This is the first publication to explore the work of Priya Ramrakha (1935–1968), the pioneering Kenyan photojournalist whose archive was recovered after over forty years. Hailing from an activist family of journalists, Ramrakha was one of the rare African photographers to chronicle the anti-colonial and post-independent struggles across Africa and one of the first to be employed by Time/LIFE. His iconic images defied stereotype, censorship and editorial demand, and captured key moments ranging from Mau Mau in the early 1950s to Africa’s independence movements through the 1960s. Ramrakha’s pan-African lens witnessed moments of political resistance by everyday people and major political figures in Africa and the civil-rights era in the United States, from Jomo Kenyatta and Tom Mboya to Miriam Makeba and Martin Luther King Jr. His work was cut short when he was killed in crossfire covering Biafra’s front lines in 1968.
1. Morley Safer (excerpt from interview, Forward) on the importance and role of photography, international affairs, and war coverage. Safer and a CBS film crew were covering the frontline in Biafra in 1968, and recorded Ramrakha’s death. Excerpts from his interview with Shravan Vidyarthi (500 words)
2. Paul Theroux. Introduction. During his years living in East Africa, Theroux’s friendship with Ramrakha grew out of shared convictions around journalism and story-telling across international borders, and the possibilities of Africa’s newest nations. (3000 words)
3. Shravan Vidyarthi. On the impetus and background on the film, on Priya Ramrakha’s collection, accessing family, local, national and pan-African stories and histories which are seldom told or seen. The socio-political stakes of this historic archive as a public good, in light of disappearing and inaccessible private, lost, state-destroyed and colonial records. Considering the demands for today’s audiences, familiar and uninitiated. (500 words)
4. Sana Aiyar. Ramrakha’s family were active politically and ran a press highly critical of colonial rule in Nairobi. This engagement helps frame Ramrakha’s own politically-charged subjectivities, including his early photography around Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion. Racial segregation in white-settled Kenya relied on governmental control of information, the press, and controlling social access across racial and linguistic divides. Ramrakha’s images of suppression, violence, and internment of Kenyans 1952-1960 (for which
historic reparations were made by the UK in 2013) are considered in light of the possibilities and constraints of photojournalism. (1500 words)
5. John Edwin Mason. Ramrakha’s photography career expanded in Los Angeles when as a student he was drawn to the intensifying US civil rights’ movements, the expansion of conflict photography, and decolonization movements around the world. Ramrakha returned to Kenya on the eve of independence, and became the first African photographer to work for Time/Life. Ramrakha’s photographs are explored as they relate to Time and Life’s coverage of African subjects during the rise of independence movements
in Africa and increasing global coverage of the continent. (2500 words)
6. Drew Thompson. Considers Ramrakha’s mobility, on the front lines and internationally in Africa and beyond. With a rapidly changing infrastructure and political upheaval, the possibilities for news outlets in Africa, Europe and the US were radically and irrevocably altered. Ramrakha’s access to his subjects frame a turbulent period of independence movements, military takeover and rebellion. (2500 words)
7. Erin Haney. On the importance of Ramrakha’s photography, its alliances, its transracial and pan-African solidarities against the larger historical sweep. Ramrakha’s archive exceeds categorization, entailing street photography, political and frontline coverage, and an iconography of rising independence leaders from Tom Mboya to Kwame Nkrumah to Martin Luther King, Jr. Contemplating the ethical frame, the stakes and transnational scope of Ramrakha’s work and his markedly inclusive approach. Ramrakha’s portrayals evoke a more complete citizenry, of individuals in political and social time and of new nations, distant from
the exoticist and racist representations that predominated much of the era’s journalism. (3000 words)
Priya Ramrakha (1935 – 2 October 1968) was a Kenyan photojournalist of Indian background and one of the first Africans to be given a contract by Life and Time magazines. After his education at the Art Center College of Los Angeles (arranged by Eliot Elisofon), Ramrakha began work at Life. In 1963, Ramrakha returned to Africa to cover the independence movement in his native Kenya as one of East Africa's first indigenous photojournalists. Ramrakha went on to cover political and military movements across Africa. In 1968, while covering the Nigerian Civil War with CBS correspondent Morley Safer, he was killed in an ambush near Owerri by Biafran soldiers.
Erin Haney is a writer, curator and Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg and the Smithsonian Institution.
Shravan Vidyarthi is a photographer and filmmaker based in Nairobi and New York.
Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best-known work is The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). He has published numerous works of fiction, some of which were adapted as feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast, which was adapted for the 1986 movie of the same name.
