Our top photographer of the weeks goes to GEORGE KING of Emmanuel bobbie photography,"As a profession photographer who has been in this industry over a decade ,there has been hights and lows for me but one thing that keeps me going is the passion i have for what i do....."
I spent my childhood in sunshine and occasionally in rain. On one weird day, we were playing five aside football on the pavements of North K Road, . I don’t remember whether my team was winning or losing but I guess it didn't really matter in the end.
Normally when it starts raining, it is natural to dash for cover. Even children do that. On that mystical day, half of us did run for cover whilst the other half looked at us, wondering if we were alright.
We were drenched but they were as dry as Harmattan’s backside. And then finally, it hit us all. It was raining only on our side of the pavement. How's that possible? How could only my left had be getting wet whilst my right hand stayed completely dry? How could my left foot be wet and my right foot be dry?
I have had the same kind of experiences in Accra, , Lome, Abidjan, r, Ouagadougou, Monrovia, Banjul, Kampala. It seems to rain only on one side of the pavement in Africa.
Yesterday, I had an exhausting, stressful flight from kumasi to -Accra on an airline that seemed more keen to help me miss my flight than catch it. I arrived and quickly bundled data on Airtel so I could go live for the BBC Focus on Africa’s 100 Women’s series, moderated by the indefatigable Ory Okolloh. As a self-declared African Male Feminist, there isn’t enough platform to share my work on women and I wasn’t going to let this one slip by. After settling into my studio and logging into Skype, the internet connection was so poor, we had to drop the interview. Even the call quality was so poor we couldn’t settle for a phone interview. How can we build a country around the poor always sacrificing for the rich?
******** SOME OF HIS WORKS AND ARTS *******************
So when you turn on the radio and you hear an old soldier and his
politician cronies quoting Churchill and Lincoln and everybody unAfrican
and trying to preach to you about sacrifice, you get pissed. I am
pissed because the only people sacrificing in Africa are these women:
For the first time in my life, I was embarrassed for the country of my
birth. This is not to say, I wasn’t aware all along of the many plagues
that accost us. Far from that. I was embarrassed because, in the past,
anytime the issue of development came up, Ghana got to be compared to
our immediate neighbours; and once you do that, we are not faring badly
at all.
It was inspiring to be saturated in such a creative environment. These
Accra dot Alt guys are really making us proud. If playing our free environment continues
in the direction it's on, it will become very comfortable people fly in from
all over their hood to play and be proud
.I have been seeing this guys on the high street for
years, and yesterday I discovered they were attached to a shrine in ASH town (Ashanti Monfon)
. They are all obviously the Monfon and seeing them performing
traditional rituals yesterday got me wondering if there is a particular
shrine in Ashanti that only has Monfon priests? It will be nice to get some
answers.
I believe Africa will only find itself, when we take the discourse of
African Unity out of the confines of white collared conference rooms and
into the farms and villages and reconnect and salvage whatever is left
of what once worked.
The child that is born will bear the father’s soul but will belong to
the mother’s clan. It is the Akan way. The father meets with the elders
of his clan and a name is conjured for this new member. If it lives
beyond the seventh day, it is assumed the child has come to stay and
must therefore be named; and happily welcomed.
FIND MORE @gEORGE King
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