dhow

From The Old Africa Album: 5 ‘Best’ Shots

This week at Lens-Artists, Steven Hyde asks to see our 5 best ever photos. So how to choose? On the one hand I have a large archive of scanned photos (the Old Africa Album), taken in the 1990s when we lived in Kenya(7 years) and Zambia (ten months). On the other hand, I have an even larger file of digital shots taken over the last 20 years. The scanned images come from slide and film negatives that were processed a decade or more after the originals were taken; they are not as sharp as the original prints (and some of my scanning was distinctly incompetent).

So it is perhaps a touch perverse to choose my five ‘best’ from this scanned collection. And also to further to discount photos from the ‘on safari’ archive (i.e. the so called Big Five wildlife attractions). Instead, then, here are five, mostly chance photos of local people. These are encounters that often hold many memories, far bigger than the sum of visual parts captured here.

The header photo was taken during a too brief Christmas-time stay on the island of Lamu. We had spent Boxing Day on a small fishing dhow, sailing through the mangrove swamps of the Manda Strait and out to the reef where some of us had fished for our lunch. The owner of the boat, seen dozing here, was Mzee Lali, a Bajun man who spoke no English, a devout Muslim and father of twelve. His youngest boy, ten year old Miski, came with us on the trip. He said not one word that I overheard for the whole trip. Meanwhile, Lali’s nephew, Athman, our guide, and for official tourism purposes, the boat’s captain (since he spoke English, Kenya’s official language, and could sit the necessary captain’s exams) told us much about island life, of livelihoods dependent on tourism and fishing now that the big Arab trading dhows no longer plied the East African coast.

This is Esther and Tom. Esther had a curio stall on the roadside in Kiboko, on the Mombasa Highway some hundred miles south of Nairobi. I saw her now and then when we were staying at nearby Hunter’s Lodge. (Graham had a project in progress at the Kiboko agricultural field station). She was very keen for me to trade any spare clothes for some of her Akamba wood carvings. She also had a notion about where she wanted to have her photograph taken, and took me along to the Kiboko petrol station where there was also a cafe with this zebra mural. She then told me her address in nearby Emali where I could send the photos.

A young woman with a plan, or indeed several.

While Graham worked, went to seminars, visited Kenyan farmers, I camp followed. And so here I was passing time, sitting in the garden of a Mombasa beach hotel with a fine view of the shore. Some of the transactions taking place there were tawdry to say the least – everything for sale at a good price, but then these Digo girls came laughing by. Probably going shopping, but so brilliant in their kanga wraps…

Taking photos of sweet Kikuyu lads wasn’t the idea. I was supposed to be manning the fieldwork clip board and recording data. Or when required, holding the end of a large surveyors’ tape while Graham measured a plot of Napier grass. (There’s clump in the top left corner).

Napier grass is a staple fodder crop in the highlands above Nairobi, essential to smallholder farmers who, lacking access to pasture, must zero-graze their animals i.e. take feed to cattle and sheep kept in pens or small paddocks. The grass grows quickly and could be found planted out on any ground not given over to human food crops. This included roadside reserves. It’s a vigorous plant, but can also be susceptible to a fungal smut disease, which happened to be the subject of Graham’s field research. Our visits to the Kikuyu farms and the welcome we always received there, even when we told the farmers that some of their grass had smut and should be burned, were some of the best times of our years in Kenya. We always came home with gifts – sugar cane, orchard plums and pears, a live cockerel…

Another country.

While we were living in Zambia, we took a road trip south into neighbouring Zimbabwe. This snap was taken one early evening in Harare. I wasn’t even intending to take any photos; for one thing the light wasn’t very good. We were coming back from the post office, but the young man with the biggest grin, spotted the little Olympus-trip in my hand, and asked me to take a photo. These are security house and shop guards waiting for the night shift pick up to take them to work.

Those smiles remind us of much that we miss.

Lens-Artists: Five of the best This week Steve Hyde asks us to post our 5 best ever photos. Now there’s a challenge.

The Solitude Within

As in the previous post, this is a Christmas photo, but one taken long ago when we were visiting Lamu off the Kenya coast. I’ve posted it before, but make no excuse for showing it again. It is one of my favourite photos, and one caught in a split second with my Olympus Trip. I think the gods of photography were smiling on me.

The gentleman so absorbed is Mzee Lali, the owner of the sailing dhow. He spoke no English, nor said a word to us that I recall on our day trip out to the reef. The conversation was dominated by his nephew, Athman, who, as a speaker of English, Kenya’s official language, could hold a captain’s licence, and so take tourists out on sailing trips.

He told us that Lali was born on Pate, one of the more remote large islands in the Lamu archipelago. He knew everything there was to know about sailing, Athman said. But because he spoke no English he could not take the necessary two and half year captain’s course, and so obtain a licence.

Somehow this photo echoes the dilemma of island elders. They belong to another world in another time.

Weekly Photo Challenge:Solitude

One Word Photo Challenge: Seafoam

Here are some more Lamu photos (see previous post). Some of you will have seen the top one before, but it is one of my favourites, and I thought the colour of awning fits with Jennifer Nichole Wells’ one word seafoam challenge. It is a colour that I anyway associate with the Indian Ocean. This shot was taken on a dhow taxi in the middle of a tropical downpour. It was December, the monsoon season, and we had just flown in to the little local airport on Manda Island. The strait between the two islands looked suddenly grey and forbidding. It seemed strangely cold too in the midst of the hot season, and not the best start to our four-day Christmas break from Nairobi.

But then the rain passed. This is the waterfront of Lamu stone town, one of the best surviving Swahili settlements on the Indian Ocean seaboard, and a world heritage site. You will have to look harder here for the gentle shade of seafoam.

Lamu is a captivating place. I was so impressed by our four days there that I wrote a teen novel, Sea Running, published by Macmillan Pacesetters for the African children’s literature market. It’s a good yarn about drug runners and first love. It also has a splash of seafoam on the cover.