Sapana, Kenya’s Pokot People National Geographic January 1982
Murray Roberts
Pan-African Festival. Delegation from Kenya. ALGERIA. Algiers. Pan-African Festival © Bruno Barbey/Magnum Photos
George Rodger. Young Masai moran wearing the ceremonial headgear at a circumcision, Kenya, 1979.
Swahili woman in Lamu, Kenya
National Geographic November 1999
Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher henna
A Maasai man in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, 1966, photo by Eliot Elisofon.
UMOJA, a feminist village in East Africa, Bruno Fert:
Three hundred and eighty kilometres North of Nairobi, a clan of Samburu shepherds - closely related to the Masai - is gathered in the middle of the savana for the circumcision ceremony of their teenagers. At sunrise, twenty adolescents boys aged between 12 to 22 undergo the rite of passage that will bring them into the adult world. By their side, sisters and cousins from 12 to 15 came before the knife as they also experienced ritual excision. Despite the official ban on female genital mutilation introduced in Kenya since 2001, the girls know that without enduring the ritual their chances to find a spouse and to get married would be seriously compromised. In the midst of this, the wife of a local chief protests in vain. Rebecca Lolosoli has been campaigning against the practice of female circumcision, though her pleas fall upon deaf ears. At her forties, the charismatic Lolosoli was invited to the UN to speak about the so close issue to her heart, and happens to be founder of Umoja (“Unity” in Swahili), a village where the law is in the hands of women. But the road to emancipation, as she knows, is still a long one!
Algae gives a red color to the hyper-saline waters of Lake Natron, Kenya. George Steinmetz.