personal photographic work / recent work
The photographic work shown here and accessed through this link is called "The Architecture of Ubuntu" and features some aerial pictures of African informal settlements , which is a project I started in May/June 2008 and which continues in 2009/10
Having worked on many community projects in Africa, I have always been fascinated by life in the " slum" - the vibrancy and the hardship in this beating heart of urban Africa. For this project I chose two places as my starting point, two of Africa's biggest informal settlements. Kibera in Nairobi and Cape Flats in Cape Town, South Africa both of which contain 1 to 1.5 million people.
One of the main and somewhat straightforward goals of this project is to show the size of these communities from the air and get a feel for the scale and living conditions. I felt this was worthwhile because mainstream western media does not often represent these communities as anything but problem areas or see them as being significant other than pools of labour for the globalization machine.
Ubuntu in Africa is a word which roughly translated means "people are people through other people" thus we do not live as one and Africans traditionally see their actions as individuals as being mutually dependent and hopefully beneficial to wider community. This seems easy to understand in the context of a village environment but less easy to understand in the setting of an informal settlement where more than 1 million people live together without often access to clean water, medical facilities or indeed to well developed civil society organizations. From my visits to Kibera, It soon became obvious that amongst the hierachys that exist in any community - and the absolute degrees of poverty in the slum, these communities whilst they have their share of informal alliances and beyond the rule of law reputation -there are also some rules and people demonstrate layers of interdependency and community co-operation that allow resources like water and power as well as security to be tangible and available to anybody willing to pay, work or exchange a service for something else. So Id say that the notion of Ubuntu is alive and well and this can only be good for Africa..
The cape flats is one of the fastest growing urban populations in the world. The truth for most people living in slum conditions is that for now this is their home, and they may have learnt to live without great resources or community representation, and they may have given up on authorities and government and are just getting on with life... or as one South African author called it However if my own experiences meeting people who live in these areas are true to life, it seems that there is plenty of resilience and vitality left in the communities of South Africa and Kenya. Whilst communities do posses high levels of crime - they are also collectively self reliant and so have to work out their problems. The question is what will happen in both locations in 5 or 10 years time when these slums grow to twice there current size given the reluctance of authorities in both countries to deal with the social realities and political issues that the growth of informal settlements raise ? Or indeed do the residents of these areas really care about being part of the first world system ?
The mainstream media largely portrays slums as entities which the state does not have a positive view of and cannot afford to manage adequately. It therefore seems ironic that from here the reservoirs of creative talent that include contributors to music, dance, design, fashion, business and street level political activism and this is the first stop for anyone migrating from village to city. For others who watch from a distance it's just a poor urban population already at melt down...little do they know ... this is as one South Afgrican writer said, a " beautiful struggle".....
The scale of informal settlements is breathtaking, a mass of intangible, undefined, seething vibrant... humanity living day to day lives based on self reliance and community interdependence.
I hope to add photographic material of Lagos, Nigeria in late 2009 and Latin American cities in 2010.
The photographic work shown here and accessed through this link is called "The Architecture of Ubuntu" and features some aerial pictures of African informal settlements , which is a project I started in May/June 2008 and which continues in 2009/10
Having worked on many community projects in Africa, I have always been fascinated by life in the " slum" - the vibrancy and the hardship in this beating heart of urban Africa. For this project I chose two places as my starting point, two of Africa's biggest informal settlements. Kibera in Nairobi and Cape Flats in Cape Town, South Africa both of which contain 1 to 1.5 million people.
One of the main and somewhat straightforward goals of this project is to show the size of these communities from the air and get a feel for the scale and living conditions. I felt this was worthwhile because mainstream western media does not often represent these communities as anything but problem areas or see them as being significant other than pools of labour for the globalization machine.
Ubuntu in Africa is a word which roughly translated means "people are people through other people" thus we do not live as one and Africans traditionally see their actions as individuals as being mutually dependent and hopefully beneficial to wider community. This seems easy to understand in the context of a village environment but less easy to understand in the setting of an informal settlement where more than 1 million people live together without often access to clean water, medical facilities or indeed to well developed civil society organizations. From my visits to Kibera, It soon became obvious that amongst the hierachys that exist in any community - and the absolute degrees of poverty in the slum, these communities whilst they have their share of informal alliances and beyond the rule of law reputation -there are also some rules and people demonstrate layers of interdependency and community co-operation that allow resources like water and power as well as security to be tangible and available to anybody willing to pay, work or exchange a service for something else. So Id say that the notion of Ubuntu is alive and well and this can only be good for Africa..
The cape flats is one of the fastest growing urban populations in the world. The truth for most people living in slum conditions is that for now this is their home, and they may have learnt to live without great resources or community representation, and they may have given up on authorities and government and are just getting on with life... or as one South African author called it However if my own experiences meeting people who live in these areas are true to life, it seems that there is plenty of resilience and vitality left in the communities of South Africa and Kenya. Whilst communities do posses high levels of crime - they are also collectively self reliant and so have to work out their problems. The question is what will happen in both locations in 5 or 10 years time when these slums grow to twice there current size given the reluctance of authorities in both countries to deal with the social realities and political issues that the growth of informal settlements raise ? Or indeed do the residents of these areas really care about being part of the first world system ?
The mainstream media largely portrays slums as entities which the state does not have a positive view of and cannot afford to manage adequately. It therefore seems ironic that from here the reservoirs of creative talent that include contributors to music, dance, design, fashion, business and street level political activism and this is the first stop for anyone migrating from village to city. For others who watch from a distance it's just a poor urban population already at melt down...little do they know ... this is as one South Afgrican writer said, a " beautiful struggle".....
The scale of informal settlements is breathtaking, a mass of intangible, undefined, seething vibrant... humanity living day to day lives based on self reliance and community interdependence.
I hope to add photographic material of Lagos, Nigeria in late 2009 and Latin American cities in 2010.
