My Life is a Struggle Voltaire There’s a lot of struggle in Ghana’s impoverished urban environment — urban poverty, wretched housing, environmental crisis (air pollution, plastic pollution, etc.). Thousands of people in Ghana flee their towns and villages to cities in search of employment opportunities every year. Many end up in urban slums, where the […]
My Life is a Struggle Voltaire There’s a lot of struggle in Ghana’s impoverished urban environment — urban poverty, wretched housing, environmental crisis (air pollution, plastic pollution, etc.). Thousands of people in Ghana flee their towns and villages to cities in search of employment opportunities every year. Many end up in urban slums, where the […]
My Life is a Struggle
Voltaire
There’s a lot of struggle in Ghana’s impoverished urban environment — urban poverty, wretched housing, environmental crisis (air pollution, plastic pollution, etc.).
Thousands of people in Ghana flee their towns and villages to cities in search of employment opportunities every year. Many end up in urban slums, where the living conditions are even harsher. They cannot go back home because it is just as worse in their towns and villages as it is in the cities. Their lives are immersed in sadness and pain no matter where they find themselves.
Some hawk on the streets in the day and take up a slice of the night-time economy through prostitution or makeshift food joints in the suburbs at night. Others sleep on cement sidewalks with their only possessions as pillows and wake up to labor in the most toxic environment imaginable.
The stress and strain of living in this rapidly changing urban environment are becoming unbearable for many young people in Africa.
Capturing their unrelenting struggle for survival in this harsh and brutal city life comes with a price for me — sleepless nights.
Also Check out This Crucial Article & Documentary
For me, some of the faces below reflect the harsh conditions and mass struggle in Accra, home to one of Ghana’s functional urban cores.
Enjoy the portraits of these men in good health, and don’t forget to check out the other galleries below!
Rural-urban inequalities drive thousands of young people to flee Ghana’s agricultural heartlands to cities in search of economic opportunities every year. Many of them end up in urban slums and in hazardous work, where the harsh environment changes them from fine-looking laboring young men to sun-burnt, wrinkled old men. The harsh environment changes them from […]
Life cheats us with shadows. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us with bitterness and disappointment in its train. oscar wilde The Thinking African Man “Long years have since passed and life in Accra is still tough,” the elderly urban African man below told me as he looks back on his life […]
I ran into these youngsters having fun playing in sawdust inside Sodom and Gomorrah (Agbogbloshie), a densely populated slum in the heart of Accra, Ghana’s capital city. Much of this area is also known as Old Fadama. Millions of children in Ghana are growing up amid scarcity and deprivation. Twenty-eight percent of children in Ghana […]
Tokyo is one of the largest urban sprawls in the world, with nearly 14 million people living within its traditional boundaries. The Greater Tokyo Area (comprising Saitama, Kanagawa, Chiba, Tochigi, Ibaraki, Yamanashi, and Gunma) is the largest metropolitan area in the world, with over 38 million people packed in around 13,500 km2 of land. Tokyo Japan […]
Peace begins with a smile.. Mother Teresa Livelihood is the epicenter of human struggle, and despite their pain, these men took a moment to be happy. Might have been a joke I cracked or something someone said. Some of these portraits make me smile and weep at the same time. Makes me weep because I […]
Hi, Muntaka Chasant here. I'm, among many other things, an entrepreneur and a documentary photographer. I'm here on the front lines of urban struggle — only with my wits and cameras — capturing key moments, collecting untold stories, and helping to forge new paths.
