Contextualized illustration
May 3rd, 2010 § 1 Comment
IPA-Tamale recently moved to a new office, and in the course of packing up the Examining Underinvestment in Agriculture storeroom I found a flipbook used by the Ministry of Food & Agriculture to educate farmers about the benefits of using fertilizer on their maize fields. MOFA has its share of politicized decision-making and elite capture, especially with regards to fertilizer distribution, but interestingly enough it still commissioned illustrations that were thoroughly representative of the lives of the average smallholder farmer.
Cover. As you’ll see, the intended audience is one of male farmers, who grow maize as an accepted male crop – but their wives still play a significant if unacknowledged role.
Skipping to the middle of the book for a second, this illustration of the farmer in his field captures a lot about the intended audience. Note the straw hat, simple sandals, manual distribution of fertilizer, and use of a repurposed condensed milk can to hold it.
Contrast this to the implicitly better-off fertilizer salesman, who shows up to deliver fertilizer in a baseball cap and closed-toe shoes. (Jan Chipchase has a good post mentioning footwear as status markers.) There’s not much romanticization of the economic prospects of smallholder farming here.
There’s some great detail as well in the section on how to avoid storing fertilizer improperly. The protagonist obviously isn’t doing too badly, because he has a metal roof, but leaks are a persistent problem. His young daughter, here seen splashing in the spilled fertilizer, is wearing appropriate earrings and waist beads. (And yes, it’s quite normal that she’s wearing nothing else.)
What does it mean for farmers to recognize themselves in this officially sanctioned view of how to farm?
……… excellent stuff. I’m guessing it caught yr eye because the prints are so beautifully rendered,especially teh cover and the one of the farmer sowing. And your question is on the money.