Enfance, Enfances - Africa

Enfance, enfances, 2001

Hiên Lâm Duc

When is a child a child? Until when, is he precisely a child? When can a child carry arms? What about boys and girl’s equity? What about the right for a child to express an opinion on decisions affecting it?

It has taken ten years to answer these and hundreds of other questions. Ten years for a working group formed around the United Nations Centre for Human Rights, UNICEF and a constellation of non-governmental organizations to elaborate the text of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted unanimously by the UN on 20 November 1989. Thanks to this agreement, the world starts to change. Lâm Duc Hiên’s photographs testifies to it.

Rwanda

In Springs 1994, the country of the Thousand Mountains has sunk in the worst of nightmares. To the inter ethnical massacres, succeeded the exile of the survivors towards the neighboring countries, cholera, the settlement of refugees in huge camps where life was no longer human. Little by little, the wounds began to close. The refugees returned to their villages. But the healing process will be long, no doubt about it.

Mauritania

Widely extended between Maghreb and Sahel, Mauritania are looking towards the horizon to forget the suffocating drought of its deserts. Children from Northern and Eastern tribes, children from the edges of the Senegal River, they all build together, since the independency, a multicultural country that live at the rhythm of the sand winds, migration towards cities, and trailers carrying out some good or bad news.

Senegal

In Senegal, the joy of life is everywhere. The children laugh, play, like if poverty and misery was not existing. Yet, misery and poverty are not far away, in the heart of the cities, on the pavements of Dakar where loneliness comes during the night until the morning.

Morocco

Morocco, the poorest of the Maghreb countries, is multiplying its efforts to enter modernity. The status of women, children’s rights, democratization, there is certainly no lack of work to be done. But the evolution is rapid, a dynamic has now been set in motion.