Growing up in 1980s Congo-Brazzaville there wasn’t a lot of technology going around. Computer games, cellphones and tablets were alien concepts and we spent our days in the streets playing, when we weren’t at school or doing homework. The streets of Pointe Noire were safe; we turned them into soccer fields, racing tracks, a place to test drive our (handmade) cars with friends. It was a lot of fun; we went from being soccer players one day to car or house builders the next. All in the mud and sand. Life was good.

Today is different.

All the cars we built as children are now being bought already made of plastic. Running around with friends all day is replaced by sitting in front of the television to watch cartoons. The soccer games are now played sitting on the couch in front of the computer or a console.

feet-n-cars-4I now live in South Africa, but go home every winter season to visit my mother, eat Congolese food, and meet childhood friends. I bring my camera along. This year was very special to me. Children who live in the vicinity of my mom’s house in a neighborhood called Fond Tie Tie, gave me a gift: They had designed and made their own cars  complete with sound system, red lights or flowers. I was back in my childhood. I was eight years old again.

The children are poor and the cars are usually made of recycled materials such as food cans, old sandals, metals and wood. I was quickly introduced to the community of young car designers. As they got to know me, they showed me the new designs they had created. The “feet & cars” project was born. Amazed by the creativity, designs and joy of life the children exhibited, I started photographing just their feet and the cars.

The world has become a new playground, not quite the same as when I was growing up, however these children really reignited my hope for this new generation as one seldom sees such enthusiasm, joy and creativity in kids these days like I saw this year in Congo. They still live in a world where technology hasn’t robbed them of their creativity and joy in playing.

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Further Reading

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.