Conflict reporting

Philip Holsinger is a photo­­journalist who has devoted his career to studying and documenting tribal conflicts around the world. His work has appeared in Time, The New York Times, and 60 Minutes. Earlier this year he spent three months in Nigeria, traveling through some of the country’s most dangerous areas to capture images of the violence and its aftermath. You can see his work in “Are Christians in Nigeria facing genocide?” in this issue. I asked him to share more about what he learned.

What made you want to go to Nigeria? I heard Christians were being persecuted, and I wanted to understand what was happening. I was already in the region, in southern Morocco, working on a story about desert nomads, so it was a natural extension of my desert story.

Was what you discovered different from what you expected? I was not surprised to learn that Nigeria’s internal conflicts are far more complex than a single news story might convey. This is always the case with deep reporting, that stories don’t match, and local sources often skew a story for advantage. But I was stunned to find the stories more often factually incorrect—and that international media relayed these stories unchecked. One reason is access. Very few people are able to travel to remote places to verify the stories firsthand, which I was able to do.

You’ve spent your career covering conflicts across the world. How did the insecurity in Nigeria compare to other situations you’ve experienced? The amount of mass murder in central-north Nigeria is staggering. People really are being slaughtered and villages completely emptied. We photographed entire plateaus of abandoned villages. In many ways Nigeria is like other clan and tribal societies I have documented, where the defining conflict is about land. Northern Nigeria is part of the Sahel, one of the world’s oldest nomadic corridors, spanning the entire southern rim of the Sahara Desert. For more than a thousand years nomads have battled land dwellers here. And for as long, self-interested groups and leaders have used the conflict to advance their own land and power agendas.

What surprised you in a good way? It appeared to me the violence was mostly perpetrated by small groups of heavily armed people—Christian and Muslim—who criminally benefit from the violence through kidnapping, cattle theft, and extortion. But the average people—Christian and Muslim—not only were peaceful, they actually love their neighbors and even share life together. I was surprised that in the ­middle of the violence, Christians and Muslims nurture their friendships and guard them.

How would you describe Nigeria’s hidden character? Nigeria is kind. Small girls curtsy. People are quick to volunteer to help you, even if sometimes the help is followed by an expectation you might pay them a bribe. It is quiet despite its size (nearly two-thirds the population of the United States). Even soccer matches are quieter than I expected.