Sapo National Park, in southeast Liberia, is a beautiful rainforest. One of the few left in the region.
Many people live in and around the forest.
The forest is remote, a ten hour drive fron the capital on rough roads that are impassible during rainy season, and across a river into the dense thicket.
To the people who lived near the forest, it seems endless. After all, they’d never seen the other side.
They cut parts of it down to start farms.
NGOs have come in to teach about conservation. They bring generators and have slideshows.
But it’s the kind of place where things are as they’ve always been.
And this is how people farm, and this is what they eat.
The park is in danger.
But so are many things in Liberia.
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About Scarlett Lion
I’m an American photographer and journalist traipsing around Africa on the lookout for the ordinary and the extraordinary, using my camera as a pretext to enter worlds not otherwise available.
This space is a scrap book of web and life trawlings – photography, music, arts, politics, and other sundry subjects. It is also a vanity press for my unpublished (and occasionally) published work.
I found the scarlett lion on the roof a friend’s house in Kampala back in 2006 when I went through a crate of discarded items he and a few other artists had gathered. On that day, I was looking for something and I found the lion: a discarded kid’s toy made in China on the cheap, that somehow found it’s way to East Africa. Something about the hollowed out, paint chipped figurine appealed to my understanding of this amazing continent: I’d never seen a real lion, after all.
Previously based in Uganda, currently in Liberia. Always roaming.
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