“Broken promises”: Jono Terry investigates a ‘colonial hangover’ at Lake Kariba, Zimbabwe

The Zimbabwean-born, London-based artist problematises his reminiscences of childhood, talking by way of his self-published e-book, They Still Owe Him a Boat

Early evenings on Lake Kariba maintain a particular place in Jono Terry’s childhood reminiscences: the 40-degree Zimbabwean warmth would lastly break, and after a day attempting to catch fish, “all of these colours would fade into one another on this beautiful expansive lake as day starts turning into night,” he says. “There’s this feeling of peace and tranquility.” For many white Rhodesians, like Terry, summer season holidays can be filled with adventures, laughter and first kisses on the lake’s banks. But for the indigenous inhabitants, who had been displaced when the Zambezi river was flooded to create the world’s largest synthetic lake and reservoir in 1960, Lake Kariba represents one thing utterly completely different. Lake Kariba

“Every time I go back to Zimbabwe there’s so many manifestations of these big colonial hangovers that still exist in contemporary African society,” says Terry. In some ways, he sees Lake Kariba as a logo of that “colonial legacy, of broken promises, of displacements, belonging, human rights, environmental destruction, the list goes on and on.” The British South Africa Company colonised Zimbabwe in 1891, calling the world Rhodesia after the corporate’s founder, Cecil Rhodes. Backed by the British military, they dispossessed thousands and thousands of Africans and created a system of white minority rule that endured for 90 years with the 1930 Land Apportionment Act even limiting black land possession in areas of the nation.

Terry has spent the previous six and a half years returning to his favorite place on this planet as a documentary photographer somewhat than a vacationer, processing how all of the issues that he had loved concerning the lake rising up, “conversely meant that other people hadn’t or had lost livelihoods and ways of life.” His new e-book, They Still Owe Him a Boat, captures the fantastic thing about the man-made lake, the white those that go to it, in addition to the households of the 57,000 Tonga folks, who had as soon as prospered from the fertile farmlands on the banks of the river earlier than they had been evicted. He speaks to the tribe’s elders, together with a 90-year-old man, who remembers an idyllic life alongside the Zambezi River, and advised him concerning the myths and folklore of the valley: “the social and cultural history, which tends to get whitewashed in the colonial advancement modernisation narrative of things.”