Priya Ramrakha’s lost futures: a pan-African archive

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Kenyan photographer Priya Ramrakha (1935–1968) has come to recent attention with the recovery of his vast archive in Nairobi. Ramrakha was among the first generation of African photojournalists to cover the continent’s anti-colonial and independence movements, as well as photographing in the US and Europe. He depicted young Kenyans protesting colonial rule, an emerging iconography of leaders and activists in Kenya in the late 1950s, the civil rights era US in the early 1960s, and would go on to cover extensively the frontlines across the continent through the decade. This paper considers a stream of Ramrakha’s imagery from the mid-1950s, during Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion, and through the 1960s, as he covered anti-colonial conflicts and military takeovers post-independence that followed in Aden, the Congo, Rhodesia, Zanzibar and Biafra. Ramrakha focused relentlessly on everyday people caught up within larger patterns of political violence – portrayals of which may merit as calls to attention and urgency, but also raise questions for larger demand for such imagery by the international press. Within his pan-African account of the 1960s, there are striking images of international solidarities and points of optimism, but his larger record is strikingly ambivalent with his deepening coverage of Biafra. The scepticism of image and narration overshadows the earlier optimisms in Ramrakha’s frontline photography, particularly evident in his own contact sheets and photographic records in contrast to the editorial stance and selections, such as those published in Time and LIFE.