In sunkissed portraits against the pastel tones of the buildings, the red earth and purple skies, Terry finds the “beautiful whilst referring to really some of these big potentially problematic themes.” Photographed sitting in a striped top he captures the elderly man, who shared so much about the place he once lived. “He is obviously the physical photographic representation of all of these people who would have had this attachment to the land that are now forced to live away from a place they love and cherish.” In the book he attributes a quote to him: “if I could return to the river, I would have already started running.”

In images, the photographer draws on his stories: a beautiful white goat recalls the story of the one slaughtered to appease Nyaminyami, the serpent-like river god, who villagers called on for protection after their displacement in 1958 following the construction of the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River. The anger of the river god is said to have caused devastating floods during the dam’s construction as the rock by the entrance to the gorge close to the dam wall site, which was regarded as the home of Nyaminyami, would be buried more than a hundred feet below the water surface. Terry went to the area it was believed to have been sacrificed and stayed with the descendants of the tribe that had carried out this act.

When the Lake Kariba dam wall was opened by the Queen Mother on 17th May 1960, along the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, it was declared an engineering feat: “the white man in Africa conquering the wild Zambezi river,” says Terry. It was supposed to produce the cheapest electricity in the world. But it destroyed more habitat than any engineering project before it. Gone was the life of abundance people described before, where the rich river soil meant most things would grow, and instead was a hard life. The resettled populations had been relocated to areas where the soil is really arid.” They work really hard, they survive off the land, but very meagrely,” says Terry.

The communities who were displaced were promised to be taken care of but as the title of his book alludes to, there was this “sort of grand colonial deception,” he says. “I was meeting with resettled tribes who still 60 years after the construction of this lake don’t have running water, don’t have electricity. The dam was built for hydroelectric power but some of these tribes who live less than 20 to 40 kilometers away from the lake shore still have no electricity,” Terry says. They were promised the ability to go back to fishing, hunting and farming; and told they would be given an allowance and have houses built for them but “there’s a continued lack of acknowledgments of the resettlement terms, things that were promised to these people that were never delivered.”

It’s not always the struggles that Terry captures but he does show life on the lake as it is now: villagers drying maramba fish under electric blue fishing nets; a moth lit up against the sun glistening in the Chibwatata Hot Springs; Charara Point where young boys dive into the lake; the homes of his fixers and friends where photographs crowd the walls; and the silhouette of Zimbabwe’s white cowboys against a barely lit sky with the crescent of the moon overhead. In one beautiful image, the shadow of leaves veils a man’s head. Solomon and Terry formed a dee friendship after he picked him up as a hitchhiker going into town. “He sort of became like my confidant, my fixer, Solomon just knew everyone,” he says. “He’s this big, loud, bubbly, friendly guy that everyone kind of knew and loved.”

These contacts, connections and stories really only happen when you give a project time, says Terry. But it was his personal connection to the land that gives the work its beauty and depth. “My dad wanted to have his ashes scattered at Lake Kariba so that was the beginning of the seed that started the story because when I found that out there were a few more questions in terms of returning to the land, belonging to a place, and I guess specifically in terms of white Zimbabweans, I get the idea of returning to a land that we are originally not from. That struck me as quite powerful, but also problematic and quite complicated.”

They Still Owe Him a Boat is available now via contacting the artist at iamjonoterry.com

“There’s this huge Black community, and a lot of people follow us due to that fact. Because they’re like, ‘OK! Everything Blackness, we can get from this page”

“Initially I was doing mostly West Africa,” says Patrick via video call. “Then later I was like, ‘Damn! Uganda looks really nice – and Zambia and Namibia also’. So I said, ‘OK, now we include East, West, North Africa, actually everybody in Africa definitely deserves to be spoken about’. And later I’d see some events and I’d think, ‘Yo, what the hell is this? It’s European!’. So I decided, let’s create an international issue, where we can just speak to anybody.”

Each issue also includes stories on fashion brands, often international and interesting in their own right. Issue 4 includes a shoot for J-Sabelo, for example, a Zimbabwean- German label. “The brand was honestly born out of a personal necessity to adorn my culture in spaces, far from home, where I felt a crisis of identity, a pure longing for home,” reads a quote from the founder, Aristide Loua. “To me, clothing does reflect one’s particular background, set of emotions, idea of the world, or even reinvention of such. And ever since coming back home, in late December 2015, after a decade living abroad, I have been on constant research, a discovery of excellence in the craftsmanship our local artisans are able to put forth.”

Random Photo Journal’s team is international in scope too, with Patrick based in Nigeria and creative director Justyna Obasi based in Nigeria and Germany; they also take frequent trips to Cape Town. Patrick grew up in Lagos, before moving to Ghana at 13; he studied business administration in Accra, returning to Lagos when he was 26. By then he was a keen photographer, and after a road trip around Nigeria, taking images on the way, launched Random Photo Journal as a vehicle for his own work. 

Then Covid hit, and other people’s photography became a way to see and hear about the world. “I couldn’t travel, I couldn’t photograph any place anymore,” says Patrick. “So I was forced to rely on other people in the places I would love to be at. I just resorted to, ‘OK, so I can’t come to Tanzania right now, but please can I talk to you about Tanzania, and please, can I see some of your images so I can have an idea of what it’s like?”

After lockdown he intended to go back to showing his own work but, having interviewed so many interesting people, and gathered so many stories, found Random Photo Journal had taken on a life of its own. It has been a learning curve, he concedes – he has made issues that lacked barcodes, or information on the spine (making them hard to distribute). But he is also part of a thriving scene and, with fairs such as Lagos Art Book springing up and over 31,000 Instagram followers, the magazine now usually sells out.

“There’s this huge Black community, right?” says Patrick. “And a lot of people follow due to that fact. Because they’re like, ‘OK! Everything Blackness, we can get from this page’.”

@randomphotographyjournal