Where ikinga Rules the Road: Photographs of Burundi’s Vibrant Bike Culture

Where ikinga Rules the Road: Photographs of Burundi’s Vibrant Bike Culture

Near the end of 2013, photographer Stephan Würth was on assignment shooting portraits of people in a hospice in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, and allowed himself a couple extra days to drive outside of town. It was his first time in the East African country, and he wasn’t sure what he was looking for. Almost instantly Würth was struck by not only the ubiquity of ikinga, the subject of his new photo book from Damiani, in particular the inventive and uncommon ways that bicycles were adapted in the near absence of cars and trucks.

Everywhere, Uwunguruza abantu n’ikinga (“bike taxi-men”) ferried passengers on the backs of their bikes—women in traditional dress riding sidesaddle, men in Western suits, a woman with a baby strapped to her back. Bikes were also heaped with coffee beans and laden with containers of cooking oil, stacked with bananas, sugar cane, works of art, and even and rather unbelievably, bricks. Necessity breeds creativity here; the average annual income in Burundi is less than $300.

In this land that was so otherworldly to me, it was captivating to see how the ikinga was used so universally—all ages, jobs,” Würth said recently by email, en route from photographing another project in Thailand. “So I decided to just take pictures of every bicycle I saw during those two days.” What he captured is a kind of cinema vérité of the vibrant motion of Burundian life on the road. Riffing on Walker Evans’s stealth method of subway photography (Evans famously concealed a small camera in his coat), Würth abandoned his Leica and ended up using his wife’s phone to make the pictures. “I noticed that almost no one saw me take snaps with the iPhone,” he says. “And I loved the images because I was able to capture something more natural and real.”

Growing up outside Munich, Würth had thought of bikes as representing freedom; in Burundi, they have functioned as a literal means of independence. As Joseph Akel reminds in the book’s foreword, the country has a long history of deep unrest. Survivors of civil war in the country depended on ikinga for their lives, taking them into forests to avoid roadblocks set up by opposition forces: “Hitching rides under cover of night, bicycle-taxis were the fastest and most inconspicuous means to escape from certain death.”

Würth’s pictures don’t examine the political strife in the country, but rather the movement of day-to-day life. A sense of liberation and joy was apparent in the ikinga culture he encountered, and it’s plainly evident in these images. “I just really appreciated how universally used and loved the ikinga are. In a place where there is so little, these bicycles are treasures that are taken care of meticulously,” he says. On the cover of the book, a bike is sweetly draped in a colorful, hand-knitted scarf. “What struck me most about the people was that they seem happy, or at least content. In the Western world, especially in the U.S., I notice people with depressed faces. Here I saw no one just lying around—everyone seemed to have a purpose in Burundi.”