The School I Dreamed Of

The School I Dreamed Of documents CEG Zongo, my childhood school in Lomé, Togo, photographed in January 2026 after years away. This school represented everything: passing the CEPD exam to enter meant wearing long pants instead of shorts, becoming someone.

Returning, I found the roof collapsed, walls crumbling, classrooms exposed to rain and sun. Yet classes continue. Students still arrive each morning. On blackboards in ruined rooms, I found chalk drawings a map of Togo carefully traced, a face radiating in the sun, a heart. The building that was supposed to lift these students into adulthood is falling apart around them, but they persist. They draw their country. They claim territory. They imagine themselves into being despite infrastructure collapse. This is not documentation of educational failure from outside but witness from within: this was my school, my classroom, the place where I believed education would save me.

The photographs refuse victimization and false hope simultaneously. The images capture collapsed roofs with golden hour light pouring through holes that should not exist, blackboards still hanging on crumbling walls, window grids framing uncertain futures. The project asks what we owe young people when we cannot maintain the places we tell them will save them, what it means when systems promise futures they cannot structurally hold. The work positions itself as personal reckoning and systemic critique not "poor Africa's failing schools" but specific interrogation of promises made and infrastructure abandoned. Shot January 2026, the series is being developed for exhibition and publication (submitted to CREA Venice Open 2026, pitched to Nataal Media), evolving from 10-15 core images toward potential video documentation of students' daily navigation of ruins, expanding the question: when buildings collapse but learning persists, what actually holds education structures or refusal to surrender?