“It’s really amazing to see that the numbers are really big in Europe. And I wish that the young generation in Africa would also pick up and fight for their future. Because it’s our future. But I think the problem is that most of them are either not confident enough or they don’t have the knowledge about it. Or their parents can’t let them do it. And some actually fear the government. But I’m really impressed by Europe. I’m seeing on Twitter there are many, many activists. And I really look for activists in Africa, I’ve really been looking.”
This one is in praise of Vanessa Nakate.
Who, you ask?
Well, yes, exactly.
Nakate, who prefers to go by her Twitter handle of @Vanessa_Vash, is a 23-year-old climate activist from Uganda. She says, only half-jokingly, that she is the only climate activist from her home country, and while that may not strictly be true, chances are she was the only youth climate activist at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Davos is where the world’s elite, many of them flying in private jets, lecture Greta Thunberg and the other climate kids about how they should study economics before lecturing the rest of the world about what much of the rest of the world already knows.
Two days ago, Nakate posed for a now infamous news photo in Switzerland, alongside fellow youth climate activists Luisa Neubauer, Greta Thunberg, Isabelle Axelsson and Loukina Tille.
The photo, by photographer Markus Schreiber for the Associated Press (AP)) news agency, was not the problem.
The problem was what happened afterwards.
The photo appeared online and in several news zines with Nakate cropped out of the frame.
Admittedly, Nakate was off to one side, and framed by a nondescript building behind her, while the other young climate activists were framed by snow-peaked Swiss mountains in the background.
It was one of those hurried decisions hard-news photo editors have to make all the time, where “Get It First” counts for more than “Get It Right.” (I worked much of my adult life in hard news, and I’ve seen from the inside how it works.)
The optics were bad enough — the young-woman-of-colour is edited out of the frame — but it wouldn’t have mattered so much if the decision hadn’t rattled Nakate to the core.
She made a video, which has since gone viral, in which she said she now understands what the word racism really means.
Worse — yes, the story gets worse — other news agencies, including Reuters, according to an account in, you guessed it, The Guardian, confused Nakate with fellow climate activist Natasha Mwansa, who’s from Zambia.
Africa is vast, as continents go; confusing Zambia with Uganda is a little like confusing Beijing with Tokyo.
Nakate shared another inconvenient truth — that while the industrialized world goes whole-hog on fossil fuels, it’s continents like Africa that bear the brunt of the worst effects of climate change. For now, anyway.
“Africa is the least emitter of carbons,” she said in her video, “but we are the most affected by the climate crisis.”
Residents of Kiribati, the Maldives and other low-lying tropical islands might disagree on that point, but she’s right on the broad strokes.
“You erasing our voices won’t change anything,” she added, sounding eerily like Thunberg on message.
“You erasing our stories won’t change anything.”
Nakate went to Switzerland hoping to shed a light on climate justice; instead, she inadvertently ended up in the harsh glare of the social justice spotlight.
AP scrambled to correct their initial oversight, and sent out a less hurriedly, more thoughtfully cropped version of the photo. In a statement, AP noted that Nakate was cropped out of the photo for compositional reasons, not anything to do with racism.
Photo editors work hurriedly and on-the-fly; there’s never enough time to do anything properly, especially when “Get It First” is the rule of the day. Corporate media organizations have fixed it, too, so that newsrooms are chronically short-staffed and over-worked. It’s perfectly understandable that a news photo might be cropped so that it’s easier to fit on a page, whether that page is a newspaper page or an image on the web.
It’s also true that, on a deeper, more subliminal level, race plays a part. One could argue that the photographer could have asked the five young women to move away from the building, so that he could get all five in the frame with the mountains in the background, but for all I know he could have been rushed, or they could have been rushed, and he had only a split second to get the photo.
This is why many hard-news photographers make the best nature photographers, because their job demands that they get the image quickly, sometimes in a split second, while it’s there.
This is also a teachable moment, though, about Nakate herself — who she is, what she’s done, and how hard she’s worked for her cause, and the world’s cause, and how she ended up representing her country.
In an interview last year with the group The Kids Are All Right published on the website Climate Kids — comments from which were extrapolated for an article in The Nation newspaper headlined Uganda’s Young Climate Activists Are Going on Strike, Nakate is pictured in the street in front of Uganda’s parliament, much like her spiritual mentor Thunberg, holding a hand-made sign about the climate, later posted on Twitter.
In some pictures, Nakate, like Thunberg, is sitting on the ground; in others, she’s standing.
The signs share a similar theme: Green love, peace and continuing the fight against single-use plastic, polythene and pollution.
Nakate, a business major and recent university graduate from the Kampala suburb of Nakawa, explained she’s afraid for the future of her country.
Uganda sits on the equatorial belt of Africa, in a region made green by the bands of year-round rain that extend through the heart of the continent and across coastal West Africa — hence the name “rain forest.”
Like much of equatorial Africa, though, Uganda is feeling the effects of desertification, which manifests itself in drought and higher temperatures, exacerbated by man-made deforestation.
According to a 2016 country report by the group Future Climate for Africa, the total number and frequency of unseasonably hot days in Uganda increased by 20% between 1960 and 2010.
Temperatures are projected to rise a further 0.9 to 3.3 degrees by the 2060s.
Ironically, developing countries like Uganda contribute the least to the fossil-fuel emissions that are accelerating climate change worldwide, and yet are most vulnerable to its consequences.
Entire regions of Africa have already suffered the widespread loss of farmland and resulting mass starvation, which in turn leads to political and social instability.
Foreign-affairs analysts across the world warn that many of the next wars will be fought over water and dwindling natural resources.
Nakate has said she wants more people in her home country to know what ’s going on, and why.
Right now, she says, too many of the people she knows don’t know enough about climate change.
Climate activism is — or rather was — virtually unknown in Africa. Nakate first learned of it when she came across Thunberg’s #FridaysForFuture movement on Twitter.
Most young people in urbanized areas of Africa now connect, communicate and get most of their news from social media.
“When it comes to my friends, most of them support me, but then of course there’re the ones that laugh about it,” Nakate said. “They say, how can I go and just hold a poster — like, how can I do that? But there’s always people who put you down. You just have to stand your ground. My parents, they don’t even know about it. I do it alone.”
Not anymore.
