[cloud] would like to take a moment to reflect on the achievement that is the Bakashimika International Photography Festival.

On 14 October 25, we hosted the first instalment of our Spill the ‘T’ professional development talks. Dr Kerstin Hacker was our guest speaking about the development of the Bakashimika International Photography Festival. She was joined by her Co-Director, Patrick Chilaisha. We want to reflect on the significance of this presentation for Critical Wednesday.

The Bakashimika International Photography Festival is the first of its kind in Zambia, and the only festival like it in Southern Africa. This is important on many levels. As Kerstin explained, Zambia’s relationship with photography has been difficult. For Zambia and its people, photography has been equated with colonialism. Its photographic history was of the white coloniser claiming the open unpeopled landscape, teaching the uneducated and unsophisticated native population to work unfamiliar machinery, or depicting Zambians as pictorial ‘trophies’ captured by the camera.¹ There remains a legacy of mistrust of photography. Photographic equipment, far from being a playful, casual, or even beloved apparatus for self-expression, has been contentious in its use and ownership. For a long time, Zambians were not allowed to own cameras. So, there is a sense of the camera being foreign and dangerous. There is only one photography course at an expensive private school, which means, even now it is not possible to study for a degree in photography in Zambia.² This is the historical context, in extreme brevity.

The importance of what Kerstin and her colleagues have achieved deserves some attention, given that history. Through long term engagement with the photographic community in Zambia, Kerstin and her Zambian colleagues have nurtured creatives who are interested in photography as a medium of self-expression, in all its forms. Building on a legacy of workshops, exhibitions, and zines they have created together in Zambia, this work has culminated in the Bakashimika International Photography Festival. There are some key points to acknowledge about this achievement, which offer some takeaways.

1. Festivals don’t come from nowhere — Kerstin and her colleagues had a history of working together on projects in Zambia, which meant not only were they comfortable working together, but the wider community knew about the work they had been doing. This familiarity enabled acceptance.
2. Bring your community to the project — Big ideas need resilient allies, which Kerstin and her colleagues were for each other. The moral support and comradery of working with trusted colleagues cannot be underestimated in its material value for achieving results.
3. Work your resources for support — Each member of the collaborative team had an area of expertise and network connections, and they worked these resources for the things they needed to make Bakashimika happen, for example, raising funding, securing exhibition space, obtaining publicity and press coverage, liaising with local government and institutional support, and connecting with photographers who had lived the history.
4. Work with clear aims for those represented in the idea — The Bakashimika team identified a clear set of mission aims for the Bakashimika festival, and they followed these rigorously at every step of the festival development using them as guidelines for decision making. Their aims were based on the actual people or causes they wanted to progress through the festival, so there was always a tangible anchor for their work and development.
5. Place is a colleague in the project — Finally, all the collaborative colleagues working on this project realised that the place of Zambia was a collaborator and a colleague in their work. Zambian colonial photographic history, the Country’s location in Africa, its political history of independence all contributed to how Bakashimika was developed and realised, and in turn, the Bakashimika festival reflected Zambia’s identity of place.

While there is still much work to be done to make the Bakashimika International Photography Festival sustainable for the long term, it has already had one notable outcome — it attracted visitors from surrounding countries to Zambia bringing income into the Zambian economy and raising its identity as an important voice in the photographic arts of the region. This is what the arts do for every economy.

If you would like more information about the Bakashimika International Photography Festival, visit their website bakashimika.com. If you would like to financially support the development of Bakashimika, contact us for more information. You can learn more about Dr Kerstin Hacker and her research on the Anglia Ruskin Website.

1. These descriptions reflect the photographic imagery of the time, and are used to demonstrate the colonialist attitudes that persisted when these historical images were taken. ↩︎
2. The details in this paragraph come form Kerstin’s talk and information shared through the Q&A with Kerstin and Patrick Chilaisha. ↩︎