Suleiman, a ten-year-old boy from Darfur, looks like an old man. The war made him an old man
Suleiman was only four years old when he was walking with his brother Musa at the outskirts of Dar al Salam, north of Darfur, Sudan. It was in November 2006, one night when his favourite football team won an important championship match. Both brothers wanted to celebrate that victory with their friends. In secret, they kept a strange object they had found not far from home. It was a lost explosive from the Darfur civil war, which by chance had not yet detonated. And they, still in secret, couldn’t wait to make a great fight with that projectile. Musa, the elder brother, was in charge of setting fire to it and everything changed tragically. The output was not what they expected. One of his best friends died. And Suleiman, like others, suffered burns all over the body.
I met Suleiman six years after that accident. He had moved with his family to El Fasher, a larger city with better medical attention. And when I entered to his house, the boy ran to hide behind his father’s legs. With a bitter smile, the man explained his son was no longer the same since that explosion. He was ashamed to show his face. And he had reasons. When he discovered himself, he looked like a very old and tired man. He kept his gaze always on the ground, due to the shame.
Suleiman was one of the main characters of a report I was producing on the consequences of the war in Darfur. And the most serious is the large number of weapons (bombs, bullets, grenades and mines) abandoned around still to detonate. The fact is that militias and soldiers did not have enough with looting and chasing civilians, they also left their ‘shit’ scattered all over. So the main victims of their random detonations were boys and girls, who thought they had found a treasure on the sand.
The interview to Suleiman was hard. He barely answered my questions. I tried to convince him about the importance of the report to warn others about post-war problems in Darfur, but I had to pull his words with much patience. I could know that he still had motivation to study and move forward, although he will always regret to have fired that artefact.
And when I got closer to him with my camera to take a portrait, two hands from his face, he raised the eyes and looked directly to the camera. It seemed he was saying with his eyes: “yes, look at me, I am like that, so what?” Just after the portrait, Suleiman lowered his eyes again and went back to his embarrassment. For a few seconds, I got a a convincing and confident look. A very brave look.
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