The N1 highway snakes down the coast, skirting the desert from Tangier in Morocco, through Western Sahara to Guerguerat. There are days of the landscape being the same. A dark highway in baking scrub desert. And, in comparison to what follows further South, a magnificent road. The heavy goods lorries that grind out the miles are often refrigerated, bright white & new. Beacons in the sunlight.

Noakshott’s perimeter is a war zone – an endless confrontation between the ravages of the desert vs. its human inhabitants. To say that life there is hard, is an understatement. The elements and economics are harsh. Plastic litter is strewn wildly around and battered Mercedes Benz cars form the eighties are everywhere.

This is a glimpse of the Ojoo Expressway / Third Mainland Bridge. Some photographs can look lucky, or spontaneous, which I think is perhaps the case here. In reality, this is the result of several failed attempts, made possible because of multiple to and fro trips driving out to Murtala Muhammed International Airport, back and forth to collect colleagues, retrieve lost and found luggage or to collect visas. The purpose of the framework structure remains unknown and adds a mysterious appeal to a scene from a city that felt permanently alien.

Yaoundé, Cameroon. On a rest day, I went out to do a bit of shopping & discovered this scene. From a portfolio of two hundred or so pictures, this is one of my favourites.

In rural Nigeria, I asked a young woman – a girl, chatting with her friends around a water well - for her portrait. She hesitantly agreed and then asked me if I could please wait until she could find another friend to join her? When they returned, smiling & laughing, I used the backdrop of a nearby wall for their photograph. It was smothered with posters of local politicians, who were of course, all men. They were delighted by this and I believe they told their back story through the picture they gave to me - knowing that they would most likely never see it. It felt like a statement.

While in Nigeria the group travelled with a security team of six soldiers and their driver, who were on call twenty-four hours a day, armed with machine guns (and more theatrical axes and machetes) in full combat uniform. In situ, surrounded by people, it would have been difficult and most likely unpopular with the soldiers and surrounding crowd to try and photograph those scenes. In small towns, the effect of the force field that they exuded became like static electricity. People stared. Everyone knew that our group fell inside their lethal orbit. Confusingly, their appearance belied their easy-going personalities and default smiles. One of them told me he had been in a gun fight a few weeks previously where people had died.

In Accra, Ghana, I had a conversation with a man holding a chicken. It started when he approached me, hoping to make a sale of it. I was taking photographs with an ancient 1950’s camera in a mobbed outdoor coach station . , I had discovered that the old camera sparked a curiosity that was a great ice breaker. “What am I going to do with a chicken?” I laughed. I countered by asking him for his photograph. He was standing in front of a pristine burgundy coach that I knew would make a great background and i was hanging around next to it for that very purpose. Call it pre-meditated randomness. “How much will you pay me?” He asked. After all, what was he going to do with being photographed? I explained that I didn’t want a staged or complicated arrangement. He was aggrieved at my stinginess, but I sensed he was proud of the chicken and we shared good-humoured mutual incredulity at the absurdity of the other’s proposition. His friend arrived. A three-way debate began in earnest, with the second man loudly condemning the idea of a freebie. The chicken relented. His friend, complaining to the end, didn't move out of the shot.

This was a petrol tanker graveyard / scrapyard, or rather, a re-cycling centre discovered by accident wandering a round the urban hinterland of a town called Jalingo. As in any automotive workplace situation, the creativity and ingenuity being applied to getting full utility and legacy from the items at hand was extraordinary. Unfortunately, the economic necessity driving this kind innovation was also responsible for a frightening disregard for personal safety. It was common place to see young men and boys working in dangerous conditions that would be illegal in the UK, Europe etc.

There was great industry here, a row of forklift workshops running alongside the railway line for about half a mile. Hundreds of forklifts & mechanics. confused that I wanted to take photographs.

This butcher’s shop was on a street blitzed with stalls & foods. The scene felt quite discombobulating, with for me, the unusual sight, close proximity and incongruity of the huge sides of beef, their colour, tinged with purple, yellow and green hues and the nagging doubt about the effect of the heat & deterioration of the meat in the sun.

African bucolic -

Gembu, rural Nigeria. Scrub fires burn everywhere across Nigeria, which lends the sunlight a golden hazy hue. The colour of the ground and abundance of honeyed wooden fixtures, market stalls and dwellings is completely complementary. The chillis drying in the sun seemed to be almost scripted to match.

I saw these Madonna statues and circled back, mesmerised by their jarring other worldly clash of colours of red dirty earth and azure blue. They’re in Grand Bassam, a small town near to Abidjan, in Côte D’Ivoire and lined up on the busy roadside next to dozens of other types of businesses selling any number of different goods.

In Gabu, Guinea-Bissau, I met two boys who were car mechanics. Their clothes were so steeped in dirt and oil that the cloth had turned a deep brown. I guessed they were around twelve or thirteen years old. Over the course of a day, I watched as they performed complicated repairs on one of the cars. Taking their portrait broke my usual rule about photographing children. They don’t usually possess reliable agency and it’s easy to slip into sentimental cliché (or worse, poverty porn). In this case, I made the choice to photograph them to provoke reflection on child labour I will take the criticism as needs be. The boys worked hard and showed their experience. Certainly they ought to have the opportunity of a childhood and an education instead. But my concern is tempered, by the thought that by the time they are adults, they will have the solid basis of an income in a country and continent where poverty is endemic. The outstanding issue is whether I should have taken the photograph and printed it here.

The scourge of convenience. Just 20% of the world's plastic is recycled.

Yaoundé, two minutes after arriving in a nice hotel after a day of hell driving on rough roads, looking out from the balcony at the hive of inner city activity going on below.

The Aspinall Foundation has a gorilla sanctuary in Congo, 45 minutes drive on rough terrain from the highway. The insect activity at night surrounding the light bulbs was frenetic.

Bush fires were generic. In rural areas jaundiced bruise-coloured wood smoke from sunrise bonfires immerses into an earthier brew from burning crop stubble and wild grass. This mixture cooks under blanketing humidity to create a velvety alchemical haze, imbuing the landscape with a hallucinogenic matt burr and grainy amber aesthetic.

This is a filling station in Morocco, with a crisp orderliness that seemed surreal -

New house building project, rural Nigeria. The site was deserted and its design seemed unusually conformist or severe when compared to the more usual rural African dwellings, which are often round with a thatched roof. The ambience seemed to be emphasized by the darkness inside the empty window frames.

This village was tiny & seemingly deserted, which I discovered after talking to the man, was because everyone else was in the fields working. We chatted for a while and I eventually realised that he was limping, and had a nasty cut on his foot - which prevented him from joining his neighbours. I gave him some anti biotic cream & left with the blunt realisation of how oblivious I am to my own good luck.

Though taken in rural Nigeria, on the road to Gembu, this scene is interchangeable with many other instances all over Africa of what happened when car problems arose en route. The scene was nearly always the same: packed sun baked oil stained earth and a mechanic with no shoes. Finding a reliable garage and mechanic was difficult. Candidates for our attention were unfailingly friendly and according to their own sales pitch, a reasonably priced expert on the mysteries of the problem at hand.

After six months of basic accommodation & simple living, Cape Town’s conformity and business traveler hotels were a shock - signalling the imminent wrench from a different kind of thinking and living, back into the mainstream of normality.