ARCHIVE 218 – KIKUYU GIRL

 

 

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Little Kikuyu girl at a wedding near Thika, Kenya; late 1970s.

The bottle of Fanta fizzy orange is about 10 inches tall – and evidently her treasure!

She’s chewing the white Fanta bottle top while wondering with horror what this fat mazungu (white man) is about to do to her!

OM-2 with 75-150 Zuiko; Kodak colour transparency.

UPDATE: This brings back a lot of memories, not least the day glow colours of much of the local knitwear, which in this case fits so well with the colour of her drink.  Kenya is a land of colour, I remember returning there from visits to England and being visually stunned and uplifted by the blazing brilliance and radiance all around.  There are two factors in this.  First, of course, the country is straddled by the equator, and the sun simply blazes down from high overhead for much of the day – your eyeballs are hammered back into your skull – and especially so on days when the sun is obscured by thin, white stratus clouds.  And to add to this effect, this photo was taken somewhere around a mile above sea level – so not only were we being blasted by the light, but we were somewhere around 5,000 feet up in the clear air – just to make sure we got the full effect!

But the other thing of course are the tropical colours – vegetation, birds, insects, clothes – absolutely wonderful to behold.  There are to be sure drabber places there too, particularly in the wilder and more arid areas, but they still have a wild beauty that stays with me.

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