Gideon Mendel
Homecare volunteer Violet Mwinuka helps to move one of her clients who was ill with AIDS-related infections in Chipulukusu Compound, October 1999, Ndola, Zambia, from A Broken Landscape: HIV & AIDS in Africa (Network Photographers, 2001), October 1999, Photograph, Collection of the artist; ©️ Gideon Mendel, photo courtesy the artist
‘How the Lord is compassionate and merciful’
Commentary by Michael Banner
Gideon Mendel’s photographic project A Broken Landscape sought to tell something of what the HIV epidemic meant in sub-Saharan Africa at the end of the twentieth century (before the ready availability of drugs to treat the condition), by means of his photographs and the personal testimonies of those he depicted.
Violet Mwinuka is a homecare volunteer in Ndola, Zambia, and, as she explains, the task of volunteers is ‘to take care of our patients in the way that they need’ (Mendel 2001: 100).
She points out that,
sometimes when the parents are not able to we have to do everything—wash the children, sweep the floor, wash the plates, wash the clothes and cook porridge for the family. When they are very ill all we can offer is our company and support. If they are believers, we will pray with them. (ibid)
Violet holds a sick man in a pose reminiscent of popular medieval images of angels holding up the dead Christ. She supports his emaciated and half naked body with firm but gentle hands, while his own hand falls limply from his enfeebled arm. She holds him in the light, while the inky darkness behind them both could indeed be that of Christ’s tomb. Before them there is an open door, suggestive of the door from life to death through which the man must surely shortly pass. Violet peers somewhat uncertainly towards the door, while the sick man’s visage suggests a resigned yet sorrowful determination.
Though we routinely refer to those who are ill as ‘patients’, we know very well that they may not possess the virtue which James especially commends to those suffering any affliction, including, of course, sickness. And yet when James bids the sick ‘call for the elders of the church’ (v.14), and bids all ‘pray for one another’ (v.16), he recognizes that patience is not simply an individual virtue, but is or can be a ‘coproduction’, as we might say. The poignancy of this picture is just that as this woman bears this man, she does so as one who is hoping to bring to birth a true patient, in the moral and spiritual sense.
References
Mendel, Gideon. 2001. A Broken Landscape: HIV and Aids in Africa (London: Network Photographers)
