In the late-1960s, the Kainji Dam on the powerful Niger River was completed in northwest Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation. As a result of the dam, Lake Kainji was formed, and many people had to be resettled beyond its expanding waters.
Wellfleet resident Aylette Jenness’ husband at the time, Jonathan Jenness, was an anthropologist who was sent by the United Nations to study the people living at the edge of the new lake. “We lived in Yelwa, which was, in fact, the dam town,” Aylette says of the family’s three-year experience. “The construction bosses were Italian. The engineers were British.” She had been through this before, when they had ventured to Alaska in the early 1960s to study the lives of Native Americans. At that time, she says, “I had a two year old and a newborn. We lived in one room. No running water. No bathroom. There were 125 people in the village. Everybody paid attention to my kids — in a nice way.”
A horrific civil war was being fought in the south of Nigeria in the late-’60s, in a region of the country that had declared itself the independent nation of Biafra, and millions of Biafran civilians died of starvation due to a government blockade. Yet the northwest was a world apart. “The area was very peaceful,” Aylette Jenness says. “They spoke different languages, and they all got along. Most were Muslim, some were Christian, some were animist. Everybody had their own niche. It’s a moving example of how diverse people can get along with each other.”
Jenness took more than 2,000 photographs of life in Yelwa, all of them in black and white. Back in the States, she used a selection of that work to put together a book for young readers, “Along the Niger River: An African Way of Life.” Though she’s now a spry 84, and her kids are grown — her daughter is now a criminal defense lawyer in Los Angeles, and her son is a journalist writing about mixed martial arts — she has decided to revisit that journey. The resulting exhibit, “Nigeria, Fifty Years Ago: Celebrating Women and Girls in the Rural North,” will be at the Wellfleet Council on Aging from April 8 through May 4, with an opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m. on Sunday, April 7.
Several books by Jenness have been published — on American families of different ethnicities, on the “Dwellers of the Tundra” and Indians of Latin America. “They’ve always been for young people, not for adults,” she says of the books. “I wanted kids to relate to them.” It has been her life’s work: for years, she lived in Amherst and worked at the Boston Children’s Museum.
And she’s not ready to stop now. “When I was no longer able to see well enough to take photographs — I have macular degeneration — I realized that my past work was a source that could be mined.” And despite the fact that she “can’t see worth a damn,” Jenness is determined to remain productive. “You can keep working in different ways than you did when you were young,” she says. “It’s very satisfying to do something that feels like it’s of some value.”
Jenness repeatedly credits those friends who have helped her put together this exhibit. Jim Rohrer, she says, “is a photographer in his own right. He’s doing the prints.” Andrea Pluhar helped curate; Robert Rindler and Dian Reynolds put together the series of exhibitions at the Council on Aging of which she has become a part. (It recently received a Wellfleet Cultural Council grant.)
“I think it’s important for people to know that you can carry on with the help of your friends and your community,” she says.