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You have just arrived for one of those noisy weekend ceremonies,
dressed to be seen. And who is one of the very first to notice you? A
commercial photographer of no-fixed address, of course! Even if you have got
cartons of photographs at home, that doesn’t matter. Even if you have a library
of photo albums, well, that library needs fresh acquisitions. And you have to
help the photographer make a living from capturing your moments in history.

If the geographic setting is Nigeria, then there are armies of
them running after you, helping to build your importance. Your ego needs this
kind of massaging, badly. Or maybe, you dislike it, but you are trapped now and
cannot escape. Shots, shots, and more shots – as you disembark from your
automobile, as you walk majestically to greet other guests, as you shake hands
with or embrace the host, as you march into the hall, as you bend to pick your
falling accoutrements, as you take your seat and adjust your clothes, as you
rise and dance to the music of the day, as you take a sip of this and that, as
you attack the menu, as you laugh at the jokes, as you “spray” some money on
your host. It’s just a matter of minutes and your frozen images would be
displayed on the ground as the wares of the day. Or, they are enveloped
hurriedly and brought to you to see and pay for. More shots?

As a social ritual, photography comes with its own drama:
individuals are aesthetic objects that are located and arranged in space, made
to assume postures and looks. In those days, the ritual of arranging
individuals to be photographed used to be very elaborate and tedious: the
photographer, in the most dramatic fashion, arranges the individual and then
moves back to his camera housed in a shroud that gives it a more mysterious
outlook, and then runs back again to adjust a part of the person’s body or
costume. It is a series of goings and comings, of peeping and perfecting. And
then, CLICK; a blinding light, and the individual becomes a frozen image.

The group photograph is even more entertaining: there is the
celebrated individual in the centre – and then there are those to flank him or
her, the privileged few. Then there are the complements, those happy to be
allowed to stoop or squat in the front, very close – mind you – to the
celebrated centre.

OK, say CHEESE.

Those who feel that they should have been asked to stay in the
centre or close to the centre but have been left at the margins do not take it
kindly. Watch out for how they say their own CHEESE, or whether they say it at
all, when the group is invited by the photographer to utter the magic word.

By the way, some of us who are not lucky enough to have very
well-formed dentition may feel uncomfortable when photographers, in a desire to
produce full images of cheerful human beings, order us to say CHEESE before
photographing us. For one, many local people in my country have never seen
cheese and do not understand the link between being photographed and the
invocation of CHEESE. Indeed, some decades back, some very elderly people who
were amazed that the camera could create an image that looked exactly like the
object physically present, thought it was pure magic, and that the uttering of
CHEESE was a necessary incantation for the magic. Understandably, some refused
to be photographed, thinking that the replication of someone’s image was a
signal of the death of the original.

Were these local people alone in associating photography with
death? Not at all, Roland Barthes too, likened the moment of capture in
still-life photography to death.

Saying CHEESE in order to enable the emergence of a smiling
still-life image of oneself is almost like uttering the last word before moving
into another life. Incidentally, this last word makes one expose one’s teeth in
a desperate attempt to make one’s face speak another language. Photographers as
artists invent situations through their photographs, which is why they try
sometimes to make us assume particular postures or utter words that help our
postures to speak more eloquently.

The emergence of computer technology has further given the photographer
the opportunity to be more and more creative with photographs as modes of
speaking. These days when it is possible for a photographer to excise the bust
of a public figure and superimpose it on the body of a donkey, or to clean up
an image of a face terribly ruined by chicken pox, is the rhetoric of the
photographic image indeed not some cheese for someone’s bite?

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, roughly one in
five Americans believes that vaccines cause autism, a disturbing fact that will
probably hold true even after the publication this month, in a British medical
journal, of a report thoroughly debunking the 1998 paper that began the
vaccine-autism scare. That’s because the public’s underlying fear of vaccines
goes much deeper than a single paper.

The evidence against the original article and its author, a British
medical researcher named Andrew Wakefield, is damning. Among other things, he
is said to have received payment for his research from a lawyer involved in a
suit against a vaccine manufacturer; in response, Britain’s General Medical
Council struck him from the medical register last May.

But public fear of vaccines did not originate with Wakefield’s
paper. Vaccines have had to fight against public scepticism from the beginning.
In 1802, after Edward Jenner published his first results claiming that scratching
cowpox pus into the arms of healthy children could protect them against
smallpox, a political cartoon appeared showing newly vaccinated people with
hooves and horns.

Nevertheless, during the 19th century vaccines became central
to public-health efforts in England, Europe and the Americas Such a move didn’t
sit comfortably with many people, who saw mandatory vaccinations as an invasion
of their personal liberty. An anti-vaccine movement began to build and, though
vilified by the mainstream medical profession, soon boasted a substantial
popular base and several prominent supporters, including Frederick Douglass,
Leo Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw, who called vaccinations “a peculiarly
filthy piece of witchcraft.” In America, popular opposition peaked during the
smallpox epidemic at the turn of the 20th century. Health officials ordered
vaccinations in public schools, in factories and on the nation’s railroads;
club-wielding New York City policemen enforced vaccinations in crowded
immigrant tenements, while Texas Rangers and the United States Cavalry provided
muscle for vaccinators along the Mexican border.

Public resistance was immediate, from riots and school strikes
to lobbying and a groundswell of litigation that eventually reached the Supreme
Court.

But the opposition reflected complex attitudes toward medicine
and the government. Many African-Americans, long neglected or mistreated by the
white medical profession, doubted the vaccinators’ motives. Christian
Scientists protested the laws as an assault on religious liberty. And workers
feared, with good reason, that vaccines would inflame their arms and cost them
several days’ wages.

Understandably, advocates for universal immunisation then and
now have tended to see only the harm done by their critics. But in retrospect,
such wariness was justified: at the time, health officials ordered vaccinations
without ensuring the vaccines were safe and effective.

Public confidence in vaccines collapsed in the fall of 1901
when newspapers linked the deaths of nine schoolchildren in Camden, New Jersey
USA, to a commercial vaccine allegedly tainted with tetanus. In St. Louis, 13
more schoolchildren died of tetanus after treatment with the diphtheria
antitoxin.

Seeking to restore confidence after the deaths in Camden and
St. Louis, Congress enacted the Biologics Control Act of 1902, establishing the
first federal regulation of the nation’s growing vaccine industry. Confronted
with numerous anti-vaccination lawsuits, state and federal courts established
new standards that balanced public health and civil liberties.

Most important, popular resistance taught government officials
that when it comes to public health, education can be more effective than brute
force. By mid-century, awareness efforts had proven critical to the polio and
smallpox vaccination efforts, both of which were huge successes.

One would think such education efforts would no longer be
necessary. Still, according to a 2010 C.D.C. report, 40 percent of American
parents with young children have delayed or refused one or more vaccines for
their child. That’s in part because vaccines have been so successful that any
risk associated with their use, however statistically small, takes on an
elevated significance.

It also doesn’t help that, thanks to the Internet, a bottomless
archive of misinformation, including Wakefield’s debunked work, is just a few
keystrokes away.

Health officials often get frustrated with public
misconceptions about vaccines but that’s no way to run a health system. Our
public health leaders would do far better to adopt the strategy used by one
forward-thinking federal health official from the early 20th century, C.P.
Wertenbaker of the Public Health and Marine-Hospital Service.

© 2011 The New York Times

It’s week two of the
voter registration exercise. After one week of hitches some facts are
gradually becoming clear. The Presidency has acknowledged that the youth
corps members being used as ad-hoc staff were ill trained for the
exercise while INEC has admitted having various logistic challenges
including the failure of one of the DDC machine vendors to deliver on
time, which has led to incomplete deployment across the country.

Above all these
hitches however, it’s heartwarming to note the enthusiasm with which
Nigerians have embraced the registration process and how they troop out,
enduring all kinds of pressures daily to participate in it. The massive
campaign at all levels has helped in no small way in getting the word
out and in making the people appreciate the need to vote in the coming
election. Many youth groups have been in the forefront of this campaign
besieging the Internet and using all youth sensitive media to reach this
largest segment of the population, who from past records have shown
apathy and disinterest.

Very heartwarming
also is the fact that the clergy are gradually stepping up to the
challenge of contributing to nation building by encouraging their
congregation to partake in this very important civic duty. For long I
have particularly been irked by the silence of the more popular
religious leaders who control congregations that run into millions while
things went awry in the polity. No gain repeating what strong influence
religion has on our people and how the religious institutions remain
very key players in the effort to rebuild Nigeria.

I have heard and
read about a couple of such efforts. A Muslim friend told how the Imam
had concluded his sermon at last Friday’s Jummat prayers with a call on
the worshipers to register to vote. Efforts such the one by the good old
priest who said Mass at my Parish church last Sunday combine to make
the call for change and progress through the ballot box not just a civic
duty but in many ways a religious one as well and that in my opinion is
how best religion should serve the interest of the people in our time.

One such message
from Pastor Paul Adefarasin of the House on the Rock caught my attention
recently. For me it was the first time I would hear the rather reserved
gentleman speak on a national issue and the message itself drove home
the need for Nigerians of all tribes and creeds to register to vote in
the coming elections.

Naturally I was
impressed this was coming from a man of God but even more I felt it was
worthy of note that he had said quite unequivocally that creed should
play no part in the people’s choice of their leaders, instead the
virtues of integrity and competence should be sought for in the
candidates. He said: “Make religion and tribe irrelevant in Nigeria’s
2011 elections. Register and vote for competence and integrity.” I take
out two important words from his full statement which I must state
contained many other nationally enriching lines; Competence and
Integrity. The absence of these qualities has been the bane of our
country. For so long we have had leaders that were either ill prepared
for the office they found themselves in or that foisted themselves on us
through the power of the gun. And when we had a chance to elect, we
fouled the system and justified it with an “it’s our turn” or “he is our
brother” bias. Competence and integrity have thus far been very
unpopular virtues amongst our leaders but as a pair of virtues they
constitute a sine qua non for progress and good governance.

If we must make
progress, then we must grow above our ethnic and religious mindsets and
install a new order. In that context, is not enough simply to have
registered. For if we all fail to sieve the candidates properly and do
as we have done in the past, we will once again end up with leaders who
do not feel responsible to us and who certainly shall not deliver the
promises their manifestos bear. As I have stated elsewhere, poverty,
disease, bad roads, power outage and all the other issues we confront
daily do not know zones and neither do they worship God in a particular
way. They confront us all squarely.

Pastor Adefarasin’s call and indeed those of all other religious
leaders who have been making similar calls is indeed a welcome
development and couldn’t have come at a better time. As we endure the
inconveniences to register, let us have this at the back of our minds:
this time competence and integrity should be the basis for our votes. We
can’t afford to do otherwise.