/ 15 March 2012

‘Afrikaner Blood’ wins major World Press Photo award

'afrikaner Blood' Wins Major World Press Photo Award

The World Press Photo 2012 Multimedia Competition has awarded first prize to Elles van Gelder and Ilvy Njiokiktjien from The Netherlands for their Afrikaner Blood production.

An extremist right-wing survival camp, about 230km east of Jo’burg, is breeding virulent racism, training teenage boys in its ideology. Elles van Gelder and Ilvy Njiokiktjien spent a week in the veld.

The multimedia package, which the Mail & Guardian carried in February, followed white Afrikaner teenagers through an extremist right-wing survival camp, teaching them defence skills and its racist ideology.

Held by a small survivalist group called the Kommandokorps, the camp is about 230km outside of Johannesburg. Its head Franz Jooste denied that young men are trained to hate black people.

The World Press Photo held its second multimedia competition in 2012, awarding second prize to US photographer and videographer Maisie Crow for Half-Lives: The Chernobyl Workers Now, and third prize to US photographer James Lo Scalzo for America’s Dead Sea.

Chairperson of the World Press Photo’s multimedia jury Vincent Laforet said the package by the Dutch duo was an extremely well thought-out piece.

“We as the jury appreciated the restraint that the authors demonstrated in the telling of this story. All of the multimedia elements and careful attention to detail served to push the narrative forward, as opposed to distracting from it,” he said.