/ARTS WEEKLY/BOOKS-AFRICA: A Day in the Life of the Continent

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Farah Khan

JOHANNESBURG, Dec 17 2002 (IPS) - A new book presents a multi-dimensional perspective of Africa – a continent often depicted as a one-dimensional basket case.

Called ‘A Day in the Life of Africa’, the mammoth project sent 100 photojournalists fanning across the continent’s length and breadth.

Modelled on the best-selling, ‘Day in the Life of America’, the brief to those who documented the publication was simple: ”capture images that celebrate a vast, vibrant continent in transition”.

The result is a gripping 288-page, coffee-table book, printed on glossy paper and designed to keep its readers turning and turning. What is its recipe?

While any documentary project could not turn away from the menacing swathe of HIV/AIDS, the continent’s wars and its poverty, these images are included but overshadowed by those of people going about their daily lives.

This is not to say the book is revisionist, only that it is fair in what its lenses have sought to capture and its editors to include.

Djibouti’s buzzing port; a water barge meandering along the Congo; an iron-ore train that cuts through the sands of the Sahara, taking wares to the communities which dot the line present an everydayness, a genuine snap-shot that shows all is not horror and want.

The book’s remit is that of a continent coming to grips with itself – its political context is that of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), with its stated aim of healing and growing.

Many in civil society are often justifiably cynical of NEPAD, but the project has galvanised hope, as expressed in the words of Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu and United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan, both sons of Africa who have made good on the world stage.

”We now dream of a new continent of Africa that is free and democratic, non-racist and non-sexist – that allows all oft is people to become better educated and more economically prosperous…but our vision of this continent is unfinished…” says Tutu.

With a brief to capture progress, the book includes images of work – stark images of railwaymen in Beira, Mozambique; Angolan oil workers tapping a peacetime dividend and the new wealth among black South African managers.

It is about productivity symbolised by the many markets that grace its pages – from the twinkling lights of Marrakesh’s Djemme-el-fena market to the heaped pilefuls of red, red tomatoes at Lagos’s Oshodi market.

And it is a book about hope. A little girl carries her own bench to school in Kuito in Angola, walking past colonial buildings pock-marked by bullets; in Khayalitsha, Cape Town, South Africa, an army of women volunteers armed with brooms rally to a call to clean-up.

In Tanzania a photo-essay shows how a rural clinic is dealing with trachoma, a type of blindness afflicting one in 10 Africans – doctors perform outdoor surgery with a huge boabab for shelter.

But it is not all about messages. For those who want only coffee-table, Africa is here in all her splendour.

The book opens on double page spreads of the Egyptian pyramids, pink in a dawn glow. Its followed by a close-up shot of the lime-green foliage curled over the top of the Victoria Falls, and the awesome, orange dunes of the Namib desert.

Laid out with style and grace and sometimes wit, ‘A Day in the Life of Africa’, for example, can make your heart sore with its stark portrait of the fresh mounds of the Chunga cemetery where an average 50 people who have succumbed to HIV/AIDS are buried everyday.

Turn the page and your heart soars, as the camera plunges you into the centre of the Atlas mountain range of Morocco.

There is wit too. A photo essay by Patrick Roberts takes readers on a fascinating journey down the Congo River, between Kinshasa and Maluku in a barge, one of the few remaining forms of transport in the war years.

After two to four weeks in which the passengers share much, including birth and death, they alight at Maluku. One of the passengers that jumps off first is…a pig.

The book ends as the day ends, with a series of night-shots. Its stops as it starts – at the pyramids, as a white moon peeps out behind the Great Pyramid at Giza, Egypt.