Michael Major

A Traveller's Eye, A Thinker's Heart

Category: Travels for Crop Trust

  • A BOWL THAT BROUGHT A SON BACK

    The room in Naluwoli was full of women as we entered – babies on hips and laps, a lively chatter amongst mothers. My colleague Scott Christiansen and I were in Uganda to document the amaranth value chain research conducted by the World Vegetable Center with support from the Crop Trust’s BOLDER project. We wanted to document how to build markets and nutrition around lesser-known crops. This room was where the whole chain finally arrives. After a welcome song and dance, one woman rose. She has come, she says, because she wants…

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    A BOWL THAT BROUGHT A SON BACK

  • SEKAKO

    While in Uganda, I repeatedly asked our host partner, Moses Owori, for the word ‘smile’ in Lusoga. ‘Sekako’, he told me. Over and over … I’d hear it but spit something different out of my mouth: ‘Sikayo’ … ‘Sickaku’ … ‘Sykuku’. A simple three syllables but I mangled it every time. I was hopeless. But the results were brilliant. My Ugandan subjects thought the way I butchered their language was hilarious. I’d get my nice smiles in the end. No one found more hilarity with my speech impediment than Annet in…

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    SEKAKO

  • DORA AND THE FIERCE VOLUNTEER

    Some crops don’t wait to be planted. They arrive uninvited, establish themselves in the gaps between everything else and dare you to ignore them. They just show up – fierce, thorny and needing nothing from anyone. Smart farmers don’t ignore them. They understand, perhaps better than anyone, that you can reap where you did not sow – if you pay attention. They watch, they learn to work with the plant and not against it, and then they build something from the volunteers. Dora Ansong Yeboah is one of those farmers. The…

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    DORA AND THE FIERCE VOLUNTEER

  • THE PUMPKIN PROCESSOR

    When our host and partner Moses Owori said our first of seven visits on the day would be with a “pumpkin processor,” I immediately began visualizing my photo opportunities. I saw workers in white coats and white clogs and hairnets checking stainless steel vats in a tidy factory. So when our Land Cruiser powered down on a narrow dirt road in the town of Balawoli in Uganda’s Kamuli District and Moses announced we had arrived, I was a bit bewildered. I didn’t see anything that looked like a food processing plant.…

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    THE PUMPKIN PROCESSOR

  • AMARANTH MAN

    Down a muddy path in a smallholder farm near Kamuli in Uganda, past rows of cacao and towering maize, my colleague Scott Christiansen and I found Samuel Ngobi standing in a field that seemed to glow as storm clouds rolled in overhead. Samuel grows amaranth. And in these parts of Uganda it grows well. As the sky darkened and thunder rumbled in the distance, Samuel, along with his sons Steven and Emmanuel, moved quickly through the chest-high plants, harvesting armfuls of the brilliant yellow-green seed heads before the rains came. Back…

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    AMARANTH MAN

  • DANCIN’ UNDER THE BAOBAB TREE

    The baobab tree has a most significant importance to the people of northern Ghana. The leaves and fruit provide an excellent source of nutrition while the bark has medicinal values. And it’s a magical tree venerated by the locals. My colleague, Scott Christiansen, travelled to the village of Punga, just a few klicks south of the border with Burkina Faso in northern Ghana, for the Crop Trust to learn how a women’s association uses the baobab tree to its fullest potential. We sat for several hours in the shade of an…

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    DANCIN’ UNDER THE BAOBAB TREE

  • THE DOOR OF NO RETURN

    Today my colleague, Scott Christiansen, and I stood inside Osu Castle in Accra – Christiansborg – built by the Danes in the 1660s on a rocky promontory above the Atlantic. It’s a beautiful building. But that is the first, uncomfortable truth. The second truth is darker. In the dungeons below its whitewashed walls, up to 60 men were crammed into a single airless room for months at a time. Women, 30 to a cell. No light. No sanitation. No dignity. They waited there – sometimes for six months – not knowing…

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    THE DOOR OF NO RETURN

  • THE SWAN AND THE SEAMSTRESS

    A Swan is a life-time investment. In fact, it’s a multi-generational investment. It’s a rip off of the classic treadle-powered Singer sewing machine of the late 19th century. As soon as the Singer lost its patent, the Swan company in China started mass-producing them and selling throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Every bit like the Singer but without the hefty brand-name price. Without a motor and with an abundance of spare parts in Africa, a Swan will outlast its owner. For Benitah Prossy the Swan is her livelihood. The seamstress from Entebbe, Uganda…

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    THE SWAN AND THE SEAMSTRESS

  • MOUNTAINS, HORSES AND JAILOO

    On maps, Kyrgyzstan looks like a country made of ridgelines. Landlocked, mountainous and wedged between larger powers, it had intrigued me for years. I finally visited in July 2023 to photograph alfalfa. What filled my viewfinder instead were ‘jailoo’ grasslands, towering mountains, vast skies and horses grazing as if little had changed in centuries. Kyrgyzstan is often described as the most mountainous country in the world. More than 90 percent of its territory lies above 1,500 metres. The Tien Shan range dominates the map, with peaks rising above 7,000 metres along…

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    MOUNTAINS, HORSES AND JAILOO
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