Africa Is a Country

Photography: 'New Men'

Photography: 'New Men'

By
Sean Jacobs

[slideshow]

From new work by Cape Town-based photographer Araminta de Clarmont. A photo series on ikrwala (young Xhosa initiates) posing in new clothes–symbolizing their status as “new men”–after returning from initiation school. De Clarmont photographed the young men, who all still attend high school, in the classrooms where they get a formal education: “… As their suits demand instant respect – so too do the men wearing them. Yet what may be the validity of believing in a fresh start, when one’s surroundings have not changed as one has oneself?“

Further Reading

Goodbye, Piassa

The demolition of an historic district in Addis Ababa shows a central contradiction of modernization: the desire to improve the country while devaluing its people and culture.

And do not hinder them

We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.