by Don McCullin
22. RAIN FOREST GENOCIDE
I have argued with a lot of journalists in my time, and the fault was often not theirs. I could be bad tempered and erratic, especially in the approach to a big assignment. Friendships with writers sometimes came under strain, and occasionally broke down. While running repairs could usually be effected at the nearest bar, there would always be some legacy of damage.
There was one writer, however, who always brought out the best in me. His name was Norman Lewis, and in a way I became his disciple. Norman was the kind of man you could pass in the street without realising anybody had gone by: tall, slightly stooped, with glasses and moustache. It was hard to imagine yourself in the presence of one of the world’s greatest adventurers. He was old enough to be my father, and this may have been relevant to our relationship. I had no difficulty in being deferential to him, and he never seemed to find it hard to be kind and considerate to me. Over a period of twelve years we teamed up whenever we could to go to some of the most inaccessible parts of the world, and on only one occasion did we exchange cross words.
Norman Lewis, 2001
It had been a tough assignment among the Panare Indians in the Venezuelan interior and we were weary as we stumbled back across the Orinoco. I had torn the flesh off my ankle while pushing the ferry boat off a sandbar and Norman walked into an iron bar that formed part of the ferry canopy and landed flat on his back with a bloody gash across his forehead.
There were options on the other side. We could charter a small plane that would get us to Caracas in plenty of time for the flight home to England. Or we could make a riskier connection by taxi—a horrendous journey of some seven hours. There was no doubt in my mind, given our condition and the possibility that Norman might be concussed. It had to be the airplane. But Norman didn’t trust small planes, which he believed fell out of the air all too frequently. So we took the bruising taxi ride instead. It wiped me out, but it left Norman, in his seventies, as composed as ever.
I served an apprenticeship before working directly with Norman. He had come back from Brazil in 1968 with an amazing story about genocide of the rain forest Indians in the Amazon. Mineral and land speculators, in league with corrupt politicians and officials, had continually usurped the Indian lands, destroying whole tribes in a cruel struggle in which bacteriological warfare had been employed. The food supplies of the Indians had been poisoned and epidemics created by issuing them with clothing impregnated with the smallpox virus.
Norman had covered every aspect of this hideous saga, except the pictures. The Sunday Times magazine asked me if I could reach some of the threatened tribes and provide suitable photographs to go with his powerful account. Before I left London, Norman himself gave me a precise briefing on what he wanted, though he warned me that it wouldn’t be easy.
I soon began to feel it was impossible. Stuck in Rio, getting the mañana treatment every day from Brazilian officials, I couldn’t see any way of getting to the Indians. Eventually a man at the Ministry of the Interior recommended that I go and photograph the Kadiweus, a mounted tribe often referred to as the Indian Cavaliers, who could be reached by a missionary plane.
Though it was not my objective, I was interested enough to follow this up. I remembered Norman telling me to beware of what he called the ethnocidal tendencies of the North American missionaries in Brazil. He saw them as the instrument by which the Indians lost their land, their self-respect, and finally their identity. I had no structured religious beliefs myself, but this judgment sounded harsh to me. I had seen missionaries in Biafra and other countries, who seemed to me to be working for the general good of the people.
All that I found remaining of the Kadiweus were a few sick and starving women and children who rode even hungrier-looking horses down to the mission house to beg for scraps. The American missionary there did not seem greatly interested in them. He was busy on his translation of the Epistle to the Galatians into Kadiweu, and expected to finish the work in another ten years.
‘But won’t they be dead by then?’ I asked.
‘Yes, they will,’ he said.
‘Then what’s the point?’
The missionary gave this some thought, and said, ‘It’s something I can’t explain, something I could never make you understand.’
I began to get some inkling of what Norman might be on about.
I really wanted to get to Xingu, in the heart of the Amazon forest, where two dedicated anthropologists, the Vilas Boas brothers, had created a secure place in which a number of endangered tribes had found refuge to live in their own style, without any danger of missionary contact. The Boas brothers shared Norman’s view on the subject.
After more days of frustration in Rio, I finally managed to fix it. I flew into Xingu on a Brazilian air force plane as the companion of a visiting doctor of tropical medicine. I presented my letters of accreditation to a short, grizzled, muscular man who said, ‘They don’t matter to me. We don’t want you here, the Indians don’t want you.’
I felt like a man who had just climbed Everest only to get turfed off when six inches from the summit. The one thing I had not anticipated was that a photographer would come in the same category of contamination as a missionary. It would be five days before the aircraft returned and, from the hostile reception I was getting, it looked as if I would be spending them with my camera bag unopened.
That evening, as the Boas brothers and their staff were about to sit down to dinner, I said, ‘Before I left Rio, I bought a few things—cheese, salami, bits and pieces from the delicatessen—that I would like you to share with me.’ To people contemplating another night of rice and beans, this had a wonderfully melting effect. Besides, I had shown respect for the Indians in the short time I had been there. They must have seen that I wouldn’t behave like a tourist. Anyway, for whatever reason, there was a complete thaw.
I felt greatly honoured to photograph the tribes, some of which were pitifully small in numbers. Overrun by diamond hunters two years earlier, the Tchikaos had been reduced from 400 to forty-three. The Kamairos were highly musical, blending their music with religion—‘we speak to the Gods with the sweet music of flutes’.
I was invited to attend a ceremony where the women—naked except for the smallest shreds of rattan—danced frenziedly to the rain god. I spent time with the men—some of whom were six feet tall, and all of them muscular—as they anointed their bodies with extraordinary colours and ochres. With the children I chased insects and caught an enormous grasshopper, all of seven inches long. At the end of it all the Boas brothers set the seal on our friendship by presenting me with a magnificent Indian headdress.
I took the grasshopper back to Rio, smuggled it to England in my camera bag and arrived in Hampstead Garden Suburb in time for Christmas. ‘I’ve got something really interesting to show you,’ I told the kids. There were screams of delight when the grasshopper emerged, though ten minutes later it died.
That trip made friends of Norman Lewis and me. We often spoke of making a joint expedition, though it would be another two years before we could get together. By then, early 1971, I was deliberately trying to broaden my range as a photographer. I didn’t want to give up war reporting but I also didn’t want to get a reputation for repeating the same images.
What impressed me about Norman was how meticulous his approach was to an expedition. His level of research was quite incredible. I used to think that he had uncanny powers of prediction but in reality he just knew a lot.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Norman, on the third day of our first expedition together, ‘you will see pagan rituals on the steps of a Christian church.’ Sure enough, this was one of the strange sights that Chichicastenango, in the heart of Guatemala, had to offer. The church bell had been replaced by an Indian who squatted in the tower thudding an enormous drum.
Chichicastenango was the kind of place that Norman thoroughly approved of, a place where the ‘civil
ising mission’ of the white man had been slowly throttled. It was an almost all-Indian town fifty miles from the nearest qualified doctor, and yet it seemed to be in good healthy shape. The combination of Indian life and old Spanish colonial architecture made for a certain style. I can remember writing home from the comfort of my four-poster bed in the Mayan Inn and thinking, This is the life.
Norman loved the small details and turns of phrase in life. I remember inexpertly trying to beat down a man who was selling a silver figure, and I asked Norman to intercede with his gift for languages. After a brief exchange, Norman turned to me laughing and said, ‘This is a very smart man. He says he is not dealing in vegetables.’ Other sights and sounds were less agreeable.
In Guatemala City, we noticed a large skinhead population but they bore no relation to the British ‘skins’. They were the result of police initiative in dealing with the hippie problem. In remote Tekal, the greatest of the ancient Mayan cities, situated in the largest rain forest in the northern hemisphere, the view was suddenly marred by the appearance of fifty combat-ready paramilitaries.
Guatemala was, as usual, in the grip of a civil war, with left-wing guerrillas in the hills and right-wing death squads in the city. The most feared group was called Ojo por Ojo (eye for an eye). After nine o’clock at night (curfew time) the army shot anything that moved. Each morning the Prensa Libre would list the corpses found round Guatemala City.
Norman made it his business to find out what progress had been made since 1954, when the left-wing President Arbenz, whose reforms threatened the holdings of the United Fruit Company, was overthrown in a coup organised by the CIA. It transpired that fewer than 200 families still owned 98 per cent of the land. Norman thought it could be safely said that Guatemala still retained its status as a banana republic, and the most murderous one at that.
Meanwhile, there was still the consolation of small pleasures, and Norman found another one at our last port of call, Puerto Barrios, an almost wholly negro town on the Gulf of Mexico. Upon hearing the most fearful screams outside our hotel, we went to investigate. Round the back of the hotel we found the source of the commotion—dozens of big rats in cages.
‘It’s highly likely,’ said Norman, with his schoolmaster’s chuckle, ‘that we are looking at tonight’s supper.’
23. HIDING BEHIND THE CAMERA
My first book of photographs, called The Destruction Business, was published in 1971. The paper was cheap and the printing diabolical, but I was enormously proud of it. Putting it together gave me the chance to assess where I had been and where I might be going.
I wasn’t about to find serious fault with my own work but I could see there was an emphasis on soldiers at war rather than civilians in war, though when the casualty numbers were finally added up it was often the civilians who had suffered the most. In future I wanted to reflect more of what happened to the women and children caught up in war, and the chance to do so came sooner than I expected.
In March 1971, soon after I came back from Guatemala with Norman Lewis, civil war broke out in East Pakistan. The West Pakistan army moved in with the intention of destroying all Bengali ambitions for an independent state. The brutality of their intervention would soon give the green light to involvement by the Indian army.
Like most photographers, I was not eager to go. This was not due to the risks, but mainly because of the lack of them. Both the Pakistanis and the Indians were highly skilled at not letting newspapermen anywhere remotely near the front. I went to the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965 and for me it was a total wash-out. Nothing but a diet of briefings way behind the lines, something for the reporters to nibble on but useless for photographers. If they ever took you to what was called a front, you could bet it was last month’s front.
Confident that I wouldn’t be called upon, I went ahead with booking our first family holiday abroad. We settled on Cyprus, a place which had a special significance for me. I still read newspaper reports about the Pakistan conflict, and remember being riveted one morning by a story in The Times. It spoke of the possibility of a million people fleeing the war and crossing the border into India. It seemed a staggering number of people to be dispossessed and homeless at one time, and in a country where the monsoon rains were due any day. I spoke to Mike Rand at the Sunday Times magazine and he gave me the go-ahead to do what I could on my own. I had less than two weeks, though my deadline this time was imposed not so much by the newspaper as the family holiday.
By the time I flew into Calcutta, a million refugees was looking like a flimsy underestimate. I took a cab and headed north. It was soon apparent that the problem was beyond counting. The road was an endless flow of people: of people carrying the crippled; of the crippled carrying the more crippled; of people on sticks with legs that bent backwards. Every form of human disfigurement, in terms of emotion and physique, was going down that road towards Calcutta.
I stopped at Hasanabad, about fifty miles north, to take some pictures. The little railway station, which would have looked busy with a hundred people on it, was now the only shelter for 8,000 refugees. You could see the families with bundles all down the track.
I arrived near the border where a battalion of the Indian army was camped under canvas. All the soldiers were on full alert. My first thought was that I might stay with them but they said it wasn’t possible: they were expecting to be on the move into East Pakistan at any moment. They directed me instead to a church down the road.
The Catholic sisters there said I could have a bed, on one condition. I would have to be ready to vacate it on Saturday night when the travelling Father arrived for a night’s sleep before Sunday Mass. It was the beginning of a chain of kindnesses that sustained me through the catastrophe.
Transport was supplied by a bicycle from the neighbouring farm, and I pedalled off to find the refugee settlements. They were dotted all around, some in old vacant buildings, others in tents supplied by the Indians, still more in primitive grass huts. They all told the same tale of dispossession and misery.
I had a strange anxiety. The rains had not arrived. Each morning as I pedalled out the sky was brilliant blue, almost cloudless. The monsoon of course is a great blessing in a land with the ever-present fear of drought. Now the flooding could only make the plight of the refugees more dire. Either way, the outcome was not in human hands.
I had just five days left, and that morning had travelled less than a mile on my bicycle when I felt the first droplets of rain on my cheek. By the time I got to the little cluster of huts that marked the settlement of thousands of refugees the monsoon was raging, and its effect was more devastating than anything I could have imagined. Already weakened people were collapsing under the weight of the torrential downpour. Husbands were carrying dead wives, and I could see men and women carrying dead children. There were virtually no medical supplies, and within twenty-four hours of the monsoon starting a cholera epidemic had broken out.
Often I found myself not wanting to look at what I had come to photograph. As I went quietly about my work I was never made to feel intrusive, yet I was horrified and heartbroken. My abiding thought was that those comfortably at home in Britain should see how these people were suffering. I saw one woman cradling her dead child whom she had carried round all day. When finally, towards evening, she squatted down and released the child it seemed even more sad than when she had clung to the corpse.
In a makeshift hospital I saw a man and his four children clustered round the sickbed where their mother lay foaming at the mouth, her eyes spent. The nurse told me that she was dying because she had been given the wrong drugs. When finally she died, the family went into a frenzy.
‘What happens now?’ I asked the nurse helplessly.
She answered patiently. ‘Well, we’re going to take the bodies from here to the dead body tent over there, so the men can take them away.’
The dead woman was carried out of the waterlogged hospital
and her stretcher put down beside the body tent. The family waded across and lay down beside her while I was taking pictures. They couldn’t believe their mother had gone. I felt as if I were using the camera as something to hide behind. I stood there feeling less than human, with no flesh on me, like a ghost that was present but invisible. You have no right to be here at all, I told myself, my throat contracted and I was on the verge of tears.
‘Mister, where will you go?’ I asked the man in a trembling voice.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘To Calcutta maybe.’ And what would Calcutta do with him and his family and the two million other refugees? I gave him every rupee I had in my pocket. It was to help me, as well as him.
I photographed the refugees under the monsoon rain for four days before my cameras started to give out. The leather cases disintegrated and the water got in, while my own body became shaky from a diet of tea and bananas. Emotionally I was drained. I thought of my pictures as atrocity pictures. They were not of war but of the dreadful plight of victims of war.
Before flying home from Calcutta I went to visit Mother Teresa’s House of the Dying, where I saw marvellous work being done for the destitute. There was a dignity about the place, and I took some pictures of Mother Teresa who, unlike the refugees, seemed very practised before the camera.
As I left I decided to stay with victims and to look more closely at conflict through civilian eyes. There was no need to travel the world to find what I wanted, for the situation was there on my own doorstep, in Northern Ireland.
I can vouch for the effectiveness of the CS gas used by the British army against riotous demonstrators in Northern Ireland. The first time I received a serious dose, in the Bogside area of Derry later in 1971, I went blind.
The demonstration had become ugly, with rubber bullets and great shards of glass from shattered milk bottles flying around. Then, suddenly, a tremendous burning sensation seized my nose and throat, and forced me to close my eyes. I can remember groping my way back from the fray and leaning my face to a wall. I was thinking that if I could zone in on an area of total darkness and flick my eyes open, the trouble would go away. It didn’t work. As I stood there in total darkness—eyes, nose, throat, ears, mouth, all burning—I felt a great lump in my back. It was a rubber bullet. Behind me a voice said, ‘The bastards. The inhuman bastards.’