Photos: Senegal’s street children turn trauma into art in Africa’s biggest exhibition

Photographs by street children displayed at the “Look at me” exhibition, Dakar, Senegal, May 11, 2018. Thomson Reuters Foundation/Nellie Peyton

Young boys who were forced to beg on the streets for Islamic teachers have turned their suffering into art, as they join more than 1,000 artists showing their work at Africa’s biggest and oldest biennale art exhibition in Senegal this month.

Some 50,000 child beggars known as talibe live in religious schools called daaras in the West African nation, according to rights groups, who say some were trafficked from neighbouring countries and many are beaten and abused.

A teenager poses in front of his photograph at the “Look at me” exhibition, Dakar, Senegal, May 11, 2018. Thomson Reuters Foundation/Nellie Peyton

FILE PHOTO: Fifteen-year-old Mamadou Doumbouya, a Talibe, or Islamic student, holds a begging bowl in front of a wall of graffiti in Senegal’s capital Dakar,REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly