Pink Color Eastern Congo

The Congo in pink

The connotations of the colour pink are enveloped in a flippant frivolity that oozes love, sex and romance. Pink has acquired a pop-culture playfulness that invokes a whimsical tone of superficial sensationalism and passionate pleasure. Pink is trifling. Or is it? Photographer Richard Mosse has defied the cliché of pink in a series of war photographs taken in the Congo and thus proved the ability of Art to render redundant the parties, princesses and porn of perfectly pretty pink.The Congo is plagued by war. Over the past 15 years, more than 40 different armed groups have fought across a country the size of western Europe. Statistics (the mere mention of which calls us to read between the lines) reveal 400,000 rapes in one year; 5.4 million deaths between 1998 and 2007. Of the number of people who have died, only around 300,000 were killed; the rest – disproportionately children – perished due to disease and hunger caused by the fighting.

This sequence of pictures depicts the integration of rebels from the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) into the Congolese national army in 2010. The pictures here show the uneasy truce that has brought an end to some of the fighting.