This is not a story about revolution.

There is no homecoming in sight.

This is not where the dust settles, this is where it clings to your lungs.

A bullet cannot sit comfortably in postcolonial debates.

You will not find a white flag here, nor a reservoir deep enough to drown white guilt.

There is nothing poetic about a raging fire.

The wind carries the echoes of a war cry,

and the morning brings news of civil unrest.

This is violence at its most profound.

A reckoning. A requiem. A rape.

This is a burial. Bloodshed. Infrared.

There is nothing poetic about a raging fire,

nor about the silence that follows it.

Unless you are on the ground,

the screen remains the only way to see across borders.

I watch the news: a coup in Sudan, an election in Sierra Leone.

Troubles scatter across the continent - each one urgent, each one fading into the next.

Broadcast as fragments across channels,

we inherit a warped reflection of our own reality,

even as we wrestle with our own unstable present.

I sit in the busiest city in South Africa,

and I ask what has led us here -

to this separation, this instability, this unending unrest.

To reach beyond my birth country, I turned to the television -

a window that both reveals and conceals,

a mirror that fractures the truth.

By photographing these transmissions,

I try to speak to the space between what is seen and what is lost.

Through distortion, faces disappear.

Through absence, histories surface.

This erasure becomes language.

A digital wound mirroring the human one -

the identity stripped, displaced, rewritten in the static.

In Africa, almost everything has happened.

Ask anyone with a tongue and an ancestor buried in the ground,

they will tell you.

This is a continent that cannot unbind itself

from its colonial ghosts,

that lives still in the echo of empire.

Here, where men are made martyrs for pseudo-freedoms,

and women are unremembered,

removed of legacy and legend.

And yet, life persists.

In the chaos. In the dark.

Through indoctrination, through disaster, through prayer.

Life continues,

sometimes only as a rememory.