In Guillaume Bonn’s remarkable photographic essay “Silent Lives,” the relationships between members of Kenya’s white, Asian, and affluent black communities and their black servants are vividly and disquietingly examined.

As Bonn writes, “For a large number of Kenyans, employment as domestic servants underline the seismic disparities in a country where over fifty percent of the population live on less than a dollar a day while others reside in stately homes and colonial estates.” Bonn knows all about such awkward social dichotomies, for he is a product of them—he is a white African, whose great-grandfather took part in the French military conquest of Madagascar in 1884-86 and then settled there. Bonn’s grandfather was born in Africa, as was his father, and so was he. Bonn grew up mostly in Kenya. 

For a long time, Bonn said, he thought about doing a project on nannies. “I often wondered, all these years, what had happened to all the ones my parents had hired to take care of me when I was a kid. I realized that I knew nothing about them, and I barely remembered their names, where they came from and what their personal stories were.

…the employers and employees in this series [exist] in uneasily close proximity to one another, intimately bound but forever distant.

Click-through for a slideshow of Guillaume’s photos, and more from Jon Lee Anderson on this social dichotomy in Kenya: http://nyr.kr/ZdPlhH

(Source: newyorker.com)

James Verini on the first-ever Presidential debate in Kenya, held last week, and Kenyan tribal politics: http://nyr.kr/UIT35V

Photograph: AP.

This week, the photo collective Everyday Africa, a project focussing on images of daily life in Africa, will be posting to our Instagram feed. Nine photographers across the continent, from Mali to Kenya, are contributing. Follow us @ newyorkermag to see their photos:http://instagram.com/newyorkermag

In this photo: Children play in the ocean in Grand-Bassam, a popular beach community outside of Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Photograph by the Everday Africa founder Peter DiCampo.