Author(s): Elizabeth L. Gilbert

Photography

"Tribes of the Great Rift Valley" is a celebration and photographic study of the traditional peoples who occupy the tiny, remote villages scattered across the deserts, plains, hills and forests of the Great Rift Valley. From the red-ochre-painted warriors of Samburu to the Mursi with their jutting lip-plates to the guinea-fowl-painted faces of the Karo, the people of the Rift Valley remain among the most untouched and unchanged on the planet.This gorgeously illustrated book provides sweeping views of this wild landscape and its people, from the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Eritrea, across the Ethiopian highlands, and down to the great lakes and primordial forests of Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi. These fascinating cultures are remarkably diverse, yet nearly all of their communities and traditions face extinction due to Western influence.For the people of the Rift Valley, this book serves as a historic record of the living traditions they have carried with them into the twenty-first century. For those outside of Africa's borders, it serves as a family reunion, bringing the viewer into the world of their lost African relatives.
This journey into the heart of Africa is designed to be a broad profile of tribal humanity to which every reader has a connection and provides a lasting record, perhaps even the last record, of a quickly disappearing way of life.