2019
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 heading 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 continue 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.
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 heading 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 continue 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.
2014 - Present
In Portuguese the name means “Thick Forest” but all I can remember is the sign that pointed the way to the Kalapolo village on the new road they had cut through the forest outside of Querência - a small farming and Gaucho town in the frontier region, and how the sign lay there in the dust of a plowed soybean field. The forest, what remains of it, stands a little way off in the distance, a final barrier separating two worlds. I remember emerging from the tunnel like road with the high canopy overhead and immediately seeing members of the Kalapalo in full traditional dress performing a ceremony in the center of the village and the grass huts all around. It was like crossing into another dimension. We had left one world behind in Querência with it’s Caterpillar and John Deer dealerships and where Brazilians with agricultural degrees from universities in Texas and Kansas wore hats with company logos like JBS, Cargill and ADM emblazoned on the front.
I knew then, as the Kalapalo probably did too, that the road was both a connection to the modern world and a severing of the traditional one, a final dropping of the green curtain that kept the foreign NGO’s and corporate monarchies, here under the guise of environmentalism, at bay. It was only a few years ago that these “enviromentalists” embargoed the region to a breaking point and the hardware store in town was forced to stop selling rope due to all the suicides.
I came under the same misplaced notion, only I called it conservation, but after years of being here and talking to the people I see the truth and I know that we are reliving history, the story of what we did to our own indigenous cultures is playing itself out all over again in the southern Amazon basin of Brazil.
Driving north out of town, we passed a tall stand of forest where a maned wolf skirted the edge and then vanished like an apparition behind a veil of green that was its birthright. We crossed clear streams with tall reed-beds where he said they used to spearfish and he told me of how you could hear the clacking of the anaconda’s teeth under water and how you had to keep an eye out for electric eels, but aside from that the fishing was good.
Later that night, in the Xingu, we dined on smoked peacock bass served on a basket made of reeds and sprinkled salt spiced with small red biquinho peppers and wrapped the fish in pieces of torn manioc while we attended a meeting of the elders in the center of the village where they bury their dead. We listened to conversations about the future of the tribes in the Xingu and how the culture among the young people is changing.
Several nights before our arrival a jaguar had come into the village and had killed a woman, but still we slept outside in our hammocks even though the men told us we were crazy. It would come back they said. Three nights later, in the quiet calm after a large gust front, it did.
Back at the camp on the banks of the Rio das Mortes I watched a fire erupt across the river and saw the forest canopy explode into flames and a few days later as I climbed to the top of a mountain in the Serra do Roncador I watched a flock of Red Macaws take flight and then entered the Cave of Pezinhos where the impressions from both human and animal tracks line the walls, many of them with six fingers. I have tried to understand the meaning of this place ever since, but I doubt that I ever will.
I knew then, as the Kalapalo probably did too, that the road was both a connection to the modern world and a severing of the traditional one, a final dropping of the green curtain that kept the foreign NGO’s and corporate monarchies, here under the guise of environmentalism, at bay. It was only a few years ago that these “enviromentalists” embargoed the region to a breaking point and the hardware store in town was forced to stop selling rope due to all the suicides.
I came under the same misplaced notion, only I called it conservation, but after years of being here and talking to the people I see the truth and I know that we are reliving history, the story of what we did to our own indigenous cultures is playing itself out all over again in the southern Amazon basin of Brazil.
Driving north out of town, we passed a tall stand of forest where a maned wolf skirted the edge and then vanished like an apparition behind a veil of green that was its birthright. We crossed clear streams with tall reed-beds where he said they used to spearfish and he told me of how you could hear the clacking of the anaconda’s teeth under water and how you had to keep an eye out for electric eels, but aside from that the fishing was good.
Later that night, in the Xingu, we dined on smoked peacock bass served on a basket made of reeds and sprinkled salt spiced with small red biquinho peppers and wrapped the fish in pieces of torn manioc while we attended a meeting of the elders in the center of the village where they bury their dead. We listened to conversations about the future of the tribes in the Xingu and how the culture among the young people is changing.
Several nights before our arrival a jaguar had come into the village and had killed a woman, but still we slept outside in our hammocks even though the men told us we were crazy. It would come back they said. Three nights later, in the quiet calm after a large gust front, it did.
Back at the camp on the banks of the Rio das Mortes I watched a fire erupt across the river and saw the forest canopy explode into flames and a few days later as I climbed to the top of a mountain in the Serra do Roncador I watched a flock of Red Macaws take flight and then entered the Cave of Pezinhos where the impressions from both human and animal tracks line the walls, many of them with six fingers. I have tried to understand the meaning of this place ever since, but I doubt that I ever will.
2016 - 2017
These photographs were made during a several week trip into the rainforest of southern Cameroon, along the Boumba River, not far from the Congo border.
I have been back a few times since this inaugural journey, but it is my first impression of the country there that has stayed with me - a collection of flashback-like memories and strangely cinematic moments that are beyond my ability to organize into any sort of linear narrative. Certain light recalls to mind the exhaustion and boredom of two-day drives on forest roads, the smell of alcohol on the breath of a drunken army officer with malaria yellowed eyes at some unknown checkpoint somewhere.
I think of river crossings on old barges or dugout canoes, salmonella poisoning, forest fires and massive storms. I hear the violent scream of a silverback gorilla deep in the forest - shaking the trees, beating his chest, then vanishing. I think of rain, dust and bees; the reenactment of a hunt and a bongo skull dancing in the half light of the fire. I see a French bible and pygmies with sharpened teeth, dead elephants, 7.62mm shell casings and the barefoot track of a lone poacher. I recall stories of Loa Loa - the eye worm parasite and how the old timers used to pour paraffin on their feet after crossing rivers. I think of massive columns of ants and chimpanzees in the early morning mist and see logging trucks overturned on forest roads. The snakes - Green Vipers, Gaboon Vipers and a Mamba in the canopy. I see it all and I think I finally understand what Joseph Conrad meant when he said, “It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.”
I have been back a few times since this inaugural journey, but it is my first impression of the country there that has stayed with me - a collection of flashback-like memories and strangely cinematic moments that are beyond my ability to organize into any sort of linear narrative. Certain light recalls to mind the exhaustion and boredom of two-day drives on forest roads, the smell of alcohol on the breath of a drunken army officer with malaria yellowed eyes at some unknown checkpoint somewhere.
I think of river crossings on old barges or dugout canoes, salmonella poisoning, forest fires and massive storms. I hear the violent scream of a silverback gorilla deep in the forest - shaking the trees, beating his chest, then vanishing. I think of rain, dust and bees; the reenactment of a hunt and a bongo skull dancing in the half light of the fire. I see a French bible and pygmies with sharpened teeth, dead elephants, 7.62mm shell casings and the barefoot track of a lone poacher. I recall stories of Loa Loa - the eye worm parasite and how the old timers used to pour paraffin on their feet after crossing rivers. I think of massive columns of ants and chimpanzees in the early morning mist and see logging trucks overturned on forest roads. The snakes - Green Vipers, Gaboon Vipers and a Mamba in the canopy. I see it all and I think I finally understand what Joseph Conrad meant when he said, “It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.”
2014 - 2020
Coming here was an attempt at salvation, a final grasp at living up to a legacy that was already sealed in the archives of history. All families have their period of greatness and ours had long dissipated by the time I came of age. There was nothing left for me in Texas, or so I thought.
So I set out searching for my own place in the world, a place where I could create a new legacy, one not yet written in stone, but one that was mine to write. This search set me on a course of migrations, nomadic movements that continue to haunt my thoughts.
Even now, when I make a cup of tea - a habit that has stayed with me - and I pour the milk and the clouds form, I am instantly taken back there, back to Africa, to the farmhouse in the foothills with the fog rolling down from the great mountain. I think of chai tangawizi next to the warmth of a fire and see the candelabra tree in the garden where the two lions laid roaring one morning.
Moments in time are burned into my memory as if they happened yesterday. I remember falling asleep as the sun rose after being up all night with the lions roaring just beneath our beds in the machan. And the time the whole country had turned green with the coming of the early rains and the grass had started to grow high all around us and we nearly stepped on the two female lesser kudu as we walked out away from the road.
I close my eyes and hear the guttural chanting of Maasai Morani at an ngoma in a village south of Arusha. I see the diplomats and foreign aid workers on the veranda at the new Sheraton and the purple flowers of the jacaranda tress that overhang the roadways. I think of long drives on unpaved roads or flights to some remote bush airstrip somewhere. I see myself waking up in a canvas tent next to the river with the hippos grunting in the early hours of morning.
It all feels like a dream and that any minute I might open my eyes and find myself sitting at the edge of small fire in a camp somewhere in the gray dawn of early morning and stirring the ashes from the night before the ironwood fire would come back to life and I’d pull the kettle from the coals, making a cup of tea and watching the sun rise over the river in the distance, waiting to see what the day holds. Maybe it’s not a dream, but a feeling, some foretelling of days that lie ahead.
So I set out searching for my own place in the world, a place where I could create a new legacy, one not yet written in stone, but one that was mine to write. This search set me on a course of migrations, nomadic movements that continue to haunt my thoughts.
Even now, when I make a cup of tea - a habit that has stayed with me - and I pour the milk and the clouds form, I am instantly taken back there, back to Africa, to the farmhouse in the foothills with the fog rolling down from the great mountain. I think of chai tangawizi next to the warmth of a fire and see the candelabra tree in the garden where the two lions laid roaring one morning.
Moments in time are burned into my memory as if they happened yesterday. I remember falling asleep as the sun rose after being up all night with the lions roaring just beneath our beds in the machan. And the time the whole country had turned green with the coming of the early rains and the grass had started to grow high all around us and we nearly stepped on the two female lesser kudu as we walked out away from the road.
I close my eyes and hear the guttural chanting of Maasai Morani at an ngoma in a village south of Arusha. I see the diplomats and foreign aid workers on the veranda at the new Sheraton and the purple flowers of the jacaranda tress that overhang the roadways. I think of long drives on unpaved roads or flights to some remote bush airstrip somewhere. I see myself waking up in a canvas tent next to the river with the hippos grunting in the early hours of morning.
It all feels like a dream and that any minute I might open my eyes and find myself sitting at the edge of small fire in a camp somewhere in the gray dawn of early morning and stirring the ashes from the night before the ironwood fire would come back to life and I’d pull the kettle from the coals, making a cup of tea and watching the sun rise over the river in the distance, waiting to see what the day holds. Maybe it’s not a dream, but a feeling, some foretelling of days that lie ahead.