I’m Glenna Gordon, an American photographer and journalist, presently commuting between West Africa and Brooklyn. Previously, I lived in Liberia. And before that, I lived in Uganda. I’ve traveled and worked in over a dozen countries in Africa.
This blog is named after a found object — a plastic lion that was in a crate of discarded items a friend and a few other artists had gathered. I sat on their roof in Nakasero, Kampala sorting through the crate. On that day, I was looking for something. “You are lost!” a Uganda might say. But, I’d found this discarded kid’s toy, made in China on the cheap, that somehow ended up in East Africa. Something about the hollowed out, paint-chipped figurine appealed to my understanding of this place: I’d never seen a real lion, after all.
... on Why Invisible Children can’t explain away this photo Every morning, I walk to the end of my road and catch a boda into town or the office. There’s always a bunch of them waiting at the stage, and usually, when they see me coming down the street, they race towards me.
Today, the one who got there first, and therefore got the shillings to take me to town, called out to the others as we were driving away, “Suckers!”
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The 27th Comrade says:
Hehehehe.
D
:’oD
:’o)
Hhohohohohohoho.
Aha.
You know …
Ahahahaha.
The Americans stole the bloody word from us! It means … no. He probably meant `circus’ (maybe to refer to their antics), for which we have no word (I mean, we have some harsher versions of `suckers’ that could work pretty well) or he actually meant `suckers’.
[Reply]
— May 18, 2007 @ 2:31 pm