A Living Scar, a Shared Story: Inside "The Rift: Scar of Africa"
Stretching from the Afar Triangle in Ethiopia to Mozambique, the Great Rift Valley is one of the largest geological features on Earth. Although the broader rift system begins near the Dead Sea and extends through the Red Sea before reaching Africa, the book The Rift: Scar of Africa focuses on its African chapter, from the Afar Triangle southward. Its path is visible on any satellite map, but to see it only from above, says photographer Shem Compion, is to miss much of what makes it extraordinary.
Compion has spent 23 years traveling across the African continent, documenting the Rift Valley as it exists at ground level: its animal activity, environmental impacts, and its people. The result is The Rift: Scar of Africa, an interdisciplinary photography book that brings together acclaimed scientists, poets, researchers, and community members to tell a story far larger than geography. Recently, Compion and Yale MacMillan Center scholar and book contributor Veronica Waweru sat down to discuss the book's origins and what they hope it will mean for students, educators, and researchers.
More than a Geological Scar
Compion is careful to distinguish between the Rift Valley as a physical feature and as a living system.
"There is so much more to the Rift Valley in terms of its significance to Africa than just being the largest geographical formation on the planet," he says. "The Rift Valley is currently the greatest binding fabric of all these wonderful elements that are not geographic: its ecology, its biodiversity, and its culture. That is the story I wanted to tell."
More than 300 million people move throughout the Rift every day. Its tectonic lakes, formed as ancient plates pulled apart, are blanketed with thousands of flamingos. Its volcanic soils, enriched by ash from eruptions millions of years ago, have drifted eastward to nourish the Serengeti plains, producing the most biodiverse stretch of land on the continent and fueling what Compion calls "the greatest mammal migration on the planet." Somewhere along its ancient shores, early humans left their footprints in cooling lava that has preserved them for 10,000 years.
The book tells a story that is way deeper than elephants and lions. It talks about the origins of mankind.
One chapter explores obsidian, a volcanic glass found throughout the Kenyan Rift at sites like Hell's Gate, and traces what the distribution of hand-axe tools made from it reveals about early human movement, trade, and territory. Another examines how Kenya now generates 47 percent of its electricity from geothermal activity in the Rift. Another focuses on the Anthropocene, documenting the environmental pressures the region faces today: shifting lake levels, declining fish stocks, and changing soil pH.
For Waweru, the book's power lies in its multiplicity.
"The diversity of voices and disciplines, and how they work together to tell a multidimensional story of Africa," is what drew her to the project. Poets sit alongside paleoanthropologists, and people who have lived on the land for generations speak alongside geologists.
Waweru's own relationship with the Rift is personal, as her grandmother was an immigrant from the Rift Valley. Growing up in the highlands, she made monthly drives down toward the Rift, memorizing landmarks along the way. That intimate geography shaped her chapter on obsidian and her broader argument that the Rift cannot be understood as a single thing.
"Africa is various because it is multidimensional, and you have multiple sentiments toward the Rift."
When Waweru scans through the book, she is not measuring the cultures documented within it against her own or anyone else's. "I am thinking it is beautiful and interesting in its own right, and there is no reason to compare it to anything else." She calls this approach an ecology of knowledge: letting each system of understanding stand on its terms.
It's not often you look at a piece of work and see yourself represented. That reciprocity and multiple voices are one of the greatest things about this book. There's something for everybody.
The Ethics of Engagement
A project of this scale, working across dozens of communities over more than two decades, demanded ethical preparation. Compion and his collaborators were meticulous about fact-checking and about the nature of their engagement with communities. Some groups were comfortable with outside visitors; others required a far more careful approach.
"The responsibility level of engagement is significant," Compion says.
The team rejected a transactional model. Rather than exchanging money or replicating the extractive logic of conventional tourism, they pursued mutual reciprocity through practical support: food security assistance, help with livestock, healthcare access, and relationship-building sustained across years. In Ethiopia, the funding they raised allowed five teachers to be trained to teach in local mother tongues, a direct alignment with the Ethiopian government's policy encouraging education in each community's first language. Ethiopia recognizes 84 official languages, and ensuring that knowledge is transmitted in those languages was a core commitment.
One of Compion’s favorite memories was in Nairobi, where the team worked with three youth organizations, including a group supporting survivors of human trafficking and a performing arts program for young people with autism, to bring the book to younger audiences. Given a single photograph from the book, participants had 90 seconds to respond in any form they chose. From poems to dances, each group reflected differently, with one group viewing a close-up image of an elephant's hide and explaining:
"We are tough and can get through things together."
Compion hopes eventually to produce a smaller, accessible version of the book for children, so that the next generation living along the Rift can understand both its wonders and the environmental challenges it faces. Waweru, meanwhile, is developing short television documentaries in local languages. The work, both say, is far from finished.