My Heart Led Me South - Travels In East Africa From 1950 To 1960 Of Street Photographer Juergen Schlichting

My Heart Led Me South from Chocolat Negro on Vimeo.

This was created in dedication to Juergen Schlichting, a German street photographer and writer born in 1936. His extraordinary work covers the 1950s to 1980s. At the age of only 46 Juergen lost his 2 year long battle with lung cancer. The scientist and researcher entrusted his entire photographic work and his writings to his young niece who was like a daughter to him. At the time of his death she was a young girl. For the first time decades later his work is shown to the public.
His photographic work is comprised of tens of thousands of images on film and slides as well as 8mm film rolls. These images are valuable testimonials of a time gone by displayed with an incredible artistic quality and sensuality.
A deeply spiritual man with a strong connection to nature he documented all his travels demonstrating an eternal love of life and a genuine belief in the good of mankind.
He wrote 26 books of poems of which none has been published yet.

In Africa, When An Old Man Dies, It's A Library Burning

 In Africa, when an old man dies, it's a library burning - spoken by Amadou Hampâté Bâ 1960 at UNESCO 

"I graduated from the great university of the Spoken Word taught in the shade of baobab trees."

"The people of Black race, as they are not peoples with a tradition of written literature, have developed the art of speech in a most special manner. While it is not written, their literature is not less beautiful. How many poems, epics, historic and chilvalrous narratives, didatic tales, myths and legends of egregious literary style have so been transmitted through centuries, carried by the prodigious memory of the men with an oral tradition's, passionately in love with beautiful language and almost all poets." Amadou Hampâté Bâ 1985

"If you know that you do not know, then you will know."

All the proverbs are from Amadou Hampâté Bâ and the pictures are from Dr.Juergen Schlichting, my uncle and mentor, a street photographer and writer who was born in 1936. His extraordinary work covers the 1950's to the 1980's. The photos in this post were taken by him during a trip through East Africa in 1959. His images complement perfectly the quotes of Amadou Hampâté Bâ. The life of this great African writer fascinates me over and over again. For the ones who would like to read more about him I have compiled a small summary below.


Amadou Hampâté Bâ was born to an aristocratic Fula family in Bandiagara, the largest city in Dogon territory and the capital of the precolonial Masina Empire (Mali). After his father's death, he was adopted by his mother's second husband, Tidjani Amadou Ali Thiam of the Toucouleur ethnic group. He first attended the Qur'anic school run by Tierno Bokar a dignitary of the Tijaniyyah brotherhood, then transferred to a French school at Bandiagara, then to one at Djenne. In 1915, he ran away from school and rejoined his mother at Kati, where he resumed his studies.
In 1921, he turned down entry into the école normale in Goree. As a punishment, the governor appointed him to Quagadougou with the role he later described as that of "an essentially precarious and revocable temporary writer". From 1922 to 1932, he filled several posts in the colonial administration in Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso and from 1932 to 1942 in Bamako. In 1933, he took a six month leave to visit Tierno Bokar, his spiritual leader.
In 1942, he was appointed to the Institut Francais d"Afrique Noire (IFAN, French Institute of Black Africa) in Dakar thanks to the benevolence of Theodore Monod, its director. At IFAN, he made ethnological surveys and collected traditions. For 15 years he devoted himself to research, which would later lead to the publication of his work L'Empire peul de Macina (The Fula Empire of Macina). In 1951, he obtained a UNESCO grant, allowing him to travel to Paris and meet with intellectuals from Africanist circles.
With Mali's independence in 1960, Bâ founded the Institute of Human Sciences in Bamako, and represented his country at the UNESCO general conferences. In 1962, he was elected to UNESCO's executive council, and in 1966 he helped establish a unified system for the transcription of African languages.
His term in the executive council ended in 1970, and he devoted the remaining years of his life to research and writing. In 1971, he moved to the Marcory suburb of Abidjan, and worked on classifying the archives of West African oral tradition that he had accumulated throughout his lifetime, as well as writing his memoirs (Amkoullel l'enfant peul and Oui mon commandant!, both published posthumously).Wikipedia

Bisimillah Africa

Thank you, Africa

In the year 1962 a 26 year old young man went to East-Africa with a very big camera. For weeks he traveled the land and took thousands of photos because this was his great passion in life. This and traveling and writing poems.

He took pictures of animals, people, flowers, landscapes, villages and cities. He photographed the sky by day and by night. He slept in the bush and listened to the sounds of life.

He looked at everything he saw with intensity and his biggest ambition was to capture the moment.

All the moments, that he had captured with his giant zoom like you catch wild horses - with speed and perseverance, he brought back to life again in his cellar, a converted dark room. He developed each photo with his own hands. And he was enjoying it remembering the smell, taste and feeling of every moment. It brought him happiness. He lived it again.

He had an exciting and rich life. And he moved on with his life and did what he had to do. He saw much more of the world than other people. He died young, twenty years later after the photos were taken. But you can say, he had seen things and had been blessed in many ways.

Before he left this world, a little girl of five years of age played in another cellar and discovered the photos and she looked at them with the same intensity. The photos had been asleep in the dark for many years.The man had not taken them out because he did not know to whom to show them. They were witnesses of his past now to him.

But the girl saw everything through his photos, that he had seen. And she was mesmerized by this vast world of blazing beauty that unfolded in front of her eyes. The man saw the fire in her eyes and was happy.

And she asked him if this was real? If this did really exist? And he said: yes as real as God and the Universe. And he told her, that there was much more that even he had not seen yet.

And that he would give everything to see all that there is of god's creation. If that was ever possible in one life.

From this moment on the girl preferred to play in the cellar close to the big cupboard that contained thousands of the man's photos. Whenever she felt like it, she took them out and studied them. She looked at all of them and some of the images burned her soul. Africa appeared in her dreams. She liked the other countries and places as well but she dreamed always of Africa.

The man let her do whatever she wanted to do with his photos.

And the man was happy because he had seen the passion and the fire in the young girls eyes. He had found a companion now to talk. The girl listened to everything he had to say. His stories never ended and the girl liked that. Everything was perfect and the man started to think of her as his daughter because he had seen part of her soul. And the girl loved him.

After a while he did not hold back any more and gave what he had to give to the little girl. The girl became his sponge, his friend and his audience. They acquired true companionship together.
He took her into nature as often as he could.

He taught her a few things. He said that life has to be respected in all forms. That one has to look close at things and to be patient with people. That one should never be cruel and always look for beauty. Of course the girl did not understand all that because she was only six then. And he did not really speak a lot.

But she understood the photos, because everything he had spoken about was embedded in them. Beauty, patience, respect. And a lot more. The years passed and they were like own blood now. He taught her how to look through a camera and how take photos and develop them.

One evening when the man came home from work the girl made him promise to take her to these places in Africa, and not only to the zoo and to show her everything he had seen. She was a little bit older now, but still very young and she had looked at the photos for years.

It was the images of Africa that she could not get out of her mind.

And the man promised with his full heart to take her there. And of course he meant to keep his promise because that was the way he was.

If he had had the time and had not died young he would have taken the girl to all the places she wanted to see.

When the man died the girl inherited his photos and his poems.

And although she was heart-broken and lonely for a pretty long while - she came to Africa on her own as soon as she could. And has seen things as beautiful as the ones on the photos.