The Story Behind The Print | Tanzanian Twins
This powerful image has always attracted a lot questions about how I came to take it, who the boys were and what circumstances they were living in.
In August 2010, I had just arrived in Tanzania, having taken a terrifying overnight crossing of Lake Malawi, on a very small and quite overloaded boat which seemed on the verge of sinking throughout the voyage. I was now cycling a long unpaved road across the Ruvuma region of Tanzania's Southern Highlands. A wonderful part of the country, which due to it's remoteness sees very few of tourists, who mainly stick to Zanzibar, The Serengeti and Mount Kilimanjaro. It was on this dusty road that I encountered the boy's family and ended up being a guest for the night in their home and having the opportunity to take this portrait.
From my travel journal that day:
Sunday 8th August 2010
Lipokela. Tanzania
Woke up early and walked around with my camera. New wave of inspiration for photography these days. Breakfast of goat soup, hot fresh milk and chapatis. Bad dirt road. Red sand coating everything and everyone. Contrasting greens and reds. Pulled over to help out a donkey cart with a flat tire and found it impossible to resist the father's hospitality. Found myself sat in a circle of drunk villagers, sharing a huge tub of maize and millet beer. In the evening the whole family sat around a paraffin candle and I drew a cartoon of the day's events, which amused everyone.
My bicycle tools were not much help to change a wheel on a donkey cart of course. Fortunately there was plenty of African ingenuity (In Malawi I had seen someone fix a punctured tyre using bark from a tree), and plenty of little hands for pushing. So the heavy sacks of maize eventually made it down the road.
As on so many other occasions, I was treated to overwhelming hospitality, and the family insisted that I sleep in their house instead of in my tent that night. I don't speak much Swahili but I was able to show them some photos on the screen of my Nikon D40. In the morning before leaving, I insisted on taking a portrait of the family. What really caught my eye was the twin brothers, their skin, their clothes and the mud brick wall behind them all impregnated with the red dust that covers everything along that road.
After returning to the UK, I sent prints of the family portraits to the address they had written down for me. I wonder if they ever arrived. It would be fascinating to return to Lipokela and try to find those boys I photographed 9 years ago.