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EXCERPTS FROM PREFACE:
This is not a comprehensive look at the pre-digital yet burgeoning modern Africa I was introduced to. Noticeably under-represented are the middle and upper classes, including the diminished but far from extinct White Kenyans of yore; not left out to suit an editorial agenda, but due to the nature of my work and my own life choices, which placed me among the schoolteachers and street children, peasants and politicians, refugees and rebels, evangelists and artists represented here. Collecting portraits of these people became just as important to me as documenting activities and events for their narrative value, and this became my standard practice.

Assignments for InterAid and other organizations took me farther afield into Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Chad and Malawi. I was invariably and regularly exposed to the disruptive conditions that render families and entire communities dependent on aid in one form or another. The NGO work was gratifying-- I relished the opportunity to support the efforts of the water engineers, agronomists, doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers, veterinarians and others involved in day-to-day fieldwork. Their personal sacrifices were great, often unsung, and occasionally fatal. Few outsiders know that Wilma Gomez, one of several Filipino medical staff who worked for InterAid and later the UN, was executed after being held prisoner by rebels in South Sudan in 1992.

Many of the friends, family and colleagues I moved with, and those I wrote about and photographed were coming of age in nascent, post-independence societies. Geographies and economic disparities imposed by colonial borders were exacerbated by neo-colonial dysfunction, power struggles over land and resources, and ethnic mistrust. Broadly speaking, beyond the tranquility and banality of much of everyday African life (which the Western media ignores by default), that period in the history of the region was rife with upheaval, transition and the pervasive specter of violence: convulsive, anarchic, tragic and too often spectacularly brutal. Civil war and famine in South Sudan, a refugee crisis and war of secession in Eritrea, the Rwandan Genocide, and an AIDS pandemic in Uganda were among the most dramatic events of the time. In Kenya, the birth pains of a multiparty democracy movement left martyrs such as Robert Ouko assassinated in its wake, warnings to all who dared seek a more public forum for their muted anger.

I was fortunate to find opportunities to meet with respected professionals, including some very independent and influential women. Though embroiled at the time in a contentious battle with the Kenyan government, environmental activist Wangari Maathai invited me to her home for three lengthy interviews, patiently answering my questions with a charming combination of intellect and humor. Another fascinating interview excerpted here is with Hanna Simon, an Eritrean freedom fighter-turned journalist. Today Ms. Simon is her country’s ambassador to France, and in a stirring reminder of just how much time has passed since our first meeting, when I spoke with her about this book project she was in the process of preparing for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Eritrean independence. We were brought together by Mehret Gebreyesus of the All-Africa Conference of Churches, who arranged workshops for me with government photographers in Asmara, and with a Pan-African collection of college students in Nairobi. Mehret also organized a documentary project on refugee conditions that took me to AACC-sponsored camps for Mozambicans in Malawi and survivors of the Rwandan Genocide in Tanzania.

Photojournalism originally done for Kenyan publications is represented throughout these pages, and I am proud to have contributed to the Daily Nation, where Managing Editor Wangethi Mwangi was always willing to consider my submissions, as was Joseph Odindo, then with Echo Magazine. Kindred spirits were found at Executive magazine, where Editor-in-Chief Ali Zaidi’s progressive stewardship turned what purportedly was a business journal into a platform for bold coverage of political and social events. Spirited late-night staff meetings were regularly held at Shamura’s, a magendo bar and restaurant in Westlands frequented by politicians, businessmen and journalists. Among our ranks was anti-corruption advocate John Githongo, so respected for his uncompromising journalistic and political ethics that in 2002 President Mwai Kibaki appointed him as the government’s anti-corruption czar.

The topic closest to my heart is that of street children. My interest in their plight, and that of others affected by urban poverty, had me loosely affiliated with the Undugu Society of Kenya from my earliest days in Nairobi. In 1992, Undugu’s Executive Director Ezra Mbogori hired me to run their information department, turning what had been a personal project into a full-time preoccupation. I spent my last two years in Kenya advocating alongside Father Arnold Grol and Undugu’s phenomenal social workers in their war on public and political ignorance and neglect. It remains a Sisyphean task. In a photograph I was able to take surreptitiously at an underfunded, understaffed remand home for street children in Nairobi, the inhumane conditions: scabies, lack of basic nutrition, and dehumanization, are clearly reflected in the faces of the boys. The subtext of the image could not be more obvious, the call to action clear. Yet analogous to the growing homeless crisis in Los Angeles and other American cities, the existence of children surviving by their wiles in the streets and slums of Nairobi persists to this day. Against this backdrop, such photographs merely serve as a nagging reminder of our collective failures.