I was recently in Western Kenya. What was intended to be a quick stopover en route to Uganda turned into four days of rummaging through a rainforest with my camera wrapped in plastic shopping bags. As my “hotel” was without it, I had to hitch a ride on the back of a motorcycle to the nearest place with electricity so I could download images and charge batteries every night. Not too long ago Africa’s midsection was a band of almost solid rainforest, stretching over six million square kilometers from West Africa along the Atlantic, through to the Central African Republic and the DRC, into East Africa. Today, the Guineo-Congolian rainforest, as it is known, is now just a remnant of what it once was, its canopies having suffered the impact of logging, oil and mineral exploration. In the case of the Kakamega Forest, large areas were cleared during colonial times[…]
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