Oh, my granddad was ahead of his time. He was always in favor of education. My dad and mother were too, but Granddad was very aggressive in that. You know, as he used to say, “You’ve got to fill your head with new ideas so you can use them later to improve your own status and that of the neighborhood.”

I think he was a great philosopher. He had a wonderful theory that you live in the “now,” which I think is important. Along with living in the moment, you also have to assume the responsibility that goes along with it, and you don’t take your position lightly. But it also means that you get the full value of the moment that you are living, so you don’t look back on your life and say, “If only I hadn’t wasted time, if only I had done this.” You do the best you can. It was wonderful to be able to go home after a performance, and think, well it wasn’t maybe so good, but it was the best I could be at that time.

And I said, “You know, it does sound silly, and it does sound as if I’m doing it just for my own fun.” And she said, “You have an obligation to do the best you can with whatever you’ve got. And if you like to do a sport, and you can do part of it well, that’s a way of expressing what God gave you.”

“David, you are going to walk among kings.” This was my mum’s prophecy when I was small. My father is from a royal family in Nigeria, so I interpreted it that way. Remarkably, she was right: I went on to play King Pelasgus, Henry VI, Martin Luther King and Seretse Khama.

So it affects my work in the sense that now I’ve been kidnapped twice. So now when I’m working in a place like Iraq — even if it’s northern Iraq and someone who hasn’t survived those two things would just drive on these roads and say, like, “Oh, this is great” — but of course, for me, all I see is ISIS around every corner. Or I envision the road filling up with insurgents because I’ve seen that, and I’ve been in that situation. So it affects my work in that sense, that I’m more paranoid than I ever was, certainly than I was in my 20s.

For a photographer — it’s like actually taking a picture is like five percent of what I do. And the rest is research, reading, contact, setting things up, making contact, getting access, making people feel comfortable, doing the reporting, doing the interviews, getting the captions. It’s not getting there physically, the logistics on the ground. I mean, literally, taking a picture is the easiest part of my job.

I’m tortured. So I’m not really a proud person. I’m always conflicted about what I’m not doing. I feel privileged that I was able to be there on the front lines of Afghanistan and Iraq. It means a lot to me that I was there because I feel like it was at a very important time in history.

I think I naturally felt like I needed to pull back, and maybe that’s one of the reasons why I decided to get pregnant then because I was 37, and I had Lukas at 38. So I have not been covering combat recently. I haven’t covered combat in a few years. I’ve been in South Sudan. I’ve been under fire. But I’m not like — it’s a very different time, also, in history. … Now I feel like I was very torn about not being in Mosul, but I didn’t go because I felt like it was extremely dangerous, and I just couldn’t do that to my family.