BBC
Chicago based doctor Heena Pranav with an African child in Gulu, a city in northern Uganda PHOTO/as posted on photo sharing site Imgur and message board Reddit
The photo has been copied and posted countless times, becoming known on the internet as “Sceptical Third World Child”. But with the images and funny captions has come a serious debate about how the Western world views and reports on poverty and African children.
He’s wearing dirty clothes and a wry expression, giving the mother of all side-eyes to a woman squatting next to him in the dirt.
This image was originally posted to Reddit three years ago by a man in Texas who spotted the amusing photo on the Facebook page of a friend. Since then, it’s been copied and captioned countless times. Many of the captions play on a crude stereotype of Africa as war-torn, poor, and suffering constant food shortages:
It’s become such a widespread internet meme that BBC Trending wondered – who is the boy? And what does the spread of his picture tell us about the internet’s culture and prejudices?
The first issue raised by memes like this is one of privacy. We haven’t yet found the boy or his parents, and we don’t even know if they are aware of the image going viral. We’ve chosen to publish the picture here because it has already been shared so widely and to highlight the debate it raises.
We have, however, tracked down the woman in the picture. Heena Pranav is a 28-year-old doctor who lives in Chicago. Back in 2012 she was a medical student and she’d travelled to Gulu, a city in northern Uganda, to help an aid project for women traumatised by the country’s war with the Lords Resistance Army. The project was run by Pros for Africa, a charity headed by a Catholic nun, Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe.
The child in the photo wasn’t connected to the aid project – Pranav says she met him at a local market and guessed he was about two or three years old.
“I was with a group of other medical students at the time, we were walking around and I saw this little boy, he seemed really sweet,” Pranav told BBC Trending radio. “His mom was nearby working in the market. I went up to him to play with him and say ‘hi’… he was the most animated child I’ve ever met.”
The boy didn’t speak English, and Pranav doesn’t speak the local languages (which include Luo, Swahili and others), but their brief encounter was captured on camera by another member of the group. Pranav says she hadn’t even heard of Reddit before her friend posted it on the message board and it went viral.
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