Dr Ben Worku-Dix on his life and Positive-Negatives

Dr Ben Worku-Dix graduated in Geography from SOAS in 2002. His final year dissertation took him to Kumbh Mela, the world’s largest religious festival where he interviewed and photographed pilgrims. On his return, he staged an exhibition of these photographs at the SOAS Gallery. He has recently opened a new exhibition featuring the work of his non-profit organisation Positive-Negatives, which combines interviews and stories with academic research to produce graphic novels, comics and animations.

SOAS World spoke with Ben about his life, how and why he founded Positive Negatives and his ongoing work.

“In 2001 I did a big exhibition at SOAS so it's nice 24 years later to be back again. It was my photos from the Kumbh Mela. I spent six weeks there and had so much fun interviewing hundreds of people, far more than I needed for an undergrad project. Before my degree I had worked as a photojournalist, so I took lots of photos.”

After graduation, Ben returned to India to work as a photojournalist with a newspaper based in Delhi.

“On Boxing Day 2004 the tsunami hit. One of my oldest friends from SOAS was working for an NGO in northern Sri Lanka and called to ask if I could come and help him. All the expat workers had gone home for the holiday and this catastrophe happened. He was running a small project with hardly any funding and needed help, physically and emotionally.

I flew out to Colombo and we shot up through the country, across no-man’s-land into the Tamil Tiger area where he was based. I thought I would be there for ten days, but I ended up staying for four years and it completely changed my life.

In the days after, we drove round this devastation with bodies everywhere trying to distribute food, plastic buckets and emergency items to people and I also began to photograph the aftermath. This was a completely different environment to anything I’d ever seen before and was a very maturing experience. The tsunami killed around 35,000 people in Sri Lanka.

After a few days, international aid workers began returning bringing British and European funding. What had been a small NGO with a budget of around $20,000 suddenly turned into $10 million. It was a huge learning curve.

I used my photography and journalism skills to create reports interviewing people who had lost family members, their houses and livelihoods, and about the need for boats, schools, hospitals and rebuilding houses. These profiles were sent to donor communities around the world and it humanised the vast suffering and impact of the disaster.

I didn’t want to go back to be a photojournalist when there was something worthwhile I could do here. These were deeply religious communities who lived, worked and worshipped around the sea and there were lots of rumours and theories about why the sea had ‘attacked’ them. They were often isolated with no internet or phone. They were unaware that the tsunami had hit eleven other countries. It felt very personal and localised to them.

I worked with a geographer from King’s College London to design the Tsunami Education Project, which was an animated presentation showing the geography of how a tsunami occurs - that there was a subterranean earthquake causing the landslip that created the wave. It showed the geographical impact and that it affected Hindus, Christians and Muslims around Africa and Asia.

I recruited a team of Tamil geography students from the local university and we got generators and projectors and we would go to the villages in the evening where we strung up stitched-together bed sheets in coconut trees to create a screen and the Tamil geography student would teach the presentation, sometimes to groups of 500 people.

We also brought in local psychosocial teams for support; there were people in the audiences who had lost everything. The trauma of people living through this was incredible and our group tried to identify those in the audiences who might need help.

We took this to 50,000 people in a year and a half. At the end of each geography section, we felt some light relief was needed. These were communities that didn’t have TV and film, so we played Tom & Jerry cartoons. It was the first time many had seen cartoons, and through the traumatised communities, we heard laughter.

After a year and a half, I knew the area really well and I began working for the UN as one of the liaisons between the UN and the Tamil Tigers. The aftermath of the tsunami had turned into further conflict between the Tamil Tigers and the government.

I found myself at the age of 31–32 being one of the team meeting with the Tamil Tiger leadership and trying to work out civilian logistics. There were half a million displaced people and we needed to build camps and shelter.

In September 2008, the conflict spiralled to the point where the UN told expats to evacuate, which we did, but we had to leave behind hundreds of our Tamil staff. 32 of them died in the nine months after that. The impotence of the UN made me emotional and angry. I went on the BBC to talk about the failings of the evacuations and how we left half a million civilians without our protection and without our witness to unfolding war crimes.

I worked with Channel 4 on an award-winning documentary called No Fire Zone bringing together camera footage; this was one of the first conflicts where civilians had camera phones. It critiqued the Sri Lankan government for war crimes and the UN for its failings.

When I was in Sri Lanka, we spent quite a bit of time in air raid bunkers. The first few times you run to one, it’s scary, but when you do it three or four times a day, it becomes normal. One of my colleagues had the graphic novels Maus by Art Spiegelman and Palestine by Joe Sacco in the bunker and I was inspired by how these books dealt with incredibly complex issues through sequential art.

I decided I wanted to create a graphic novel about the war in Sri Lanka. I started working with an artist and put together an idea of how to tell this story. A friend at Sussex University persuaded me to start working on this as a PhD of how to turn complex testimonies of survivors of Sri Lanka's conflict into a graphic novel, which became Vanni: A Family’s Struggle through the Sri Lankan Conflict.

During my PhD I founded Positive-Negatives as an organisation to work on the graphic novel. It was then commissioned by the Open Society Foundations to create a series of comics on the Somali diaspora across Europe.

After my PhD, Positive-Negatives began working on more projects, mostly with ex colleagues from Sri Lanka who were by then working for different NGOs who needed to communicate their work. This was at the same time as the rise of social media and organisations looking at how they could communicate their work differently.

We grew to ten staff and were working on projects in multiple countries with big budgets. All the team were great, many SOAS post-grads who were incredibly smart and enthusiastic, but we were predominantly white, middle-class and from the Global North and I grew uncomfortable with this model.

When Covid hit and travel was restricted, we used our funding to send teams from local universities instead. We’d train them in online workshops on our methodologies and what information, stories and photographs we needed, all tied to academic research, then they would undertake the work.

We now consistently use this model and the money is directed to partners in the Global South. Our carbon footprint is hugely reduced and we’ve moved to decolonise Positive-Negatives. We now have links with 65 researchers and over 400 artists across the world who work as project-based consultants.

From the beginning, I was focused on how I could use what I was building to teach the next generation in schools. We have set up Animated Learning with Lifeworlds Learning, which will be launched at the exhibition. When we work with academics, our budgets include the animation and research along with the pedagogy developed from the script, which is used for Continuing Professional Development days to teach teachers. You teach one teacher, who then teaches 3,000 students.

I’ve worked many times with academics from SOAS. One of my favourite collaborations was with Professor Laura Hammond called Life on the Move. It features interviews in Somaliland about people’s journeys, including mothers whose children had made the journey across the Sahara to Libya and then across the Mediterranean. It was emotionally challenging and fascinating to turn this into a stop-motion film based on the map of the Horn of Africa with figures going across the world. We had to design and 3D print our own figures as you could not get models of Somalis, Yemenis and people in hijab.

I’ve also worked with Professor Jonathan Goodhand on Drugs and (dis)order about drug issues in Afghanistan, Colombia and Myanmar. It was our first big-budget, multi-country project, and all three of the countries experienced conflict or civil war during the production, so it was challenging. It features ethnographic research into drug issues: addiction, criminality, and smuggling.”

Positive-Negatives works with many different organisations including the AHRC, UN, European Research Council, The Guardian, LSE, UCL and Harvard among them.

“Abike’s Story is one of the projects that was particularly impactful. We were commissioned to visualise the Modern Day Slavery Act 2015 legislation that went through Parliament. You can’t read Abike’s Story and not be moved by her harrowing account of being trafficked from Nigeria to the UK as a sex slave and then the judicial issues when she tried to flee and got arrested.

Other projects include Hooked about drug addiction in Guinea-Bissau, which got 90 million views over two weeks, was translated into multiple African languages and serialised on BBC World.

We’ve now completed 107 projects at Positive-Negatives and even going back to 2013, unfortunately each one is as relevant today as when we created it, which is depressing. In Perilous Journey there’s three stories of migration. In one, Khalid is arrested on top of a building watching demonstrations in Daara from the first Syrian uprising in 2011 and was sent to a torture facility. This facility has been stormed and opened recently. If this was being taught in the classrooms today, these comics could be used to help understand and dissect the issues.” 

Stories of Migration exhibition opened at the SOAS Gallery on 16 January 2025 and runs until 22 March 2025.