China Road — Tito West Studio

Tito West

Tito West was born in 1985 and was raised across the south Texas brush country and along the coastal islands of the Gulf of Mexico. These landscapes instilled in him a deep fascination for the natural world. He has spent the last 20 years following that fascination by working on extensive projects across Africa and South America and a number of other places in between. Tito is currently working on writing a screenplay and developing a feature film based on his experiences working in Brazil. In 2024, he published his first monograph of photography titled Another Life.
Tito now divides his time between projects in Africa, Brazil and his home in south Texas, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Notes
Another Life
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China RoadEthiopia and Somaliland

When we first saw him he was out walking along a road in a place that seemed a long way from anywhere. The Mursi called this the China Road because the workers building it were a product of that country’s One Belt One Road initiative that had been spreading across the continent for several years now. It ran from South Sudan to the port at Eritrea on the shores of the Red Sea; its sole purpose being a means by which the new country could export its oil reserves to the far east since they have no infrastructure for doing so otherwise.

We spoke to him briefly and he said he would join us in a matter of days and then he continued walking in the direction we had found him only moments before. I would learn that he had a habit of doing this. In the coming weeks he would often disappear on a track, only to resurface two or three days later saying nothing of where he had been. That road connected him to his youth, leading to the country he had fought against in the civil war during the early 1990’s. He was shot in the face and bared the scar of that time, a harsh reminder of his earlier life and the absurdity of politics. Later, I would watch him climb into dense riverine forest after a wounded buffalo, in bush so thick that it required crawling on all fours. At one point he came face to face with the wounded animal and they locked eyes, each unable to move and in that moment he and the animal were one being and I knew that he looked at them not as some other creature but as a part of himself and that he saw things that were not of this world. That’s not to say that they weren’t real, but they were hidden to those not open to the idea of their existence.

As time passed, the rains slowly started and eventually the whole country was soaked and the tsetses were so bad that the Mursi began to move to drier pastures further south. It’s a conundrum that plagues them their entire lives. They depend on the rains for the grasses their cattle graze, but with it comes the relentless onslaught of the flies that carry the fatal disease known as Nagana, a form of sleeping sickness. It was something I had learned many times over the years in different parts of Africa; that life and death are forever joined and that within the essence of the very thing we depend on, lies also our ultimate fate from which we cannot ever escape.

The day came when it was time for us to leave as well, but he would not be coming. His place was here. We traveled east to the desert country beyond Dire Dawa. The maps show it as still being in the control of Ethiopia but the culture and the language there is distinctly Somali and the people think of themselves as belonging to that country, a reminder that borders exist only in the minds of men. As we pressed further into the desert the sun rose over the low hills and camels were out walking along the roadway. The minarets of countless mosques silhouetted on the horizon. Still I continued to think of him and with the war there now I wonder if it makes him think of his youth and the pointlessness of conflict and I hope that he has disappeared on yet another track to that place that only he knows.