Until 17 August 2013, central Ljubljana is home to an exhibition entitled ‘Heroic Africa’, which unites three photographic projects by French photographer and writer Philippe Bordas, whose central themes are specific social groups of three African countries.

The exhibition encompasses Malian hunters, Kenyan boxers and wrestlers of Senegal. The photographic collection bears witness to an unknown side of Africa, seen as such by very few people. The exhibition says nothing about sport or hunting, but reveals a part of the history of these countries through stories from marginalised social groups.

The exhibition is located in three venues in central Ljubljana:

• Hunters – City Hall’s Historical Atrium, Mestni trg 1
• Wrestlers - Galerija Fotografija (the Photographic Gallery), Mestni trg 11/I
• Boxers – City of Ljubljana temporary exhibition space, Mestni trg 11/II

The exhibition co-organisers are Galerija Fotografija and the Kresija Gallery.

Philippe Bordas’ ‘Heroic Africa 1988–2008’

“Widespread civil wars, the impact of famine and the consequences of AIDS have made from Africa a collection of hellish photos, which the West, flowing Dante’s lead, classifies and names and through incantations seeks to make sure that evil loses its power. According to the newspapers, Africa is a place of extremes and oblivion, a place without writing, a place without history, a place void of writing and a damned region of violence and epidemics.

“I have seen the stigmatised Africa. But what I experienced and realised was only the Africa of memory, living writers and poetry, the Africa of resistance. I encountered its ‘high politics’, consisting of bodily and written excellence. I met remarkable people, exemplary people, whose images collected in this exhibition represent their heritage.
 

“My intention was not to create a piece of work. I wandered through slums and savannas, from point to point for more than twenty years. I was looking for its definition. These images are in a way a testimony and memory of some journeys. These people were my friends, modern heroes in the solitude of cities and the library of time. Self-taught heroes that reject black and white elites, fanatics, full of grace, respectful titans, retaliators. Frightening, virtuous and determined people. Artists who chant hymns, hunters of beasts, trainers of hyenas, defenders of vocabulary, sculptors of the alphabet, winners, mystical warriors who are no longer found in my native lands.

The hunters of Mali

Bristling with amulets and talismans, armed with rifles preserved from time immemorial, they are the intact memory of the African Middle Ages.

Descendents of the elite army corps of the Malian Empire, they wear the same costumes and obey the same laws as the riders and soldiers of King Soundjata Keïta (1190-1255). The hunters ignore the borders that were drawn under colonial rule and live in most of Western Africa, in modern Mali, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Guinée Bissau, Mauritania, and parts of the Ivory Coast. They are bearers of the oral traditions of Soundjata Keïta's empire, which stretched from the Sahara to the equatorial forest and from the Atlantic to the River Niger.

Keïta's reign was a time of peace and prosperity when Islam and animism coexisted. After centuries of tribal war and trade in humans, Keïta united the armies from smaller kingdoms and supplanted those of his rival Soumaoro Kanté in 1235. He built his capital in Niani, Guinea, near the border with Mali.

The hunters form a brotherhood of initiation in which new members are co-opted, irrespective of their birth, their origin or their class. These living legends represent village authority and are the depositories of justice as well as poetic and genealogical oral traditions. They are also the masters of therapeutic and magical knowledge and time-honoured hunting skills. Against the corruption and chaos generated by neo-colonialism and the systematic erasure of memory instilled by liberal globalisation, the underground transnational power of these traditional hunters forms one of the spiritual foundation stones of Africa: an active utopia.

Bare-fisted Africa: Kenyan boxers, Senegalese wrestlers

This is not about sport.
There’s no winner.
There’s no loser.
It's just a ritual battle between men who have been chosen.

In these no-man's lands annihilated by globalisation and roasted by the IMF, landless men still live on. Through boxing and bare-fisted wrestling these men become heroes.
On the far eastern side of Africa : Nairobi, Kenya. On the far western side: Dakar, Senegal. On one side, English boxing.

Fifty boxers hidden away in a Sunday school meeting room in the heart of the giant slum of the Mathare Valley. Sweating bodies in a room deliberately deprived of oxygen, like flayed figures blurred under a faltering neon light, galvanized by the ghost of Mohammed Ali, their minds burning with the noble ascetic pursuits of the White world: boxing and Christian mysticism.

On the other side, Senegalese wrestling.

Replete, rested bodies. An open-air confrontation in arenas of Senegal sand. A ritual jousting match in the heart of the towns and villages. A socialised, musical duel, free of any influence of the whites. Wrestlers rooted in their own land, not dreaming of America. Wrestlers untrammelled by the magical words of marabouts or the song of the drums, protected from the world by the chorus of women and the warrior poems born in the roots of their land.

On one side of Africa, boxing in a cell. Fighting as a dizzying form of self-destruction. Fighting against oneself. On the other side, open-air wrestling. Fighting as a poetic unfolding and a link to invisible forces.