Freelancing
by Peter Chilson

1.

It's best to start with hard details. Think of props: 50 or so goats, a handful of cattle, and the talent, so to speak. The inhabitants of a West African village, maybe 100 people - elderly women and men, a few younger, and so many children. And there was Richard, the director. Richard Ward. In a way, it was fun to watch.

Think of "the set," the village of Martalah and its square mud homes, footpaths winding among them. It was that kind of late afternoon, when the sun blurred in dusty air, soft light in waning desert heat. Good for taking photographs. Think of the "assignment," the "story." Think of drought - the "starving" animals, the "grim" elders in long brown tunics, and the "stars," the children. Richard selected seven, three boys and four girls, the dirtiest. ("I don't want smiles," Richard shouted in his sharp Scottish twang. "Grim, I want grim"). To get the job they had to have extended bellies, the result of too much carbohydrate and no protein ("We have to tell the story," Richard shouted). Then - I remember this - he said the children must change to rougher clothes or be photographed nude. He scooped a handful of sand and rubbed it on a boy's face and T-shirt. He held the boy, who was about six years old, by the shoulder with one hand as he spread sand in his hair. The child screamed and broke away. Villagers laughed and pointed. Richard shrugged and turned his head from one side to the other as if looking for another child.

These things I saw.

Richard moved like a dirt devil - especially when he was nervous and trying to think - quick steps, this way and that, a camera in hand and another swinging from a strap round his neck. Locks of red hair curled from beneath his khaki ball cap, making him look younger than he was. The sun had turned his ears and neck pink. He wore high top white sneakers and dirty khaki pants. A dust and sweat-stained blue cotton shirt stuck to his bony frame.

He stopped pacing. With his left hand he plucked a plastic lighter and cigarette from his shirt pocket. To watch Richard smoke was to watch him reload. He lit the cigarette and sucked deeply on it, hunching over and raising his shoulders as he inhaled. Then he withdrew the cigarette clipped between two fingers and arched his lanky, thin body, head back, face to the sky and hands at his sides as he exhaled and then took a deep breath. He took a couple more puffs and then flicked the halfsmoked butt away. A teenage boy picked the thing up and put it to his lips. Richard turned to a group of older men standing a few yards away, and with his hands raised and palms open he pleaded in English, which no one spoke. "Look, people, we're reporting on disaster here. I need cooperation!"

The elders frowned and nodded respectfully, clucking their tongues. Our driver and translator, a young university student, watched silently from several yards away with his arms folded. Richard clasped his hands behind his head. He paced for a minute and then let his hands fall to his thighs. He turned to face this young man. He pointed at him. "Do your fucking job," he said. "Translate!"

I don't recall the young man's name, nor can I find it in my notes. He was 22, tall and muscular and strode forward with his head bowed. His feet in leather sandals touched the earth soundlessly, toes pointed forward. He wore a perfectly pressed light gray cotton tunic and trousers and he translated Richard's English to Hausa in a toneless voice that softened the words. But Richard began talking over the translation.

"Can't you see how important this is for your country?" Richard stared at the elders and then raised his hands and squinted. "For your village?" The translator fell silent and walked away. Richard didn't notice. He assumed he would be understood regardless of language.

The young man hiked up a slope looking over the village. When I caught up to him, he did not acknowledge me. Together we walked hardpan maroon soil, iron-rich laterite, which is what remains when wind and rain peel off topsoil. He looked upslope, taking those long steps in sandals on gravelly ground littered with fist-sized rocks. We stopped a quarter mile above the village, which spread out in clusters of mud compounds that looked accidental, as if they'd spilled off the slope and piled at the bottom. The wind seemed to have spared some sandy topsoil around Martalah. Here and there millet and sorghum plants grew in patches, like outsiders in nervous little groups. Wisps of blown sand broke around our ankles, while the sun, a reddening blur above the horizon, turned the ground shades of maroon and pink. Grass no longer survived here, but on the plain beyond the village a few thorny bushes and acacia trees clung to their roots. A giant baobab, with a trunk as wide as a school bus and great gnarled limbs like massive hands, guarded Martalah on its southern edge. It was the young man's idea to bring us here.

I spoke in French. "How do you know Martalah?" I asked. He had a wide, fleshy face with deep-set unblinking green eyes. He never smiled. Our trip began in the capital two days earlier and from the start, he'd kept a distance, answering questions bluntly.

He looked at me, hands folded behind his back. He said. "I grew up in a village like this, near here." He nodded in the direction of Richard and the children. "I am one of those children. I herded animals, I planted manioc."

In the village below we could see Richard on his knees, trying to get a shot of children hitting goats with sticks. He had a camera in his left hand and gestured with his right, his shouting punctuated by sounds of bleating goats. Somehow, he'd lost his hat.

Compulsively, I said, "I'm sorry."

We were silent for a time. Then he spoke in a quiet voice. "You have your image of Africans, like we are animals. We've been working these lands a thousand years and you portray us to the world like we can't think, as if you Europeans invented agriculture and government and soil conservation, while we Africans invented only misery."

We eyed each other. When I looked away, he began walking down the slope. By morning we were back in the capital city. I never saw him again after that day.

The visit to Martalah happened in 1989, a good year, which is to say it rained across many parts of inland West Africa. In places closer to the river and the capital, where the wind had not done its work on topsoil, fields of young millet and maize looked dark green in the dawn, the leaves beginning to shrug. Green spilled to the horizon, rippling over shallow ravines and hills. Across this land, farmers built egg-shaped silos of mud, with roofs of thatch layered in cones. The wind carried the soft rhythm of women pounding grain, laughing and chanting as they worked, raising wooden mallets high and plunging them into the sockets of wooden mortars.

The storms that year brought life back to land the Sahara seemed to have annexed. In places the green seemed to suddenly erase the desert, or merely replace it like a holographic image. Across the Sahel the rain is fickle, blessing one village while ignoring another, or perhaps falling in one place with such violence that crops and villages are washed away. In early summer, the monsoon drives inland from the Atlantic Ocean, cool, heavy and moist air that wedges in under the dryer and hotter air that moves high into the atmosphere. But the Sahara pushes from the opposite direction, keeping the ground hot so the rising heat never really ceases. The heat shreds the monsoon, evaporating the moisture before it reaches ground. People welcomed the rains, but warily. They spoke of unrest among the spirits. "They are fleeing the land and sky," they said. "The rains cannot be trusted."

2.

When visiting Africa, I give people my office address in Paris. Never my home. That address is not auspicious.

My wife and I visited Paris in 1964. The city was cheap and lovely. We stayed, I as a freelance journalist and Karen as an English teacher. We have an apartment near the Boulevard St. Germaine on the Rue du Colonel Moss, the name of an early French military governor in West Africa. I travel to Africa often and tell people only that I live near the Lycee Louis Pasteur, where Karen works.

And Richard, I see him as I have always known him - accidentally, by way of interruption. In 1981, for example, Karen was going through the mail over breakfast and handed me a copy of the Columbia Journalism Review. Richard looked out from the cover with that hard, blank look I first met in West Africa in 1977, his red hair still as short and unruly, as if it had not grown from the day I told him to get it cut. His brow was furrowed and his mouth was set with his bottom lip slightly tucked in under his teeth. Richard had deep blue eyes, which an African farmer once told me are the mark of a man who brings bad things. Blue is the color of the empty sky, "the color of death," the farmer said. In the photograph the veins on Richard's neck stood out and his chin seemed more prominent, making him seem even thinner. He wore a dirty khaki vest, like a fishing jacket, and held a camera in his hands. Another hung from a strap around his neck. The headline in black letters ran down the cover beside his face: "Photographer chronicles the Soviets in Afghanistan and wins a Pulitzer."

Karen said, "That's him, isn't it?"

3.

I like to think we are not voyeurs, or mere distributors of a sort of pornography of poverty and decay, of cultural destruction -information that provides people at home the energy and time to take up other causes. The campaign against fur coats, for example, and the protection of the Yellowstone buffalo, or the woman who took up residence for two years in an 800-year old redwood.

The politics of plenty, Richard calls it. Richard - he is the chief voyeur. The pornographer, though I am not without guilt. I went to Ivory Coast once to write about malaria. One day I sat for hours at the foot of a hospital bed watching a 10-year old boy in a malarial coma, his body bent back in an oddly perfect bow. His mouth and eyes stayed open and his fingers and toes twitched. The parents, both teachers, knelt at their son's side, stroking his head and arms. We were waiting for him to die, the parents in grief and I in a quest for information. I wanted to understand what the disease did. I wanted to watch him die.

Yet this story is all about Richard Ward, the photographer, my colleague, who in 1981 captured that now famous moment of the Russian soldier in Afghanistan as he emerged from a firefight with the Mujahedeen in a mountain village. In that picture of a moment, fear and dirt etch lines of exhaustion on that young soldier's face, looking out from half a million magazine covers. The man, his head clean-shaven and smeared with dirt, is coming down a rocky pathway, an automatic rifle in his hand and his uniform covered in gray dust. Dirt colors the hollows of his cheeks and the deep lines of his forehead, as if they'd been cut there. He squints at the camera with his mouth wide open, not to speak, but in fatigue and pain, as if he cannot control his jaw muscles. His lips are wet and sweat or saliva drips from his chin. I love to believe that the soldier's face, with that squint around his eyes, also shows absolute annoyance, maybe even outrage. He was, after all, looking right at the camera. Right at Richard.

I don't know him well. I am 63 years old, two decades older than Richard. In fact, I've rarely spent more than a few hours - and once just a couple of days - in his presence. But I've been around him dozens of times and crossed his tracks all over: At the trial of a former SS officer in Paris; in South Africa just after Mandela's release; in the former Zaire during Mobutu's last days, and in what replaced that bastard country, the new Democratic Republic of the Congo; and while covering the coronation of a king in Thailand. From one hotspot or another, I have written about tragedy and fortune and bumped into Richard. When I was younger, like Richard, I did this job for the rush and the illusion that I was telling important stories that would unnerve people at home, cause them to put down their coffee and ponder the slow starvation of one's own family in drought or to think about the meaning of watching one's family slaughtered by strangers, which happened to a farmer I interviewed in Liberia in 1987.

I saw him first in the country, as I said, in 1977, during another failed rainy season in West Africa, when he had no career and no name. He had just a camera and some savings to get him started. Early one morning, at a hotel called the Malam Daouda, I was returning to my room from breakfast, walking along the second floor balcony, when I saw him in the parking lot below, the little bastard from Scotland, confronting Africa in his fashion, screaming and waving his arms. In a way, even then, it was fun to watch.

"What are you doing?" Richard shouted as he paced the pavement in front of an old Peugeot sedan, his own, and where a group of Africans had decided to camp, blocking his way. He stopped there with his hands on his hips, this six-footfour-inch white man with wild red hair looking down on the women and children and men who were sitting on mats spread on the asphalt. He began pacing again, those small steps this way and that, and shouting with his head down, to no one in particular, as if he were practicing a grand speech. He had a camera bag slung over his shoulder and it bounced off his hip as he walked and that uncombed red hair bobbed with every step. "This is a parking lot, a parking lot you cock suckers!" When he paced he would run his hands through his hair, clasp them behind his head and then let them fall to his thighs (Over the years I've come to expect that gesture - the hands, the hair, the slap on the thighs - as the period to Richard's frustration). His hard-edged brogue sounded like flying glass.

During the night, several Fulani families moved in and made the parking lot their encampment, which worked because the space offered plenty of room around the 20 or so cars there, mostly heavy four-wheel drive agency vehicles of the UN, Lutheran World Relief, and the like. The Fulani are nomads, cattle herders and warriors from the arid lands up north, and east and west. They are an unmistakable people, creatures of a certain unlimited cultural geography of the Sahel that gives them a right to settle where they will. Fulani men carry long swords at their waists and wear wide brimmed conelike hats of leather and tightly woven grass. The women dye their lips blue and keep their hair in tight buns on the tops and sides of their heads. They all wear facial scars - six short strikes cut into the skin high on the cheekbones and died blue, a sort of identification code of the African ethnic landscape, both beautiful and horrifying in its permanence. At army road checkpoints, ubiquitous across Africa, facial scars boast ethnic pride, which is reason enough for a soldier of one tribe to prey upon another.

There is also this. The capital city offered safety in ever more dense crowds. The city grew by the day as people fled land that could no longer feed them. Mile upon mile of metal, wood and mud shanties spiraled outward across sand and rock. Under monsoon the mud melted and the shanties flew away. Beyond the city, landmines killed farmers and herders in fields they had worked for generations. Rebel soldiers were recruiting in villages and shooting chiefs who didn't provide food or young men to fight. They operated like the French before them, who punished villagers for failing to meet quotas for crops or raise the labor needed to build roads, sewer trenches and whatever else they needed.

I leaned against the wall in the hotel's arched entranceway and counted 24 people, including a few men in loose white cotton leggings and sleeveless shirts, faces obscured by the pointed leather hats. They were squatting around a teapot set on hot coals in a wire forneau. Women and small children and a dozen goats spread out across the lot, which faced the densely crowded marketplace across the street. The market was why they had come. There was no fence or wall around the parking lot, just a night guard, an old man who spent his days in a metal lawn chair set against the hotel wall. He likely didn't see a problem with people using such a large a space. The Fulani spread out their wares - trinkets, leather bound jewelry boxes, sheaths for knives, and piles of dried meat and goatskins. They'd come to do business and so had Richard.

The Fulani men looked at Richard, sputtering and shaking his head. They sipped their tea and stared at him glumly, swords across their laps, while the women softly laughed and talked among themselves. The children stared. I walked around the parking lot and threaded my way across the street that was thick with cars, bicycles and motor scooters, to the market where the old guardian was drinking tea with friends. I told him about the problem. As we spoke, the din of voices and car horns rose as three camels appeared on the street, forcing traffic to the margins. The beasts walked with their heads raised high, moving with a deliberate and softly bobbing grace as if walking on air. No one seemed to be leading them.

I looked back to the old man who nodded and smiled. "Ahh, oui," he said, "Monsieur Ward." I returned to the hotel and went up to my room. From my open window, just above the lot, I watched Richard plead with the women to move as the guardian spoke to the men. They nodded and smiled and rose to their feet and spoke to their women while Richard paced. They all made room so he could move his car. They waved and smiled at him.

"About bloody time," Richard shouted.

I met him in the hotel bar that night. I made a point of meeting him. Richard had been in country only a few days. He was good, I saw that quickly. And young, 23, he later told me. He would sit at the bar with his photos splayed out, smoking and drinking beer from a glass, his work there for every one to see. (He developed his photos in his hotel bathroom, with a red bulb fixed to a flashlight on a metal plate he screwed into the wall, and towels wadded beneath the door crack). At first I thought that was the only point of his being in the bar - to advertise himself, pick up another job or one of the women streaming through the hotel on various assignments. I was wrong, at least in part. I watched a German woman, a journalist I knew, walk over and ask about his photographs. She smiled and said something I could not hear. She reached across the bar and picked up a photo. Her face changed to a studied frown as she held the picture, slanting it to catch the light from behind the bar. Richard drew on his cigarette and stared at her.

Quietly, he said, "Fuck off." I didn't hear the words, I saw them on his lips. He took another drag on his cigarette and turned his head to blow smoke at the floor. The noise in the bar softened, as if stifled by this sudden tension. The woman frowned. She dropped the photo in front of him, gave a kind of half laugh (what else could she do?) and walked away. Once Richard spit those words, he never seemed to notice her reaction.

Even then, as a young man, he had this sharp desert rat look to him, which for some in the expatriate lifestyle is an affectation, an attempt to look rough, but in Richard was genuine. He had long, oily hair that sprouted from his head in long clumps, barely touching his shoulders. In those days he wore T-shirts and jeans everywhere he went. Photographers can get away with that, even at formal events. He seldom shaves, even now, and he doesn't eat seemingly at all, which means he's rail thin, an accentuated quality on a man of his height. There are a lot of guys like him in this business, kind of crazy, kind of weird, field bravado we call it, but Richard is believable. He cares about the end product, the picture, nothing else.

I sought him out for assignments on stories I covered. It was not my idea. The editor of a magazine I wrote for in New York had spotted one of Richard's photographs in a newspaper - Richard had managed to get to the desert crash site of an Air France flight that had blown up in mid-air and killed a French Army colonel - and told me to get in touch with him. Richard had gotten a shot of a Berber nomad picking through the wreckage, with a camel in the background tethered to what remained of the tail fin with the French tricolor emblazoned across it. He wired the photos unsolicited to agencies in New York and Paris. He got the notice he wanted. "Get him," the editor said. "He does good work."

But that night, I'd never heard of him. I was drinking with a couple of acquaintances and watched as he leaned against the bar smoking with his left hand, cigarette between the index and forefingers, and cupping his chin with the other hand, a man unto himself, drinking and smoking, glass after glass, smoke after smoke. He was fun to watch though I never saw him drunk. His fingers concealed half his face as if it were a mask that wouldn't stay fixed. His fingers flitted over his bottom lip, picked at his teeth and rubbed his nose. Occasionally he'd pick up his beer with that free hand and sip, smacking his lips as he set the glass down to take another drag on the cigarette, his shoulders hunched forward.

A few minutes after the German woman rejoined friends at another table, I walked up and peaked over Richard's shoulder at the photographs. He turned and looked at me, without expression, the hand with the cigarette a few inches from his face.

"What can I do for you?" he asked. He blew smoke out of the side of his mouth.

In front of him, on top of a messy sprawl of photographs, lay a black and white of an African woman screaming in rage. In the picture's slightly blurred background there were a few cars and people, paying no attention to the scene. The woman didn't appear to be injured and she was looking directly at the camera with both fists raised, framing her face. She was looking at Richard. I suppressed a smile. From her point of view, facing this particular young man coming at her with a camera and flaming hair, I imagined that her emotions, rage or whatever, might be understandable. My eyes fell upon a plate of lemon slices sitting atop the photos on the bar. He sucked on them between sips of beer, letting the seeds linger in his mouth before spitting them into another empty glass. I studied the image of the woman for a few seconds and then tapped the photo with a pen drawn from my shirt pocket.

I told him, "Get close to your subject."

4.

Richard always got close. He went fast, which is to say he never got involved, he followed the stories and knew the issues, but never got caught up in details.

"The trick is not to care," he said once.

I learned that about him.

Here is what I mean. I'm thinking of events surrounding a series of photos Richard made of an African woman mourning over the body of young girl, which happened about the time we met in the country. This was August 1977. The president, a certain general, invited the press and diplomatic corps to visit a farming village with him just north of the capital. I had agreed to accept the American ambassador's offer of a ride to the event. The general wanted to make the point that the countryside was safe and that he cared about his people. I convinced the ambassador to let a photographer come along. That's when I told Richard to get his hair cut, "if you want to be taken seriously," I said.

He said, "Whatever, boyo. Colleagues now are we?"

He met me in the hotel lobby an hour before dawn, in boots, jeans and a white collared shirt, camera bag over his shoulder, and with his hair cut and his face clean-shaven. The morning was hot and breezeless and his hair was wet and matted to his skull, highlighting a narrow face like a Roman general, with a prominent nose that announced ruddy cheeks and a wide chin. He stood there, in the middle of the open lobby area with a cigarette clipped between two fingers of his left hand at his side, a few inches from his thigh.

I had to repress a laugh. For a moment he looked like a desk clerk, which is when I asked him his age.

"I'm twenty-three," he said, staring at the floor and exhaling, "just twenty-three." He lifted his head and blew the rest of the smoke at the ceiling.

The ambassador arrived in a white Chevrolet Suburban with an American flag mounted on the front fender. We joined the president's motorcade at an appointed site on the outskirts of the city as the sun began to color the horizon. The heat wasn't yet awful, which is why the president timed his "visits with the people" so early in the day. The drive took half an hour, with six cars from various embassies, and eight Toyota Land Cruiser pick up trucks full of soldiers. The president's black Land Rover (a gift of the British) was wedged square in the middle. We drove to avoid ambush, at 100 miles per hour on a wonderfully straight asphalt road (a gift of the Canadians), just six meters wide and pointing north toward the Sahara, across the vastness like a floating bridge. After half an hour the motorcade slowed into the village, which the road split. Soldiers directed the embassy cars to pull off on the left shoulder. They surrounded the cars and pointed their weapons (gifts of the French) at us.

"They won't let us leave the car," the ambassador said to Richard and me, "until the general is ahead on his tour."

In cool bullet and soundproof isolation, we waited with the ambassador, his African driver and two Marines dressed in civilian clothes, one in front and one in the second seat, beside the ambassador. Richard and I sat in the third seat. We watched through the thicket of gun barrels as the president walked down the road with his aides, waving and shaking hands with villagers, before he was to be led off to tour a garden project. Children lined the road through the village, shouting the president's name and clapping a beat in time with their feet pounding a rhythm in the dust. They wore white T-shirts bearing the general's portrait in a military tunic and cap. A light tank, another gift of the French, watched from a hill above the village, its long gun aimed at the horizon.

The ambassador sat with his arms folded. "Little boys in uniforms," he mumbled. Then he said, "God I hate this place." I didn't know this ambassador well. He was career Foreign Service, not a political appointee, which means I expected a cooler head. But he fidgeted during the drive out and now he rubbed his hands together nervously and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. He kept glancing back and forth from his watch, to the Marine beside him, and to the scene out the window.

In a soft voice Richard corrected him. "Boys with guns," he said. The ambassador appeared not to hear him. I looked at Richard. His bluntness made me like him, if only for that moment of compulsive truth.

The Chevy's air conditioner whirred. Outside, the general walked slowly, accompanied by a procession of aides in green field uniforms and blue and white pastel robes. He was a thin man with a long face and slightly sunken cheeks. His uniform khaki tunic hung from his shoulders as if from a coat hanger. He wore a khaki peaked cap with green stripe around the stock and shiny black leather shoes. A gentle wind tugged at his trousers, pulling the fabric against his thin legs. Long ago, he'd been a sergeant in the French Army and tended goal on the army football team. He was wounded in Indo China in 1951, a Viet Minh bullet through his shoulder. He walked gracefully, gazing at the children who came up the road with a group of village men. The children danced and clapped and the general looked on, his brow furrowed as if in study. Then he turned with his people up a pathway that led through the village to the fields. The president disappeared from site.

The soldiers lowered their guns and followed him, while others spread out through the village. The ambassador said, "Let's go," and he opened his door. The heat on our skin was instant, like a grip. The ambassador began walking up the roadside, between the Marines. I followed, making sure my notebook was tucked in my trousers, beneath my shirt, where it could not be seen. Richard, camera bag over his shoulder, was already several yards ahead of us all. He turned and snapped a few pictures of the ambassador.

Then we heard shooting. At the sound of the first burst, the Marines bundled the ambassador right back to the Suburban as if they expected the shots. They picked him up, hooking an arm under each shoulder and ran to the car. Within a minute screaming villagers were running in the road, but I could still see Richard, that shock of short red hair weaving upstream through the villagers. I caught up to him and we made our way carefully off the road and up the pathway the president and his entourage had taken through the village. We hugged the mud walls of houses along the path and stopped now and then to listen. We passed the bodies of two children and a farmer. By the time we got to the fields, the shooting had dwindled to an occasional shot. There was shouting and wailing.

Soldiers, we learned later, had hidden the general in one of the mud homes. He was unharmed. Villagers and soldiers ran about. Gunfire had killed a small girl and her blood was sprayed across the leaves of the sorghum plants against which she fell. An older woman, her head wrapped in a bright green cloth, knelt on the ground beside the body and sobbed, her head on the girl's shoulder and her arms folded against her own stomach. I stared at this, feeling strangely calm, transfixed by how quickly and easily death had come. Richard and I looked around, and I began judging the risk of being seen taking a photograph or making notes, but Richard had already made his decision. He walked to the girl's body and knelt across from the sobbing woman. I was standing just a few feet away and could see that bullets had minced the child's torso. Blood now covered the arms of the sobbing woman.

Richard took a light meter from his bag. He tapped it with his fingertips and held it over the girl's body near the head of the woman, who was oblivious to his presence. A few feet away lay an overturned metal bowl, with its contents of dried tomatoes spilled on the ground. The woman buried her face in the dirt. Her fingers clutched at the girl's bloody cloth. The girl's face was curiously unsoiled. Her mouth and eyes were still open, capturing the shock of the moment, but not the pain. There had been no time for pain. Flies had already begun to buzz around her face and form an odd gray outline of her lips, indifferent to the grieving woman. The girl's face had been recently scarred. Three inch-long vertical strikes, deep and still pink, perhaps only days old, shone from the dark skin over her cheekbones. Hausa markings.

Richard stood up, leaving his camera bag on the ground. He began snapping pictures from different standing angles. Then he dropped back to his knees, and then flat on his stomach, and then standing again, walking round and round the grieving woman and the body. He went through several rolls of film, changing cartridges quickly. He gave two to me and put some in his pockets.

In my time I've witnessed a few situations like this and never gotten used to it. In Africa, suffering and violence from one place to the next are so surreal and permanent as to be a blurred cycle of oppression and corruption, rebellion and famine, birth and life. Death arrives at an average age of 43. Years ago in Benin a young soldier at a roadblock put his pistol to my head when I hesitated to pay a "passage tax." The weapon turned out to be a wooden toy, painted black and issued to this kid because the government could not pay to arm most of its soldiers. He grinned and said, "Boom." In Nigeria, during the last days of the Biafran War in 1970, I watched an officer shoot a rebel prisoner at a roadblock. The officer had stepped out of a car and was speaking with the members of a patrol who had brought the prisoner in. The man was sitting on the ground, bent over with his chin on his chest and his hands tied behind him. The officer drew his pistol and shot him in the head, the bullet punching his body backward on the ground. I have never forgotten the absence of transition or conclusion, of any emotion at all. I carried a camera back then, and the officer invited me to photograph him kneeling beside the body with his pistol drawn. I obliged him. Then he wanted me to photograph him cutting off the dead man's penis. I have not carried a camera since.

I looked back at the girl's body, trying to reconstruct the last steps of the errand that ended here. Her arms and legs were spread out. Her head was cocked slightly to the right and her skin had begun to gray. Flies covered her face now and buzzed thickly about the head of the woman hunched over her body, her hands clutching the cloth covering the girl's stomach. The woman buried her face in that cloth and when she lifted her head to breathe, her face was shiny with blood. I was aware of my own breathing and the woman's sobbing. For a few moments I couldn't tell between them until I realized the woman was murmuring, "Alllahhh, Alllahh," over and over. All I could do was watch.

Then Richard did something extraordinary. He was squatting near the girl's feet, trying to get an angle on the body with the sun behind him, but the woman was in his way, rocking back and forth against the body as if her grief might call back the girl's soul. Richard stood and walked over to the woman. He tapped her on the shoulder. "Excuse me," he said, "excuse me, I need you to move, please." He touched her again, jabbing her shoulder a little with his fingertips. "Can't you move? I need a photo of her alone."

Suddenly, there was the abrupt sound of loud voices behind us, and a soldier grabbed me roughly by the collar. Two soldiers took Richard by the shoulders and they began leading us back toward the road. One soldier yanked the camera from Richard's neck, snapping the strap. Another held his camera bag. Richard shouted, "What the fuck?" and looked back at me. The soldiers seized film inside the cameras. They searched Richard's bag, but not his person, nor mine. Crazy luck. Richard lost his cameras, but got his pictures, five rolls' worth.

For days it wasn't clear who was responsible for the attack. The soldiers reportedly captured four rebels and shot them on the spot.

The government radio reported that much.

Richard and I were detained in an army barracks for two days, film cartridges still in our pockets, and then escorted to the airport and deported to Paris. We sat apart on the plane.

My articles of the attempted assassination appeared in several American newspapers. They got little attention. The event was, after all, just another blip in Africa's misery, a story wire editors cut to two or three paragraphs and buried on page nine. Standard African soup, no big deal. But Richard sold his photos to the Associated Press in Paris and a series of three photos of that old woman and the girl made page one around the world. Attempted coup in Africa, dramatic photo, story inside.

I eventually learned the president had everyone in the village arrested and the homes bulldozed. I'm not sure what that means.

A few months later Karen and I went to the United States to see family. In Washington, D.C., we visited a gallery showing of news photography from Africa. They called it, Africa: Land of Splendor and Agony. We separated in the gallery, absorbed by our own tastes and interests. She had wanted tosee photo displays of countries I'd visited, and insisted that I attend the showing with her. Eventually I wandered outside and found her on the museum steps, nursing a coffee. She looked up and smiled. I sat and put my hand on the small of her back.

She said, "Did you see his work?"

I said, "I didn't look."

5.

What I find myself returning to here is that day in Martalah, the village Richard turned into a quasi film set.

But let me tell you this, first. By early summer of 1989much of the Sahelien grasslands had turned to sand. The fresh rains meant little after 20 years of unwavering drought. The land had crashed. More than half the livestock died of starvation or thirst. Half a dozen countries in the interior teetered on the edge, their governments bankrupt and people moving to coastal countries on foot and crammed into buses and trucks by the tens of thousands every day. Richard Ward had published his fourth National Geographic cover and I was back in the country with my notebook to do a series on drought relief. The president the rebels had tried to kill in 1977 died of a brain tumor and a new man, a colonel, his cousin, ruled. This was also a time of coups d'etat across West Africa, when young army officers attempted to govern a region that was in deep desperation, as if they, as if anyone, knew what to do.

Governments, relief agencies and Western rock musicians were finding new opportunities to raise money for relief. Before every available camera lens they were staging dramatic helicopter food drops - mostly rice, flour and dried milk. Once the relief workers flew away, soldiers and village chiefs seized the food and sold it to their own people at two or three times the market price. Riots broke out. The government banned helicopter drops and began "distributing" food aid from truck convoys under heavy guard.

In Africa, I learned to smile a lot, as if time were my friend, to make jokes easily and expect nothing. I learned that anger is the worst emotion because it reveals everything - what you want and how badly you want it.

Here's an example.

I was at the Ministry of Information early one morning, seeking a permit to travel with a government food convoy, 15 trucks with rice and flour and high protein soup packets for children. I sat in a wooden school chair before an amiable man at a large gray metal desk, listening to him explain in French why it was not safe to leave the capital. He wore a billowing white robe and red fez. Round wire-rimmed glasses balanced on the edge of his nose as he talked with his hands folded on the desk. The office was cramped and chilly, besieged by piles of dusty papers on shelves, chairs, the floor. Dog-eared edges rustled under the breeze of an air-conditioner that whirred from the window ledge. He said he himself had not been out of the capital in five years.

"We can't guarantee your safety," he said. "As you know, there have been troubles."

I shrugged. "That is kind," I said, "but you're not responsible for my well being." My idea was to gently press him, perhaps obliquely raise the possibility of a bribe, and if nothing worked, to simply ignore him, rent a car and take my chances. The phone rang and he answered it.

"Yes, send him up," he said. "I have another American here." He replaced the receiver and smiled. "One of your colleagues is here."

He walked in, a tall and thin man with unruly red hair, wearing khakis, a blue collared shirt and sneakers. I hadn't seen Richard in a couple of years. Red-ray stubble claimed his chin and cheeks, but his face was still thin and hollow. He frowned and nodded to me, I frowned back. The official offered him a seat and began to explain in French the "difficulty of the situation." I listened, dismayed and angry.

Richard put his elbows on the desk and leaned forward. "Look, I'd love to chat," he said in English, "but time is a serious issue. Can't you understand how important this story is to\ your people and your country?"

"Yes, of course," the official said, switching easily to English, "but -"

"What is this?" Richard was not yelling exactly, but lecturing. "I represent one of the largest circulation magazines in the world. A story like this can mean tremendous exposure and millions of dollars in food aid . . ." He went on.

The official's face froze but he kept his composure. I clapped my hand on Richard's shoulder, tightening my fingers so that he turned and looked at me.

"Shut the fuck up," I whispered.

The official issued a joint permit, requiring Richard and me to travel together, but he forbade us to observe a food convoy and assigned us a government guide who would drive for us. Then he said to me, "Perhaps you can keep an eye on your friend."

I tried to focus on the story. We were speeding along a gravel road, three silent men in a light blue United Nations Land Rover. Richard and I hadn't talked at all. He sat up front with the driver, the young university student who would translate for us.

"I am pleased to be your driver," he had said. "The ministry thought I might of use."

I sat in back, studying my notes. The night before a storm brought dust and rain, dense sheets of muddy water carried by winds that ended as we left the city at dawn. The road had been built by Canadian engineers and elevated on layered tar and crushed granite brought from the mountains in the northeast. So the road worked like a dyke and survived. The rains washed away young crops; instant lakes and ponds spotted the fields. Families were out, planting their remaining seeds - millet, sorghum, corn, peanuts. People looked up as we passed. The men smiled and shook their fists in a gesture of respect. The driver lowered his window and waved.

Richard suddenly shouted at him to stop. We'd just passed a group of three men who were working a few yards from the road. He'd turned, both hands on the seat back as if he were going to climb over it, and was looking behind us at the farmers.

"Stop, stop right now," he shouted again. "Turn around." The student and I were unsure of the urgency. We had been traveling at high speed and it took him a hundred yards or so to stop.

"What is it Richard?" I asked.

He ignored the question.

"Quoi?" the driver kept asking, "C'est quoi ca?" The road was too narrow for a swift U turn, so he had to make a series of furious forwards and reverses, gradually turning around while Richard rummaged in his camera bag and shouted, "What the hell, can't you drive?"

I looked at Richard as the car pulled up opposite the three farmers. He had the door open and was halfway out while the car was still moving. Richard ran ahead and the young student at the wheel watched him in wonder and anger, raising his hands and looking at me.

Richard bounded down the embankment with his camera bag over his shoulder, a light meter in his hand, and a camera swinging from his neck. He shouted the traditional Muslim peace greeting as if he'd just learned it. "Salamalekum, Salamalekum!" The farmers paused in their work, hoes in their hands, talking quizzically to one another and keeping an eye on this white man coming at them with all the gear hanging from his body.

"This is very bad," the student said to me. "Your friend is an imbecile. They don't know who he is or what he's doing. They could hurt him. He should have told me what he wanted."

He touched my arm and told me to stay with the car. He hurried down the embankment and into the field. To the farmers, muscular, barefoot men in torn T-shirts and shorts, this young man in pressed tunic and trousers, with white men in tow, must have looked like trouble, a tax collector or police agent. The farmers had surrounded Richard, not quite in a menacing way, not close in, but more as a means to study him. They talked among themselves in low voices, eyeing the student and then me standing on the road.

Richard pleaded. "Please, go back to work," he said. "I want to photograph you while you work." He turned around and around and holding up his camera for them to see, as a kind of explanation. One of the men said something to him in Hausa and Richard, seeming not to hear, kept on talking. "Please, don't pay attention to me."

Our young man walked into the group while Richard looked on, hands clasped behind his head. The student began speaking to the men in Hausa. I don't know what he saidexactly, but it took a while. He explained things. He made jokes. They all laughed. The men returned to work and let Richard take his pictures, but he had to keep his mouth shut.

I'm thinking now of my notes from the attempt on the general's life and the words I found recently, in my own rushed handwriting, large letters slanting down an otherwise empty page. Girl sprawled on her back, much blood, all shot up, Richard circles with camera. And these words: They ought to shoot him.

Those five words are barely legible, though clearly my own, and I'm not sure where I had the time and presence of mind to write them, standing there as shots rang out and as a woman cried over a girl's body. I don't remember writing anything, though I do remember handing off my notebook, even as a soldier hustled me along, to the embassy driver who'd come looking for us.

They ought to shoot him.

I don't remember having that thought. But from time to time I have thought of that sobbing woman and what might have happened. Would she have ignored Richard or moved aside as he asked? Would she have turned on him in an explosive rage?

Such a scene would have been fun to watch.

6.

Karen still has never met Richard face to face, though she saw him recently at a showing of his photographs at a gallery on South Street in Philadelphia, where we were visiting her parents last year. She knew better than to ask me to attend, but she was curious and wanted to see "what he was like." He wore a black suit with a dark green shirt and black tie and was sitting at a table, she said, signing his photos and a book of landscape photography about Africa. I know the book. Richard sent an email message asking if I would write the accompanying text. I never replied.

At the gallery, according to Karen, Richard sat in the center of the room, surrounded by his work on all four walls, signing pictures with tiny initials in the right hand corner.

"He's so thin," Karen said. "And cold. People would try to talk to him. He shrugged a lot and he smiled, sort of, but didn't say much." A man, college age, asked Richard for advice on how to get into photo journalism.

"He didn't even look at the guy," Karen said. "He just said, 'Get a camera,' and kept on signing pictures."

A young woman, likely a photography or art student, bought the sequence of photos of an elderly African woman mourning a girl shot in an attack on the village: The old woman kneeling over the girl's body, sobbing, her arms folded against her own stomach; the old woman's hands pulling at the girl's clothing; and the old woman raising her face to the camera. Karen said the woman who bought the photos was stylish and attractive, dressed in black - shoes, stockings, skirt and blouse. Before she paid for them, she stood with her arms folded, studying the mounted display for a long time.

"I couldn't help noticing," Karen said. "She seemed to know something. She planted herself in front of the picture of the Russian soldier for a while, as if she saw something in the work that we mere mortals, we non-artists will never achieve."

We laughed.

"That's not all," Karen said. "She asked Richard to sign the photos, and as he was doing it I heard her say, 'These people in your photographs, they must really hate you.'" Karen paused at this and then said, "He didn't even hesitate. He looked right at her and said, 'Yes, they probably do.' He handed her the photos and when she started to leave he said, 'I bet people want to take your photograph all the time.' Karen shook her head. "Of course, the woman just walked away."