In 1980 Mike Wells snapped this Powerful photo of a Catholic missionary holding the hand of a starved Ugandan boy. In multiple ways, it basically looks like the hand isn’t human.
It almost looked like the hand of a space alien, a distinct species, or anything but the hand of a human.
Unfortunately, it’s the hand of a starving human being!
In 1980, Photographer Mike Wells was in Africa working for the Save the Children Fund of the United Kingdom, handling their anti-polio campaign in Swaziland and Malawi.
Wells took this photo while on a side trip to Uganda, at a seminary where the Verona Fathers were dispersing food during the early days of the starvation. One of the monks explained the circumstances to Wells and told him that the Karamojong boy was about 4years old.
Food scarcity in Karamoja started in July 1978, after plant disease drought and crop failure. Not being a province of great economic or political importance for the Ugandan government, President Idi Amin’s administration didn’t take any action after being notified of the situation that year.
Following the overthrow of Amin and the breakout of his soldiers in 1979, Karamojong soldiers obtained a gigantic amount of guns and ammunition. The inflow of guns drastically diverted regional power balances and cultural traditions around raiding. It became risky to move in and out of Karamoja.
National insecurity caused a total meltdown of trade. Households started to run out of food in the early 1980s. The circumstances became crucial in May, and the starvation attained its height in July and August of the same year.
In July, the Verona Fathers in Karamoja pleaded to the World Food Program in Rome for critical aid. Catholic missionary activities had started in the region in 1933, with the Catholic Church supplying relief aid during periods of starvation since the 1960s.
The photographer Mike Wells, who would later win the World Press Photo Award for this photo, confessed that he was really ashamed to take the photo. The same magazine that sat on his picture for five months without publishing it entered it into a contest. He was embarrassed to win as he never entered the contest himself and was against winning prizes with photographs of people starving to death.
