The first thing that hits him is the smell.
In Ethiopia’s Erta Ale, the air tastes of sulphur and dust, hot and metallic on the tongue. Further along the Rift’s wandering spine, he is breathing something entirely different. In Virunga’s rainforest the humidity feels granular, heavy with decay and life. “You can smell the mould going into your nostrils,” Shem Compion says. Across this sweep of land the ground rises and falls in basalt domes, lakes and escarpments, a 6,400-kilometre fracture that has become one of the richest corridors of life on Earth.
For 20 years the South African naturalist-photographer has followed that great geological tear from Ethiopia to Mozambique. His new book, The Rift – Scar of Africa, is the result: a visual atlas of a geography that never stands still. Much of this time has been spent with people who travel alongside him on photographic safari, learning how to read Africa’s wild spaces through the same patient, image-led discipline that shapes his work. Every expedition over the years has deepened his understanding of this ancient living continuum, a reminder that this landscape is defined not by spectacle but by complexity.
The art of immersion
In conversation, Compion often circles back to the way attention shifts in the wild. He speaks of how the wilderness slowly loosens the grip of the city on those who walk with him. “They come from big cities where their senses are dulled,” Compion tells me during our conversation. “Out here everything feels raw. They often say, ‘I didn’t know an elephant’s call could move through me like that.’”
Safari, for him, is a rewilding of the human body. Stillness over speed, presence over pursuit. Immersion, he insists, is everything. “The more you immerse yourself in the experience, the more you receive.” He believes that nature does not perform on command; it reveals itself slowly to those willing to match its pace.
The same exacting rigour shapes Compion’s photographs. Light is his first tool, particularly the minutes just after sunset when animals’ eyes reflect the sky, and later the blue hour when the last afterglow turns Africa cool and spectral. Composition is his grammar. Wide frames are sentences, deliberate and balanced. Tight portraits become active statements, capturing the charged moment when the wild ceases to be background and becomes the subject.
Compion knows the odds: “There are roughly 61,400 photographs taken every second.” His answer is not more images, but deeper ones. For him, a photograph must ring with an adjective — joy, sadness, awe. “You want that pause when something lands.”
That instinct guides what he notices and what he chooses to frame. In the beadwork of northern Kenya, he finds patterns shaped by history and colours refined over generations. By abstracting those details, he suggests, “you reveal the beauty”.
The fragile organism
Beneath the splendour lies an unease Compion rarely states but often circles. When I ask what the Rift would be if it were a single living being, he reaches not for a lion or an acacia, but for a termite mound, borrowing from Eugène Marais’ classic study The Soul of the White Ant.
A mound works as a body: workers, soldiers, winged elites and a queen, each performing its role in near darkness. Temperature and humidity remain almost perfectly constant. “If one disappears, there is organ failure,” he reflects. The Rift, in his view, is no different, a self-regulating organism made of predators and prey, wetlands and forests, pastoralists and farmers. Remove any part and the whole begins to falter.
After two decades, Compion has watched those fractures appear. Land squeezed by people, fish stocks shrinking, forests thinning. Yet he refuses easy despair. In Gorongosa he sees communities using beehives and chilli belts as living fences for elephants, solutions that protect crops and create income. His view is simple: “Solve for the short term and the results are harsh. Solve for the long term and everyone benefits.”
This is the tension his work inhabits. Those who walk these wild spaces with him come seeking wonder; their presence sustains conservation and keeps landscapes economically visible. Yet they are also consumers of experience, moving through a system that must function whether they are present or not. Where, he seems to ask, do they sit within the mound? Workers or visitors? Essential or peripheral?
A double truth
For me, the appeal of the book is unmistakable. After spending time speaking to Compion, the book reads as a study in light and patience, a two-decade collection of volcanic horizons, luminous eyes and small, decisive gestures in grass and water. These images do what he hopes. They make you stop.
Yet the book stands equally as a testament. The scientific voices threaded through its pages highlight beauty as ecology, the outward trace of systems where a farmer’s new fence or a shrinking wetland can ripple through an entire food chain.
The termite mound metaphor remains. In Gorongosa, researchers working alongside community leaders have documented the fragile balance between crop protection and elephant movement, a balance that can tip dangerously with even a single failed season.
Perhaps the clearest reading of Compion’s portrait of the Rift is to hold both truths at once. He has created a finely tuned study of a place that still has the power to reawaken dulled senses, to rearrange how we see. At the same time, he has recorded how fragile that power is and how uncertain our role within it remains.
What stays with me, after speaking to him, is how the Rift itself seems to exhale across the pages. The sulphur heat of Erta Ale, the cool breath of Virunga, the subtle movements of species and people that keep the system alive. The book suggests that to truly see the Rift, we must pay attention to that breath, the one that rises and falls across its 6,400 kilometres. In that rhythm lies both its wonder and its warning.
Available at all good bookstores and online from hphpublushing.co.za.
