressures were too great for him. A few days after announcing once again he was going to commit suicide, this time he did it. He was found in his beloved, old red pick-up truck, asphyxiated in the cab of his truck with a garden hose tied to the back of the tail pipe of his running car, which he had driven to a favorite, childhood park. Beside him was a bottle of alcohol and letters he had written to various friends and family. My fiancé and I found out about his death, while reading an Associated Press news story in the Sacramento Bee.

Aahh, the reader is saying about now. Finally a return to the designated subject for this story contest, however indirectly, through mention of the Sacramento Bee.

And it is a genuine return to that subject, though, perhaps alas, not immediate. You see, when I read about my friend’s death in my hometown newspaper, all it made me want to do was return at once to South Africa. But my fiancé and I were on assignment, and could not. So, we missed Carter’s funeral, and were very sad about that. When we returned to South Africa, finally, it was a changed place, in both good and bad ways. The good ways were obvious; Mandela had just been elected president, and apartheid was officially “over.” The bad ways were more subtle; the mainstream media decided that the “hot” African story was now elsewhere, and it largely, to a person, picked up their temporary bureau headquarters, including CBS, ABC, NBC, the New York Times and many, many others, and moved their southern African bureaus elsewhere.

But I, naïve, sucker that I am, wanted to stay on in South Africa. Yeah, the “big’ story was over, Mandela had been elected with a modicum of fuss and violence (which greatly disappointed a number of foreign journalists) but I still thought there were stories to be told and published. So I stayed on another three years, covering wars in Mozambique and Rwanda, interviewing five African “dictator’s” for a book project, and then finally deciding to leave my base in Jo-burg, when my fiancé urged us to move back to the States, where I would publish our book and he would start a new career as a fashion photographer.
 

This is part one in a two part series to be continued.....