Book Review: Winters Cook’s ‘Nozuko’s Story: The Story Of An African Family’
Oct 19th, 2011 | one response
American ex-patriot Susan Winters Cook is that rarest of contemporary photojournalists because she still shoots in black and white.
“I believe color distracts from the image unless it has a direct role in the message,” she tells me, and that is abundantly clear from her newly published Nozuko’s Story: A Story of an Africa Family.
Nozuko’s Story is the story that Cook was born to write and I can say that with authority. She and I worked together for 15 or so years at the Philadelphia Daily News. I was a demanding editor and she a demanding shooter, and she pretty much single-handedly convinced our bosses to underwrite several trips to South Africa where she ventured into the squalid townships where few white journalists would go for a series of photo essays that were to win a Robert F. Kennedy Prize, the Pulitzer for photojournalists, and later chronicled the end of apartheid with the release of future President Nelson Mandela from prison. No newspaper covered that pivotal era in South African history better than the Daily News or more eloquently than Cook.
Cook fell in love with South Africa, its enormous problems and all, and from the vantage point of her farm in the Eastern Cape has tirelessly documented the nation’s staggering HIV/AIDS epidemic through magazine articles, public health booklets and now Nozuko’s Story.
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One Response to “Book Review: Winters Cook’s ‘Nozuko’s Story: The Story Of An African Family’”
Mzee Kazi! You are driving upon my fathers grave!
Stunning revelation that they bury their dead near them, under piles of rocks to keep the hyenas from desecrating the corpse. What happened to my boys? Two that died of this terrible disease so young after many years as my loyal local staff. Years of training and teaching. Years of studious attention. Years of friendship and laughter and dodging cattle raiders bullets. Years of oglai and cabbages and canned corned beef for lunch around the shop telling jokes and stories. One by one they left to hospital. One by one their loyal currier carried a note from a hundred miles away: “Help me Mzee Kaza, I am dying”. But I cannot do anything I am not a doctor, the disease is fatal….“mzee kazi….you can do anything….your tribe has traveled to the moon.”….
Like a river, the tears never stop flowing, though the rain has stopped long ago.
Thank You Shaun.