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Outlook

Factual: Life Stories

True stories of ordinary people and the extraordinary events that have shaped their lives

True stories of ordinary people and the extraordinary events that have shaped their lives.

Outlook: Congolese Soldier and US Photographer

Madot Dagbinza

13/04/2015

Congolese Soldier and US Photographer

BBC World Service - Outlook, Congolese Soldier and US Photographer

The Congolese soldier who caught the eye of an American war photographer

The female soldier from Congo whose beauty captivated American photographer, Michael Christopher Brown. She left behind her secrets in a photo album.

Madot Dagbinza was a sergeant in the Congolese army. She was with the 42nd Commando Battalion, fighting on the front line in the east of Congo. Unusually for a woman, she had been given the job of protecting a colonel - and last year, they were both killed in an ambush. But her legacy lives on - through a photo album that she left with an American photographer, Michael Christopher Brown. He had rare access to the unit, and had bonded with Madot over their shared love of photography.

Chilean Miguel Angel Pellao has sung his way out of poverty. He was born in Santa Barbara, home to many of Chile's indigenous people - the Pehuenches - and where many just about get by through farming and forestry. But Miguel had other ideas. Now known as El Tenor Pehuenche, he has toured all over Europe, and has recently been performing in the south of Chile.

Hugo Lucitante has a strange double life. He was born in the Ecuadorean jungle, a member of an indigenous tribe, the Cofan - and splits his time between there and Seattle, in the United States, where he lobbies the United Nations about the damage done by settlers to their ancestral land. The Cofan are under pressure - and when Hugo was eleven, the tribe feared its extinction. So they sent him to the US to get a western education, in the hope that he would use it to help them out. Which he does. He and his American wife, Sadie, spoke to Outlook about their lives.

(Picture: Madot Dagbinza. Credit: Michael Christopher Brown/Magnum Photos)

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