Mambo? Poo! Zanzibar

In April 2019, the book Mambo? will be published by the Bigg Boss publishing house. Poo! Zanzibar, on which the pair of authors Vladimir 518 and Tomáš Souček worked for more than three years. Although this East African archipelago seems incredibly far from a geographical and cultural point of view, thanks to their regular visits, the creators of the publication gradually discovered its local specifics, which they subsequently incorporated into the internal structure of the publication. She set herself the goal of documenting the entire spectrum of contemporary culture of the islands, at least in outline, which is why the topics of the city, village, ocean, religion, but also music, nature, and the distinctive local phenomenon, which is football, meet side by side.

Author duo Vladimir 518 and photographer Tomáš Souček have completed two other significant book projects in the past. Namely, it is the first part of the subcultural trilogy TRIBES (2011) and a trip to the world of Czech art studios OBSESE (2015). Their new publication guides the reader on its more than five hundred pages through the complicated world of contemporary Zanzibar, which has always been a melting pot of diverse cultural influences in the context of the whole of East Africa.

“I watch a man praying on the concrete shore of Zanzibar Town's harbor and I see before me a picture that combines many seemingly contradictory emotions. The situation of destruction and poverty is naturally mixed with a certain aura of purity, it is bathed in a golden veil of starlight, it contains information about everything we have had the chance to see and experience here so far. I think that traveling as such brings into a person's life mainly a change in the outlook on his home, on his own culture. Above all, I see our deep encounter with Zanzibar as a strong point of reference that I will undoubtedly lean on for the rest of my life. That otherness, which we were forced to explore with such intensity, also paradoxically helped us uncover a huge amount of information about ourselves. And this is perhaps the result of some thought equation and this story itself, because the feeling of distance always brings a vague awareness of closeness. In the end, a strong awareness of difference is mixed with a surprisingly strong sense of belonging", writes Vladimir 518 at the end of the book.