short film portfolio pieces representing work of students from the mohamed amin foundation broadcast and training school in lavington, nairobi (achtung: quicktime .avi files).
featurette on ziff (zanzibar international film festival)
heavy metal: jua kali karai (basin) makers at work set to an industrial beat
my nairobi: manufacturing a soccer ball, githurai stlylee
“kenyan” and “photographer” are two words that do not find themselves next to each other too often. they came together famously in the case of mohamed amin, but i am aware of few other cases. a cursory web search inspired by a link forwarded to me for felix masi’s site is not much more instructive, something i would like to attribute to a small web footprint and poor metatagging, not just that they don’t exist:
slyvia njenga: commercial photographer
willis okech: nature/wildlife photographer
felix masi: photojournalist
robert carr-hartley: art photographer
will keep looking.
picked up a new (to me) magazine called clam; andrew dosunmu is a primary image contributor with a number of fashion spreads throughout the magazine. there is a photo essay on cuba by another of my fav photographers marc baptiste. there is also a huge feature “kampala now” about the youth kulcha in uganda’s capital.
i am trying to find a photographic voice that at once reflects my roots while rooted in the world i live in today which is definitely not african. that is why i am fascinated by the work of dosunmu and magazines like clam (and trace and other transcultural publications) that seem to be navigating the same territory.
samuel fosso: central african republic based nigerian photographer famous for his self portraits.
“Fosso talks about his work with striking simplicity. It may be this clarity that stops him from being too interested in the critics and the attention he now receives. “When I’m taking a self-portrait, I’m not looking to find out more about Samuel Fosso. I’m searching first of all to see my beauty. That’s how I started.
“When I look at myself in the mirror, I am not looking to find out if what I see is an Ibo, a Central African or even a black American. The only thing I can see is Samuel Fosso, who is trying to make himself as handsome as possible before taking a self-portrait.”
from guardian article discussing a 2002 program on fosso.
i just finished reading “Imperial Reckoning” by caroline elkins about the brutality that the british visited on the kikuyu (mostly) in response to the mau mau threat. the book paints the suffering of the kikuyu in the emergency (from 1952 to 1960) as “unspeakable”. many of the interviewees in elkins’ book talk of their inability to effectively use words to describe how horrible life was during that time. forced labor, random beatings, humiliation, torture, rape, summary executions, starvation, disease, family separation were all facts of daily life to the 1 million + people who were forced off their land or rounded up from nairobi and the rift valley and forced to live in overcrowded “reserves”.
i have recently been very curious about how the history of the mau mau has been written; attributing their negative image to the fact that the british were devastatingly effective in painted them as primitive savages in the press of the early/mid 1950’s. but the truth is more nuanced than that:
1. during the emergency one was either a mau mau, a mau mau suspect or a british loyalist. in the wake of independence, many of those who were loyalists inherited power and access to resources and were the real beneficiaries of wiyathi (independence). it would have been very difficult for former homeguards, now in positions of leadership, to reveal what they did during the emergency. the best strategy was to bury the memory of mau mau with the hope that they wouldn’t have to answer for the beatings, torture, rape, murder and land grabbing that they were party to during that time.
1a. related: kenyatta was no mau mau radical and was even shunned by his fellow detainees at lokitaung for his moderate views on how kenya could shake the colonial yoke. he was is no position to lionize the mau mau legacy; he was not one of them. he owed his hero status among kenyans partly to the british who so vigorously (and wrongly) painted him as the mastermind of the mau mau insurgency.
2. even within the kikuyu community, the mau mau phenomenon was very divisive. those who had embraced christianity couldn’t join mau mau as part of it involved invoking the traditional god ngai and participating in traditional rituals that they had already distanced themselves from culturally. there was also a class dimension; the mau mau oath attracted most those without land who felt this was their way to redress this problem (land is economic power in kikuyu culture). also, during that time the mau mau offered two choices; join us, or die as an enemy our cause. so, in my family’s case, i now understand the context within which both of my grandfathers were murdered; my paternal grandfather most likely for his christian faith (he was a lay preacher).
3. ithaka na wiyathi (land and freedom). that was the rallying cry of the mau mau. kenyatta and the former loyalists who formed the first kenyan government amassed huge tracts of former settler land after independence. very few, if any, former mau mau vets had the money or connections to buy this land. thus kenyatta, et al needed to “forget” the mau mau struggle. ostensibly it was to unite the country (”we all fought for independence”), and to keep settlers from bolting from the country (and undermining a fragile new economy). but it also allowed the government to shut down any talk of land reform, using the same administrative and law enforcement structure that the british had used on the mau mau. admittedly kenya may have avoided what is happening in zimbabwe today, but when i think about how much of the country is owned by a handful of people, and see an overcrowded nairobi full of young unemployed people from the countryside, i wonder if kenya is not still sitting on the same powder keg that exploded in 1952.
this book has whetted my appetite to understand more about kenya and its history. Imperial Reckoning has only scratched the surface of this, not so much because of any deficiency on the author’s part, but that so little is available anywhere. our parents’ generation talked about the emergency, reserves, detention, johnies. many homes have that painting of kenyatta being led away to jail on oct. 20th 1952. but that is about it. this is a critical part of our heritage, one i fear will go to the graves with the many survivors who are now growing old. where is our kenyan ken burns when we need one to bring this history to life and show how much more we can understand and be proud of our national heritage?
the tree of life: ofshoot of project in mozambique to decommission millions of weapons left over over from the war. local artists use the discarded weapons to create art pieces. featured at africa 05 held earlier this year in london.
tanzania at 15 mph: audio slide show of two bicyclists who traversed tanzania from dar to kigoma on a tandem. (nytimes link registration req’d)
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