Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan
Photo via Foreign Policy
A former colleague brought to my attention this incredible photo essay in Foreign Policy of Afghanistan in the 1950s and 1960s. The photographs of Afghan life in the 1950s and 1960s come from a book that CSU East Bay president Mohammed Qayoumi owned as a boy growing up in Kabul. Frustrated and disheartened by Western characterizations of Afghanistan as a barbaric, medieval state, Qayoumi dug up the book to prove that the Afghanistan we know today is a fairly recent creation. He compiled the essay to prove that his memories were not failing him - Kabul was in fact once a thriving, educated, modern society for men and women alike.
"Remembering Afghanistan's hopeful past only makes its present misery seem more tragic," Qayoumi writes, and the contrasts between the photographs and the images of modern Afghanistan are sobering. In one photograph men and women sit beside one another peering into microscopes in a Kabul University laboratory; today, fewer women work outside the home or attend secondary education than they did a half-century ago. In another a group of nurses-in-training stand attentively at a modern maternity hospital; today, the author says, preemies share incubators because hospitals don't have enough equipment. Even a nighttime photograph of Kabul vibrantly lit for an independence celebration is bittersweet; Kabul today is dark, desolate and threatening after dusk.
This is a part of the world of which I'm all too ignorant. These photographs and essay are enlightening, and the captions that accompanied the photographs in the original text are heartbreaking in their failed promise. "Afghanistan's racial diversity has little meaning except to an ethnologist," reads one. "Ask any Afghan to identify a neighbor and he calls him only a brother.'"
Posted on Friday, Jun 18, 2010
