WAKA WAKA is a visual meditation on movement and a journey across geographies, cultures, and time. Spanning more than fifteen years and over fifteen African countries, the project reflects an ongoing search for what it means to see and be seen within one’s own landscape. Through the lens of Ernest Danjuma Enebi, WAKA WAKA becomes both an archive and an invitation: a call to witness the ordinary as extraordinary, to find rhythm and dignity in the everyday.
Moving through markets, streets, coastlines, and intimate domestic spaces, Danjuma’s photographs reject the distant gaze that has long defined Africa’s visual history. Instead, his images emerge from proximity encounters born of curiosity, humility, and belonging. They trace the continent not as a static subject but as a living, breathing continuum of stories, gestures, and shared humanity.
At its core, WAKA WAKA is a work about presence, about seeing Africa not through the lens of lack or potential, but through the fullness of what already is. It is an act of attention, a celebration of texture, humor, and spirit. The accompanying exhibition extends this gesture, transforming still images into a spatial experience that invites reflection on travel, memory, and the quiet poetry of daily life.
In WAKA WAKA, Danjuma offers a portrait of Africa that is at once deeply personal and profoundly collective, a continent in motion, where each photograph becomes both a document and a conversation, a moment and a journey.