The Photograph That Became a Symbol of Sudan’s Hunger and the Story Behind the Image
A skeletal figure lies on parched earth, his body reduced by hunger, while an outstretched hand appears to offer the possibility of food. Around him is a landscape littered with bones. There is no abundance in this picture. There is only exhaustion, desperation and the terrible distance between hunger and survival.
Images such as this have become shorthand for famine. But behind every photograph of starvation is a much larger story one involving politics, conflict, displacement, failed harvests, restricted humanitarian access and people whose ordinary lives have been destroyed.
That is particularly true of southern Sudan during the late 1990s.
In 1998, the region experienced one of the most severe humanitarian emergencies of the decade. The crisis was not simply the result of people failing to grow enough food. War had disrupted agriculture, displaced communities and made it increasingly difficult for humanitarian organisations to reach those in need. Drought and poor harvests compounded the catastrophe.
A famine created by more than drought
Southern Sudan was already suffering from years of civil war between the government in Khartoum and the Sudan People's Liberation Army and associated forces.
For rural communities, conflict could mean far more than fighting in the distance. Families could be driven from their homes, livestock could be lost, crops could be destroyed and access to farmland could disappear.
A 1997 FAO assessment warned that poor harvests and the inability to access farmland because of war meant that an estimated 1.645 million people across several areas of southern Sudan would require emergency food assistance for part of 1998. The assessment also projected that around 2.2 million people in the south would need relief assistance.
Then the situation deteriorated.
In Bahr el Ghazal, one of the worst-affected regions, the number of people estimated to need food assistance increased dramatically during 1998. Human Rights Watch records estimates rising from about 250,000 in January to one million by August.
The crisis was therefore not a sudden event that appeared without warning. There were signs that the food situation was deteriorating, but the combination of insecurity, difficult terrain, inadequate infrastructure and restricted access made an enormous humanitarian response necessary.
When food itself became part of the conflict
The history of the 1998 famine also reveals a darker reality about war: food can become a weapon.
A United Nations report concluded that famine in southern Sudan was among the consequences of systematic violations of humanitarian law and that food was manipulated as part of the conflict. It also reported that 2.6 million people across Sudan were at risk of starvation in mid-1998, including about 2.4 million in southern Sudan.
This matters because famine is often misunderstood as simply a shortage of food.
A region can have food somewhere within it and still experience famine if people cannot reach it. Roads may be unsafe. Markets may collapse. Farmers may be unable to reach their fields. Humanitarian aircraft may be prevented from flying. Relief convoys can be delayed or attacked.
In southern Sudan, all of these logistical problems became part of the humanitarian emergency.
The enormous air operation to keep people alive
The scale of the crisis eventually forced an extraordinary international response.
The World Food Programme launched what it described as its largest humanitarian food airdrop operation ever in 1998. Fighting, government restrictions and heavy rains had made many roads impassable, leaving aircraft as one of the few practical ways to reach isolated communities.
WFP ultimately delivered approximately 116,000 tonnes of relief food during the year.
At the height of the emergency, between July and September, food assistance reached approximately 1.85 million beneficiaries. Bahr el Ghazal alone accounted for about 70% of WFP's beneficiaries during the operation.
The logistics were extraordinary.
WFP expanded its aircraft fleet from five planes to 18 and operated from bases in Kenya and Sudan. Aircraft were supported by river barges and road convoys from neighbouring countries. More than 130 WFP field staff were working on the ground by the end of the year.
But even that enormous operation could not instantly undo the damage.
By the end of 1998, some areas were still reporting severe malnutrition. WFP noted that in some locations almost half of the children remained malnourished. Displacement also meant that people who had managed to survive the crisis could not necessarily return immediately to productive farming.
The photograph that people often remember but with the wrong date
The supplied image is also easily confused with another photograph that has become one of the most recognisable images in the history of humanitarian journalism.
In March 1993, South African photojournalist Kevin Carter photographed a severely malnourished Sudanese child near a feeding centre, with a vulture nearby. The photograph was published by The New York Times and subsequently circulated internationally. In 1994, Carter received the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for the image.
That photograph is frequently associated with the phrase "the Sudan famine", but it predates the 1998 famine by five years.
The distinction is important.
The child in Carter's photograph was not an illustration of the 1998 crisis. The picture belonged to the earlier famine in southern Sudan and was taken in 1993. The Pulitzer citation itself describes the subject as a starving Sudanese girl who had collapsed while travelling toward a feeding centre.
Later accounts also reported that the child was actually a boy, Kong Nyong, a detail that emerged years after the photograph was published.
More than a photograph
Carter's photograph became powerful partly because it forced audiences thousands of kilometres away to confront something that statistics could not easily communicate.
Numbers can tell us that hundreds of thousands or millions of people are hungry. A photograph can make that suffering feel immediate.
But there is a danger in allowing a single dramatic image to become the entire story.
Famine is not simply a picture of a starving person. It is a breakdown of food systems, livelihoods, security and access. It is often connected to decisions made by governments, armed groups and institutions far removed from the individual whose suffering eventually appears in a newspaper or on a screen.
The 1998 southern Sudan famine demonstrates that clearly.
Drought contributed. Poor harvests contributed. Flooding damaged crops in some areas. But war, displacement and restrictions on humanitarian access magnified the crisis.
Remembering the people behind the numbers
Today, decades after those events, photographs from Sudan continue to circulate online, sometimes without accurate dates, locations or captions.
That makes historical verification more important, not less.
The person shown in an image should never become merely a symbol of suffering. Behind every statistic was a human being : a parent, child, farmer, worker, neighbour or community member who had a life before famine reduced that life to a desperate struggle for food.
The lesson of southern Sudan's 1998 famine is therefore larger than the photograph.
It is a reminder that famine rarely arrives from a single cause. It grows when conflict destroys livelihoods, when people are displaced from their land, when food cannot reach those who need it and when the international response comes too late or cannot reach far enough.
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