Framed poster
Ndong has spent eight years in a rented room behind the Owendo market without hanging a single thing on the walls, and this framed mandrill print is just the opposite: a framed piece, ready to go up the day it arrives. It carries his portrait, from my Animal Kinhood series, where every animal has clothes, a city, and a job of their own.
Foto: Y S (@santonii) / Unsplash (Unsplash License)Mandrillus sphinx
Show me the light, and I'll stop.
Tropical lowland rainforest across west-central Africa: southern Cameroon, mainland Equatorial Guinea, Gabon — home by far to the largest population — and the southwest of the Republic of the Congo. It favors primary forest and dense ginger thickets, and also turns up in forest-savanna mosaics like those of Lopé.
In his story, Ndong's room is one room: a hot plate, a chair, and a fan he doesn't switch off even in the dry season. Eight years there, and the walls look the same as the first day. He does have belongings, but they're all somewhere else, deep in the forest, at his mother's house. When someone from the line comes up to visit him, they're surprised, and he doesn't explain.
Before he drove trains, he learned the kilometers by walking them, a bar over his shoulder, out ahead of the track crew. Even today, when he passes the level crossing at kilometer marker forty-one, he knows the ballast on the left sinks with the rains, and he slows down a little early without thinking about it. It's the kind of thing you don't learn from a manual. The mandrill, by the way, is the largest monkey on the planet: an adult male weighs about what a seven-year-old child weighs.
