Description
Author: Denis Ramseyer, 180 pages, 145 color pictures, 15 B&W pictures, 5 maps and graphics.
Edition: Fondation Culturelle Musée Barbier-Mueller and Ides & Calendes.
The world of the Kuya described in this book has in great part disappeared. In the last decade of the twenthieth century, deforestation, climate change and Christian missionaries’ instrusion into the region transformed the way of life of this welcoming people, proud of its traditions.
The Kuya belong to one of the smallest but also one of the least-known ethnic groups of Côte d’Ivoire. They speak a language that in 2001 was declared to be among the most threatened on the planet. This people of fewer than twenty thousand individuals had the misfortune of finding itself at the centre of the conflict zone that ravaged the country in 2002-2003 and then again in 2010-2011.
This account retraces the transformation of the traditional way of life and the rapid evolution of a forest society that has found itself caught in the grip of the war between the northern and the southern parts of the country, which has forced an entire population to adapt to a new an unstable situation.
Patiently, over forty-five years, the author has assembled field research, photojournalism, notes and regular correspondence with a Kuya interlocutor and friend, which is finally being published in this comprehensive overview.
