The Mosquito coast


  • Photographer
    Guillaume Bonn
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Date of Photograph
    2011-2013
Story

For many years I have been grappling with the changes that Africa is undergoing, not being sure if changes are good or not and at the same time wishing to retain intact the Africa I grew up in, which is fast fading away into a transforming new one.
It’s a strange feeling I have in me seeing a place that in many ways has define me for many years, being erased in front of my eyes and being unable to do anything about it.
We are told or made to believe that progress is a good thing, that mobile phones and the Internet will transform our lives and that it will make us all happier.
Seeing old parts of Africa being demolished and replaced by skyscrapers, highways, parking lots and all that comes with the consumer world, makes me long for something that has vanished almost entirely.
Luckily, through my travels I am still able to catch a glimpse of this past that I am so familiar with, bubbles of an era mixed with colonial architecture, patinas of dictatorships and wars, and the animal world that we all come from.
At the same time I cannot push away this feeling of sadness I have in seeing all these changes happening in front of my eyes. My antidote has been to document the old Africa struggling to survive and the new one that is emerging.
I was not sure where to start and how could I capture all these emotions and souvenirs
of my childhood, I did not have a beginning or an ending into this journey that I wanted to undertake.
How could I visually link east Africa together and tell that story.
What is it that Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya and Somalia have in common?
I am not entirely sure how this came to me but Mosquitoes and Malaria is what came to mind.
The changes all started a long time ago, it came from very far away, by boat approaching the shores of main land, it happened in different waves; the Arab slavers, the Omani sultans, the Portuguese, the English, Italians, French but it all started from the coast and that’s where it all begins.

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