Publisher's Synopsis
For years the Northern Kenyan was a forgotten frontier. It was so dire that the census did not include the population in the national count and it was where errant government and law enforcement officials were sent as a punishment. I remember learning the phrase 'hardship allowance' related to all those who worked in that region. As a teenager, I got acquitted with the North because one of two of my best friends went to school there, it was super hard to understand why they were sent there when there was a whole country to go to. At age 19, I had saved a bit and got the simplest consumer hobbyist plastic film camera by Kodak, got three 36 film rolls, took my bag pack, and headed North. The last bit was easy enough, there was a tarmacked road that after half a day led us to a small town called Isiolo. We convoyed to the edge of out of town on tops of trucks carrying cattle that were being transported to Wanjir, Kenyan north-most town, and to traders in Somalia. At the edge of town, the police convoy asked us to alight from the truck, had a rougher inspection then the starkest thing happened. They asked us to pray to the God we all believed in, and for nonbelievers to pray anyway since the journey we were embarking on was seriously dangerous. This is the point when I started wondering what the F**** I was doing here. I left my suburban home in the leafy Nairobi to take a few pictures in the North. There wasn't turning back. The issue was, there were tracks and sand tracks and barely any roads. To make it worse, the tracks meander through goes and valleys and bandits would attack from vantage point to steal the cattle and other valuables. That was why the vehicles traveled in a convoy and there was a police escort in what was, in essence, a suicide mission. Years on, when I had an opportunity to go back to the North, I was a bit apprehensive. The idea of dealing with bandits and dust storms, crosswinds, and broken trucks in the middle of nowhere was not appealing at all. When the one and half hour flight option fell through, I thought a road trip can't be as bad. What I was not prepped for, was how good the road was, right from the capital, Nairobi all the way to Adis Ababa, Ethiopia. The road was buttery smooth. Here are some of the most remarkable images from this trip.
