By now everybody knows the impressive aerial photography by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, who apparently got his passion for landscape photography while living in the Maasai Mara national park in Kenya for 3 years during the 1970s. Well, browsing his website today I stumbled upon his pictures taken Côte d'Ivoire, including one from Abengourou. And interestingly, it's not of a landscape, but of a bunch of people looking up. Although I looked really closely for really long, unfortunately I didn't recognize anybody:
There are other photos in the album that I liked, such as this one of a pile of cotton bales taken in the Korhogo area:
Or this other one of people doing laundry in the Adjamé market in Abidjan:
Check out the whole Côte d'Ivoire album here.
I haven't been online much lately mainly due to the rolling blackouts that the CIE (the national electric company) started last weekend. But I keep wanting to post some photos of the famous Yam Festival I attended last Friday at the king's palace (Nanan Boa Kouassi III, pictured on the left) in Abengourou.
According to the king's website, the Yam festival (or fête des Ignames in French), the origin of this festival is that during the hard times of the founding of the Indénié Kingdom a certain type of yams helped them fight hunger and survive, and establish themselves in this region. So honoring yams is a way of honoring the founding fathers of the kingdom, the ancestors and welcome a new and prosperous season. In fact, the Yam Festival marks the start of a new year for the Indénié Kingdom, and everything needs to be renewed, such as the embers in the fires and the water in the containers. And the mortars and other objects of daily usage need to be cleansed.
The celebration, which lasted several hours, included lots of dancing, drums and pantomime. But hte most important part of it was the ritual to honor ancestors, in which a line of royal stools from previous Indénié kings (it's interesting to note that in Europe crowns represent royal power whereas here it's a stool to sit on) were offered various gifts. Including gin, purifying herbs, yam powder and the blood of a freshly sacrificed ram.
Although I didn't enjoy watching the poor ram being killed and bled out, the offering ceremony was the most interesting bit of the day and the whole procedure was interesting to watch. Once that was done, bowls of pounded yam were offered to the attendees, since it was then ok to consume the sacred tubers. All the while some lively music and comic dancers entertained the audience.
And for some reason one goofy dancer (pictured on the right of the picture above) became infatuated with me and so I became the butt of a few jokes and loud laughs. Fortunately one of the distinguised guests (the mayor or some minister) helped me out with a 1000 FCFA note so I could get rid of my insisting admirer after he tried to kiss me several times.
Another anecdote I enjoyed more was being painted with kaolin, a type of white clay or porcelain that women use to paint their bodies as a sign of joy and purification (like the one pictured on the right). You can read more about the experience here, but basically once the women realized the white clay wasn't as visible as in their bodies (obviously), they were extremely amused and I'm sure they talked about it for days.
In spite of the blazing sun and the trying length of the event I felt fortunate to have witnessed it, and having been part of it, somehow part of the Abengourou community for a little fraction of time. My only frustration was not to hear the king's voice, since he never speaks in public but through a spokesperson. He just sits royally wisely observing everything.
> You can check the whole photo album of the famous Yam Festival of the Indénié Kingdom here.
> For more information on the Inénié Kingdom, you can visit their official website [in French].
On Sunday I was invited to eat fish and attieké, ground cassava, (see a photo of the meal in this post) by a lovely friend of a friend named Raïsa. She was wearing a tailor-made dress that my expat friend and I admired, and since I have a few fabrics in need of inspiration to take to the tailor, I asked Raïsa to take a picture of her outfit. She happily obliged, and she enjoyed being in front of the camera so much that she decided to model some of her other tailor-made dresses for us. Such as this one:
Or this one:
Or this other one:
As you can see, Raïsa is a natural with the camera. I think she could have spent hours trying poses and changing dresses. In the end, she gave us a little Ivorian dance lesson while wearing a Rihanna outfit (her words):
She hopelessly tried to show us how to shake our asses properly while showing us a few Ivorian dance moves, which made for a few good laugs. In my case, though, I'm afraid this is a lost cause as I'm extremely intimidated to dance here. In between giggles she made us promise to go dancing with her and her friends next weekend. I hope I'll survive.
Now that I have a faster internet connection and a bit of time on my hands as it's too cold for me to enjoy doing anything outside the house, I find myself browsing through photographer's websites that I had been bookmarking for months. Here are a few of South Africa that I particularly enjoyed, mostly because they show very different sides of the country.
This is how he defines himself in his website:
When I was child I asked my grandmother, whilst walking back from 'goga metse', "what was on the moon? She replied, "an old woman with a bucket of water on her head walking back home with a child." I still believe that to this day. Her name is Sinah Ntholi Nkoane and I am that child.I am lebogang nkoane. I am merely exploring photography.
Btw, you can also follow him on Twitter at @LTDN (which is how I found his photography in the first place).
I don't really know much about this photographer, only that I think he's based in Johannesburg and that he has amazing abstract compositions that remind me of cubist painters like Mondrian.
This Johannesburg-based photographer became famous for her series of portraits of black lesbians which she started in 2007, challenging the public's perceptions of female and male identity. She then continued with a series of intimate scenes of the domestic life of black lesbian couples in South Africa, such as the triptych below.
Another Johannesburg-based photographer, but again with a completely different style. In this case, the series that gave him popularity was Invisible Women, of women cleaning the inner city of Johannesburg which he photographed over an eight-month period at night between 11pm and 3.30am.
More recently he showed a series titled Men Only, focusing on the George Goch hostel on the East Rand of Johannesburg built in 1961 to house migrant mineworkers. Only men are allowed in such hostels, and in the collective imaginary they are places of violence, sexual abuse and illegal trafficking. They are also places where the legacy of apartheid is still clearly evident, despite the gains of the past 15 years of democracy. Mlangeni says:
It is these imaginings that led me to photograph life in these buildings, going beyond the stereotypes and trying to capture the normality that exists in an abnormal, unnatural situation.' Men's hostels are not easily approachable places, both practically and visually, and, Mlangeni says, 'my curiosity and maleness weren't enough to gain me access to this private world'. It took him two years to develop the trust and familiarity needed to show the residents' lives with honesty and clarity.
Veleko became popular thanks to her Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder, a series of bold, funky street fashion portraits providing a contemporary face to South Africa.
This is what this Cape Town-based photographer says about himself:
Extremely verastile and adaptable photographer with an easy way with people.My goal is to change the way people see their differences and what makes them unique.
To travel the world and show new and exciting perspectives on the planet we live on.
Some cool shots from Abidjan's golden years under Houphouët-Boigny's rule. Those were the years when it was the most desirable tourist destination in West Africa, with casinos and fancy shopping areas, when it earned the cheesy nickname of "the Paris of Africa" and ads like these were produced to attract international tourists to its glamourous hotels like the Ivoire Hotel.
This is the sign for a bookshop in a busy street of Abengourou which caught my attention because in Côte d'Ivoire is very rare to see signs written in local languages - they're usually written in French. Also, I'm quite intrigued by the reading turtle. Does it mean that with reading you have to take your time? I'm very curious about what does the sentence actually says. Maybe some Agni or generally Akan speakers out there could shed some light on it?
A jewelry workshop in Abengourou, where you can get things like custom-made cross pendants or wedding bands with huge initials carved on them.
I have several photography blogs in my rss reader, but one of the best ones is surprisingly by MSF Canada who also has a bunch of really interesting field blogs. And I say surprisingly not only because it's the Canada section, but because I'm typically not a big fan of humanitarian organisations' promotional photos. This photo blog, though, doesn't fall into the expected clichés (or not too much, at least), and shows much more than poor people receiving medical assistance. Every day they publish a picture from a different country where they work, every day by a different photographer. And they have worked with some of the best news photographers in the world
The reason why they're one of the few NGOs with a photo blog is:
Words can tell a story, describe emotions, and explain the facts, but they can never replace a powerful moment captured in a photograph. Compelling images offer a window into people’s lives, often depicting their reality with a unique perspective.
Although the blog is not only focused on Africa, it features pictures from African countries quite often - and, of course, those are my favorites. Especially the ones that show unexpected beauty, like this one below of a muddy road in Northern Uganda taken by Chris de Bode.
Since this is after all an MSF blog it does have many pictures of people in conflict zones, of refugees, of hospitals, and of aid recipients in general. But these pictures are often beautiful, intimate portraits showing a thoughtful person, or focus on an interesting detail or angle of the scene. Some of them even show people laughing, or playing, trying to carry on with their lives in spite of their surrounding. Or wearing funky sunglasses in a completely destroyed town in Somalia, as shown in this photograph by Petterick Wiggers:
And last but not least, I also enjoy the pictures they post every so often from the DRC - which is still my main country of interest in Africa for good or for worse. Like this one taken by Carl De Keyzer in Boende, in the Equateur province:
Check out the whole MSF Canada Photo Blog here.
Thanks to a tweet from Madatsara, I discovered the Ulysse database of the Centre des Archives d’outre-mer of the French National Archive in Aix-en-Provence. This database is an online treasure of scanned old photographs (as well as a few posters and maps) of French colonies, including over 4,500 of black and white images from Africa. Although I only browsed through a small portion of the collection after spending two hours enthralled with the website, it seems that the majority of them are from the first half of the 20th century. Some of them are of buildings, landscapes or of groups of people posing for the camera, but there are also a great many of them capturing scenes of daily life, such as shopping in the market, a class at school, handcraft production, hunting, rural activies, ritual dances or ceremonies, chiefs meetings, etc. etc.
Even when no white people are pictured, and there are many of those, in amusing dignified poses, light-colored shorts, tall socks and the inevitable pith helmets or long missionary robes and beards, they all seem to have a certain colonial quality to them. In spite of the diversity and the often seemingly casual local scenes, it's as if the bewilderment in the eyes of the photographers reflected on the images, showing their fascination with things that they were unable to understand and which appeared so incredibly foreign and exotic to them.
I recommend anyone interested in the history of Africa to spend some time digging into the database, which contains some truly unexpected gems. As a sample, here's a small selection of the images of the French posing with the natives that I found amusing, but there are many other types of pictures in the Ulysse, and believe it or not most of them don't even include ungraceful Indiana Jones look-alikes wearing pith helmest or suspicious moustaches in them. You'll see if you look for yourself.
The explorer Binger buying karité butter at the market in a village in the Haute Volta region (nowadays Burkina Faso) between 1900 and 1936.
Soldiers of the Forces Françaises Libres near Bangui in the Oubangui-Chari region (nowadays the Central African Republic) in 1940
Missionaries and their students in front of a school in Fada Tikondi in the Haute Volta region (nowadays Burkina Faso) in 1957.
[Poster above of "Visitez le Congo Belge", meaning "Visit Belgian Congo", displaying the Niragongo volcano and an okapi, from 1930]
The first time I went to Congo, I remember noticing a couple of gentlemen wearing extremely elegant and expensive-looking suits on the flight from Paris to Kinshasa. Both the colors and the cut were old-fashioned, and they were wearing long-sleeve shirts, vests, jackets, hats and all despite the sticky heat awaiting us as soon as we landed. Back then I had no idea they were probably sapeurs, or members of the famous society of well-dressed people called Sape.
Although the origin of the word and of the movement is somewhat unclear, it seems that it originated in Congo Brazzaville quite a long time ago as a result of French colonisation.
This is how Héctor Mediavilla Sabaté, a Spanish photographer that has been photographing sapeurs in both Congos since 2003, explains these origins:
The arrival of the French to the Congo, at the beginning of the 20th Century, brought along the myth of Parisian elegance among the Congolese youth working for the colonialists. Many considered the white man to be superior because of their technology, sophistication and elegance. In 1922, G.A. Matsoua was the first–ever Congolese to return from Paris fully clad as an authentic French gentleman, which caused great uproar and much admiration amongst his fellow countrymen. He was the first Grand Sapeur.Respected and admired in their communities, today’s sapeurs see themselves as artists. Their refined manners and impeccable style in their attire bring a little glamour to their humble surroundings.
The famous musician Papa Wemba, who often visited Brazzaville, became fascinated by the sapeurs and their ways. It was him who made popular and gave an international dimension to the Sape phenomenon in the 60’s with his songs. This was probably a reaction to Mobutu's authenticité efforts, which culminated in the Zairianisation between 1972 and the 1990's which involved imposing more traditional outfits and therefore banning the Western suit (instead men were expected to wear the abacost).
Although I didn't see very many sapeurs on the streets of Kinshasa, I have to concede that like many articles on the sapeurs point out, Congolese are proud to be among the most elegant people in Africa (and abroad, I might add). I suspect the sapeurs are really a dying breed, at least in the way described in this article that started Western media's fascination with the sape, or on Mediavilla's photo statement. I guess that's why there's now a whole book to enjoy more pictures of sapeurs titled Gentlemen of Bacongo by Italian photographer Daniele Tamagni [H/T Mister Crew]. And also an exhibition on the book at the London Newcastle Project Space, London, as part of Photomonth from 19-29th November 2009.
One of Papa Wemba's musicians, King Kester Emeneya, is quoted as saying "The white man may have invented clothes, but we turned it into an art" and looking at sapeurs we can only agree with him.
All photos by Daniele Tagni, from the book Gentlemen of Bacongo
