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Nakate: The Ugandan in photo saga
Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate appears in one picture and is cropped out in the other that was published. NET PHOTO
Vanessa Nakate, the business administration graduate from Makerere University Business School (MUBS) in 2018 started research on the climatic changes affecting Uganda.
By the second week of January 2019, she had started staging protests on the different streets of Kampala in what she called ‘Fridays for Future climatic strikes’.
Every Friday, she carried posters that read: ‘Green love, Green peace’, ‘Beat plastic, polythene bags, pollutions’. ‘Thanks for global warming, climate strike now’.
Ignored by many Ugandans Nakato did not stop. She tweeted and posted all that she was doing on social media. In September, she was invited by the United Nations to attend a Youth climate summit that was held in New York.
“I was sent a message via Twitter requesting for a Skype call. In this members of the UN asked me a number of questions about my activism. I was later given an invite,” she says.
Since then UN has been referring her to different climate summits, some of which she said were held in Denmark, Nigeria and Spain where she attended the C40world mayors summit. In December, Ms Nakate received an email from the Arctic Base Camp inviting her for a five-day World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. This was scheduled for January 20 to January 24.
“On arrival, I was welcomed and treated like one of them. During the press conference, I was given a chance to address the media and say what I thought needed to done, ” she said.
However, Nakate was dismayed to find out that she was cropped out of a photo that was published by the Associated Press news agency (AP) yet it featured other activists. On learning this Nakate could not hold back, and tweeted her disappointment.
“During the Youth climate summit in New York, I was asked to vacate a number of seats for the white people to sit. It hurt, but I chose to ignore it. However, cropping me out of the photo and editing my voice out of the story was too much for me to bear,” she said.
Ms Nakate said she felt like her voice and message was erased after she was cropped out of the group photo yet the white activists who were standing beside her were featured.
However, after Nakate’s tweet and video had gone viral, the news agency was forced to post the original photo.
Ms Sally Buzbee, the AP’s executive editor, issued a statement last Friday apologising over the incident: “We regret publishing a photo this morning that cropped out Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate, the only person of colour in the photo. As a news organisation, we care deeply about accurately representing the world that we cover. We train our journalists to be sensitive to issues of inclusion and omission. We have spoken to internally with our journalists and we will learn from this error in judgment.”
However, Nakate says the page onto which the statement was posted is not the agency’s official page.
She said the agency should have posted their apology on the same page where the story was run.
