fotos for food

Village of Bulongo, Kasai Occidental, Congo.
January, 1979.

On December 25th, 1979, the president of Zaire (now the Congo), Mobutu Sese Seko (under the "advice" of the IMF and the World Bank) decided to change the currency of the nation. If your savings were in the old colors, your money was useless. As it turned out, only the rich and connected were able to exchange their money for the new currency, and most of population simply lost their life savings.

Overnight, we were plunged into a barter economy since money was useless. I was a secondary school teacher (science) in those days, in the remote village of Bulongo. As such I had nothing concrete with which to barter. We devised a "fotos for food" campaign, and put a sign up in our window of food items that = 1 foto. People brought food (pineapples, eggs, etc.) and I would take their portrait, send it back to the US for processing and printing, and give them the print the following summer when mail from the US arrived.

Previously, using my camera in the village had been a bad idea...risking linking me to the image of tourists; no one in the village owned such a valuable item. A radio was the height of luxury. Now word spread, and for awhile we lived day-by-day on food exchanged for portraits, until the new money began to trickle out from the cities.

I would ask people to look however they wanted to be in their photo, so this series consists of the self-portraits of the villagers of Bulongo, Winter 1979 through Spring 1980.

This is the first photo in that series and is the village primary school math teacher (Mukanya Badibamba, center) with his wife (Mama Elise, right), their son (also Badibamba), and Elise's sister, Lusamba. Don't know the idol's name.

-K

Lusamba is also in this photo.

Other Congo shots from this series here.