Jones didn't just visit war-torn areas. She brought there something that the U.S. and other western governments would never think to send. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail; and when all you spend money on is soldiers and missiles, you imagine those tools capable of things they are not suited to. Jones brought with her a different tool: photography lessons.
Jones gave women who had never seen a camera or a photograph, cameras and memory chips and lessons in using them. The women did not recoil in superstitious horror. They became artists, activists, and empowered members of communities that until that moment had treated women as objects to be owned.
"Prudence in Zokoguhe photographed a man beating his wife with a broom. Martine in Zokoguhe photographed a woman landing in the dirt face-first and the man who had thrown her to the ground. Jeanette in Koupela-Tenkodoko photographed a man beating his wife with a stick."
Change began swiftly.
"One woman reported that her husband, who had never before shared the proceeds from the family field, now proposed to give a little something to his photographer wife. Another reported that her husband, who had never before provided money for a sick child's medicine, rode his bike all the way to the health center to make sure that his photographer wife and child, who had gone ahead on foot, were being served by the pharmacy. Another told of her neighbor, an habitual wife beater, never deterred by others who tried to intervene. When she threatened to fetch her camera, he stopped hitting his wife and ran away."
Women showed their photographs in a public meeting. Never having spoken in public before, women took over the meeting. The village chief took their side and followed their lead. They began participating in writing laws to stop the violence in their village.
Jones collected her cameras to take them to another country, and by that time the women no longer needed them. But wouldn't it be nice if they could keep them? With a $1.3 trillion military budget in the United States alone, you'd think we could afford a few cameras that actually accomplish things that missiles and soldiers are falsely advertised as accomplishing. In fact, I don't just want to give women cameras. I want to give them websites.
Jones is an advocate for making women part of peace negotiations, part of government. Give women power and rights, and things will improve, Jones believes. And she's right, of course, up to a point. But the notion of "no justice, no peace" has to be reversed. Without peace we cannot build justice. We must end the wars. HOME VIOLENCE BEGINS IN WAR.
We must keep our priorities straight as critics soften their complaints with the pro-torture and pro-murder movie Zero Dark Thirty in part because it was made by a woman, and as a pro-war woman named Hillary Clinton positions herself to run for a presidential office that has been given single-handed power of life and death over great masses of human beings.
*****
* Jones is wrong, I believe, that the first African-American settlers arrived in Africa in 1822, since a group sailed from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone in 1792 including slaves who had escaped to fight for the British, including a man formerly owned by George Washington.
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