Jono Terry<\/a>\u2019s childhood memories: the 40-degree Zimbabwean heat would finally break, and after a day trying to catch fish, \u201call of these colours would fade into one another on this beautiful expansive lake as day starts turning into night,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s this feeling of peace and tranquility.\u201d For many white Rhodesians, like Terry, summer holidays would be full of adventures, laughter and first kisses on the lake\u2019s banks. But for the indigenous population, who were displaced when the Zambezi river was flooded to create the world\u2019s largest artificial lake and reservoir in 1960, Lake Kariba represents something completely different. Lake Kariba<\/p>\n\u201cEvery time I go back to Zimbabwe there\u2019s so many manifestations of these big colonial hangovers that still exist in contemporary African society,\u201d says Terry. In many ways, he sees Lake Kariba as a symbol of that \u201ccolonial legacy, of broken promises, of displacements, belonging, human rights, environmental destruction, the list goes on and on.\u201d The British South Africa Company colonised Zimbabwe in 1891, calling the area Rhodesia after the company\u2019s founder, Cecil Rhodes. Backed by the British army, they dispossessed millions of Africans and created a system of white minority rule that endured for 90 years with the 1930 Land Apportionment Act even restricting black land ownership in areas of the country.<\/p>\n
Terry has spent the past six and a half years returning to his favourite place in the world as a documentary photographer rather than a tourist, processing how all the things that he had enjoyed about the lake growing up, \u201cconversely meant that other people hadn\u2019t or had lost livelihoods and ways of life.\u201d His new book, They Still Owe Him a Boat, captures the beauty of the man-made lake, the white people that visit it, as well as the families of the 57,000 Tonga people, who had once prospered from the fertile farmlands on the banks of the river before they were evicted. He speaks to the tribe\u2019s elders, including a 90-year-old man, who remembers an idyllic life along the Zambezi River, and told him about the myths and folklore of the valley: \u201cthe social and cultural history, which tends to get whitewashed in the colonial advancement modernisation narrative of things.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Zimbabwean-born, London-based artist problematises his memories of childhood, speaking through his self-published book, They Still Owe Him…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7640,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[106],"class_list":{"0":"post-7639","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-zimbabwe","8":"tag-zimbabwe"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7639\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}