The images gathered in this special issue of Global Africa do not simply illustrate separate regional contexts. Rather, they form a continuous visual thread—a current running through the journal—that connects territories across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Moving across these spaces, the series returns to a deceptively simple yet crucial question: what does it mean today to live with rivers in a world shaped by a deepening ecological crisis?
Rivers have always been spaces of both movement and anchoring. They have sustained human mobility, structured local economies, shaped social and religious imaginaries, and contributed to ways of inhabiting territory. Yet they are also among the places where the combined effects of rapid urbanisation, infrastructural intervention, pollution, and climate disruption are most acutely visible.
This visual essay does not aim to provide a comprehensive documentation of these transformations. Instead, it explores through images the multiple and often contradictory relationships societies maintain with their waterways: relationships of memory, power, vulnerability, but also care, attachment, and reinvention.
In Mauritius, water first appears as a moving archive of memory. Situated at the crossroads of Africa and Asia and shaped by the histories of the Indian Ocean and colonial circulation, the island carries dense layers of narratives and practices. The photographs of Ganga Talao and Rivière Bassin reveal this stratification of time: the sacred, the colonial, and the contemporary are entangled without ever fully stabilising. The river and lake become less objects than relational environments, where connections between the living, the ancestors, and the land are continuously renegotiated.
In the metropolitan region of Jakarta, Indonesia, floodplain landscapes reveal another dimension of rivers: their politicisation. Here, water is inseparable from regimes of territorial governance. Mapping practices, hydraulic infrastructures and urban planning policies have gradually transformed riverine landscapes into technical and cadastral objects. Yet behind this apparent control, the images expose unstable and inhabited spaces shaped through everyday negotiation. They remind us that situated knowledge and ordinary practices continue to challenge technocratic approaches to land and water management.
In Colombia, the Bogotá River basin opens up a different register: that of care and re-appropriation. Despite severe pollution, collectives, residents and local initiatives maintain active relationships with the river. Through gatherings, shared meals, and agricultural and culinary practices, they reconfigure forms of attachment to the watershed. The gesture of “returning to the river” is not only spatial; it is relational, sensory, and political. It involves a reworking of responsibilities and forms of belonging.
The African continent is also represented through the Niger River, whose waters have shaped livelihoods, mobility, and exchanges across West Africa for centuries. In the region of Gao, Mali, the river remains a vital artery for transportation, trade, agriculture, and fishing. Canoes, motorized boats, and ferries carry people and goods, while the river supports rice cultivation in one of its historic floodplain regions as well as a range of economic activities. The images capture this everyday relationship between riverside communities and the Niger as a space of work, sociability, and well-being. They also point to the growing pressures facing this ecosystem, including recurring droughts, insecurity, disruptions to river transport, pollution, and environmental degradation. Between continuity and change, the Niger River highlights the challenges confronting societies whose lives remain closely tied to the rhythms of the river.
Taken together, these visual constellations compose a sensitive geography of contemporary river worlds. They remind us that rivers are neither mere resources nor landscapes: they are inhabited milieus, spaces of memory and conflict, but also sites where new forms of coexistence with the living world are being experimented.
Across Africa, Asia and Latin America, this visual journey highlights distinct yet resonant experiences. It reveals histories shaped by colonial legacies, ecological inequalities and global transformations, but also by the persistence of ways of living and knowing that continue to reconfigure relationships between societies and environments.
As a subtle current running through the issue, this iconographic thread ultimately invites a shift in perspective: rivers should no longer be seen as backdrops to development, but as full actors in our ecological and political presents. They remind us that any reflection on the environmental crisis is also a reflection on relations—between humans, territories, memories and shared waters.