After Bergen-Belsen Rodger decided to set out for Denmark and cover the German surrender. He was jubilant and celebrating the victory of the allied forces. He crossed the Belgian country in a Jeep with a Union Jack flag on his windscreen and when he finally arrived at the Danish border he found there, in his own words, “Cheering crowds. Flowers, wines, kisses. And my war was over” (Rodger 1994: 97). He then moved with his wife to Paris and lived there until 1948, when he decided to go to Africa. Financed by the severance pay from his work for Life magazine, Rodger set off with no plans and no commitments. From Johannesburg in South Africa he would cover a 13,000 mile journey before reaching the Equator. His journey ended in Kordofan, a place set in the heart of the Sudan and west to the White Nile, a region of difficult access because of the high mountains that surround the plains. It was there that Rodger found the Nubas tribes.
Rodger photographed every kind of animal and human during his journey, but it seems that it was in Kordofan that he would finally achieve a construction of the myth of the African man from a colonial imagery perspective. In the introduction for his photo-essay book The Village of The Nuba, Rodger said;
“The face of Africa is undergoing a change. Progress and education are reaching far into its darkest regions. (…) Government by fear and witchcraft is gradually being replaced by administrations whose characteristic tools are paper and ink (…)” (Rodger 1999: 9).
He argued, however, that there were places in Africa that remained inaccessible. It is in those regions, according to him, that one can find what he classified as the “real Africa”, the Africa untouched by western and white society. He goes on to say what this “real Africa” is:
“They are as primitive now as they were three centuries ago and their continuing existence forms a rare link with the Africa of time passed” (Rodger 1999: 12).
Since the nineteenth century, anthropological photography served to sate Europe’s interest for the exotic. Scientists and photographers went to Africa guided by firmly established scenarios of the “primitive” and the “savage”. Rodger clearly had an ideological filter when he shot his Nuba’s pictures. The “primitive” denomination that he used to describe the person who lives in these villages is a heritage of a post-colonial way of thinking. The term “primitive” is pejorative and is linked by the fact that white European colonialists considered themselves a greater culture (more advanced one) then the one which they were colonizing.
“At the heart of Modernism was a myth of history designed to justify colonialism through an idea of progress. The west, as self-appointed vanguard, was to lead the rest of the world toward a hypothetical utopian future” (McEvilley 1992: 85)
Everything that wasn’t part of this ideal of the exotic primitive African men was filtered out by Rodger in his Nuba’s pictures. The photographs from this photo-essay consisted mainly of naked black men and women exercising some kind of ritual. Arguably, Rodger would embrace and construct the myth of the Nuba’s identity, drawing special attention to the traditional wrestling rituals. The myth here refers to what Barthes would classify as a type of speech – not an object, or concept or an idea but a mode of signification – because cultural identity, gender and sexuality exist as cultural constructs, therefore the truth of identity as essential is put to question. The construction of the Nuba’s identity in that sense is ideological: Rodger as a representation of the white man seen as a sign of the norm and the Nuba black African men seen as a sign of difference “the marking of difference is thus the basis of that symbolic order which we call culture” (Hall 1997: 238).
This form of stereotype is a crude mental set meant to represent the world. It is an imaginary line between the self and the object, which becomes the ‘Other’. Stereotype in that sense is similar to the myth: the mental representation of the ‘Other’ shifts with the paradigms of our world. Emblematic to this argument is the photograph Rodger took of the champion of a korongo wrestler being carried shoulder high by the defeated fighter. The background is composed by black men holding huge spears. Everything in this picture is phallic, it is vertical and powerful and dialogs with manhood and power. This image is fetishist; it represents the exotic black man, the image of the ‘black’ savagery. It plays with the stereotypic white man ideal of the prowess of the black man. It could be argued that this man, the phallic champion, would represent the white western fantasy of the big black penis. The fact that the genitals of the champion are hidden by a black man’s face makes this notion more iconic.
Leni Riefenstahl, the former Nazi filmmaker, was so fascinated by this picture that she appended it in the back cover of her book The last of the Nuba with this caption;
“The author was so fascinated by this photograph, taken by the famous English photographer George Rodger, that for years she tried to find the Nuba in order to study the life of this primitive people” (Riefenstahl 1995: 208).
It is interesting that her interest in photographing the Nubas started not from a cultural interest but rather from this Rodger’s photograph. As argued by Kobena Mercer, “In this sense her anthropological alibi for an ethnographic voyerims is nothing more than the secondary elaboration, and rationalization, of the primal wish to see this lost image again and again” (Mercer 1994: 187).
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