SOHIE
TO THROW OFF MELANCHOLY
Bagamoyo, a rapidly growing town in Tanzania, is moulded by the historic encounters at the intersection of land and sea.
Bwagamoyo, ‘to throw off melancholy’, was the name given by caravan porters that reached the shore at the end of a four to six month journey from the African interior. It was the place of reunion, an oasis of worldly pleasures and promise.
During the 19th Century, the town emerged as a principal caravan entrepot on the east coast of Africa. It gained global prominence due to the formation of the slave trade as it connected the African hinterland with the Zanzibar slave markets.
Soon after establishing Bagamoyo as the capital of the German East African colony, the Arabian stone town was expanded with the necessary infrastructure and buildings to support the German Colonial Administration. During the First World War, the battle for Bagamoyo was won by the British and the town was officially subsumed by the new Tanganyika Protectorate in 1919.
The struggle for independence followed, marked by the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) stronghold in Bagamoyo. Independence in 1961 led to a socialist reform of the newly formed country. Bagamoyo entered gradual decline as its role was reduced to be the supporting hinterland of agriculture commodities to the Dar es Salaam.
The turn of the millennium announced a new era, marked by a new set of aspirations, enforced by global economic dynamics and emerging capitalistic values. In recent years, the looming construction of the largest container port of East Africa and Special Economic Zone in the area, led by Chinese and Oman investment, unleashed a trajectory of rapid change and unprecedented development which dramatically alters the physical environment as well as the social and cultural attributes of society.
The photography series were taken over the past three years, wandering the streets of Bagamoyo. They intend to reflect the fluidity of the modern condition which gradually infuses a traditional society and comes with processes of social change and reconceptualisation of place, locality and identity. Historic territories are being recodified as the imaginary is continuously shifting, defined by the old and new worlds, perception of primitive and modern, global and local claims.
Young men are the central protagonist, epitomising the fall of a traditionalist society, aware of their condition marked by ambiguity and contradiction. Being modern represents a disorientating experience whereby one finds oneself in a cycle of perpetual disintegration and renewal.
As much the physical space as the imaginary dimension of Bagamoyo are continuously reborn, constructed upon the layers of personal and world histories which fuse at points in time. The seashore has been conquered, moulded and inscripted by man through the centuries. Today, it is a terrain vague where the old and new converges, and the world of traditional shipbuilders and fishermen coexist with swimmers, joggers and tourists.
The shore embodies apparent oppositions, sited between memory of hardship and idyllic beauty, the local ways of life and the global gaze. What was once a battleground is now for many a site of hopes and projected dreams, a place outside modernity’s crushing homogeneity, deflecting the relentless pressures of change.
