Ongoing project: by Kate Thomas.
“Take time,” they say in Liberia, when they see you walking too fast, working too hard, squeezing too much into your day. As a writer working in developing countries in West Africa, and elsewhere in the world, I’m interested in different grasps of the concept of time.
I could be two hours late to a meeting in Senegal (don’t worry, I try to make that a rarity) and somehow still get there before the other person. In London or New York, by then the day would have long moved on without me. In rural France, waiting for two hours for a bus to turn up might ruin someone’s morning; in rural Sierra Leone, it’s an accepted part of the day. There, the art of waiting has been mastered, carried out with grace.
This project explores concepts of time in countries in transition: Liberia, Libya, Guinea-Bissau, Tunisia, a few others. I’m documenting – through words, images, drawings, interviews – how we measure time and, crucially, what happens between those defining moments in a country’s history…between those moments that are caught by the media.
I visit a street in Liberia’s capital Monrovia, where once-grand, 1920s American-style houses are now home to migrants from Nigeria. I visit the site where a legendary 1940s piano bar once stood; in its place, there’s now a computer games booth. In Libya, I capture moments between the Qaddafi regime and the political future; not moments on the battlefield or in the boardroom, but in the homes and, perhaps, in the thoughts of Libyans.
A somewhat philosophical project on time would not be complete without addressing travel and journeys. I look at what happens on the road, when people in developing countries are traveling from one city or country to another – by plane, by bus, by bush taxi. We may not regard them as such, but those times – those moments that take us from one place to another – are ‘places’ too, and I think they deserve to be documented as such.
